He opened the door with a key from a ring attached to a long chain on his belt and stepped in ahead of me.
“Suzanne, it’s Nick.”
I stepped inside the small, overheated living room. A redheaded woman, thick through the middle, with spindly legs in black stretch pants and a billowing zebra-print top rose from the green plaid sofa.
“What happened to Marla?” she asked in a low, grating voice.
I inhaled unevenly and told her about Marla and Eric. Her face paled when I finished. The tattooed dagger over her right thumb seemed to lengthen as her fingers danced with an unlit cigarette.
“I don’t want to cause any trouble for you,” I said. “Just tell me if any of this has to do with my husband.”
“Who’s your husband?” she asked.
“John Harper. Jack. He was killed in a car accident on old Highway One about nine months ago.”
“Oh, no.” She bent over and held her head in her hands.
“What?” I asked in a desperate voice, my pulse racing.
She sat up, gestured for a light from Nick, who shook his head.
“Just give it,” she said. “I’ll quit some other time.
“I worked with Marla at Trigger’s, but I guess you know that already.”
I nodded and she continued.
“One night we closed the place like we usually did, pushing the drunks out the door, counting the till. Then we decided to take a six-pack and a pizza and go down to the beach. Marla was having some man problems and we were going to talk.”
She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and gave a tiny, cat cough. “She knew of a beach where you could drive right out on the sand. We were going to watch the sunrise. On the way we passed someone stumbling along the road. It was the strangest thing. Not a car anywhere. Just this guy tripping on his own feet along this little road. All dirty and bloody. Big gash on his arm.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Some guy Marla knew from the bar. I only worked there a couple of months, so I didn’t get to know them like she did.”
“Why was he there?”
“I guess his car had broke down or something. We figured he probably wrecked it. I don’t know. The guy was drunk as a pig. Marla hauled him into the back of her van and we drove to some ranch house outside San Celina. He could barely walk, but she helped him up to the front door and went inside. She wasn’t in there but five minutes and then she took me home. The pizza was cold and the beer hot by then. Fool ruined our night.” She took another long drag off her cigarette.
“Go on,” I said harshly.
Suzanne eyed me coldly. “Hold your horses. Look, all I know is the next day she was reading the paper at the bar and told me she’d found a sure thing. I thought she was talking about a racehorse or something. A couple a days later she gave me five hundred bucks and told me not to tell anyone about what I saw that night. When I moved up here to be near my sister, she just kept sending money to me. Said she might need me to tell what I saw someday. It was no skin off my back. I took the money.”
“Why did you conceal where you were, change your name?”
“She just thought it was a good idea. This was like cops and robbers to her. I didn’t care. Just went back to my maiden name. Hart was my second husband’s name.”
“Could you find this ranch again?”
“It was past three in the morning after an eight-hour shift and four beers. I didn’t know my name, much less where we dropped that guy off at.”
“What did he look like?” I pressed.
“I don’t know. Like a guy. Middle-ageish. Good-looking. I don’t really remember.”
“Did he have a mustache?” Wade? Ray? I didn’t want to consider it, but I had to.
She thought for a moment, pulling absently at a strand of her thin red hair. “No, I don’t think so. Seems to me he was clean-shaven. Looked like something the cat coughed up, but he was a pretty good looking guy. That, I remember.”
“What did he look like?” I asked again, feeling desperate. This was all so ambiguous, like no real information at all. “Did Marla say his name at all? Did she talk to him at all?”
“Look, all’s I remember is when she helped him out of the van, she made some kind of joke, called him something that made him laugh.”
“What?” I said, my voice frantic. “What did she say? What did she call him?”
“Jimmy Olsen.” Suzanne gave a wet cough. “She called him Jimmy Olsen. Now, what do you think she meant by that?”
18
I WANTED TO drive. Anywhere. Coming to the freeway on-ramp, north and south beckoned with conflicting arms, like divorcing parents with an only child. I pictured myself speeding north through the pastel housing tracts of San Jose, the pumpkin patches of Half Moon Bay, over the Golden Gate Bridge, up the long cold northern coast of Calfornia, Oregon, Washington, to Canada; changing my name, my citizenship, dyeing my hair black.
I drove south. The shock of finding out Carl was in the jeep with Jack the night he died finally caused an uncontrollable trembling in me that made it impossible to drive. Outside Paso Robles, I pulled over and parked in a scenic turnout overlooking a dark field where a farmer was night plowing, the headlights of his tractor a long silver knife in the blackness. Unusual for this time of year. I wondered what problems drove him out of his warm bed to carve the long, even furrows. I sympathized with him. At least plowing a field was something you could control.
I climbed up on the hood of the truck, leaned back against the windshield, and stared up
