by Jan Burke
“That’s what I was just telling myself.”
“Let me run this by Bredloe. Maybe I can work it out so that I can go along. I don’t like the idea of you going somewhere connected with Mr. O’Connor on your own.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“About three o’clock.”
“Criminy. They’re going to think I quit again. I’ve got to get back to the paper.”
“Let one of these guys make sure you get to work okay,” he said, motioning to one of the patrolmen.
The officer walked over and introduced himself as Mike Sorenson. It seemed silly to get in a car for a two-block ride, but I didn’t feel like walking over near the sidewalk where Miss Ralston’s body was still lying.
“You’re Frank Harriman’s friend, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “You know him?”
“Oh, sure. Great guy, Frank. I saw him earlier — he didn’t look so hot, but they said he’ll be one hundred percent before too long. I don’t know, seeing him there just made me boil — -really got to me. We all want to nail these bastards. Frank’s a good cop. And he says you’re okay. No offense, but I don’t usually get along so hot with reporters. But if Frank says you’re okay, then you’re okay.”
“Thanks. I wondered if — if people might blame me for what happened to him.”
“Naw, are you crazy? We know who’s who in this mess. Hell, lady, you’re damned lucky to be alive, and you know it.”
“You’re right.”
We pulled up at the newspaper and he got out and walked me in. I could hear the presses rolling. Snap out of it, I told myself, you’re lucky to be alive. I thanked Officer Sorenson, waved hello to Geoff, then made my way upstairs.
I talked to Lydia — she had been worried. Someone was already covering the hit-and-run.
I went over my progress on the funding story with John Walters and then I asked if we could go into his office. He looked up at me with a raised eyebrow, then motioned me inside the little glass cubicle he called home and shut the door on the nosiest people in the world.
I told him that I wanted to go to Gila Bend, and that I’d probably be taking a cop along with me, both for protection and for entrée to any business I might need to do with the Gila Bend cops. I told him that there really wasn’t any way for me to do this story on the sly from the cops, and if that bothered him, he ought to can me or get somebody else to cover it.
He started laughing. Not the reaction I expected.
“You are so damned ethical, Irene. I love it. You haven’t been here forty-eight hours and you’ve got the news editor in his office, giving him ultimatums so you can work with a clean conscience. Brother.”
I waited.
“God save me from girls who went to Catholic school. Guilt just eats them alive.”
I still waited.
“Irene, you know what the dangers are of getting too chummy with the people you may have to write some story about later. You’re a professional. I’m not going to give you advance absolution for any sins you are about to commit against the paper, I’ll just trust you to use your best judgment. Just between the two of us, I’m happy as hell that you’re not going out there alone.”
“I know, John, I know. Don’t think I’m not frightened. You should have seen me fall apart out there today. I even puked on the street.”
“What the hell do you expect? You see someone you were talking to five minutes earlier get their head cracked open and die. Are you supposed to just stand there and say, ‘Gee, that reminds me, I didn’t have lunch today’?”
“I didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“I didn’t have lunch today.”
This broke him up again.
“Hell, John, I don’t ever remember making you laugh like this before. Either I ought to go onstage or you’re becoming a raving lunatic.”
“The latter, I assure you, my dear, the latter. Now call it a day. Go home and make travel arrangements.”
On the way home, I bought a couple of steaks. By the time Lydia came in, I had a small feast waiting; Cody serenaded us with loud noises of anticipation for the leftovers.
PETE CALLED to say Bredloe had okayed the trip, and I told him I’d take care of the reservations. I called Fred back and cancelled O’Connor’s arrangements. Fred worked it out so that Pete and I could get on a flight to Phoenix the next morning and reserved a rental car. He needed to ask Pete some questions about seating preferences and so on, so I gave him Pete’s number and said goodnight.
At about seven-thirty, over Lydia’s protests, I headed back to the hospital. I hated the drive there, hated the walk in. But when I got to Frank’s room, all of that changed. He was awake and seemed fairly alert, and I realized I was damned glad to see him.
“You did come back,” he said.
“Sure. You remember my visit this afternoon?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“You look better tonight.”
“Thanks.”
I sat down and reached for his hand. We were quiet for a while. I was debating whether or not to tell him what had happened that afternoon. I decided not to. It would probably just worry him; besides, I reminded myself, I was there to comfort him.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“Hospitals scare me, I guess.” It wasn’t a complete lie.
“Hmm. That all?”
“No, that’s only part of it. I’m not going to be able to see you tomorrow. I’m going to Phoenix for the day with Pete. We’re going to check something out there.”
“Glad Pete’s going, too. I’ll be okay.”
I stayed a little longer, and he seemed to be wearing down again. He tried to stay awake, but I could tell he was feeling drowsy. I didn’t want to push it. I started to leave and he roused himself enough to say, “Take care.”
“You too,” I said.
When I got back to Lydia’s I took a hot bath for my sore muscles’ sake and climbed into bed. Cody wasn’t ready to turn in and so he hung out with Lydia. I’d given the little bastard steak and he still snubbed me.
23
I WOKE UP before sunup, about 4 A.M., and couldn’t get back to sleep. I dressed as quietly as I could, so as not to wake Lydia. I was a lot less sore than the day before. I felt restless, and I still had a few hours before the flight to Phoenix, so I decided to take a drive down to the beach. I grabbed a sweatshirt and eased the front door open, holding the knob to keep the latch quiet. Outside, the streetlights reflected softly in the cloudy June sky, and the air was damp and cool. Crickets sang. The car was covered with dew.
I started the car, and in the quiet of the neighborhood the sound seemed incredibly loud. As quickly as I could, I put it into gear and headed down to the water.
I reached the shore just as the pre-dawn light was filtering above the horizon. I parked and walked out to the end of the pier, passing only a few avid fishermen silently standing along its sides. Without the traffic and beach crowd to distract from it, the Pacific roared in an endless, uneven rhythm of waves.
“Peaceful,” her name meant, and though I had seen her storms and wrath, I always felt restored when I saw her. She stretched to the horizon, a reminder of the power of nature at the doorstep of southern California’s posturing artifice. All my worries seemed so small before her.
I watched a terrific sunrise, one full of gentle color and changing hues in water and sky. The gulls were beginning their day noisily, their cree, cree echoing off the cliffs. I went down the stairs to the beach, took my shoes off and chilled the bottoms of my feet in the soft, cold sand. They soon felt numb. I plodded along, letting the wind pull my hair across my face, taking deep breaths of salt-sea air.
I walked until I reached the Las Piernas cliffs. Above them the sun was glinting off the windows of the upper sundeck of the enormous Sheffield Estate. Here, for as many generations as Las Piernas had been a city, the Sheffield family had reigned. The earliest Sheffields had started
a general store, then a bank, then a pharmacy, and so on and on; they bought and sold real estate in and around Las Piernas to amass the original fortune, and added to it when one of the Sheffield grandchildren developed a knack for making ice cream. Sheffield Ice Cream stores were everywhere, and always seemed to be one step ahead of the latest ice cream craze. The last of the Sheffields was Elinor Sheffield Hollingsworth, who had married a handsome young Harvard law graduate who was now the district attorney of Las Piernas.
The Hollingsworths spent most of their time in one of the other family mansions, one up in the hills above the city, where they could socialize more easily with the other members of the upper crust. And so it was that today, like most other days, the cliffside estate looked vacant and lonely. Completely isolated, no other houses for two miles on either side, it stood sheltered on three sides by deep stands of trees that stretched from shore to road.
I turned and walked away from the twin cliffs and headed back to the pier. I watched a fisherman reel in and toss back a small perch. I thought about how strange an experience that must be for the fish, imagined the act of eating breakfast leading to a yank up into outer space and then a sudden fall back to earth.
I padded barefoot back to the car, the asphalt of the parking lot much warmer than the sand. I brushed the sand off my feet and pant cuffs. I put my shoes back on, then sat looking out at the water a little while longer. On this side of the pier, surfers had been riding waves since just before daybreak. I checked my rearview mirror and looked around. No one watching, as far as I could tell. I started up the car. No bomb under the hood. Whoever was trying to kill me had missed a golden opportunity. Not even that kind of thinking could disturb me much as I drove back to Lydia’s.
24
PETE CAME BY to pick me up just after Lydia had left for work. It was only about a fifteen-minute drive from Lydia’s place to the Las Piernas Airport. The airport was built in the late 1930s and it has a certain appeal because of it. The architecture has the curving chrome, brass, and green-glass look of the time. It’s small, just six gates. Only three major carriers use the Las Piernas Airport, but between them and the smaller airlines we get pretty good service and a hell of a lot less hassle than LAX. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a Hare Krishna recruiter there.
Our flight was on American Southwest Airlines. We pulled out our plastic and paid for our tickets. Pete checked his gun in with security; they put it in a special box for the flight. We walked about forty feet to the gate and had a seat. Pete offered me a piece of gum.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“I gotta have gum before a flight. I quit smoking fifteen years ago, but every time I get near an airplane I want to light up so bad, I can’t stand it.”
“Gum’s easier on your lungs.”
“Yeah, no kidding. You ever been a smoker?”
“Never really was a smoker. As a kid I tried it a couple of times — never really learned how to inhale. Thought I looked pretty cool just carrying one around, but the charm of that wore off fairly quickly.”
“Yeah, well, you’re lucky. Took longer for the charm to wear off for me. Now I’ve got what they call the zeal of the convert — I hate being around it, you know? But not when I’m in an airport — then it’s all I can do not to go into the bar and buy a pack of cigarettes. It’s crazy.”
“You afraid of flying?”
His cheeks colored. “Naw, I wouldn’t say that.” But after a moment he added, “I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah, I guess it does make me nervous.”
“I won’t tell a soul, Pete,” I said.
“Thanks.”
By the time they called our flight he had gone through half a large pack of Big Red Chewing Gum. He smelled like a cinnamon stick. I still preferred it to the smell of smoke. I stood up and started for the gate. He grabbed my arm.
“Not yet,” he said.
“You’re not going to completely balk at getting on the plane, are you?”
“We’re in no rush. I’d just prefer we let everybody else get to their seats. We don’t have any luggage or anything to put in an overhead compartment.”
I sat down again. I wondered if Pete was nervous about flying with one of Las Piernas’s leading targets.
Although they were supposedly boarding by sections, it seemed like most people just got on as soon as they could. Phoenix is a hub for American Southwest, so the flight was almost full. They got to the final boarding call. Pete looked around in the waiting area and didn’t seem to find anything out of the ordinary. We walked down the ramp and on to the plane.
People were still standing up in the aisle, trying to shove impossible amounts of carry-on baggage into the overhead compartments. Eventually we made our way back to our seats. Pete asked me to take the window seat, and he sat in between me and a kid who looked to be about sixteen.
The kid was dressed for effect. Except for his Day-Glo green shoelaces and a bleeding-skull-and-crossbones necklace that looked as if it came out of a gumball machine, he wore a basic black outfit, complete with knee-length jacket. He was listening to a radio whose earphones were smaller than his earrings. He had one of those haircuts that was what we used to call a “butch” on one side of his head, but from his crown forward was straight and about chin length. I wondered if a person could wear that haircut and feel in balance at all times. I admonished myself for this kind of thinking, remembering the guy I dated in high school whose hair was twice as long as my own, and how loudly I protested over my parents’ narrow-minded reaction to him.
The kid caught me looking at him. I smiled and said, “Hi.” Apparently reading my lips, he flashed me a peace sign. I think it’s still a peace sign.
Pete looked at me and rolled his eyes.
One more passenger came on board, a tall, thin man with hollow cheeks. He had hard, piercing eyes that roamed over the faces of the passengers as he walked down the aisle. He moved just past our row and sat down right behind Pete. I could think of no specific reason to feel uneasy about this man, but we had failed to be the last ones on board and I couldn’t help but wonder about the way the man had looked over the passengers.
I felt my palms break out in a sweat. There were only a few open seats left on the plane. Had he just been looking for an empty seat? No, he was looking at people, not just scanning the rows for an available place. Then I noticed that he had passed up one of the ones closer to the door.
Why sit right behind us? Was that his assigned seat, or did he just choose that seat on his own?
“Got any more of that gum?” I asked Pete.
“Sure,” he said, offering me a stick, and then holding one out to the kid.
“Thank you, sir, that’s very kind of you,” the kid said politely.
I know we both looked slack-jawed. I don’t know why. The hippie I dated in high school was the most well-mannered of any of the handful of guys I went out with.
We started down the runway and I saw Pete’s knuckles go white. I thought about how odd it was — here was a guy who could handle resuscitating a bloody man who was buried alive in sand, but he was scared silly by an airplane’s takeoff. For my part, few sensations were better than the rush of being airborne.
It was a short flight. They barely had enough time to hand out peanuts and drinks before we landed. Pete seemed to be bothered even more by landing. We were going to have to buy more gum before the day was over.
Once we were on the ground, Pete gradually relaxed. But as we pulled into the gate, he motioned to me to stay seated. “Wait,” he said.
We watched all the other passengers leave. The man whom I had started to think of as “Hawkeyes” was one of the first ones off the plane. Maybe I was imagining things after all.
Not having any baggage makes flying a totally different experience. Except for my windbreaker and purse, I had nothing to keep track of. We retrieved Pete’s gun from Phoenix Airport security, then went down to the car-rental counter to pick up the compact Fred had reserved for us. As I gave
the information for the rental contract, Pete leaned with his back against the counter, watching the people around us.
Outside, the morning was already turning warm. Only 9:00 A.M. and it must have been about eighty degrees out. I asked Pete if he would mind if I did the driving. He didn’t, and after accidentally turning the windshield wipers on while trying to adjust the steering wheel, we were on our way to Gila Bend.
Traffic in Phoenix was a bitch, so it took us a while to get clear of the city and its immediate neighbors on U.S. 10. The road became less and less crowded as we moved west. We passed the dark-green swath of farmlands along the Gila River, crossing over the river itself near Buckeye. We made the turnoff on Highway 85, and the landscape changed as we went south through clusters of dry Arizona mountains.
For miles we saw few signs of human inhabitants. Scattered here and there were vacant farm houses along the road. Broken windows gave them a forlorn look, as if they were ashamed of their shabbiness. Already scrub brush and cacti were reclaiming the abandoned fields.
Pete yammered away throughout the trip.
“I grew up in upstate New York,” he told me. “Like a friend of mine says, ‘Only penguins should live there.’ You ever been to upstate New York? No? Well, I suppose for some people it’s got attractions. But every time I even start to miss it, you know what I do? I go out to my garage. I got a snow shovel out there. Honest to God. I’m probably the only guy in southern California with a snow shovel in his garage. Yeah, I just look at that snow shovel and think about what it feels like when there’s a good windchill factor and a driveway full of snow, and I say, ‘Just sit there, you bastard, I’m never picking you up again in my lifetime.’ No kidding. That’s what I do.”
Outside the car, it was probably nearing a hundred degrees, and I was listening to stories about snow shovels.
“How long you known Frank?” he asked.
“We met years ago in Bakersfield, but I haven’t seen much of him until — well, until this week,” I said, thinking of that morning on O’Connor’s front lawn. Was that only a few days ago?
