by Jan Burke
“I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“You think that only happens to women or something? I think it’s almost a universal experience for anyone who’s single long enough.”
“I guess you’re right. You were pretty serious about somebody for a while, weren’t you?” Of course, I was pretending Pete hadn’t already given me the salient details about the woman who lured Frank to Las Piernas.
“Yeah. Her name was Cecilia. She was with the Highway Patrol. I transferred down here to be with her, then she decided to go back to Bakersfield. It was just as well.”
“I suppose I should be grateful to her.”
He looked at me. “You don’t have to be grateful to anybody.” He looked back out at the water, suddenly self-conscious. “I should have looked you up again. I’ve thought about it lots of times.”
“Yeah, I thought about you, too. Guess I didn’t want to find out you were married or in some steamy romance with somebody.”
He laughed. “I’ve come close to being a monk.”
I decided not to reply that close only counts in horseshoes. I also decided I’d be better off not recounting the details of my last decade.
A big wave hit the shore and came within inches of soaking our behinds.
“Time to move on?” I asked.
“Sure.”
We started an easy stroll toward the pier. It took a while, but we made it there just as the afternoon winds were starting to come up. I could see that his ribs were bothering him by the way he walked, and that he was starting to wear down.
“Let’s take the boardwalk back,” I suggested, seeing that the afternoon crowd had thinned out.
“Okay,” he said, and took my hand. We walked like that all the way back to the house, not saying a word, just watching people. I had noticed earlier that Frank had the cop’s habit of casually but constantly taking in all that was happening around him.
When we got to the house, I followed him into the kitchen, where he opened a fairly empty refrigerator, then asked me if I had plans for dinner.
“No, but you look tired. Why don’t I run to the store and pick up some groceries — I’ll make something for us here.”
“I’ll go with you. I’m enjoying being out.”
He looked pretty beat to me, but I said, “Okay.”
“If you won’t call me a yuppie, I’ll invite you to sit in the hot tub later on.”
“So that’s what’s in the corner of your yard. Yuppie, huh? You’re not exactly in one of those lines of work they classify as ‘yuppie.’ I’ll have to stop at my house and get my suit.”
“Okay, great. Hang on a second.” He walked down the hall into one of the bedrooms while I waited. It took him a while to come back out.
When he did, he had his shoulder holster and gun on. I have to admit that it took my mood down a notch.
He caught the change and said, “I just want to make sure you’re safe while we’re over there.”
“It makes sense, I just wasn’t thinking along those lines.”
He put on a windbreaker and we walked out to the car. He had a hard time lowering himself into my little convertible. He managed it, though, and said, “God, I miss my old Volvo.”
“Sorry, Frank. You’re at the mercy of those of us who still have their wheels.” I backed out as gently as I could, not wanting to jar him around any more than I had to. But he seemed so glad to be out of the house, I don’t think he would have noticed.
“You’re not supposed to be doing this yet, are you?” I asked.
“That just makes it more fun,” he said.
When we got to my house, I was worried about him trying to get in and out of the car again.
“Why don’t you stay here — I’ll only be a minute.”
“Get real,” he said, and shoved himself up out of the seat. Except for a kind of exhaling noise he made when he stood outside the car, he wasn’t going to show me that it bothered him. I decided not to comment on it.
I wasn’t so shocked by the appearance of the house this time. I unlocked the door, but Frank made me wait while he checked the house. “It’s okay,” he said at last. He walked to the back of the house with me, and I thought he was going to follow me around, but he was going toward the back door. He opened it and checked out the door and lock. “The guy was smooth, I’ll say that for him.”
“Pete told you what happened?”
“Yeah.” He was looking out at the backyard. “Roses,” he said, as if he were a thousand miles away.
“Isn’t that supposed to be ‘Rosebud’?”
“Huh? Oh, no. Sorry. I was just thinking about pesticides.”
“You think there’s some kind of bug in my roses? I know my garden doesn’t look half as snazzy as yours, so I’m open to suggestions.”
“No, it’s something that Hernandez told me today. They’ve identified what killed the guy you saw in Phoenix — the one you call Hawkeyes. It was nicotine poisoning.”
“He died from smoking?”
“No, he didn’t smoke. Nicotine is very toxic. Someone put it in his after-shave — it’s been done before. If you absorb nicotine into your skin at a high-enough dosage — and it doesn’t have to be very high — you’re a goner.”
“Someone poisoned his after-shave?”
“Yeah. Weird. But like I said, it’s been done before. Hernandez said there was a famous case in England — woman did her husband in the same way.”
“So where do you get nicotine? Boil cigarettes?”
“I suppose you could, but I’m not sure. Hernandez said it’s sometimes used as a pesticide — especially on roses. I was just thinking that it would be easier to trace if it was a pesticide for something a little rarer than roses.”
“So he knew whoever killed him?”
“Most victims know their killers.”
“Hard for me to think of him as a victim.”
“I know what you mean. I’d say he probably did know the poisoner. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment kind of murder. It would take planning, knowledge of Hawkeyes’s habits, where he lived, when he’d be away long enough to gain access to his house to poison the after-shave. Maybe it was given as a gift, knowing sooner or later he’d use it. I don’t know what the level of nicotine was, but someone would probably not try it with a smoker except in a heavy dose — smokers sometimes develop a level of tolerance to nicotine. The poisoner also had to have some idea of his taste in after-shave. No use dosing something he’d never use.”
“Do you know who Hawkeyes was?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’ve identified him. He had a record. Even had a conviction on a prior use of the trick with the hot iron on the feet. His name was Alf Bryant. Very twisted kind of guy. Apparently somebody didn’t want him talking about his recent work on their behalf.”
He looked out the back-door screen, making me think about the possibility that this “twisted guy” had been in my house while I was taking a shower.
Frank looked over at me. “Don’t think about it anymore. Not today — I’ll quit bringing it up.”
“I’m okay. I’ll get my suit.”
WE LOCKED UP and drove over to the store. There was some fresh swordfish on sale, so we picked up a couple of steaks of it, a cold bottle of fumé blanc, and salad fixings. After a brief hassle at the checkout stand, we agreed to split the bill.
It was starting to get dark by the time we got back to his house. While Frank opened the wine, I made a call to the paper to make sure the story about the nicotine poisoning had gotten out of the coroner’s office. They had heard about it and already had someone working on it.
We let the swordfish cook on the grill while we made the salad. We ate outside on the patio. The warm evening air was redolent with honeysuckle.
“Great dinner,” he said.
“My compliments to the co-chef.”
We finished the wine and cleaned up.
“We should wait awhile before sitting in that hot t
ub,” he said. He turned the radio on to a classical station. “This okay?”
“Fine.” I don’t know what it was, but it was gentle and soothing. I sat down on the couch next to him. He was rubbing his forehead. “Headache?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Lie down with your head in my lap.”
He gave me a look that said “What are you up to?” but he did it. A long time ago, a friend of mine taught me a few things about massage — the genuine article. One type of massage is great for headaches. Keeping in mind that he had some tender spots from the accident and that his concussion was probably causing the headaches, I very gently started rubbing his forehead, his neck and shoulders, and the area behind his ears.
“That feels great,” he said.
“Good. Let me know if I hurt you — I’m trying to avoid the bruises.”
“You’re doing fine.”
He closed his eyes, and within about two minutes was fast asleep.
“I knew you were worn out,” I whispered.
I watched him for a long time. After a while my feet started to tingle from lack of circulation, but I held off waking him.
He moved a little and I guess that woke him up. He seemed a little startled at first, then relaxed. “Well, I’m an exciting kind of guy to be around. You’ve probably spent more time around me asleep than awake this week.”
“You’re a guy who was in the hospital a couple of days ago. Why don’t you call it a night? The concussion, wine, and hot tub might not be such a great combination right now anyway.”
He reached up and traced my brow. “You’ll take a rain check?”
“It’s a deal.”
He dropped his hand to cover a yawn.
“In that case,” he said, “I’ll admit to being dead tired and a little achy and thank you for being understanding.”
We said goodnight and I left.
As I crawled into bed later that night, I thought about how I had made it through two days in a row in a fairly peaceful fashion. Cody jumped in with me and I snuggled close to him. I felt good all over. I don’t know how I could go from feeling so good to the nightmare, but that night I dreamed that someone was trying to cut off my hands and feet.
37
I WOKE UP IN DARKNESS, startled and drenched in sweat, after hearing myself cry out in my sleep. In those first few seconds, bordering between being asleep and awake, I wasn’t sure my hands and feet were still attached. As I reassured myself that the faceless villain of my dreams had not succeeded, I became aware that my heart was racing. I took some deep breaths and tried to calm down.
I looked at the clock radio. Three in the morning. The dream still seemed close to me, and I felt some small fear of its return should I fall asleep too soon. I decided to get up for a few minutes, hoping that if I left the room, the dream would quit hovering over me, and leave by the time I got back to bed.
Cody made some fussing noises as I turned on the light and sat up, and was thoroughly displeased when I got out of bed. He seemed to waver between following me to see what I was up to and staying in bed. In the end, his curiosity won out and I heard him thump to the floor behind me.
We went into the kitchen, where I cut a few pieces of salami as a treat for Cody and poured a glass of milk for myself. Now that I was awake, I reflected on the fact that this was really my favorite time of day, when the coolness of the air combined with a kind of stillness. Distractions were at a minimum. No one was going to call or drop by, few if any cars would be on the streets. There were enclaves of activity here and there, but most of the city was asleep. “Just you, me, a few night owls and certain members of the criminal element are up and about,” I said softly to Cody, who was washing up after his meal. He looked at me as if I should hear some reply he had made, then went back to work on his front paw.
The paper I had bought earlier at the hospital lay on the kitchen counter, and I began to browse through it. When I reached the front page of our local news section, I saw something that triggered a memory that had been itching at me since the night before.
It was an announcement of a graduation ceremony for Las Piernas College. The memory it triggered was that of the moment just before Elinor Hollingsworth had noticed Pete’s car at the gate. We were up in the tower, and I was looking at Andrew Hollingsworth’s undergraduate diploma. It was from Arizona State University.
In itself, it might not mean anything. Lots of people had graduated from there. As far as I knew, Hollingsworth had always been thought of as a “clean” candidate. Other than O’Connor’s suspicions about some funding irregularities between the DA and the mayor, I had no recollection of any scandals associated with him. And in Las Piernas, anyone married to a Sheffield would be under lots of public scrutiny.
I thought about the microfilm article on the Hollingsworth wedding, which had been so close to the date of Jennifer Owens’s murder. I would have to look at the microfilm for those dates again. He had been a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, so he would have been older than Jennifer by some years. He also would have been away from Arizona for a while. I didn’t know if he was from Arizona originally, or if he had just gone to undergraduate school there.
No use suspecting everybody who had ever been in the state of Arizona, I told myself. All the same, I knew that whoever was involved was powerful, and few men in Las Piernas were more powerful than Andrew Hollingsworth. What if on the eve of his wedding, a young woman had suddenly shown up to tell him she was pregnant with his child? Would he kill her? Mutilate her body? Why not just pay her to keep quiet?
Who would have better access than a district attorney to a rogue’s gallery like the one that had been involved in the dirty work so far? I tried to picture Andrew Hollingsworth in this role. It was not impossible, but I had a long way to go before I was out of the realm of speculation.
I picked Cody up and lugged him back to the bedroom. “You weigh a ton, old boy,” I whispered to him, and got a purr in response. I flopped down on the bed with him, and we got settled in. I turned the light out and lay in the dark, thinking of Frank. I wondered if he was still asleep. I wondered if we would start driving each other crazy if we got any closer to each other. He could irritate me so easily, and I knew I could return the favor. Yet, paradoxically, there was something so comfortable about him, so easy to be with.
I wondered if I felt drawn to him because of the circumstances, if I had reached out to him as some kind of refuge. I was vulnerable, and I knew it. O’Connor’s death alone was enough to make me feel I had lost my footing. Was I getting close to Frank just because of the situation we were in? Could I have any kind of perspective on anything in a week like the last one? Was I just grateful to him for protecting me? Guilty because he had been injured?
I thought of him standing there in his shorts and smiled in the darkness. I didn’t know if Frank and I would be able to be more than good friends, but I did know that something more than dependence and guilt was involved.
“I like the guy,” I said aloud, and Cody looked up at me. I scratched him between the ears. Before long I was fast asleep. Morning came so quickly, I’m not sure I had time to dream.
38
I WOKE UP with the lousy awareness that exactly one week ago, my whole world had blown apart. O’Connor dead a week. I lay in bed, feeling the spike of painful, hopeless longing for his company run through me. I wanted so much to hear his voice, his laugh, his lousy Irish jokes. I wanted him to come back, to be alive again. I knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, but I wanted it anyway.
I made myself get up and get dressed. It didn’t help. Lydia was scheduled to work a half-day at the paper; I asked if I could ride in with her.
“Sure,” she said, studying me. “What’s wrong?”
I shrugged, not wanting to open a Pandora’s box of emotion by talking about how much I missed O’Connor. I was afraid I’d spend the morning blubbering into my breakfast cereal. I tried to make an effort at light conversation; when I failed
to carry that off, I settled for being quiet.
Throughout breakfast and the drive to work, Lydia didn’t try to force me to confess my mood or the cause of it. If I had been on better emotional footing, I would have been grateful for it; as it was, I felt bad about not talking to her. I wondered if she regretted taking in such a brooding boarder.
“Lydia,” I said as she pulled into a parking space at the newspaper, “I don’t know how long all of this will go on. Maybe I should try to figure out some long-term arrangements.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t want to put a strain on our friendship. Maybe I should look for a place of my own.”
“Irene,” she said, giving me the exact same look that Sister Joseph used to give me when I had misbehaved in third grade, “relax. We’ve been friends over a long period of time. We survived both Catholic school and being roommates in college, and we’re still friends. So we’ll be okay. Not another word on the subject.”
“But if I start to bother you—”
“Irene.”
Even Sister Joseph was never so exasperated with me. “Yes?” I asked meekly.
“I know what’s wrong with you this morning. I don’t like thinking back on it either. But there are fifty-two Sundays every year and we can’t just fall apart on every one of them. So let’s deal with it like good little workaholics. Get out of the car.”
So I shut up and we walked into the building together. Once there, we went our separate ways; Lydia went to work at the City Desk, I went to the morgue. I checked out the same roll I had looked over before, and threaded it through the machine.
A little bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I tried to concentrate on the microfilm images on the small screen before me. I found the June 18, 1955, issue again, with its story of Jennifer Owens’s murder. It struck me that I was reading the article on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the night she was murdered.
