Innocent Blood

‘Well, this is one heck of a coincidence,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I guess the same as you. Trying to clear my head.’

‘You weren’t hurt, were you?’

‘No, it didn’t hurt. How about you?’

‘My . . . uh . . . my son died. I lost my son.’

‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ She reached out and touched his forearm. ‘You must be absolutely torn apart.’

‘He was hit by a flying nail. I didn’t even realize. You and I, we were talking, and all the time he was bleeding to death in the back of my car.’

‘That’s tragic. I don’t know what to say to you.’

‘Don’t worry, my wife does.’

‘She doesn’t blame you, does she?’

‘Blame me? The way she talks, you’d think I planted that bomb myself.’ He looked around. A suntanned young man in a blue and yellow T-shirt was standing not far away, eating an ice-cream cone. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked. ‘Or is that . . .?’

She turned, and frowned, and then she shook her head. The young man lifted his ice cream to her in salute. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m all by myself.’

‘Maybe I can buy you a coffee, or a drink.’

‘All right,’ she nodded. ‘A drink. I think I’d like that.’

They crossed Palisades Beach Road together, and halfway across she took hold of his hand, as if they were already friends. A woman in a soiled floral-print dress was standing on the opposite side of the road with a shopping cart piled high with old newspapers and broken lampshades and 7-Up cans. As they crossed she cackled like a chicken and called out, ‘Young love! Don’t it make you want to throw up!’ But the young woman still didn’t let go of his hand.

Frank took her into Ziggy’s, a light and airy bar with a blond wood floor and shiny stainless-steel chairs. On the wall behind the counter hung a strange painting of six women with blue faces, their eyes closed, their hair waving in the wind.

‘I’m Frank,’ said Frank, holding out his hand.

‘Hello, Frank. You can call me Astrid.’

‘What does that mean? Isn’t Astrid your real name?’

‘What’s in a name, Frank?’

Frank resisted the temptation to quote Shakespeare. That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.

‘They do a great strawberry daiquiri here,’ he told her.

‘OK. Strawberry daiquiri it is.’

‘You said you lost somebody close to you.’

Astrid took off her hat and placed it on the table, with her sunglasses neatly folded in the brim. ‘I . . . ah . . . don’t really want to talk about it, Frank, not today. Today I came out to think about something else.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. Did you see the news? It looks like some Arab terrorist group is supposed to have done it.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Jesus, though. I can’t imagine how anybody could blow up innocent children like that. I mean, what kind of demonic thought process was going on in their heads when they decided to do it?’

Astrid looked at him with those pale, pale eyes. ‘Everybody’s fair game, Frank, to people like that. All they think about is showing the world how aggrieved they are. They don’t care who suffers. They don’t care who dies.’

The server came over in shiny blue hot pants and Frank asked for a strawberry daiquiri and a Scotch. ‘By the way, the police want to interview as many eye witnesses as they can find. I have their number if you want to go talk to them.’

‘I don’t think so. I didn’t see anything.’

‘Come on, you were right there beside me. You must have seen something. Maybe you think that it wasn’t particularly important, but you never know. It might give the cops that one small piece of sky that’s going to finish the jigsaw.’

Astrid said, ‘The truth is, Frank, I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be someplace else.’

‘Oh. Oh, right, I understand. But couldn’t you make an anonymous phone call?’

‘I didn’t see anything, Frank. Nothing at all.’

There was a long silence between them. Eventually Frank nodded toward the painting of the six blue-faced women and said, ‘What do you think that’s all about?’

‘It’s about women and their mystery. If you look at the faces for long enough, the eyes appear to open.’

‘I didn’t know that, and I’ve been coming to this place since day one.’

‘That’s because you’ve never looked at it for long enough. Look at me, Frank. Go on, really look at me. Who do you see?’

‘Um . . . I don’t exactly know what you’re asking.’

‘I’m asking you to see me, that’s all. Describe what you see.’

‘I see . . . What do I see? A young woman of maybe twenty-three, twenty-four years. Brown hair, blue eyes. Maybe a Swedish or a Polish mother, judging by your cheekbones. Sure of herself, independent. Lives on her own, maybe with a white cat.’

Astrid laughed. ‘Sorry, no white cat. But what else do you see?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know you well enough. What do you do for a living?’

‘A living? Nothing. Not now. But I used to pretend to be somebody else.’

‘You used to what? I don’t think you and I are talking on the same wavelength.’

‘Oh, yes we are. Or we could, if you really wanted to. Tell me about you.’

‘There isn’t much to tell. Frank Bell, very distantly related to Alexander Graham Bell. Very, very distantly. Thirty-four and one half years old.’

‘That’s it? No career?’

‘Oh, you want my whole life story? OK . . . my father used to run a hotel in Ojai so he expected me to run it after he retired.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No way. I hated the hotel business. Hotel guests behave like swine. They steal everything, they break everything, and you should see what they do to the mattresses. So I took a job as a bartender, and then I cleaned swimming pools, and then I took dance lessons, and then I appeared as an extra in three episodes of Star Trek Voyager, wearing a red jumpsuit and a false nose and pretending to drink Aldebaran whiskey in Ten Forward.

‘While I was waiting around the Star Trek set I wrote a TV pilot about two Mid- Western farm boys who always wanted to be famous rock stars. I sold it to Fox, made a success of it, end of story.’

‘If Pigs Could Sing,’ smiled Astrid.

‘That’s the one.’

‘I love that show. I really adore it. Dusty and Henry, they’re so kind of gentle and goofy, and I just love their grandpa. What’s that song he always used to sing? The one about the limp?’

‘“The Girl With The Left-Footed Limp.” It went to number ninety-seven in the Hot One Hundred. And straight back out again the next morning.’

Astrid reached across the table and took hold of both of Frank’s hands. On her wedding-band finger she wore an emerald ring. If the emerald was real, thought Frank, it must be worth nearly ten thousand dollars. She looked as if she were about to say something but then she didn’t.

‘What?’ he asked her as their drinks arrived.

‘I was just thinking that you won’t feel like writing that kind of stuff anymore, after losing Danny.’