“Her helmet,” I suggest. “She switched on the safety lights on her helmet.”
“Why would you turn on helmet safety lights if you’re not riding?” Colin says. “Why would you wait until you’ve reached your destination?”
“You wouldn’t,” Chang answers. “She was doing something else.”
29
It is almost nine p.m. when Marino and I arrive at the hotel, the back of his van packed with bags of groceries and other necessities of life, including cases of water, a set of pots and pans and cooking utensils, a toaster oven, and a portable butane stove.
After he picked me up in front of Jaime’s building as Chang and Colin were clearing the scene, I had him take me on a series of errands. First we visited a Walmart for whatever items I deemed essential to set up camp, as I put it. Then it was a Fresh Market for basic food supplies, and after that a liquor store. Finally we stopped at the specialty market on Drayton Street that Jaime recommended last night for its selection of nonalcoholic beer, and I was reminded of what some might view as the coincidence of proximity on the one hand and the senselessness of it on the other.
While I understand the concept of fundamental randomness, the favored theory of physicists that the universe exists because of a Big Bang roll of the dice, and therefore we can expect a mindless messiness to rule our everyday lives, I don’t accept it. I honestly don’t believe it. Nature has its symmetries and laws, even if they are beyond the limits of our understanding, and there are no accidents, not really, only labels and definitions that we resort to for lack of any other way to make sense of certain events, especially god-awful ones.
Chippewa Market is only a few blocks from Jaime’s apartment and the Jordans’ former home, and around the corner from the former halfway house on Liberty Street where Lola Daggette was a resident when she was arrested for murder. But Savannah Sushi Fusion is some fifteen miles northwest of where Jaime lived, and in fact is closer to the Georgia Prison for Women than to Savannah’s three-and-a-half-square-mile historic district.
“The locations are telling us something. There’s a reason for them, and a message there,” I’m saying to Marino, as we climb out of the van into the steamy night air, and water pours from gutters and drips from trees, and puddles in the city’s sea-level streets are the size of small ponds. “Jaime put herself right in the middle of some sort of matrix, in the backyard of evil, and the sushi place is the odd man out, way off to the northwest, as if you’re heading to the airport or the prison, which might be how she discovered it. But why didn’t she use a place closer to where she lived if she was going to have take-out delivered several times a week?”
“It’s advertised as having the best sushi in Savannah,” Marino says. “That’s what she told me one time when I was with her and she had it brought in. I said how do you eat that shit, and she said it was supposed to be the best in town, but it wasn’t as good as what she got in New York. Not that any of it’s good. Fish bait is fish bait, and tapeworms are tapeworms.”
“How does one make a delivery on a bicycle from there? Some of it would be highway. Not to mention the distance in this weather.”
“Hey, I need a couple of carts,” Marino yells for a bellman. “No way I’m letting anybody haul this shit upstairs,” he lets me know. “If you’re going to all this trouble to make sure everything’s safe, then we don’t let anything out of sight. Zero possibility of our stuff being tampered with. I’m not going to say you’re kooky as hell. But I’m sure it looks kooky to anybody watching. Like the Brady Bunch is on summer vacation and can’t afford to go out for a burger or order a pizza.”
I trust nothing. Not a cup of coffee, not a bottle of water, unless I buy it. Until we have a better understanding of what is going on, we’re staying right here in Savannah, and no food or drink will be delivered to us by restaurants or room service, and we’re not touching prepackaged food or eating out. I’ve also given fair warning that there will be no housekeeping. Nobody outside our circle is to come into our rooms, period, unless it is a police officer or an agent we trust, and someone needs to be in residence at all times to make sure no one enters and touches anything, because we just don’t know who or what we’re up against. We will make our own beds, empty our own trash, and clean up after ourselves as best we can and eat what I prepare as if we are in quarantine.
Marino rolls two luggage carts to the back of the van, and we start unloading cookware, appliances, and water and nonalcoholic beer and bottles of wine, and coffee, and fresh vegetables and fruit, and meats and cheese and pasta, and spices and canned goods and condiments. As if we are the Boxcar Children settling in.
“I don’t see how it’s coincidental.” I continue to talk about the geography. “I want us to get an aerial view, maybe Lucy can get a satellite map up on the television screen and we can take a really close look, because it means something.” We roll our overloaded carts through the lobby, past the front desk and the crowded bar, and people stare at the couple in investigative uniforms who appear to be moving in or setting up an outpost, and I suppose we are.
“But Jaime wasn’t around when it happened,” Marino says, as we push onward to the glass elevator. “She wasn’t staying in that apartment in the middle of the matrix or the evil backyard or whatever. She wasn’t here in 2002 when the Jordans were murdered.” He taps the elevator button several times. “So whatever the locations might have meant back then, they wouldn’t mean the same thing now. It’s apples and oranges. It’s you being spooky. I don’t know about the sushi place and the bicycle, though.”
“It’s not apples and oranges.”
“Except if you were going to poison her food, it wouldn’t be all that hard if she was a regular customer of some place and had stuff delivered all the time,” he says. “That’s the only connection I’m seeing. A place she used all the time. Didn’t matter where it was.”
“And how would you know Jaime used that place all the time and had her charge card on file unless she was in sight? Within range? Unless both of you were common to the same environment somehow?”
“How the hell do you think so much? I don’t have any thoughts left in my damn head, and I’m dying to smoke, I admit it. See? No evasiveness. I didn’t buy any cigarettes during our shop-a-thon. But I’m letting you know I need one really bad, and I might go through two six-packs of Buckler, whatever it takes.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” I again say to him, as the elevator doors slide open and we roll our provisions inside, plastic bags swaying from the frames of the carts.
“Plus, I’m hungry as hell. Like one of those times when nothing I’m going to do will make me feel good,” he says, and he is getting grouchier by the minute, about to come out of his skin.
“I’m going to whip up a very simple spaghetti and salad of mixed greens.”
“Maybe I want a damn cheeseburger with bacon and fries from room service.” He irritably taps the button for our floor, then taps it again, then taps the button for the doors to shut.
“It won’t take me long. You drink all the Buckler you want and take a hot shower. You’ll feel better.”
“A damn cigarette is what I want,” he says, as the glass elevator takes off like a lazy helicopter, rising slowly above floors with their vine-draped balconies. “You need to quit telling me I’m going to feel better. This is why people go to meetings. Because they feel like fucking shit and want to kill everyone who says they’re going to feel better.”
“If you need to find an AA meeting, I’m sure we can.”
“No way in fucking hell.”
“It’s not going to help if you go back to things that hurt you,” I say to him.
“Don’t lecture me. I can’t take it right now.”
“I don’t mean to lecture you. Please don’t smoke.”
“If I have to go to the bar to bum one, I’m going to. You don’t want me to be evasive, right? So I’m telling you. I want a damn cigarette.”
“Then I’ll go with you. Or Benton will.”
“Hell, no. I’ve had enough of him for one day.”
“You have every right to be devastated and disappointed,” I reply quietly.
“It’s not got a damn thing to do with disappointment,” he retorts.
“Of course it does.”
“Bullshit. Don’t tell me what it has to do with.”
