“Big deal.” She looked down at it, then extended it in front of her to allow her fifty-plus-year-old eyes to focus. “Anybody can make one of these. You got some ID?”
Gage reached into his front jeans pocket, withdrew his ID case, then flipped it open, displaying his California private investigator’s license. She grabbed for it, but he pulled it away. “Sorry. No touching.” He didn’t want to wrestle with her to get it back.
“Why do you want to talk to Son of a Bitch?”
“It’s about something that happened a long time ago,” Gage said. “You know where he is?”
Jeannette lifted the beer to her mouth and took a sip while peering at him with narrowed eyes. The bottle made a popping sound when she pulled it away.
“What thing that happened a long time ago?”
She said the words in a tone communicating that other than Son of a Bitch running off, only one thing of any significance had ever happened in her life, and she had only been at the edge of it.
“Over at the refinery,” Gage said.
“Can’t help ya, pal. He’s gone, gone, gone.”
“As in dead, dead, dead?”
“Naw, just dead gone.” She grinned, then eyed his left hand. “You married?”
“You looking?”
“Does pork fat come off a pig?”
Two Harley-Davidsons downshifted up the short hill; the syncopated chugging of their V-twins vibrated the house. Gage turned to see black Hell’s Angels vests disappear over the crest.
“You wanna come in?” Jeannette asked.
Gage smiled. “You’re not going to try to seduce me, are you? My wife won’t let me go out and play anymore.”
Jeannette winked. “We’ll see.”
Gage followed her as she backed into the house. It smelled of beer, cigarette ashes, and dog pee, the odors Gage went to sleep with as a rookie cop the night after his first day on the job. It couldn’t be washed off and stuck to those old wool uniforms like epoxy. That was one of the reasons he’d decided to wear a cotton shirt and Levi’s.
She pointed to the couch. “You can move those newspapers.”
Gage was surprised. He hadn’t taken her for a reader, and she wasn’t. They were months-old Auto Trader s she apparently used to shop for the Fiesta.
“You wanna beer?” she asked, walking toward the kitchen and stepping over a Slurpee cup.
“Sure.”
Gage watched her open the refrigerator, pull out two Budweisers, then twist off the caps. She headed back with the two bottles and handed one to Gage. He lifted it toward her, then took a sip.
As she lowered herself into a green upholstered Barcalounger, her shoulder strap slipped off again. She left it there, then peeked over at Gage and grinned.
“It do anything for you?”
Gage shook his head. “I’m not allowed to look.”
She pulled it up.
He took another sip, then waited for her to take one.
“You know where he is?”
“Sorta. He’s in one of them rag-head countries.”
“You know which one?”
“I’m not good with geography. My son is though.”
“Is he around?”
“Nope. County jail.”
“How come?”
“Got wrongly accused of touching a little girl-at least that’s what he says. But I don’t believe him about that any more than I believed his father about anything.”
“Has Wilbert called lately?”
Jeannette’s brows furrowed. “Wilbert?”
She said the name with such puzzlement Gage thought for a half second he’d misremembered Hawkins’s first name.
“Wilbert?” She laughed. “I’ve been calling him Son of a Bitch for so many years I almost forgot his name was Wilbert.” She shook her head, a smirk twisting her mouth. “What a stupid name for a guy born in Marin County.”
She squinted toward the tan phone hanging on the kitchen wall.
“Yeah, he called three years ago. On my daughter’s thirteenth birthday.” She snorted. “He should’ve spent the money on child support.”
“Where is she?”
Jeannette stared at the clock on the mantel of the trash-filled fireplace. “Let’s see, she got off work at Wendy’s about a half hour ago, then she was going to pick up my pills at the Walgreens… Let’s see…” She tapped her finger against her chin as if thinking through her daughter’s after work route, then looked back at Gage. “I know exactly where she is. She’s screwing her thirty-six-year-old biker boyfriend in the garage he calls an apartment.”
Gage glanced up at framed baby photos of the children on either side of the clock, innocent eyes gazing out at the wreckage their lives had become, and then changed the subject.
“Did Son of a Bitch leave an emergency number?”
Jeannette lowered her bottle to the armrest. Her eyes slid from Gage’s face to his Carhartt shirt, then held there. She breathed in and out like a kid gathering up courage to race across a railroad track just ahead of a train.
“Yeah, you can have it. I don’t owe any of them shit. None of them suits from TIMCO ever sat down in my house and had a beer with me.”
Chapter 23
Isn’t this kind of a long shot?” Faith asked as she drove Gage toward the San Francisco International Airport. They were traveling south past the 49ers’ stadium, dropping down to the gray stretch of freeway bordering the bay. The afternoon traffic crept along, more stop than go.
“Of course it’s a long shot,” Gage said. “But at worst it costs the price of a flight and a few days of jet lag.”
Faith flicked on the radio to check the traffic report in order to decide whether to slip onto the frontage road and skirt the backup. It was tuned to National Public Radio broadcasting one of a series of interviews of leading presidential candidates. It was Landon Meyer’s turn. She reached to change to the A.M. news channel, but Gage said, “Hold on. Let’s see what he has to say.”
“I’d like to start with your first campaign for Congress, your victory over Democratic incumbent Nelson Hedges. It’s still the closest race in California history.”
“It stands as a lesson that every vote counts.” Landon chuckled. “Well, at least the last twelve.”
“Were you aware during the campaign that Congressman Hedges had been diagnosed with ALS?”
“I didn’t learn about it until his announcement on the day he left Congress.”
Gage shook his head. “Amazing guy. He’s still keeping his promise even though Hedges has been dead for years. I’ll bet he’s never even told Brandon.”
Hedges had called Landon to come to his hotel near Stanford Hospital at midnight on the day he was diagnosed. The two talked and prayed together until past midnight. Landon promised neither to disclose nor to exploit it during the campaign.
“Did you learn any lessons from that election, Senator?”
