I reached in front of him and put down the meditation card, snapping it sharply against the countertop to intrigue him.
He played cool, didn't pick it up right away. 'I plan to come by the Grille after the show, chow down on a heart-stopping pile of fried shaved ham, shoestring onions, and biscuits in gravy'
As I circled the microphone island, sat on a stool opposite him, and pushed the other mike aside on its flexible arm, I said, 'I won't be cooking this morning. Got the day off.'
'What do you do on a day off-go out there and moon around at the tire store?'
'I thought I might go bowling.'
'You're one wild party animal, Wizard. I don't know how your lady keeps up with you.'
The Miller tune wrapped. Shamus leaned into the mike and let ad-libbed patter dance off his tongue, cuing back-to-back cuts of Benny Goodman's 'One O'clock Jump' and Duke Ellington's 'Take the A Train.'
I like to listen to Shamus on the air and off. He has a voice that makes Barry White and James Earl Jones sound like carnival barkers with strep throat. To radio people, he's the Velvet Tongue.
From 1:00 a.m. to 6:00, every day but Sunday, Shamus spins what he calls 'the music that won the big war,' and recounts tales of the night life of that long-ago age.
The other nineteen hours of the day, KPMC eschews music in favor of talk radio. Management would prefer to shut down during those five least-listened hours, but their broadcast license requires them to serve the community 24/7.
This situation gives Shamus the freedom to do anything he wants, and what he wants is to immerse himself and his insomniac listeners in the glories of the Big Band era. In those days, he says, the music was
The first time I heard this rap, I expressed surprise that he would feel such affinity for an age of active segregation. His answer was, 'I'm black, blind, seriously smart, and sensitive. No age would be easy for me. At least the culture had
Now he told his audience, 'Close your eyes, picture the Duke in his trademark white tux, and join me, Shamus Cocobolo, as I ride that A Train to Harlem.'
His mother named him Shamus because she wanted her son to be a police detective. When he went blind at three, a law-enforcement career ceased to be an option. The 'Cocobolo' came with his father, straight out of Jamaica.
Picking up the black plastic card, holding it by the top and bottom edges between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he said, 'Some stupefyingly stupid bank give you a credit card?'
'I was hoping you could tell me what it says.'
He slid one finger across the card, not really reading it, just determining its nature. 'Oh, Wizard, surely you don't think I need meditation when I've got Count Basie and Satchmo and Artie Shaw.'
'So you know what it is.'
'The last couple years, people have given me maybe a dozen of these things, all different inspirational thoughts, as though blind people can't dance, so they meditate. No offense, Wizard, but you're entirely too cool to give me a plastic fantastic spiritual whizbang like this, and I'm a little embarrassed for you.'
'You're welcome. But I'm not giving it to you. I'm just curious what it says in Braille.'
'I'm relieved to hear that. But why curious?'
'I was born that way.'
'I get the point. None of my business.' He read the card with his fingertips and said, ' 'Father of lies.' '
' 'Father of flies'?'
'
The phrase was familiar to me, but for some reason I couldn't make sense of it, perhaps because I didn't want to.
'The devil,' Shamus said. 'The Father of Lies, Father of Evil, His Satanic Majesty. What's the story, Wizard? Is St. Bart's old-time religion just too boring these days, you need a whiff of sulfur to give your soul a thrill?'
'It's not my card.'
'So whose card is it?'
'
'For a nice boy who makes an honest living with a fast spatula, you sure hang around with some seriously whacked people.'
He slid the card toward me, across the microphone island.
I got up from my stool.
'Don't you leave that brimstone Braille here,' he said.
'It's just a plastic fantastic spiritual whizbang, remember?'
My twin reflections watched me from the dark-blue lenses of his glasses.
Shamus said, 'I knew a practicing Satanist once. The guy claimed he hated his mother, but he must've loved her. Cops found her severed head in his freezer, in a sealed plastic bag with rose petals to keep it fresh.'
I picked up the meditation card. It felt cold.
'Thanks for your help, Shamus.'
'You be careful, Wizard. Interestingly eccentric friends aren't easy to find. You were suddenly dead, I'd miss you.'
FORTY-FOUR
THE RED DAWN CAME, THE SUN LIKE AN EXECUTIONER'S blade slicing up from the dark horizon.
Elsewhere in Pico Mundo, a would-be mass murderer might have been looking at this sunrise while inserting cartridges in spare magazines for his assault rifle.
I parked in the driveway and turned off the engine. I could wait no longer to learn if the shooter who popped Bob Robertson had also murdered Rosalia Sanchez. Yet two or three minutes passed before I found sufficient courage to get out of the car.
The night birds had fallen silent. Usually active at first light, the morning crows had not yet appeared.
Climbing the back-porch steps, I saw that the screen door was closed but that the door stood open. The kitchen lights were off.
I peered through the screen. Rosalia sat at the table, her hands folded around a coffee mug. She appeared to be alive.
Appearances can be deceiving. Her dead body might be awaiting discovery in another room, and this might be her earthbound spirit with its hands around the mug that she had left when she'd gone to answer the killer's knock on her door the previous evening.
I could not smell freshly brewed coffee.
Always before, when she waited for me to arrive to tell her that she was visible,
