True Detective

'Two cups of coffee. A sandwich.'

'Don't get serious on me. Nathan. Can't you see the benefit of a place like this?'

'You mean a world that isn't the real world? Sure. It's nice to go someplace unreal once in a while.'

'You're damn right.' she said, and tugged at me, and said. 'This is my favorite part,' and soon we were in a tiny wedding chapel, formed of pebbles and stones and mortar, with a rock altar eight feet wide, eight feet deep, ten feet high.

'The smallest Christian church in the world,' she said in a hushed tone.

'No kiddin'.'

We were holding hands; she squeezed mine.

'Hundreds of couples are married here every year,' she said.

That she could be warmed by a cool, stone closet like this was a testament to her imagination and sense of the romantic.

'Isn't it splendid?' she said.

Well.

She put her arms around me. looked up at me with that innocent look that I had come to know was only partly artifice.

'When we get married.' she said, 'let's get married here.'

'Are you asking for my hand, madam?'

'Among other things.'

'Okay. If we get married, we'll do it here.'

'If?'

'If and when.'

'When.'

'All right,' I said. 'When.'

She pulled me out of there, almost running, like a schoolgirl. When we were out in the oriental court, with a little brook babbling nearby, she babbled, too: 'This was our favorite place.'

'What?

'Jimmy's and mine. When we were kids. We came here every week. We'd make up stories, run around till the guides'd get cross and stop us. Even when we were teenagers, we'd come here now and then.'

I said nothing.

She sat on a stone bench. 'The day before Jimmy left, we came here. Walked around and took it all in. There's a greenhouse we've yet to see. Nate.' She stood. 'Come on.'

'Just a second.'

'Yes?'

'Your brother. I don't mind looking for him. It's my job. You're paying me to do that. Or you were. I'm not inclined to take any of your money, from here on out. But. anyway, your brother…'

'Yes?'

'I don't want to hear about him anymore.'

Her face crinkled into an amused mask. 'You're jealous!'

'You're goddamn right.' I said. 'Come on. Let's get the hell out of heaven.'

She kissed me. 'Okay,' she said.

'Jimmy's a good kid.' Paul Traynor said, 'just a little on the wild side.'

Traynor was only a few years older than me, but his hair was already mostly gray, his lanky frame giving over to a potbelly, his nose starting to go vein-shot, the sad gray eyes looking just a shade rheumy. He was sitting at his typewriter at a desk on the first floor of the newspaper building, in a room full of desks, about half of which were occupied, primarily by cigar-puffing men who sat typing through a self-created haze.

'He grew up during the Looney years,' Traynor said, 'and developed this fascination for gangsters. And, you know, we always have run a lot of Chicago news in the Democrat. We cover the gangland stuff pretty good, 'cause it has reader appeal, and 'cause the Tri-Cities liquor ring is tied to the Capone mob. So a kid around here could easily grow up equatin' that stuff with the wild west or whatever.'

'His father said you and Jimmy were pretty friendly. You let him tag along to trials now and then.'

'Yeah. Since he was maybe thirteen. He read the true detective magazines, and Black Mask, and that sort of thing. Kept scrapbooks about Capone and that crowd and so on. It seemed harmless to me. Till he got out of high school, anyway, and started feelin' his oats.'

'Drinking, carousing, you mean? Lots of kids do that, when they hit eighteen or so.'

'Sure. A kid out of high school wants to get laid, wants to go out with his pals and get blotto. Flamin'

youth. And so what? No. I wish that was the way Jimmy'd gone: hip flasks and raccoon coats. Oh yass.'