with other human beings to such an extent they start to see themselves as the dead human. You may be okay for a while, but in time, those things you do, things you’ve seen, they come home to roost, like pterodactyls.”
“Do you have moments like that?” I asked.
“I don’t. Not if I thought what I did was the right thing to do. I’m pretty self-righteous. I mean, there are guys out there, sociopaths that end up in war, and for them it’s like a free hand job every day. They like it. They don’t feel. That’s different. I think it needs to be done, I don’t brood. You, you’re always digging into your feelings. You leave them raw, mess with them so much. You’ve seen plenty, but last night you saw one too many. And I think Vanilla Ride, meeting her, may have been a big trigger, not just poor old Bert. She was the gun. Bert was the bullet.”
Vanilla had been a while ago, but he was right, she was in the back of my mind all the time.
“Vanilla is a beautiful woman,” Leonard said, “charming, very feminine, and she can kill you with an ice pick or a gun, maybe her bare hands, and sleep like a baby. And I know you. In the back of your mind you’re thinking: Once she was a kid like me, and she grew up to kill, and she grew up do it for money and not care who she killed or why. You feel like you might be slipping over into her bit of darkness. I tell you, man, no way. You ain’t comin’ from, and ain’t never been comin’ from, the farm where she was raised.”
“Farm?”
“Figure of speech.”
“How bad was I?” I said.
“I’ve seen a lot worse. But, know what I think? I think you might have sat in that chair for days, maybe starved to death if Brett hadn’t come along, called me.” Leonard swallowed and his facial expression changed. “You know what Brett said to me when you were in the chair? She said he’s your brother, he loves you, maybe more than me. Fix him.”
“And you did,” I said.
“I put a Band-Aid on it. You got to be your own doctor. A little bed rest perks you up. A little experience helps you deal with it. But it’s like a super staph infection. It gets better, but it doesn’t go away.”
29
In Marvin’s office, he said, “I thought you fuckers had retired.”
“No,” Leonard said. “We were on strike.”
“For what?”
“Better working conditions
Well, you’re shit out of luck.”
“What we figured,” Leonard said. “That’s why the strike is over.”
Marvin eyed me. “You’re awful quiet. Usually I can’t shut you up. No wisecracks?”
“Not today,” I said.
“Hap found a body. Bert, Mini’s stepdad. He’s been killed.”
“No shit,” Marvin said.
“I just missed the murderer,” I said, and I told him what we knew. About how Bert was scared, and claimed to have information, and then he was dead. I told him about the SUV, the phone call from Bert’s phone.
“You tell the police?” Marvin asked.
“Not yet.”
“That’s not smart,” Marvin said.
“I haven’t been feeling smart,” I said. “I have been, shall we say, under the weather.”
“I can work this out a bit,” Marvin said. “An anonymous tip. Let the cops know the body is there, but not who told them. Or I know a couple of them well enough they’ll pretend they don’t know who told them. You all right, Hap?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
Marvin picked up a pencil from his desk and tapped his teeth with it. “How does Bert’s murder tie in with the rest of it?”
“Therein lies the pickle,” Leonard said. “We don’t know.”
The pickle of it all hung in the air like a zeppelin.
“So we don’t know shit?” Marvin asked.
“If we do,” Leonard said, “we haven’t figured out that we do. Not yet. But no doubt in our minds, it’s all connected.”
“You said Bert thought someone was after him?” Marvin said. “Couldn’t it have been someone else did it? Someone not connected to all this? I mean some reason besides our case?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s all a little too sweet to be a coincidence. We talk to Bert. He wants to see us. He ends up dead. And I get a call on his phone, and a hang-up. I think that was a kind of threat. A warning at least.”
“All right, then,” Marvin said. “See if you can tie it all together.”
“We will go about detecting, then,” Leonard said, standing up.
“You mean you two will go about bumbling in the hopes that happens to lead to something.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s pretty much it.”
30
Out in the parking lot, as we got in Leonard’s car, he said, “To Marvin, we are nothing more than a couple of minions. Carrier pigeons to carry messages and bring messages back. Slaves to his judgment. Faces in the crowd.”
“You’ve had way too much coffee,” I said.
“I do feel a little itchy, like my nerves could jerk a decorative knot in my dick. But, minions though we may be, it beats honest work.”
“Actually, we don’t seem to do much, just find out about dead people,” I said.
“And in your case, you even found one that’s fresher than the rest.”
“He wasn’t all that fresh.”
“Since the others, the vampires, are all in the ground,” Leonard said. “He was the lily of the bunch.”
“Ha! If they’re vampires, they may not be in the ground.”
“Oh, you are wise.”
When we were well situated in the car, seat-belted in and hoping it would start, Leonard said, “I’m confused.”
“About what?”
“Who do we annoy next? We have a list, but… who?”
“I vote Cason Statler,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because we can.”
“Now you’re startin’ to sound like yourself,” Leonard said.
But I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t even close.
The drive over to Camp Rapture was nice because it was a pretty day. The rain had cleared up and the sun was out, and the car was a little warm inside. We wheeled to the Camp Rapture Report, the newspaper Cason worked for, and went inside.
Cason was sitting at his desk in the middle of the newspaper office. There were other reporters around, but fewer than I had imagined. There was also an advertising department. One of the women who worked there was overweight and frumpy with pissblonde hair that looked to have been made by electricity and a sense of humor. She was wearing a too-short top that showed a lot of belly and a silver belly ring. She had on shorts that showed way
