Jumper:Griffin _s Story j-3

by Steven Gould

  The accompanying sketch is of one of the three men (and one woman) involved in their murder. He was also seen in La Crucecita, Oaxca, Mexico, on November 13th, 19____________________ , and near the Russell Square tube stop in London, England, March 3rd, 200-. On March 16th, 200-, he was involved with the murder of Sam Coulton and Consuelo Mon-Jarraz y Romera and six INS agents in south-central San Diego County, California. His name is "Kemp" and he has a pronounced English (Bristol area) accent.

  Sincerely,

  Griffin O'Conner

  March 29th, 200-

  CC:

  San Diego police department

  FBI, San Diego field office

  San Diego County Sheriff's Dept.

  New Scotland Yard I reduced the sketch to half a page-I'd drawn a full-face and profile view to go with it-and put a nice inky thumbprint beside my signature, so they'd be able to prove it was really me.

  I made five copies, four to send, one to put up on the board, and posted the three in San Diego, at the downtown post office on Horton Plaza, and the other in a post box outside the Epping Tube station, the very last stop on the Central line.

  I went back to Mont-Saint-Michel at sunrise, jumping to the causeway, then sat and waited. If they were watching Cousin Harold they might feel me arrive; I doubted they were. But if they had stationed someone here, well then, they'd probably be along directly.

  I just wanted to know.

  I wasn't tired-I'd been shifting my operating time more to Greenwich zero. When you wake up in a sealed cave, it doesn't matter what the local sunlight is doing. I did tend to use the Kinko's in San Diego a lot but that didn't really matter, most of them were open twenty-four hours a day.

  When no one arrived desperately looking for a jumper, I walked the rest of the way across the causeway to the island.

  The tourist buses hadn't started arriving yet and the ones staying locally were still snug in their beds.

  I received an odd look or two from the few locals who were out, but they responded with nods or smiles to my unsmiling "bonjour." I wanted something hot to drink, coffee preferably, but the tourist cafes weren't open yet so I found a nook and jumped to San Diego, and bought a muffin and a very large latte from a Starbucks that was about to close, then went back.

  The shadows of the low morning sun threw the stonework of the spire into sharp relief and I used that, sketching the tower and the spire above from the courtyard outside the abbey. I stood up to stretch when a voice said in badly accented French, "No! Retorner, si vous plait." Then, immediately, in American English, "Where did you get Starbucks?"

  I turned. A redheaded teenaged girl in an enormous black coat sat cross-legged on the stones about ten feet back near the entrance of the courtyard, a large-format sketchbook propped in her lap. The coat was tucked under her rear and legs, and she wore fingerless gloves and black-rimmed glasses, comme Elvis Costello. She was older than me, but still a student, I suspected. She hadn't settled into her body yet-not the way Alejandra had.

  "Why shouldn't I move?" I asked her, ignoring the question about the coffee.

  "You were part of the scene. I mean, I wasn't going to include you but then you didn't move for the last twenty minutes so I decided I should include you and I really like the way I got your hair and the drape of your coat so you really need to sit back down." She said this very emphatically, with a rush at the end and a stab of her forefinger at the bench where I'd sat.

  I raised my eyebrows and she added with a suddenly nervous smile, "Please."

  "Very well, a votre service, mademoiselle." I sat back and took up the sketchpad again. "How's that?"

  "Turn a little more to your left-that's it. Are you done sketching? I mean, you can go on sketching but I'm drawing you as you were looking up at the spire, the sketchpad in your lap, right?"

  "I'll just look up, then-I'm done with the sketch." I could've worked on it more, but the shadows were vanishing as the sun rose higher, and part of drawing is learning when to leave off.

  I was a little angry with myself. I'd been sketching for two hours, at least, and though I'd been vaguely aware of people coming and going, I hadn't been paying attention. What if it had been Kemp?

  Well, it wasn't. I drank from the now cold latte but returned to the pose.

  "You never said where you got the Starbucks," she said. "I thought they weren't in France."

  I knew they'd been in London for a year or two but really didn't know about France." "Don't know. I got this one in San Diego." I started to look around to see how she'd take that but she stopped me.

  "Be still-I'm working on your ears. You're from the States? You sound like a Brit. Long way to bring a paper cup. Why bother?"

  "My parents moved around," I said, answering the first question. I decided right then to get a travel mug, to avoid this problem in the future.

  "You have very distinctive ears," she said.

  I blushed. "They stick out like the handles on a sugar bowl."

  The girl laughed. "That's… sweet."

  "Ha. Very funny."

  "Couldn't tell it by you. Well-I'm done. I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

  I raised my eyebrows again and she blushed.

  "Sketches!"

  We sat on the bench. My first impression of her coat was correct-it brushed the top of her shoes and the sleeves were rolled back once so as not to swallow her hands-a man's coat, large.

  I handed her my sketchbook, open to the morning's work. She seemed surprised, then pushed hers toward me. I guess she'd meant it when she said "show," not "handle."

  She was working with charcoal pencils and a kneaded eraser on nice coarse paper. More impressionistic than a study, but she was right-with just a few strokes she'd captured the way my hair was sticking up in back and the way my anorak folded as the hem rested on the bench. The tower with its spire and the courtyard walls rose nicely, too; the proportions were good and the shading of the morning light hitting the upper spire was very nice.

  Looking at mine she said, "How many days have you been working on this?"

  "Just this morning." I looked over at it. Mine was much more of a study, more detailed, more photorealistic, less heart. "I was here at sunrise."

  She pointed at the stepped arches in the lower tower and the crenellations where the slate roof tiles met the granite. "It's illustration quality-I mean, I'd wouldn't be surprised at all to find it in an architecture magazine or The New Yorker."

  My ears-those large sugar-bowl-handle ears-burned. "Yes, but it took me two and a half hours."

  "This is the sort of thing that takes some people days. What's your name? I want to be able to say I met you back in the day."

  "Ah, well, Griffin. That's my name."

  "Griffin?" She held out her hand, palm up, as if coaxing a timid animal out of a cave.

  " Griffin O'Conner." Hell, I said it. It's not as if she'd be asking Interpol about me, right?

  She extended the hand farther, taking mine. "Nice-tameetcha! E. V Kelson, As in Elaine Vera Kelson, but if you want me to answer, call me E.V., okay?" She gave my hand a firm shake, then dropped it. "So, where are you staying? We're at the Auberge SaintPierre."

  She hadn't given me back my sketchbook and was now holding it up at arm's length, comparing it with the spire itself.

  "I was staying with a friend's cousin in Pontorson, but I'm leaving today." Both literal truths. Ultimately a lie.

  "Oh? Me, too. We did Paris, now five days in London. What about you?"

  "I'll be going back home. Uh, who is 'we'?" She looked at me blankly and I clarified, "The 'we' who're staying at the Auberge-Pierre."

  "Ah, the French Club. Trenton Central High School, New Jersey. There's eight girls, two boys, our teacher, and four parent chaperones."

  "Ah. And do they know where you are?"

  She glanced sideways at me. "Why? You planning on kidnapping me?"

  I tilted my head to one side as if I were considering it, then shook my head regretfully. "I
've got a bag job at noon, and two snatch-and-grabs for two-thirty. I couldn't possibly fit you in. But there's always coffee. If that would be all right with your chaperones."

  "Well, yes, sort of, they know where I am-that is, on the Mont, sketching. I'm supposed to meet them back by eleven for checkout." She looked at her watch. "In two hours. If I don't get lost." She stood up promptly. "Coffee. I know where they'll serve cafe au lait and croissants. Found it by accident-then we can walk a bit, I'm stiff from sitting."

  She took one last look at my sketch, and we exchanged books.

  E.V. hated New Jersey, having moved there the previous summer from upstate New York. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a middle school art teacher whose jobs were always iffy as art funding was always the first thing cut. E.V.'s older brother, Patrick, was a freshman at Princeton and she had a large dog of indeterminate breed named Booger. She wanted to go to the School of Visual Arts in New York City when she graduated in two years. Her current boyfriend had asked her not to go on this trip simply because he needed her to go to a party and he was now her ex-boyfriend. "Though, to tell the truth, he was on the way out before that. He thought my cartoons were cute and he wanted me to draw him in the nude."

  I learned all this in the ten minutes before we got to the cafe. Over coffee she wheedled out the fact that I was traveling alone and that my parents were dead.

  "Oh." Her mouth opened and closed as if she was trying to find something appropriate to say.

  I held up one hand. "Miss them terribly. It's been six-Oh. It's been seven years. Rather not talk about it if you don't mind. Tell me what you saw in Paris. Better yet," I tapped her sketchbook, "show me."

  That worked. As I had the same sketchbook I'd had in Paris myself, we were even able to compare sketches of the same subjects.

  I touched a picture of the Seine running under the Pont Neuf and said, "I love the way you did the water here near the lie de la Cite. It's alive-mine is more like asphalt than water."

  "So, how often do you draw water?"

  "Not often-it looks too much like asphalt."

  "Practice. That's all. Make the next ten drawings you do be of water and I'll bet you catch the trick of it. Pinky deal," she said, holding out her little finger.

  "Pinky deal? What do you mean?"

  "You shake pinkies to seal the deal."

  "How can it be a deal? What are you going to do? For your part?"

  She looked at me, surprised. "Oh. I guess that's fair. But I'm telling you what to do. You should make the matching condition."

  I thought about it. "Okay-I draw ten pictures of water and you let me draw you in London. Sunday."

  "You'll be in London?"

  "I can be."

  "Draw me how?" she said, her eyes narrowing, and I realized she was thinking about her ex-boyfriend.

  "Fully clothed, in public, but you'll have to lose the coat. Outside, say, in a park."

  "We're staying at the Best Western Swiss Cottage but I have no idea where that is."

  "Probably near the Swiss Cottage Tube stop-it's a neighborhood up Camden way. That's close to Regent's Park. I'll check in with you Saturday afternoon."

  "O-kay. I think we have theater tickets so don't leave it too late," she said. She took off one fingerless glove and extended her pinky, hooked it around mine, and shook it up and down firmly. She let go and said, "Now you go boom."

  "What?"

  "Make a fist."

  I did and she crashed hers into mine and said, "Boom."

  "You're insane."

  She nodded emphatically. "Yes."

  Phuket has amazing water, stunning shades of blue and green both still and active. I did my first sketches on Ko Bon island, moving around from the leeward side to the more active waves. I worked in Prismatic colored pencils. I rarely used color but I couldn't stand the thought of trying that transition from deeper water to shallow sand bottom with graphite alone.

  Next, I tried the Thames, but it's boring in the city-row after row of apartments with water views. I went back to Oxford and dodged tourists until I found a nice spot near Magdalen Bridge where I sketched people punting through the round archways.

  I thought of going back to Oaxaca but it was too painful so I spent some time at Children's Pool Beach in La Jolla drawing sea lions coming onto the sand or the waves pounding against the other side of the sheltering breakwater.

  It was a gray day, overcast, and the ocean was like that, too. Graphite pencil felt right for this water. Monochrome.

  Just before I left, I went to a public phone and called the San Diego FBI Field Office.

  "I'd like to speak with whoever is handling the March sixteenth murder of the six INS agents."

  The woman who answered the phone said, "And your name?"

  " Griffin O'Conner. I sent some information last week. By mail."

  "Ah. One moment, please."

  I got hold music for about twenty seconds. I was going to hang up when a man came on the line. The background noise was different. "Hello? Griffin O'Conner?"

  "Yes."

  "Ah, good. I'm Special Agent Proctor. Give me a moment-they patched you through to my cell phone and I don't want to crash."

  The background noise lessened. "There, I'm on the shoulder. Where are you?"

  "Surely your office already told you the phone number and location."

  Proctor was silent for a few seconds and then he chuckled. "Well, yes, they did. I got your letter. Very interesting reading."

  "Has it produced any results?"

  "Maybe. A lot of questions, for one thing. What makes you think this Kemp character was involved in the murders at Sam Coulton's ranch?"

  I thought about what to tell and what not to. The truth, I decided, or most of it. The only people the truth would hurt were already dead.

  Or people I wished were dead.

  "Kemp talked to me from there. By phone. He told me to come there or he'd kill Sam and Consuelo. I was afraid, so I called the INS and the sheriff. And yes," I added stridently, "I lied to the INS about there being a bunch of illegals there, but I thought the more people, the less chance of anyone getting-" I took a deep breath. "I lied."

  "And this Kemp was there when your parents were killed?"

  "Definitely."

  "What's the common thread here, Griffin? What does Kemp want?"

  "Me. I'm the common thread. Kemp wants me-he wants me dead."

  "Why? He could've killed you at your parents', right?"

  "He tried. I got away. I've got the scars."

  "Again, why? What's the motive?"

  I shook my head. I still didn't know-it had to have something to do with the jumping. "I don't really know why." A partial truth.

  Proctor continued, "And where do Sam and Consuelo come in? Were they friends of your family? 'Cause I'm not finding any record of that."

  "No. They found me in the desert after I got away. I was a mess and they took care of me until I was better. Later, I went and stayed with Consuelo's niece in Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca. Her house was blown up two weeks ago." I paused. "You knew that, right?"

  Proctor exhaled. "Yeah. That I know. It was too close to the murders, the niece's home and all that. No bodies found."

  "They missed. It was close."

  "Were you there? There weren't any calls from Mexico that day, to the ranch."

  "Ah, phone records. Mine would be the call from the pay phone in El Centra." I told him a half-truth. "Alejandra was almost killed in the explosion."

  "That's the niece?"

  "Yes. Alejandra Losada."

  "Where is she now?"

  "In hiding." I hoped. I frowned. "You haven't once asked me to come talk to you! You sent people, didn't you?"

  Proctor paused, then said, "It's for your protec-"

  I hung up. Out on Coast Boulevard, two black-and-white SDPD cars had stopped behind all the parked cars and four officers were getting out.

  I went down the stairs past the seal obser
vation deck, moving briskly, dodging the tourists, and headed out onto the breakwater. It was windy and cold and there were only a few people braving the sea spray that regularly shot through the railing.

  The police followed slowly. It was a dead end, after all.

  I reached the end, put one hand on the rail, and launched myself over. It was rocks and surf perhaps twelve feet below and I heard someone shout from behind, and then I was trembling in the Hole.

  The Best Western Swiss Cottage was, oddly enough, by the Swiss Cottage Station on the Jubilee line, only a mile northwest of the zoo.

  I caught E.V. in the half hour before her group was to go to dinner and a restaging of Candide. I called her from the house phone in the lobby.

  "So, it's a pinky deal promise, right? Are we on?"

  " Griffin? Ha! I told them we had a date and they said you were just putting me on. Did you keep your end of the deal?"

  "You decide. I left you a packet at the front desk before I rang you up."

  She gasped. "Are you here? At the hotel?"

  "For a minute. I'm off to have Pakistani food in the West End. Ten o'clock all right?"

  "Yes, but I've got to bring a chaperone." She said it like it was a mortal illness, like I've got leukemia.

  Well, that's sensible. You can't expect them to let you go off with random strangers. I mean, what do they tell your parents? 'Let her go off with a strange boy and she didn't come back. Terribly sorry.'"

  She laughed. "I could come down-we're on the third, no, second floor, right? Ground, first, second?"

  "Shouldn't you be getting ready for dinner?"

  "Well, wait for me. They made us all dress up and somebody should see it. It's very rare for me. My mom bought this dress specifically for the trip."

  I smiled. "All right, then. I'll wait down here."

  The entire group, all fifteen of them, spilled down the stairs and the lifts. E.V. was wearing her gigantic black coat but unbuttoned and she spread it wide to show me a black velvet square-necked gown that more or less molded itself to her. I had to listen to a bunch of introductions while trying very hard not to stare at E.V.'s body. She was more, uh, mature than I'd realized, under that black coat. She still wore her glasses but her short red hair had been moussed into spikes.