Stone Junction

High Life asked abruptly, ‘Your mother now, she the Annalee who Gideon had the bad hots for back in the late sixties?’

‘So it seems.’

‘How’d she die?’

‘A bomb exploded.’

High Life nodded, staring at the joint in his hand. ‘Well, man, you know how it is – accidents happen.’

‘Not this time.’

‘I knew them both. Your mother couldn’t have been sixteen, seventeen. Stunning chick. Mysterioso. Make the scene for a few days and – poof – gone till you saw her again. Gideon was what? Early thirties? Very hip, definitely knew the scoobies from the doos. He went for her hard. He thought she might be an actual Moon Goddess. I mean, Gideon truly believed there are gods and goddesses who assume human form in order to increase their understanding of us. Anyway, I was in Vesuvio’s the night Gideon pulled a gun on Johnny Gilbert and threatened to blow him away if he didn’t quit porking your mom – that wasn’t very sensitive on my part, was it? But that’s what he said to Johnny Gilbert, who was a poet. She dug poets. But I’ll tell you, Gideon loved her as real as you can. He might have killed for her, but he’d never have killed her.’

‘She was in love with someone else.’

‘When are we talking about?’

‘Early 1980.’

‘No way. Me and Gideon were tight into the late seventies.’ High Life held up his thumb and index finger pressed together to illustrate how tight they’d been. ‘He’d gotten over your mother by then. He was an artist, and artists are passionate people. He wasn’t happy unless he was obsessed, taken with some glory vision, some monstro-truth, and when he was in it, he was in it, over his head. And when he came up, it ended. Like when he knew your mother, he was obsessed with moonlight. He used to go up on the roof at night and fucking moonbathe. He wrote letters to NASA threatening to kill any asshole astronaut that dared to set foot on the moon. He called your mom Diana – believed to his bones, man, that she was a genuine Moon Goddess. All he talked about was her and the moon. It lasted about two years. Then he got into Marx.’

‘Karl Marx?’

‘Don’t ask me how he made that leap, but he read every word of and on Marx for about two years. Then it was clouds.’

Daniel asked: ‘What about Mickey Mouse – was that another of his obsessions? He did a series of sculptures, didn’t he?’

‘Oh yeah, he got into Mickey deep. He gave me the second sculpture he did. They all represented an hour of the day, dig, and mine was midnight. A little painted bronze of Mickey Mouse with his head up his ass. Best one in the series, I thought. But I had to sell it when I hit some hard times. You know, in some ways Mickey was his last shot. After that he became extremely interested in, uh … sonic sculptures, if you follow me – loud noises. I mean, after Mickey Mouse, what’s left?’

‘When did he do these Mickey Mouse sculptures?’

‘Umm, let’s see? Must have been around seventy-seven, seventy-six. Yeah, seventy-six, the Bicentennial, because that Christmas he gave everybody a Mickey Mouse watch with the hands pulled off.’

High Life began a long rant against cultural idiocy, but Daniel tuned him out. In late 1976 they’d still been at the Four Deuces, but Annalee hadn’t been making her monthly city trips for a long time. It was highly improbable she could have connected Gideon to the bomb. And then Daniel surprised himself by immediately deciding not to tell Volta the new information, or not until he had thought it through.

It wasn’t pleasant thinking it through. He lay on his mattress in the basement of the Treat Street house resifting evidence, considering motives, entertaining the improbable, trying to seize the obvious, taking each person carefully, starting with himself.

He knew he hadn’t betrayed his mother, but it was possible that the girl who’d wandered into the house the night before the theft attempt and who’d so wonderfully sucked his cock might have been an agent investigating the phony paper they were producing. Maybe she’d found something in the house, a note or something his mother had left. The trouble with that was he didn’t think his mother knew where the bomb would be planted until the next morning.

He eliminated Shamus mainly on instinct. What he had learned didn’t contradict his gut feeling that Shamus had been the one with the most to lose. Volta’s suggestion that perhaps Shamus had changed the bomb so that it would kill Annalee seemed utterly farfetched; Daniel might have entertained it if Shamus had gone ahead with the theft, but he hadn’t, nor had he tried to eliminate the others involved.

Gideon was more problematic. A faulty bomb was possible, but Daniel had to doubt, in light of the information from High Life, that the blast had been intentional on Gideon’s part. High Life had claimed Gideon had never said much about nuclear devices one way or another except to insist they were possessed of such horrible karma it was best to not even think about them. Daniel wasn’t sure what that meant, since it could be taken as a mindlessly blithe dismissal or an aversion as deep as taboo.

He provisionally eliminated Carl Fuller, the wheelman, and Olaf Ekblad, the alarm specialist. Shamus had said whoever was involved would deal only with him and know only the part assigned, and evidently that was the case.

That left his mother. She, he thought ruefully, would have done just about anything to stay with Shamus, and whether the theft was successful or not, she was going to lose. Only by preventing it could she have stayed with Shamus. And though she certainly had her sacrificial side, it was insulting to think she would kill herself to save the relationship. She wasn’t crazy. And even if she would have endangered herself, she wouldn’t have put him in peril. But what finally convinced him it couldn’t have been his mother was the memory of her scream telling him to run: It had been terrified. Whatever had happened, she hadn’t expected it.

Daniel, heeding Shamus’s message to be careful of Volta, decided Volta should be considered as well. There were just too many unknowns. First of all, Volta would have had to know what was happening – where and when – which meant somebody would have had to tell him. Only Shamus and, for a few hours, he and his mother had known where the bomb would be placed. Of course, Volta had been strongly against the plutonium theft, and knowing how Annalee and Shamus felt about each other, he might have put tails on them. But it’s the nature of tails