“I take your meaning,” Irv says, starting the Wagoneer.
It is seven o’clock in the evening, but Deputy Melinda Powell decides not to go home quite yet and instead sit with Marcus as she finalizes some work. After all, it took so long to find him; seems weird to just leave him there.
Irv has only told her tangentially what happened at the lake and she’s hoping Marcus will open up and share the rest, but the longer she sits at Irv’s desk—still in the opposite jail cell—the more certain she becomes that the likelihood of Marcus uttering even a single word is very low.
“Do you like Thai food?” she asks him.
Marcus looks up.
“Thai food. Do you like it?”
“I guess so.”
“You must be hungry for some hot food, living out there in the woods like that for a week or more. What did you eat, anyway?”
“There was no Thai food.”
“Well . . . you’re in luck then. Because they deliver. The Thai people. Who I think might be Irish.”
Melinda orders a few appetizers and three main courses. It’s much more than they need, but she can put it on the station’s tab and squirrel away the leftovers in the fridge, which is now working again.
When the food arrives she makes Marcus a plate and hands him chopsticks from her adjoining cell.
“Irv says the Thai don’t use chopsticks; they use a spoon and sometimes a fork to push the food onto the spoon.”
Marcus nods as he uses the chopsticks.
“I don’t want you killing yourself with those or trying to make a prison break or anything, OK?”
She accepts his silence as agreement.
Melinda makes small talk as Marcus eats. “I doubt a lot of people—even the most highly motivated—have what it takes to off themselves with chopsticks. They’re quite brittle,” she says. “I guess you’d have to bunch them together and then hold the sharpened tips against your chest right between the ribs and have a good fall on them. Impale yourself through the heart. That would be the winner.”
Marcus stops chewing and looks at her.
“You didn’t hear it from me, though. In fact, give them back when you’re done, OK?”
Melinda notices that Marcus, who had been utterly expressionless since being placed in the jail cell, now has something akin to a smile on his face.
“What are you getting all hysterical about?” she asks.
“Your sheriff was right. You Americans keep talking, don’t you? I’d never really noticed.”
“You’re just used to us by now, that’s all.”
Sheriff Irving Wylie surrendered his three-bedroom Victorian in the divorce with an understanding that—when the house was eventually sold—he’d receive half the sale price. He didn’t mind moving out and liked the idea of his daughter having the stability of the home she’d been living in since they moved there fifteen years before.
He bought a two-bedroom in a modern building with an elevator and a decent view of the distant hills from his fourth-floor balcony. The condo is tastefully furnished. The living room has a blue area rug, an indigo velvet chair of a modern design, a tan leather sofa, and a wingback armchair in a green patterned fabric. The coffee table is glass. There are bookshelves along the walls filled with both novels and academic tomes. A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin. On Law, Morality, and Politics by Thomas Aquinas. Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris.
Sigrid reaches for the Sedaris book but stops when her eyes fall on pictures of his ex-wife and their daughter at all different ages. There is a Yamaha acoustic guitar in the corner of the room slightly askew on a steel stand.
Taking her shoes off, she picks up the guitar and flops onto the sofa with it, laying it across her lap. Irv pours two glasses of red. She strums her E chord. “You planning to wear that gun all night?” she asks him.
“That’s got to be the sexiest question I’ve ever been asked.”
Irv walks over and hands her the glass. He places his on the coffee table. He slips off his shoes, his gun belt, and his outer shirt. His white T-shirt has seen better days. He sits on the velvet chair and crosses his legs.
“To a job well done,” he says, raising a glass.
“You’re not done,” Sigrid says.
“What does that mean?”
“You told Melinda and Reverend Green to come up with a plan. She said they did.”
“Oh?”
“You’re going to go back to that church and tell the people there what really happened. And you have to be humble and respectful and make them believe you.”
“You mean the black church?”
“I mean the church filled with your constituents. Reverend Green says they need to hear from you. They’re in pain and, he believes, only the truth will help. You’re going to tell them what Marcus told you.”
“Swell.”
“Can you play this thing?” Sigrid asks.
“I can almost play ‘Handle with Care’ by the Traveling Wilburys. Do you know it?”
“No. Are you going to press charges against Marcus?”
“No.”
“You believe his story?”
“Turns out that it doesn’t matter. Apparently you told Melinda to find out what Chuck—our one and only eyewitness—was doing on the street corner when he saw Marcus run over to Lydia. As it happens, he was selling crack.”
“How do you know he was selling crack?”
“She asked him. Oh yeah, and she wanted me to tell you that sometimes the investigative question and the interview question are actually the same. Does that mean something?”
“It means she’s growing,” Sigrid says, smiling. She hands Irv the guitar and slips her feet beneath her. She sips the wine.
“The assistant district attorney says we can’t use Chuck. Melinda has also been up to the sixth floor of that building and she couldn’t find anything other than a lot of footprints. And while we could probably match some of them with Marcus’s and Lydia’s shoes, he’s not denying they were there. What we can’t do is prove that Marcus pushed her and since no one here has Smilla’s Sense of