Blackbird

by Tom Wright

  Suddenly I woke in a cold sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs as if I’d just run a hard 220. The late weather report was almost over. I clicked the TV off, stood and stripped off my wet shirt as I headed for the shower, the dream fading like the Cheshire cat, leaving behind a smile cruel beyond imagining.

  EIGHT

  The next day on my way to work I made two stops, the first at a grocery store for a chunk of salt pork and a meat thermometer, the other at a builders’ supply where, after examining the faces of the different models, I bought a California framing hammer along with a half-dozen bridge spikes and a six-foot white pine four-by-four. I drove out to the murder site, tossed the timber on the ground, unwrapped the salt pork, laid it flat on the wood and used the hammer to drive a couple of the spikes through the pork and into the wood. It took at least a dozen hard swings for each spike, and hard swings at a nail generally guarantee a high proportion of glancing blows and complete misses, which is what I got now. But the chequering on the face of the hammer tended to bite into the metal and keep the force of the strike confined to the nail head. Looking closely, I saw an impressed waffle pattern that to my inexpert eye seemed identical to what I’d seen on the heads of the spikes pinioning Gold’s wrists.

  I walked over to the tree she’d been hung from and looked up at the abraded area where the crossbeam had been affixed to the tree. Standing close to the trunk, I reached up to touch the scraped bark. It was easy enough to reach, but too high for me to conveniently lash a cross-piece to the trunk. I carefully inspected the trunk farther down and eventually found a pair of barely visible horizontal indentations in the bark where something with hard, probably metallic, narrow edges at right angles to each other had been pressed forcefully against it.

  I got out the meat thermometer, located the spot where Wayne had said the coin was found, and brushed away the dead leaves and litter to expose the bare soil, which I looked at carefully before pushing the probe a few inches into the ground. I watched until the temperature levelled off at forty-eight degrees, then pulled the thermometer up and repeated the process a foot north of the first spot and at about the same distance from the tree. The earth looked the same here, and after a few seconds the needle settled at the same temperature. I picked up the thermometer, stood looking at the tree a while longer, thinking about the height of the indentations in the trunk, then walked back down the slope to where I’d parked.

  I was sitting at my desk studying my right hand as I flexed and clenched it when Wayne stuck his head in the door and said, ‘Ready to hear what we got so far?’

  I waved him in. He took the chair at the end of the desk and got out a pocket-size black casebook with D.G. and the date the body had been found printed on a square of yellow paper and taped to the front cover. Flipping it open, he started reeling off facts. Or maybe non-facts would be a better way of putting it. He hadn’t found any usable fingerprints or organic material other than Dr Gold’s on the bridge nails pinning her to the crossbeam and tree. They were ten-inch smooth spikes from GripInc, which he said didn’t help either because GripInc was the second-largest manufacturer of nails, screws and various other kinds of fasteners in North America, meaning the nails could have come from just about any hardware outlet or construction supplier in the United States or Canada. The imprints left by the framing hammer used to drive the nails showed a couple of distinctive wear marks that could possibly be matched to the tool itself if it was ever found, but he wouldn’t advise betting the doghouse on that outcome. The duct tape was a generic manufactured by KKL-Co and shipped out by the ton to wholesalers all over the country. There were no fingerprints on it, but a match of torn ends was possible if somebody was caught with the roll before using it again. The wood of the crossbeam was untreated and unweathered mill-cut southern longleaf pine, but that’s all he knew about it at this point. The rope was general utility quarter-inch twisted sisal imported from Mexico by Jirem Corporation that had been cut with a sharp-bladed instrument such as a utility knife. It was also untraceable.

  ‘What about the body?’

  ‘Not much to tell from what we got before the ME’s people – ’ he cleared his throat ‘ – asked us to clear the room and leave the body in their capable hands.’ What this amounted to was that nothing foreign was found where Gold’s vagina had been, shooting down the outside guess that that was where her tongue might have ended up, but a tightly wadded yellow sticky note with one unevenly torn edge had been found in her right nostril. Somebody had written glowen on it with a number two pencil.

  ‘Glowen?’ I said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No idea, Lou.’

  Under the word, or letter sequence, whichever it was, was a line of numbers that somebody else – judging by the handwriting – had printed on an overlying sheet, leaving indentations that could be read in side-lighting:

  4’ 68 9172350

  ‘What about this?’ I said.

  ‘Same answer,’ he said. ‘But we’re still working on it.’

  A balled scrap of brown paper probably torn from a grocery bag had been found at the base of the tree Gold was hung from, and a nose hair along with ‘mucosal residue’ found on it showed this wad had once been in the other nostril. No fingerprints or writing of any kind were found on it. Wayne’s thinking was that the murderers, wanting to make sure Gold wasn’t found alive in the morning, had stuffed the paper wads in her nostrils just to be on the safe side.

  ‘But it looks like she woofed one of ’em out,’ he said.

  I pulled my keyboard into position to get online, but something stopped me. As I looked at the keyboard, the G, O, L and D seemed to grow slightly brighter and clearer while the other characters lost some of their definition. I took a deep breath and shook off the illusion. I typed in ‘glowen’ and pulled up a hotel, a town and a music festival in Germany, a collage and installation artist, an industrial planner, a college student and a hundred other people, places and things with no connection to the case that I could imagine. There were no Glowens in the yellow- or white-page listings for Traverton or the three-state region, and no towns, lakes, rivers or mountains by that name in my year-old road atlas.

  Finally I gave it up, hoping LA had been right about my brain working behind the scenes. I asked Wayne to get a copy of his report to the chief, and signed out to pick up Casey and Jordan at school for the lunch I’d promised them.

  NINE

  The girls tossed their backpacks into Buford’s bed, buckled in beside me and we drove the twelve miles down to Bullfrog Marina for catfish and shrimp at a wrought-iron table on the dock. The day was bright and cool, and there was a faint smell of shady water and faraway woodsmoke on the breeze. A couple of the year-round Canada geese that hung out at the marina glided past us toward open water, pulling long glassy vees behind them over the smooth surface.

  I watched as the girls, angling for the best selection of side items, negotiated a sharing arrangement for fried okra, coleslaw, tomato relish and french fries, and for a few seconds felt like the luckiest guy in town. Casey, starting out as an only child, had always been energetic, disorganised and dramatic, noticing and reacting to everything, easy to piss off but just as easy to get forgiveness from. She had Jana’s eyes and chin and quick emotion, but her toughness and creative power manifested itself in other ways – in her courage and originality and skill at colouring outside the lines.

  Then came Jordan Jillian, who turned out to be a kind of anti-Casey, as she grew older becoming more and more like a little female Mr Spock minus the pointy ears – logical, focused and even-tempered, with no nonsense in her. If anybody was ever born an engineer, or maybe a physicist, it was Jordan. She understood everything mathematical or mechanical without even trying. Her favourite force of nature was gravity, and she drove Jana and Casey nuts by dropping ping-pong balls, paper clips and buttons on them or the cat from the top loft of the A-frame and timing the fall with her little pink wristwatch. She was also tidy and green-minded – a rain-forest-an
d-public-radio girl.

  ‘I think I’m gonna have this,’ Casey pronounced. ‘A virgin strawberry daiquiri.’ She absent-mindedly pushed her hair back from her cheek in a way that was so exactly like Jana that it twisted my heart.

  Jordan was disgusted. ‘Five dollars for a six-ounce slushy,’ she said. ‘Good thinking.’

  For some reason Casey let this go as she watched a grey-bearded man in a tan jumpsuit and faded camouflage boonie hat idling his green johnboat past us through the no-wake zone, a stack of bream tackle propped carelessly in the bow. Casey waved to him and he waved back.

  I said, ‘How are you guys really doing?’

  Casey shrugged, and Jordan said, ‘With what?’

  ‘I mean sleeping okay, keeping up with schoolwork, no morale problems, that kind of stuff.’

  Jordan looked off across the water, saying, ‘Everything’s okay.’

  Casey selected a corn chip from the basket and bit off a corner. ‘That’s not really true, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s no good without you there. A house with only females in it is just so bogus, like a zoo without a gorilla. Everything’s organised and quiet, and there’s nobody to check out the garage monsters at night – all we can do is hunker down and hope that was just a possum we heard out there . . . ’

  ‘When did you hear a possum out there?’

  ‘Night before last,’ Casey said.

  ‘How do you know that’s what it was?’

  ‘He left his card, Dad – how else?’

  Jordan shook her head. I watched Casey.

  ‘Anyway, Mom’s always taking care of us now, fussing around about our clothes and stuff,’ said Casey. ‘I mean, it was better when she’d make us do our homework and then chase us off to our rooms so she could sit on your lap.’

  I fiddled with my iced tea. ‘I think so too, Case,’ I said. ‘But things are a little complicated.’

  A couple of small frown lines appeared between Jordan’s eyebrows, and she shook her head again. ‘It’s hard, but it’s pretty simple. Mom is sick of you being a cop but you can’t give it up.’

  Casey crunched the rest of her chip. ‘A gift for stating the obvious,’ she said.

  ‘You got that line from the movie we watched last week,’ said Jordan. ‘A good memory is no substitute for really thinking.’

  ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘It’s not your job to worry about me, or your mom. She and I need to get this worked out, but – ’

  Casey said, ‘Mom’s like, you’ve lost your centre or something, Dad.’

  Jordan snorted.

  ‘She told you that?’ I said.

  ‘Not me. Grandma. They were on the phone, and I eavesdropped. Mom was talking like it was some kind of karma deal.’

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ Jordan said. ‘It’s a murder deal. Dad can’t leave his job when people are doing that kind of stuff. What if all the cops did?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad, what’s happening with that?’ asked Casey, already on the next page. ‘Everybody at school is like, what’s going on, y’all? Even the teachers. Like I’d know anything.’

  Our plates came, and Casey picked up a shrimp, twisted the tail off and tossed it into the water, watching until a bream drifted up and grabbed it. She popped the shrimp into her mouth while Jordan stirred coleslaw around with her fork. I realised I wasn’t hungry either.

  Casey swallowed and said, ‘Some of the kids think it was a cult. But I heard talk like, nobody’ll ever catch whoever did it because they weren’t flesh and blood.’

  Jordan shook her head contemptuously but said nothing.

  ‘Ghosts?’ I said.

  Casey shrugged. ‘They’re saying there were no tracks and no fingerprints or anything. Somebody even said people heard horses and the sound of marching boots out there that night. Is that true?’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to know, but it was kind of like, “I heard some kid’s brother told his cousin about it”.’

  ‘I just wish I knew more about cryogenic suspension,’ said Jordan without looking up.

  ‘Cry-oh-what?’ said Casey.

  ‘Why, Jordan?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, one of the kids said his uncle told him Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann didn’t die at the end of the war. He said they had their heads cut off and frozen, and the Nazis have been keeping them in some kind of deep-freeze in Argentina. Now they’ve got them hooked up to machines and the heads are telling them how to fight the mongrel races and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.’

  ‘Gross,’ said Casey.

  Jordan stopped poking at the coleslaw and laid down her fork. ‘The thing is, people do get themselves frozen, and there could be stuff going on that we don’t know about. That boy who was talking about Hitler and Bormann said his uncle told the whole family to stay on their toes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I guess he meant for them to watch out. Like something bad might happen to them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he said the government is getting totally out of control, and there’s nothing they won’t do any more. He said they burned up all those crazy people in Waco that time and – ’ She stopped and frowned down at the coleslaw.

  ‘And what, honey?’

  Her eyes came up to meet mine. ‘And this time there’s gonna be hell to pay.’

  TEN

  Back at the office, I grabbed a few of the pink message slips that were piling up on my desk and looked at them. They were all call-back requests from reporters in Houston, London, Austin, Tel Aviv and Dallas. I picked up some more and in addition to duplications of the first handful counted three from Canada, one each from Shreveport, Bonn, Mexico City and Little Rock, and another that was hard to read but seemed to be from somebody named Ocaro at a shoppers’ weekly in the Azores. By now Dr Gold’s means of death was general knowledge, her killing touching some nerve that all the everyday murders missed, but the reporters had almost nothing to work with except the fact that Dr Gold had ‘apparently been crucified’.

  For local reporters the lack of hard information meant a lot of background coverage, opinion pieces and miscellaneous filler. Some of it was about me, one editor actually calling me a ‘tragic figure’ and a dogged nemesis of killers and rapists because of what had happened to my partner’s wife and daughter six years ago. I tried to generate a mental picture of a dogged nemesis but only got an image of Snoopy in a trench coat.

  But what happened to Bo’s family – and what Bo and I did because of it – was no cartoon, and there was no way to deny it had changed me. I still saw flashes of their faces everywhere, in mirrors and windows, or out of the corner of my eye, as if I couldn’t completely agree with myself that they were gone for good. Jana said it had changed me, that I was less empathic and harder than the man she married.

  ‘I’ll take that at bedtime, baby,’ she said. ‘But when was the last time I got you to watch a female movie with me? You won’t even eat eggs over easy any more.’

  And it wasn’t only Jana who saw something different in me.

  ‘That’s what I’m talkin’ about,’ Mouncey had said after watching through the two-way as I was questioning a high-school sophomore I’d brought in for shooting his stepfather through the heart with a crossbow. ‘You gettin’ to be some kinda bad po-lice.’

  Bo had been one of only two long-term partners I ever worked with, the other being Floyd Zito, a story in himself, who had the kind of unpredictability and atmosphere of danger about him that made him interesting to women and kept bystanders alert. Bo, who’d partnered with me for six and a half years before he died, hadn’t had quite that kind of star quality. He’d been tough and lanky, about my height, quick and coordinated enough to play shortstop but looking at first glance more like a beach bum, and he’d come closer than anybody I ever met to being a man without fear. He’d also been too much of a gambler, the kind of guy who ordered raw jalapenos with everything and saved the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle for d
essert.

  But the night I got myself shot for the second time I’d come around long enough to hear him praying aloud and with no embarrassment beside my hospital bed: ‘Lord, I know I’ve been out of touch for a while, but this fool here is my partner that I’m nearly used to by now and I need him out there with me because when it comes to having a guy’s back he’s not that bad, so I humbly beseech that you will see fit to keep his haemoglobin up and his white count down, and if you can do anything about his IQ now while we’ve got him in the shop, that’d be much appreciated too.’

  His wife Lynn, from an old Arkadelphia family, was shy and thoughtful, had a magical touch with potted plants, flowerbeds, or anything else that grew, and loved opera and ballet. She had raised their daughter Kimberly to be a classical guitar player like herself, a thinker and an animal lover, and I enjoyed the serious way Kim talked with me, along with her spur-of-the-moment guitar recitals whenever she had learned a new piece.

  Kim was eleven and her mother thirty-three when they died. A sidewalk drug dealer named Jeremy Tidwell carjacked their Kia when they stopped for a light on their way back from an after-birthday pool party some of Kim’s friends had thrown for her. Sixteen hours later a family on a picnic found the Kia at Fox Lake, and an hour after that a reserve deputy found their nude bodies. Both had been raped, strangled and left posed in sexual positions.

  ‘Oh Christ, no, Bis, no. No. No,’ Bo whispered, his knees buckling.

  Hugging him, holding him up, blinded by my own tears and choking on the rocks in my throat, I said, ‘Hold on, man, hold on. I’ve got you. Just hold on.’