The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Back in the darkened living room, I found the remote and raised the blinds. Watched the lights of San Diego twinkle on the black surface of the bay. Considered the bottle of vodka, from which Paige Hulet had had to guzzle to attempt sex—after the restaurant cocktails, wine, and digestifs on the town. Plenty of courage, Doctor. She may have been the summa cum laude doctor of medicine and I just an average man, but it was pretty clear to me that she needed more than courage.

  I went in and sat near her on the bed. She uncurled onto her back and I saw the faint sparks of light reflected in her eyes, and then they disappeared.

  I kissed her lightly, lingering just a moment to gather in her breath, an undertow of alcohol, and the smell of her body. I ran my fingers through her hair. Faintly and very far away, from under the hum of the sleeping city, I heard Justine’s voice. No words or syllables, even, just its rhythm and timbre. I felt noted by Justine, not blamed. Then she was silent. Don’t go. Don’t stay.

  I walked around Paige Hulet’s hushed lair one more time, went into each of the rooms, just trying to register it all. Had the feeling that I wouldn’t see it again.

  —

  Downtown San Diego was quiet at four in the morning. The moon was gone and the mist was April cool and the formerly busy sidewalks were all but empty. I backtracked my way through the alleys to Fifth, followed it to the parking lot. My truck was where I’d left it, one of only a few vehicles still waiting for their drivers. As I stepped onto the darkened lot I saw a figure on the far side of it, hands in his hoodie pockets, trotting away from me. Solid-looking guy, spring in his step. Then footsteps behind me. I turned to see a man in a ball cap hustling across the street ahead of a coming car. He glanced back at me and picked up his pace.

  The newsstand across the street had opened. In the fog the gas lamps flickered and a man wrestled a bundle of newspapers from a truck. Coffee steam rose from a service window on the sidewalk. Another man stood near that window, sipping from a white cup, looking at me. Big fellow. A leather duster. Wide face, thick mustache, a shaven head that caught the flickering light. Calm, like he was daring me to connect him to the other two men who had slunk off into the darkness. A linen-supply truck parked along the curb in front of me. When I walked around it and looked over at the newsstand, Bald Mountain was still there, his back to me, choosing a paper off a rack.

  27

  Shade goes well with a warm day, a cold beer, and a stack of almost-overdue bills. Reclining on a patio lounger under the palapa, I wrote out checks to SDG&E and for propane. Water and phone. I paused to look out at the pond and the rolling hills beyond. My mind drifted easily back to last night’s strange twists and turns. Pretty, uptight Dr. Paige Hulet, dressed to kill, then undressed and drunk but still trying to heal me. Her past highlighted on the wall of her office.

  Dick and Liz sat to my right, closer to the barbecue, and closely side by side, to better dispute and berate each other. Wesley Gunn lay on the chaise longue on the other side of me, fending off the bright sunshine with dark glasses. His black eyes were at their worst on this, the second day since his run-in with the Tijuana pimp. He had earbuds in and the player resting on his stomach and one foot keeping rhythm. Lindsey and Burt had gone into town.

  I looked down at my stomach, shorts, legs, and feet. Pale from winter. Wondered what Paige Hulet had thought, then realized I’d never taken off my clothes. I thought about Bald Mountain and his two confederates waiting near my truck. Were they part of the Arcadia/DeMaris crew? If so, had they followed the transmitter on my car, or were they staking out Paige’s penthouse? Possible. I had to figure that if Briggs Spencer was worried enough to follow his own PI, he was worried enough to surveil his own employee, too. Or, maybe some grudge from his unrequited passion.

  “So, how’d the date go anyway, Roland?” asked Liz. “You didn’t get home until sunrise. And you looked very GQ when you left here in that suit.”

  “Well, to be frank, Liz,” said Dick, “Roland’s three-button coat is pretty yesterday.”

  “She liked the suit,” I said, opening the next bill—satellite for the TV I almost never watched.

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” asked Liz.

  “It was a good date.”

  “Just exactly how good?” demanded Dick.

  “Let me run some figures on my calculator, and I’ll get back to you.”

  I felt the afternoon warmth on my skin and finished paying bills. Picked up the New York Times Book Review, which always takes me a few days to get to. Full back-page ad for Hard Truth, Briggs Spencer’s rugged face staring at me.

  HARD TRUTH

  THE COST OF FREEDOM IN THE WAR ON TERROR

  ON SALE APRIL 18

  Felt drowsy. Drifted back to Paige Hulet. Dick and Liz argued men’s fashions, then sex-or-not on the first date. Changed their own opinions and facts to create an argument. I wondered if Justine and I would have ended up like that. Didn’t think so. Had so little time for it. Though I’ll admit that, by now, at thirty-eight years of age, I’ve glimpsed myself in my parents and grandparents more than once. And every time I see me in them I vow to delay by any means possible their infirmities and combative dopiness and their frightening descents into habit. I also know by age thirty-eight that only time lasts forever.

  One night after we’d made love, and not long after we’d met, Justine asked me to tell her seven things I believed in. Not believed, but believed in. They could be someone else’s ideas, but I had to use my own words. No one else’s. I tried and couldn’t. She ran her fingers through my hair and laid her head on my chest. Rattled off seven things that she believed in. True and clear and simple. Her voice a whisper. Red hair on pale shoulder in the half-dark. “They’ll keep you from going adrift. File your brief when you’re ready. Take your time.”

  “Why seven?”

  “Don’t be extra thick. Work on them.”

  Never did.

  —

  When I woke up it was getting dark but someone had put a blanket on me and replaced my unfinished beer with a fresh bourbon over ice. I turned my head to see Dick wave at me as he sidled back to his casita.

  I called Paige. She said she was driving down the mountain from Arcadia, on her way home. “When did you leave my place, Roland?”

  “Just after four. How are you?”

  “Profoundly hungover. God, I’m an ass.”

  I took a small first sip of the bourbon and closed my eyes. In a flash I was back in that twenty-seventh-floor condo, half carrying this beautiful woman to her bed.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Home, by the pond.”

  “Not the pool, the pond. Do you live in the country?”

  “Kinda. Rolling hills.”

  “Is the pond clean and pretty?”

  “So far as ponds go.”

  “I’d like to see it someday. What did you do last night after I went MIA?”

  “Took the self-guided tour.”

  A beat. “Find anything that interested you?”

  “All of it. You were always smart and pretty. Didn’t realize you were an athlete, too.”

  “I had no gift for tennis. Just worked hard.”

  “I wondered which pictures were of Daniel. Wondered why you didn’t keep some of his things.”

  Paige spoke softly and deliberately. “I took the pictures down. Too painful. I threw out his clothing in a fit, a year after he died. Every last sock. A few days later I regretted it. That was four years ago, before I sold our Kensington place and moved downtown. As you probably know, the sudden throwing away of a loved one’s things is a way of coping with loss. It is statistically common for widows and widowers.”

  I hated the word widower. Maybe I was statistically uncommon. Because Justine’s closet was full. Not an item discarded.

  I told her about the men loitering near my truck at
four that morning, the big guy at the newsstand. “My first thought was they had tailed me there the night before. Then I wondered if they might have been set up around your place and I’d come up in the net.”

  Paige went silent. I could hear the ambient noise of her car on a road, the very distant swoosh of other vehicles around her. “I saw two men Friday morning outside my building. Not residents. Not merchants, not tourists. They looked and felt wrong.”

  I described Bald Mountain.

  “Yes,” she said. “My first thought was Briggs.”

  “Explain.”

  I listened to the road noise as she gathered her thoughts. “I told you most of it. Once I got to know him, Briggs struck me as morbidly detached and antisocial. He was very possessive, unreasonably jealous of me. And we were nothing. So would he send men to find out what I was doing, or who I was seeing? I think he’s capable of that. I know he has contacts in the intelligence world. From the war. From the black sites he ran for the CIA. Don’t people like that help each other to do ugly things and get around the law?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I’m worried for you,” she said.

  “They didn’t touch me.”

  “It was intimidation. Now you’ll be looking over your shoulder every waking minute.”

  “I do that anyway.”

  “Then you’ve chosen the right profession.”

  More road noise, a patch of static. Burt’s car came up the drive, the sound of its engine overtaking Paige’s. “Did Clay ever mention having evidence of crimes committed in Romania?”

  “Not directly. But sometimes, in therapy, he would talk about revealing the truth of White Fire to the world. Implying that he might have some other kind of documentation of what went on there. Why?”

  “I have an idea I want you to hear. Something I’ve been chewing on since Clay butted into my text messaging with Sequoia.”

  “Tell.”

  “Clay’s a Nell Flanagan fan, right? He emailed her about telling his story on TV, on her show. He tried to persuade her with a ‘graphic component.’ But she didn’t respond to him.”

  “I remember those emails. It upset him she didn’t answer.”

  “Well, what if Nell changed her mind? And ‘her story editor’ is about to contact Clay about the story he wants to tell?”

  Paige was quiet for a moment. “Sneaky.”

  “But Clay trusts you. So this story editor would need you on his side. For an introduction, I mean.”

  “Doesn’t Nell Flanagan have real story editors?”

  “Not credited. There’s a producer, an assistant producer, and a director for each segment.”

  “What if he contacts KPBS and there is no you?”

  “I’d tell him I’m not affiliated with KPBS. I’m one of three story editors working for Nell Flanagan’s management agency in New York. And I happen to be the one who read his pitch to Nell and smelled a knockout story. I’d advise Clay to keep his communication with Nell to a minimum until she green-lights this piece. I’d remind him that Nell is a genius, has roughly one million other stories to consider, and she abhors complication. And that it would make me look good at the agency to make this story happen.”

  “And if he calls KPBS anyway, and they put him through to her, and there’s no you at her agency?”

  “Then, well—just kidding, Clay. This is PI Roland Ford and I think you should come back to Arcadia with me.”

  “I won’t allow it.”

  “It’s up to the Hickmans. Not you.”

  Paige was quiet again at the other end. Her tone of voice went cool. “What’s this alleged story editor’s name and number?”

  “First I’ll need to set up one of my burners.”

  “Burners?”

  “Throwaway phones.”

  “You keep them just lying around?”

  “I have two in a desk drawer. Still in their boxes.”

  “And how many guns?”

  “In the drawer? Just one.”

  “Funny. Will you have to get fake ID?”

  “Already have some.”

  “You are a contradictory man. Risking wrong for right.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  I heard the faint hollow sound of her car on the road. “I’m very sorry I drank so much and made a fool of myself last night.”

  “You weren’t a fool.”

  “Of course I was. I’m not accustomed to what we did last night,” she said. “Or didn’t do. Does that make sense? Could we start over?”

  I thought about that. “Might be easier to just continue.”

  A beat. “You’re a good man,” she said. “I hope I’m a good doctor. It’s all I ever wanted to be. Is that enough to justify a life?”

  “Being a good donut maker is enough to justify a life.”

  “I was trying to fix us last night. Cure us. So doctoral of me. So presumptuous.” A pause. “Text me as soon as you’ve set up your phone and come up with a name. I want to hear from Nell Flanagan’s ‘story editor’ as soon as possible. Let’s get this show in the can, Roland. I want my partner safe and on the road to some kind of healing again.”

  “It won’t be long.”

  28

  8:02 AM

  Dear Dr. Paige Hulet,

  Thank you for responding to my earlier email and for offering your contact information. As I explained, I am David Wills, story editor for Nell Flanagan, multiple-Emmy-winning KPBS show host. I would like to communicate with Arcadia resident Clay Hickman regarding the story idea in his 4/3 email to Nell. You now have my cell.

  9:42 AM

  Dear Mr. Wills,

  Arcadia has procedures in place for such requests. But I will happily tell Mr. Hickman of your interest.

  9:42 AM

  Dear Dr. Hulet,

  Appreciated and hopeful.

  Clay’s text message came through nine minutes later:

  9:51 AM

  Dear Mr. Wills,

  Thank you for contacting my doctor. I worked in a secret CIA prison in Romania in 2008 and early 2009. I was a United States Air Force airman assigned to private contractors. My story is about what happened to a high-value detainee with important intel, or so we believed. We subjected him to EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques). Then other events transpired. My story is true. I have graphic evidence of key moments in our procedures and of the tragedy that unfolded. The graphic evidence is video with sound. A San Diego–area celebrity is involved. The detainee’s name was Aaban. This is a very disturbing story and not for the faint of heart. Nell Flanagan is my choice to tell this story because she is smart and kind to all people on her show.

  Sincerely,

  Clay Hickman

  11:46 AM

  Dear Mr. Hickman,

  Stories involving national security are tricky, at best. Federal government/military are generally unwilling to cooperate and can make things difficult. Still, I will communicate this information to Nell Flanagan. She is extremely busy and under constant deadlines. I sense a good story here. She will certainly have questions, in particular, about statements such as “then other events transpired.” And of course, who is the San Diego “celebrity” you mention? Can you write a brief synopsis and make your graphic evidence available to us now, as a timely way of giving us a better idea of the story possibilities?

  11:47 AM

  No. I can only do that when I have a commitment from Nell.

  11:55 AM

  I understand, but hope that’s not a deal breaker!

  11:56 AM

  Someone will want to air this story.

  12:20 PM

  I will present this in a positive light. We’ll see what Nell says. Out of office today but will text late afternoon with Nell’s response.

  —

  I sat at the picnic table, f
inishing lunch and reading the morning paper. The war on homegrown terror. Middle class sucks more wind. New Secretary of Defense. Padres picked to strike out in the NL West. Bad news makes bad thoughts. Such as John, Laura, and Michael Vazquez. What kind of god would let that happen to them? I thought: Don’t get me started.

  Because I felt my personal luck turning. The April day was clear and warm. Lindsey had not only made me lunch but paid her rent, only ten days late. On his morning hike, Wesley Gunn had shot video of a peregrine falcon taking a dove out of the sky. Clay Hickman had responded quickly to David Wills’s interest in his story. Paige Hulet had couriered me another cash payment of forty-eight hundred U.S. dollars, reflecting Briggs Spencer’s urgent doubling of my hourly wage. I regretted having taken his money to begin with, but until taking it I had never known the depth of his involvement in torture for profit. Let him get his damned white fire, whatever it might be. Morally, his cash would spend just fine.

  So, I was ready for good things to happen. For Clay and Sequoia to return uninjured to civilization. For me to see Paige Hulet again. For science to find a cure for Wesley’s eyes, for Lindsey to sober up enough to get joint custody of her son, for the Padres to win the wild card, for global warming to stop. My mother used to tell me I was too much of a softie to be a good Marine. Which I’m sure applied equally to being a good boxer, cop, or investigator. Maybe she was right. I sure didn’t get much soft from her, however. She’d chew a lightbulb to get what she wanted.

  And as often happens, while I was readying myself for luck, it struck on its own: a return call from Clay’s sister, Daphne, in Laguna Beach. She told me that Clay had “showed up yesterday, out of nowhere,” and she agreed to meet with me “very briefly” this afternoon. She didn’t know where Clay was headed after Laguna, only “back south.” She informed me she had dropped the name Hickman years ago and was just Daphne. Judging by her voice on the phone she wasn’t looking forward to meeting me, but you take what you can get. I was never popular in high school and learned from the experience.