who is this asshole? Beats all, doesn’t it?”
“I spoke with the Captain this morning. He’s the only one back at the station house who knows what’s going on. Wants me to tell you don’t worry, he’s got you covered.”
Neither of us said anything else for a time.
“I appreciate this, buddy,” Randy said finally.
“Hey. Don’t get me wrong, you’re no prize. But with you gone, either I head out alone or wind up having to take care of some half-assed retard no one else’ll have. At least I’m used to you.”
We both let the silence have its way again. After a while he said: “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
“Looks like it.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Besides get your shit together and get back on the job, you mean.”
“Yeah… besides that.”
A nurse came in with a tray. He held out his hand. She upended a fez-shaped container of pills onto it, handed him a small waxed cup of water. He drank and swallowed. She went away.
“Anything I can get for you?” I said. “Anything I need to take care of?”
He shook his head.
“Bills are all paid up. Plenty of food in the house… Unless you want to try to get in touch with Dorey, find out where she is.”
I’d already done that, but I wasn’t going to tell him. I said I’d look into it.
“I can’t, I just can’t,” Dorey had told me. She was staying with a friend on Clark Place, in an old red-brick house behind a screen of fig trees. We sat in wicker chairs on the enclosed front porch, behind a checkerboard of glass, struts and putty. Full of imperfections, each pane warped the world in a different way, reducing, enlarging, folding edges into centers, bending right angles to curves. Mockingbirds thrashed and sang in the fig trees. “Will you let me know how he is?” Dorey asked. I said I would.
“Gotta get back on the horse,” I told Randy. “Anything you need, you’ll call me, right?”
He promised he would.
“I’m so sorry,” Marsha said that night over Mexican food. We’d been together six or eight weeks. A band looking like something from The Cisco Kid or a Roy Rogers movie, guitar, bajo sexto and trumpet, emerged from the kitchen playing “Happy Birthday” and stepped up to a table nearby. Our enchilada plates emerged moments later, pedestrian by comparison.
Marsha was a librarian. We’d met when a drunk fell asleep at one of the reading tables, she’d been unable to wake him at closing time, and, being right around the corner, I took the call. She was strikingly attractive, all the more so for never giving her appearance a thought one way or the other. Her mind was agile, the angle it might take at any given time unpredictable; good conversation sprang up spontaneously whenever she was around. Ten minutes after meeting someone, she’d be winnowing her way to the very best that person had. Despite my protests that it was important work I was good at, she kept insisting I was wasting my time as a detective.
“You remind me of my sister,” I told her when she first brought it up. “Always going on about how when I was young I’d been a natural leader, and she wondered why that changed.”
“Did it?”
I shoveled about half a cup of salsa onto a chip and threw it back, washed it down with a long sip of Miller’s.
“What happened, I think, was we grew apart.”
“You and your sister?”
“Me and the other kids. We had everything in common at first. They weren’t a particularly vocal or imaginative lot, and I’d just step up there, speak for them, pull them together. But as time went on, as we became individuals, our interests diverged. They took to sports, which I couldn’t care about. I just never got it, you know? Still don’t. Then I gravitated to books-every bit as mysterious to them, or more so.”
Marsha reached over and got my beer, took a swig. Things liberated always taste better. “Just listen to yourself,” she said. “Exactly what I mean.”
Flagging down the waitress, I ordered another beer.
“Don’t suppose you want one?” I asked Marsha.
“Me? A beer? Why on earth would I?”
“Just as I thought.”
She forged ahead into enchiladas, refried beans and soggy pimiento-shot rice, bolstering same with occasional forksful from my plate, though it was identical with hers. Neither of us did well, finally, by the challenge. Fully half the food remained heaped on our plates when we were done, foil-wrapped tortillas untouched. I had another beer. We declined offers of take-home containers.
Out, then, into a typically fine southern evening, cicadae singing, moths beating at screens, quarter-moon above. My car waited. Beneath artificial lights its shiny, hard, blue-green body resembled nothing so much as the carapace of another insect.
“Randy doesn’t have much to look forward to, does he?”
“Not right now.”
“Without you, he’d have far less.” She laid her head back against the seat. “It’s so beautiful, you almost forget.”
Years later in similar circumstances, in what might have been the same night inhabited by the great-great- grandchildren of those same cicadae, Val Bjorn turned her head to me and said, “A real Hank Williams night.” As she hummed softly, the words came to me. A night so long… Time goes slowly by… His heart’s as lonesome as mine.
Chapter Seventeen
Much prison conversation consists of homilies, catchphrases, familiar incantations passed back and forth without thought. Someone gave voice to one of them, others within hearing would nod, that was an entire conversation. A particular favorite was: You don’t use your time, it’ll sure use you.
From every indication Carl Hazelwood had been well used by time, long before he wound up pinned like a specimen moth to a carport wall.
I’d barely got back to the office from talking to Sarah, who’d been picked up by Adrienne after she put their exhausted father to bed, when Don Lee answered the phone and handed it over.
Val Bjorn jumped right in. “Hey, I have your man. Had to hold my head right, figure out which way to look. His fingerprints…” She trailed off. Because I’d not responded? “You had it already, didn’t you?”
“Just.”
“Day late and a dollar short.”
I filled her in on the Hazelwood family’s arrival. “Not that this in any way lessens my appreciation of your efforts, you know.”
“You have no idea how hard I humped to get this.”
“Maybe I can make it up to you.”
“How are they? The family. They have any idea what might have gone down?”
“Mostly they’re still trying to figure out what he was doing here.”
“Aren’t we all.” She paused to sip at something. “What’d you have in mind with that making-up thing?”
“Dinner, maybe? I’m open to suggestion.”
“You cook?”
“I buy.”
“That could be a problem ’round here.”
“So could my cooking.”
“Hmmm. Then maybe I should cook. Lesser of two evils. Not a lot lesser, I’ll admit.”
“Or we could throw that whole food business overboard-”
“Quick footwork there, Turner. Look out below!”
