NINETEEN
I was in Seattle over an hour before we were due to meet. I used some of the time in a book and record store on Fourth. I went into the jazz section, found the clerk who looked least like he’d rather be snowboarding, and got my cell phone out. I played him one of the MP3 files I’d transferred from Amy’s phone. The clerk stooped with his ear cocked, listened for barely two seconds, and then vigorously nodded his head.
“Beiderbecke,” he said. “‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ A classic. And so true.”
He led me into the section, ran his hands down the CDs as if down the spine of a man he loved, and plucked one out. The cover showed a black-and-white-era guy holding some kind of neo-trumpet device. I allowed the clerk to sell it to me.
“Such a shame,” he said as we waited for my card to be authorized. “Bix, I mean. A prodigy. Could barely read music but played like an angel. Dead at twenty-eight. Drank himself to death.” And then he sighed, as if it had been a personal loss.
I walked up Pike Street to the market and got a place at one of the tables outside the Seattle’s Best across the street. I was still early. Fisher had refused to tell me anything more on the phone, probably judging—correctly —that he wouldn’t get to see me in person if he told me what he knew. My head felt empty and bright. The atmosphere the previous evening had been stilted. I could not help feeling that Amy was being more normal than usual. She’s one of those people who can grab random handfuls of ingredients, throw them up in the air, and have them land in bowls looking good and tasting great. Last night the food had been barely edible, and I don’t think that was just a result of the churning in my stomach. Afterward she worked in her study for a while and emerged later seeming distracted. When I had a cigarette out on the deck toward the end of the evening, I watched through the window as she sat flicking through coffee-table books, as if looking for something she couldn’t find. I’d seen her like this a few times over the last couple of years, but when I asked her if she was okay, she always said yes.
When I’d left her that morning, saying I was heading to the city to try to make some crime contacts, she looked up sharply, hesitated, and then shrugged.
“I just don’t think it’s so great an idea,” she said, and went back to work. But after I’d been on the road barely twenty minutes, I got a text from her:
Good luck:-D
I didn’t really know what to think, and I sat there in the cold early-morning sunshine not-thinking it. I heard a story once, about the early settlers of the region. It told that when Europeans finally landed on the northwestern shores of America, feeling like conquering heroes in a new world, they were disconcerted to find that the locals were not surprised to see them. This was not because unknown white men had forged a route overland from the East, however, but because over the last several generations the tribes had very occasionally seen trading ships far out to sea—once every ten, twenty, fifty years. They knew these could not be the work of local people and therefore surmised that some other group of men or beings were on their way, however slowly.
When I first heard this story, I shivered. I don’t even know whether it’s true, but it has stayed with me: the idea of these hazy visitations, of inexplicable form, seen from afar, never coming closer—but, once seen, impossible to unsee. A first indication that the world held more than had been bargained for, a foreshadowing of events that would be impossible to change, impossible to hurry, impossible to stop. Portents of unknown type and provenance, far out in the mist of the seas, a future held in abeyance, for now, but irrevocably on its way.
The local people watched and saw, then turned their backs on the sea and got on with their lives.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to do that.
When Fisher arrived, I was struck first by how tired he looked. He sat down in the chair on the other side of my table, took a deep swallow of the coffee he’d brought.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
I just stared at him.
“Okay.” He reached into his coat pocket, hesitated. “I’m going to show you something. Then I’m going to tell you something before I explain what you’re seeing. It’s going to take a few minutes, and you’re not going to want to listen, but you have to, or you’re not going to understand my interest here. Okay?”
I nodded. He pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. I opened it and withdrew the contents. Two photographs, six-by-four. Both had the muddy, blown-out quality of digital pictures taken beyond the limits of the lens range.
The first showed a woman standing outside an unremarkable-looking doorway, in a street that could have been pretty much anywhere. The door was open. The woman’s face was in profile. It was Amy.
When you looked a little closer, you could see there was someone else in the picture, a shadowed shape in the doorway. The quality of the light suggested that the photo was taken in the late afternoon.
“Big deal,” I said. Fisher said nothing.
The second photograph was of another street, or the same street from a different angle. It showed a man and woman walking together, shot from behind. They were fairly close together, and the man had his arm around the woman’s shoulders. From the angle at which the picture had been taken, it was impossible to tell whether this man was the one I’d seen in the photo on Amy’s phone. He was a little over average in height, wearing a suit, could be either blue or black, dark hair. You couldn’t see their faces, but the clothes the woman wore were the same as in the other photograph.
I glanced up. Fisher had his eyes elsewhere.
Photographs do lie, and one of the ways is by only capturing instants. Advertising people are tactile. Amy could have been walking along the street with a colleague or client, and he’d grabbed her shoulder to make some point or celebrate a corporate victory. Or she could have said she was cold and he’d momentarily looped his arm around her, awkward, feeling it was a man’s job to do something and knowing that convention allowed this brief intrusion on personal space. Captured at the right instant, frozen beyond their true duration, any of these gestures could have looked like more than they were. Or so I wanted to believe. “Where are these from?”
“Taken in Seattle last Friday,” Fisher said.
When I was also here in town. I took a long, slow breath. I’ve spent a lot of hours getting statements from witnesses. If you want them to talk, you have to let them. And you’re not allowed to hit them first.
“So talk,” I said.
He stood up. “Walk with me.”
Fisher led me out of the antiderelict enclosure around the coffeehouse and up First. He took us north for a couple blocks, then steered several rights and lefts.
“I told you my interest in the Anderson murders came from an estate,” he said as we walked. “A client of the firm. Name was Joseph Cranfield. Heard of him?”
“No. Should I?”
“I guess not. Old patriarchal business type. Tough, six foot and still square-shouldered in his late seventies. Started work at thirteen—one of those kids who had a job when he was in diapers, crawls around delivering papers with his teeth. You ever wonder how some people are ready from the get-go, looking for the main chance and knowing what to do when they find it?”
I’d met people like that in my own life, the ones who hit the ground running. I’d never thought too much about it, and I wasn’t in the mood to start now.
“I guess.”
“By the 1950s Joe was into failing mills in New England, turning them around and then reselling them. Soon as that was killed by overseas markets, he sidestepped to retail, franchises, anything that kept money coming in. From there into real estate, became a partner in some of the earliest supermalls in Illinois. It wasn’t like he never made a mistake. But he took the hits, moved on.”
“An American hero,” I said. “There should be statues everywhere.”
Gary nodded. “Right. Could have been the smuggest asshole to ever draw breath. I met him when I was fresh out of law school. After a couple weeks, they sent me to Cranfield’s office, to advise on some tiny thing. I was scared. I’m twenty-three, I’ve lucked into an all-star firm. If I fail this rite of passage, I’m history. So I show up in my new suit and shiny briefcase knowing that this is a meeting where my life can split two ways. My gastrointestinal tract was empty, I’ll tell you that.”
The thought of Gary Fisher being nervous was more compelling than what he was telling me, which appeared to have no bearing on any universe I cared about.
