You tried your best, Daddy. You just forgot that fathering is a skill as well as an art. And it's a skill that demands practice as well as good intentions. And nobody was there to tell him that Tiff was hurting too. That when you're fourteen years old, frustrations and humiliations are deep knife wounds. Wounds that can be fatal if not treated in time.
He was alone to take it all and deal with it. And that next night, after all the Dawkinses and Nunnalys and police and juvenile authorities had cleared out, he sat there in the dark feeling like he was having a heart attack, and it all came to sit on him with its enormous weight of guilt, and he sat there sobbing and hurting in the darkness of his fine home and began paying dues with currency he didn't even know he had.
And he was still there the next morning, sitting there on the carpeted stairway, racked with the dry heaves, on the edge of breakdown, consumed with guilt, nailed by despair, and absolutely, painfully, heartbreakingly alone.
And half of him was sorry for himself and the other half wasn't, and slowly, like the hard, seemingly stout heart of a diseased gum tree, he began to crack apart deep inside.
So Spain sits there on the edge of his reality, in the gathering debris of his life, well and truly screwed, blued, and subdued.
And the shadow of death edges closer.
Eichord fingered the edges of a few cards and scowled slightly. Christian's Cards and the ritzy mall in which it was situated — both brimming with purposeful, moneyed Californians and a smattering of ordinary commoners like himself — were as far removed and remote as the constellation of Andromeda. Another distant and far-removed spot on the planet, Chicago by name, kept nudging him.
He felt totally out of place in the shop, among genteel, immaculate women clerks and genteel, immaculate customers who regularly frequented such a place. Eichord stood looking at humorous greeting cards in the midst of the L.A. work day, such as it was; a homicide cop feeling the proverbial bull-in-china-shop as he sweated through his short-sleeved shirt, handgun harness, and stylish polyester.
The weight of the heavy revolver in the shoulder rig, the incongruity of the surroundings, the knowledge he was looking at cutesy cards with all that bad steel under his arm, made him feel ludicrous, out of place, quite uncomfortable. A trickle of perspiration trailed down his spine as a small and perfectly coined woman with a slightly rodentlike face asked him pleasantly, 'Can I help you with something?'
He smiled automatically as he shook his head. 'Just looking. Thanks.' Brilliant. She would never have guessed you were looking. He was standing there trying to figure out which of the crazy cards a little girl would like. He was trying to recall what her age was now. He had her birthdate written down somewhere, but he'd forgotten where. He looked at another card and it made even less sense than the last one.
What would a little girl like to get in the mail? He'd tuck a twenty in there. Kids that age (what age?) would like money better than anything else. But would she be uncomfortable getting money? Would she remember him?
And what would her mother say when Lee Anne asked her who this man was?
'Oh, you remember Jack, Uncle Jack the cop?
What kind of a favor would he be doing a little girl whom he never saw anymore. Somebody into whose life he'd insert himself once or twice a year with a phone call where neither party had anything to say. Somebody growing up so fast. She'd been what? Fifty inches tall when he'd seen her last. A year ago when he'd called she told him how big she was, and she seemed to have sprung up a couple7 of feet overnight. They'd be unrecognizable if they saw each other again. But he couldn't let go.
He pulled another card from the rack, a ridiculous-looking caricature saying 'You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you. So this year, when your birthday rolls around again ...' And you opened the accordion fold and the caricature assured the recipient, '... that's what I'm going to do for you: NOTHING.' He sighed and pulled the card and its envelope off the rack and went over to pay the lady.
Eichord thanked her and put his change in his pocket and walked out into the sunlight. He opened his car door and pitched the sport coat onto the back of the seat next to him. He was already drenched. Why was he so hot? It was just a card.
He wondered what Edie would say or what she would think when she saw a letter from him to her daughter. He thought about how she'd react to the twenty and he decided against sending any money. He'd write a note instead.
He was going to lose them, he knew. He was losing that sweet little girl too. The distance and time would do it, if nothing else. Life can be a bitch, he thought, wondering what would happen to him next. Would the fault crack open swallowing the shopping mall, the cars, him, the rat lady — all of us? Would the whole fucking thing fall into the ocean?
Eichord took the transmission lever out of Park and drove out of the expansive and posh shopping center, and as he drove by a metal trash barrel, he lowered the window and threw the card, envelope, and the sack into the trash and drove slowly out into the traffic, shaking his head as he shivered in the icy blast of AC.
What he ought to do was, he should go back and pluck that card out of the trash. But in that half-second he felt the chill of the eyes of the man at the airport. The man looking at him over the top of a greeting card. A wise guy's eyes. And Eichord shivered again, sweat chilling on him like the foreboding of death frightening the soul of some fey visionary. And the case intruded on the flash of imagery, as he realized he was leaving L.A. knowing less than when he'd started.
Somebody once asked Eichord, 'What do you
And Eichord said, 'You look for footprints in the cottage cheese.' It got a laugh at the time, but hell, who's kidding who? There it was.
The 'Eyeball Murders' were anybody's guess. Unrelated kills except for the assassin's trademark. The victims had their eyes shot out. It could be the old mob-style punishment hit. Or one of those and a couple of copycat kills. Or any damn thing. Whatever it was. Jack hadn't even a glimmer of a clue. It was, by the looks of it, another fine fucking mess and he couldn't wait to be away from Lala Land, and back to Buckhead, where NOBODY knew who the fuck John Frankenheimer was.
She had inherited her mother's skin, the kind of pigment that tanned to a golden coppery lustrousness, skin so smooth and pliant as to bedazzle and cause grown men to get a little catch in the throat at the sight of it when it appeared in any degree of expanse, such as displayed in a string bikini or a tiny halter top and short shorts. And that was Greg's next move, to get as much of that lovely skin showing as possible.
She had her father's eyes of many colors. Slate-gray to blue-green depending on the light. Greg gave her eyes his biggest smile and a wide sparkle of Hollywood white gleamed in his dark, beautiful face.
'Ummmm.' He nuzzled her, roughly licking at her like a big puppy, leaving little love marks on her neck and moving down the side of her throat as he gently eased the little top off. 'I could eat you up, you know that?' he said.
She made a contented murmur as he ran the tip of his tongue across her chest and down toward the still- rather-flat breasts and small nipples. He said something softly to her, but it was muffled in her chest and she said, 'What?'
'I said you know where I want to take you?' he repeated, looking up at her as his tongue flicked out at her in little darting moves like a bullfrog after June bugs.
'Where? To bed again?'
'Of course. For sure. But I want to take you to one of those great ski places like Vail or Aspen. You know — get a little cabin of some kind all alone up there where the powder is really bitchin'. Like on the advanced slope and like, uh, you know, just kick back.'
'Oh, Greg,' she purred, 'it's just like I thought it would be between us.' He nuzzled her again and she gazed down at him with her wide-set cat's eyes and let her hand tangle in his curly hair.
'Do you know I love you?'
'Yes,' she breathed. 'And I love you, too.'
'Ummm.' He nuzzled and kept talking into her body and she laughed softly. God, how she adored him. It was working out, after all. It was so good, and he was gentle and considerate, and she knew it was going to be
