I SAT on the familiar sun porch of my home sweet home in Washington. I was sipping a cold beer with Sampson.
It was fall, and the crisp, cool bite of winter was already in the air.
Our beloved and despised Redskins were already in football training camp; the Orioles were out of the pennant race again. “And so it goes,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote once upon a time, when I was at Johns Hopkins and susceptible to such easy, breezy sentiments.
I could see my kids in the living room. They were on the couch together watching Beauty and the Beast for the leventy-leventh time. I didn't mind. It was a good, strong story and it bore repeating.
Tomorrow, it would be Aladdin again, my personal favorite.
“I saw today that D.C. deploys three times as many police as the national average,” Sampson was telling me.
“Yeah, but we have twenty times as much crime. We didn't get to be the capital city of America for nothing,” I said. “Like one of our past mayors said, ”Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.'
Sampson laughed. We both did. Life was finally returning to normal.
“You all right?” Sampson asked me after a while. He hadn't asked that since I'd been back from the South, from the Outer Banks, my “summer vacation,” as I called it.
“I'm just fine. I'm a big macho, kick ass detective like you.” “You're a lying sack of shit, Alex. Ten pounds in a one-pound bag.” “That, too. Goes without saying.” I admitted to my faults with him.
“I asked you a serious damn question,” he said. He was giving me a flat, cold stare from behind his shades. Kind of reminded me of Hurricane Carter when he was a fighter. “You miss her, man?” “Of course I miss her. Hell, yes. I told you that I'm all right, though. I never had a woman friend like that. You?” “No. Not like that. You understand that both of you are very odd?” He shook his head and didn't know what to make of me. I didn't either.
“She wants to set up practice where she grew up. She made a promise to her family. That's what she's decided to do for the time being. I need to be here right now. Make sure you grow up all right. That's what I decided to do. That's what we decided together down in Nags Head. It's the right thing.” “Uh, huh.” “It's the right thing, John. It's what the two of us decided.” Sampson sipped his beer thoughtfully, as us macho men often do. He rocked in his easy chair, and watched me suspiciously over the mouth of the beer bottle. He “watched over me” is what he did.
Later that night, I sat all alone on the porch.
I played “Judgment Day,” then “God Bless the Child” on the piano. I thought about Kate again and about the thorny subject of loss. Most of us learn to deal with it somehow. We get better at it anyhow.
Kate had told me a powerful `=,54' story while we were in Nags Head. She was a good storyteller, a reincarnated Carson Mccullers.
When she was twenty, she said, she learned that her father was tending bar in a honky-tonk near the Kentucky border, and she went to the bar one night. She told me that she hadn't seen her father in sixteen years. She sat in the seedy, bad-smelling bar and watched him for almost half an hour. She hated what she saw. Finally she left, without ever introducing herself to her own father, without even telling him who she was. Kate just left.
She was so tough, and mostly in good ways. That was how she had survived all of those deaths in her family. It was probably why she was the one who had escaped from Casanova's house.
I remembered what she had told me just one night, Alex. A night neither of us would ever be able to forget. I hadn't been able to forget it. I hoped Kate hadn't either.
As I stared out the porch window into the darkness, I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that I was being watched. I solved the problem in true Doctor-Detective fashion. I stopped staring out the grime-stained window.
I know they are out there, though.
They know where I live.
I finally went up to bed, and had no sooner fallen off to sleep, when I heard a banging sound in the house. Loud banging. Persistent noise.
Trouble.
I grabbed my service revolver and hurried downstairs, where the banging noise continued. I glanced at my wrist-watch. It was three-thirty. A witching hour. Trouble for me.
I found Sampson lurking at the back door. He was the noisemaker.
“There's been a murder,” he said as I unlocked, unchained, and opened up for him. “This one is a honey, Alex.” The End
