Darren Pitcavage bust. And he
“Hey, why not? I’m accomplishing so much here.” Colin grabbed his slicker. It had been raining when he pedaled in this morning. The minister would probably say the heavens were weeping for Mike Pitcavage. Ministers said that kind of stuff. Just because they said it didn’t make it so.
It was still raining-drizzling, anyhow. Luckily, the Hofbrau and Sushi Bar was close. On the way, Rodney asked, “So how do you like being a nigger, man?”
“Say what?” Colin wondered if he’d heard that right.
“How do you like being a nigger?” Rodney repeated. He laughed harshly. “Yeah, I know-if you called me that, I’d clock you. But it’s sure as hell how they’re treating you since Mike decided to punch out for good. They leave you out of everything. They do their best to pretend you aren’t around, even when you are. That’s what being a nigger in a white man’s world is all about, or part of what it’s about, anyway. Welcome to the club, dude.” He held out a hand.
Colin shook it. “Thanks. Thanks a bunch. If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”
If you had to be a restaurant these days, a Japanese-German restaurant was the right kind. You could still get raw fish, or squid and octopus if you couldn’t. And German cuisine ran to the kinds of things people raised in a cold country. Potatoes. Turnips. Pork if you happened to have a pig. It might not be exciting food, but it was there.
They took a long lunch. When they got back, the station had filled up. The cops and clerks and secretaries had returned from the memorial park. “How was it?” Colin asked Gabe Sanchez-somehow, Caroline had left him off her we-don’t-want-
“Not so good.” Gabe hesitated, then went on, “Better you hear it from me than from somebody else, I guess. The preacher didn’t quite come out and say you put the rubber band around Mike’s neck to hold the bag in place. Not quite-but he might as well have.”
“Christ! Just what I need!” Colin said. “Let me guess-a bunch of people bought it, starting with Caroline and Darren.”
“Right the first time.” Gabe nodded unhappily. “I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry as hell. No good deed goes unpunished, is what they say.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say, all right,” Colin agreed. The conventional wisdom wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss most of the time. This once, the multiheaded
* * *
Marshall Ferguson had told his father what he knew. Because he had, one man was in jail and another man was dead. When you were sort of on the edge of making your living as a writer, you thought you knew how powerful words could be. They could make people think. They could make people feel. And there you were at the strings, as if you had a violin or a guitar.
Words could make people die.
He’d never imagined that. If he hadn’t talked to his dad, Mike Pitcavage would still be wearing fancy suits and getting expensive haircuts. It wasn’t as if Marshall had had any great liking for the chief or his son. Getting Darren busted didn’t break his heart. He wouldn’t have been bummed if Mike had resigned in disgrace. He might even have been proud, though he never would have shown it.
But when Mike Pitcavage killed himself. . Marshall wasn’t proud of that. He’d always pretty much skated through life. The worst things that ever happened to him were grandparents passing away and his folks breaking up. He’d been little when his grandparents died one by one, and they hadn’t been young. He’d grieved, yes, but not enormously. And, while the breakup hurt like hell, he knew more people with divorced parents than with fathers and mothers who’d stayed together.
He didn’t know anybody else who’d driven someone to suicide. Vanessa might have wanted to, to show what a femme fatale she was. That was different, though. For one thing, it was bullshit. For another, even if it weren’t, dying for unrequited love was a long way from dying because your son was looking at a felony rap.
No way could he talk to his friends about any of this. If they found out the chief’s suicide had rocked him, they would also have to find out why. He didn’t want them knowing he’d talked to his father.
He couldn’t talk about it with Dad, either. If anything, Dad was hurting worse than he was. A lot of the cops seemed to have decided it was
“This really sucks, you know?” Marshall said to Kelly. He could talk to her, after a fashion. But she was bound to be hearing it from his father, too. Getting it in stereo was the last thing she needed, especially when she was taking care of Deborah, too.
“It totally sucks,” she agreed. “I’d like to go to the cop shop and bash their stupid heads together, you know?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Like we expected Pitcavage to do that, or wanted him to. No way!” When he said
For a wonder, she got that. “You did the right thing, Marshall. You-” Deborah chose that moment to wake up with a yowl. “One moment, please,” Kelly said, like an old-time telephone operator.
She came back with the baby and started nursing her. For modesty’s sake, she covered her breast with a blanket. It didn’t bother her, but she’d discovered it did bother Marshall.
For a bigger wonder, she remembered what she’d been saying when she got interrupted, and picked up where she’d left off: “You did the right thing. You can’t help it if Mike Pitcavage did a back flip into an empty pool on account of it. That’s not your fault.”
Marshall desperately wanted to believe it wasn’t, but he couldn’t help asking, “Whose fault is it, then?”
“His. Or Darren’s, for dealing drugs to begin with. Or nobody’s. Sometimes stuff just happens. The supervolcano wasn’t anyone’s fault. It just happened.”
“People aren’t like that, though. I don’t think they are, anyhow.” Marshall believed in free will. But if he was predestined to believe in it, how much good would that do him?
“Well, I don’t, either,” Kelly admitted. “Would turning it into a story make it any clearer in your own mind? Or I guess I mean, would that make it any better for you? I know you’ve got some of your story ideas by taking off from things you went through.”
She paid enough attention to him to notice something like that! The only other person who did was his father, and Dad paid such close attention that half the time Marshall wished he wouldn’t. Right now he felt like that about the whole thing with the Pitcavages.
Which didn’t answer her question. Slowly, Marshall said, “When I do that, I, like, file the serial numbers off first, know what I mean? I don’t see any way to do that with this one. And it doesn’t look like the kind of story that’s got a happy ending for anybody.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it?” Kelly nodded. “Stories don’t have to, though.”
“No, they don’t. But the ones that don’t are a lot harder to sell.” Marshall wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms if not for the lessons from his still-struggling career. He’d sent out a couple of pieces he’d been proud of, to have them come back over and over with rejections that said something on the order of
Kelly raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t looked at it like that. You don’t see many tragedies on TV, either.”
“Part of it, I guess, is that most people’s lives are pretty miserable a lot of the time. They don’t need stories to remind them about it-or editors sure don’t think they do,” Marshall said. “That’s always been so, I bet, but it’s got worse since the supervolcano blew.”
“Everything’s got worse since the supervolcano blew.” After two or three seconds, Kelly corrected herself: “Almost everything. I’m married to your father now, and I wasn’t before. And we’ve got this little portable air-raid siren here now, too.” She grabbed one of Deborah’s pajamaed feet. The baby hardly knew she had feet yet. Marshall remembered John Henry discovering his. Tiny people could be pretty goddamn funny. That was bound to be one of the things that kept their parents from booting them.
“You know what? I think she looks like you,” Marshall said. Talking about his half-sister was one way not to dwell on the bigger problems of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
“Babies look like babies, is what babies look like.” But Kelly went on, “You really think so?”
“I do,” Marshall said. “Dad’s face is kinda squarer than yours, and a kid with his nose would already have a
