outstretched.
Dr. James Melvin Hudson.
Kling hung back.
Ducked into a doorway.
She took his hand, Dr. James Melvin Hudson's hand, reached up, kissed him on the cheek, which Kling thought an odd greeting for a pair of physicians; cops never even shook hands with other cops. She sat opposite him, and he signaled to a waiter. She'd just had a coffee . . .
Kling could imagine her explaining this to him . . .
So if he didn't mind, she'd just sit here . . .
Turning away the waiter's proffered menu . . .
And then leaning into him over the table, Dr. James Melvin Hudson, her elbows on the table, heads close together, talking seriously and intimately as on the sidewalk passersby hurried on along, unknowing, uncaring, this was the big bad city.
Kling watched them for the next half-hour, hidden in his secret doorway, a cop, shoulders hunched as if it were the dead of winter and not the seventh day of June, hat pulled down low on his forehead, hiding his blond hair. The blond guy and the black girl. Had it been a mistake from the start? Was it now a mistake? Would black and white ever be right in America?
He looked at his watch, Dr. James Melvin Hudson
did, and signaled to the waiter. Sharyn watched him as he paid the bill, rose when he did, kissed him on the cheek again when he went off, and then sat again at the table, alone now, seemingly deep in thought as the shadows lengthened and evengloam claimed the distant sky.
GENERO HADN'T BEEN inside a public library since he was twelve years old and checked out John Jakes' Love and War with his new Adult Section card. His current reading ran to the Harry Potter books, but he actually bought those because he felt people should support starving writers who wrote on paper napkins in coffee shops.
The library he went to that Monday night was in his Calm's Point neighborhood and stayed open till ten P.M. He got there around eight, after having dinner with his mother and father in their little one-story house nearby. His mother made penne alia puttanesca, which she told him meant 'whore style,' in front of his father, too. When he asked the librarian if she had a book that had everything Shakespeare ever wrote in it, she looked at him funny for a minute, and then came back with a heavy-looking tome that he took to the reading room, which was as quiet as a funeral parlor.
He didn't plan to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote; he simply planned to count all the stuff he'd written. The numbers he came up with were thirty-seven plays, five long poems, and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, which up to now he'd thought were also poems, but since they were in a separate section of the book labeled SONNETS, he now guessed otherwise. He also guessed this was a very large body of work. In fact, he could hardly think of anyone else who'd written so many wonderful
things, he supposed, in his or her lifetime.
He didn't know to what use he could put this newfound knowledge, but he considered it very sound detective work. And besides, when he returned the book, the librarian looked at him with renewed respect, he also supposed.
LYING IN BED, waiting for her to come to him, Kling told her they'd probably figured out what weapon — or weapons, actually — the Deaf Man planned to use, but not whom he planned to kill, or even if he planned to kill anyone at all.
'It's darts,' he said. 'Plural. D-A-R-T-S. Probably poisoned. We figured out it's, like, the law of diminishing returns. In his notes, he went from spears to arrows to darts, in descending order. Like backward. So we're pretty sure it's darts, but we don't know who or how — or even when, for that matter.'
'Mmm,' Sharyn said.
She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. She seemed preoccupied, but she often got that way while getting ready for bed. Lots of things a woman had to do before bedtime. Even so . . .
'Thing is, that's not his usual style,' Kling said. 'Announcing a murder, I mean.'
Sharyn spit into the sink.
'We think he killed this woman last week, but that may have been getting even for her betraying him or something. Mayhem is more his style. Subterfuge. Leading us in one direction and then moving in another.'
'He sounds like a real pain in the ass,' Sharyn said, and came back into the bedroom. She was wearing a baby-doll nightgown, no panties, fuzzy pink slippers.
'A supreme pain in the ass,' Kling said. 'But dead serious.'
'Are you cold in here?' Sharyn asked. 'Or is it just me?'
'It is a little chilly,' he said. 'Such a nice day, too.'
'Lovely.'
The room was silent for a moment.
'How'd your day go?' he asked.
'Okay,' she said.
He hesitated. Took the plunge.
'What'd you do?'
'The usual,' she said. 'Parade of the halt and lame at Rankin, lunch at a Chinese restaurant, march of the poor and oppressed up in Diamondback. Same old, same old.'
She took off her slippers, climbed into bed beside him.
And afterward?' he asked.
'After what?'
After work?'
'Bought a coffee at Starbucks, and caught a bus borne. Come warm my feet,' she said, cuddling close to him.
9.
IT WAS ALREADY one o'clock on Tuesday morning, the eighth day of June. Despite the light drizzle wetting the streets and dampening the libido, the stroll in Ho Alley had been underway since eleven or so last night.
There was a time when Ollie might have found these nocturnal adventures exciting . . . well, actually had found them exciting, never mind the 'might have.' Half the girls out here looked like they were parading in their underwear. The other half were wearing skirts cut high on their thighs, some of them slit up the side to expose even more flesh, barelegged, with strapped stiletto-heel sandals or boots of the dominatrix variety, leather laces up the side. If you were a red-blooded American male, how could you not get excited?
Especially when these girls reeked of everything forbidden. He didn't mean just the casual blowjob; junior high school girls were giving those away free nowadays. He meant the very concept of Anything Goes. In a society becoming more and more restrictive, here on this five-block stretch of turf, everything was permitted. Anything imagined by the Great Whores of Babylon had been refined to perfection over the centuries and was now for sale in this outdoor bazaar where girls talked freely and seemingly without fear of arrest about such delicacies as the Moroccan Sip, and the Acapulco Ass Dip, and the Singapore Slide.
There ought to be a law, Ollie thought.
There was, in fact, a law, but you couldn't guess it
existed on this street at this hour of the night. As short a time ago as only last month, Ollie would have found all these flashing legs and winking nipples and glossy wet lips . . . well . . . arousing. Even now, he felt a faint stirring in his groin, but he suspected that was a conditioned response and not anything generated by true desire. Or maybe it was because one of the girls had just grabbed his genitals and asked, 'What you got here, Big Boy?'
'Nothing for you, honey,' he said.
'Sure about that? I'm a virgin from Venezuela.'
'And I'm a bullfighter from Peru,' he said.
'Less see what you got there, torero.'
'Unzip him, Nina.'
'Want me to suck your espada?
