“Yes.”
“Is this man a snake?”
“Even a snake doesn’t grow a new head,” I said.
“I know that. Do you know that?”
“Then it was a dream,” I said.
“It was a dream that bleeds,” he said. “Did you see this guy?”
“I know it was the same guy.”
“Did you see him?”
“Of course I saw him.”
“You saw him clearly? I didn’t think last time you saw things so clearly.”
“I haven’t seen his face. I don’t have to. I know who it is. I didn’t last time, but I do now.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Everyone has a name.”
“You’re a fuck, Cale,” he said, angrier and angrier.
“His name is Ben Jarry,” I said.
“Shit.”
I looked at the raggedy crowd in the doorway. “What about them?”
“This is my investigation,” Wade said. But he looked back at them.
“She ran out,” I said. He looked back at me and I thought of something else. “She also said something this time, she said something to me.”
“What?”
“It was Spanish I think.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I knew for sure what she said I would know for sure if it was Spanish.”
“Like you know this was Ben Jarry,” he said, “the man with the world’s unluckiest neck.”
“I told you it was a dream,” was all I could say, and then there was the light again, and that did it. It was no electrical storm. I jumped up from the chair. “What’s that damned light,” I said. I looked in the direction it came from and so did Wade.
“Sit down,” he said and pushed me back into my chair. “Mallory,” he called, turning to the wiry little man with red hair who had taken my radio. I could see a form moving for the door and it set me off and I jumped up from the chair again. Wade saw her too. He called to his man again. “What’s she doing here,” he said furiously.
It was the woman from the grotto in the blue-and-white dress, with the camera. “She’s a cop,” I said out loud to everyone who could hear it. I turned to Wade and said, “She’s a cop and you’ve got her following me taking pictures. That’s why she was in the bar that night.”
She was out the door with that, pushing aside the squatters who were still watching. The red-haired guy named Mallory started after her and so did a couple of others. Wade was looking at me in absolute amazement and then back at his men and then back at me, all within seconds. “Wait a minute!” he bellowed, and Mallory and the others stopped. In the distance in the lighted hall I could see her disappearing around a corner.
“She’s a cop,” I started in on him again.
“Shut up,” he said. He turned back to his men and then back to me. He was genuinely confused and he wasn’t pushing me into the chair anymore. His eyes narrowed. “You really don’t know who that woman is, Cale?”
“She’s a cop,” I said.
For a long minute he said nothing, and then he shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, and looked back down the hall, “she’s no cop,” and he got tired all at once and sat in the chair I’d been in, sagging into it almost the way the headless body had sagged onto the floor twenty feet away. You want us to go get her, Inspector? Mallory asked. “No,” Wade answered quickly. The cops looked at each other and didn’t move. “Cale,” Wade exhaled to me softly, “I had high hopes that you and I would have a low-key relationship. It hasn’t been turning out that way. It’s disappointing to me. Now I’m in a situation where I have several imponderable circumstances and no way to resolve therm.” He said, “Tonight something happened. Somebody bled enough for an army. But I still don’t have a body, I still don’t have a weapon, I still don’t have a perpetrator, and as a witness you’re a bit on the unreliable side. But I guess you know that. There’s nothing I can do except take blood samples and a statement. In the case of your statement, I’d rather not have it. It’s the kind of thing where I’d like to pretend something never happened but I can’t. You know what that’s like.”
“Yes,” I said quietly, “I know what that’s like.”
“Yes,” he said, “I suspect you do.” He got up. “You were easier to deal with,” he said, “when you were paralyzed with guilt. What’s gotten into you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t still paralyzed with guilt. But not so long before, before I saw a woman with a knife and hair as black as a gash in the day, I didn’t care who was my spy, or who thought I was on whose side of things, or how many times Ben Jarry died. I didn’t care if I was crazy or sane, or dreaming or awake, or alive or dead. Now I just wanted to see her again, and take her next time, Spanish or no Spanish, knife or no knife, and seize the chance to save Ben Jarry’s life once, for the once in which his neck had snapped on my account. That redemption was worth any measure of sanity or, for that matter, my life itself. Wade had to have seen some of that.
“Tell me when you figure it out,” he said.
“What about the woman with the camera?” I said.
“Stay away from her.”
Like hell, I thought.
There is a tree by a river, it is out west. A man comes to the tree and looks up and sees among its branches a nation of men; they’re living their whole lives in the tree. The man calls to them and says, What are you doing living in that tree? And after some silence, from the deepest foliage of the tree’s highest limbs, someone answers…
I forget. I forget the answer. It’s a good punch line and now I’ve forgotten it. I heard it
