Blackbird

by Tom Wright

  Li, a terrific dancer herself, slid her arm around my waist, said ‘You okay for a turn?’, and fell smoothly in with me as I swung us across the deck and into the music, the two of us weightless as a couple of shadows, my knees so free of pain that I actually forgot about them. It reminded me of how much I had liked dancing before TCU and the injuries, and of the lessons with LA and her girlfriends back in Oak Cliff a thousand years ago, the summer they’d recognised that it was time for me, a male and therefore in need of remediation, to learn the essential skill of slow dancing. Li wore a slightly flowery, after-the-rain scent that suggested green spaces and clean air.

  But then suddenly the flow of time seemed to ripple and double back on itself, and I was dancing with Kat Dreyfus, her image brighter and clearer than anything real could be as she gazed at me across the years. ‘Soon,’ she said softly.

  ‘Ooh, Dancing With the Stars,’ Abby said.

  Kat faded, to be replaced by a surreally brilliant image of the dead-black crosshairs of a mil-dot sniper reticle against a featureless grey background.

  I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, my heart slamming in my chest. When I opened them again Li was back.

  The number ended, Li curtsied and I applauded her, swallowing hard against the sensation that I’d just ingested a bellyful of angle iron. Trying my best not to look the way I felt, I made my way back to the grill, scooped the browned pineapple and plantain slices onto a plate and turned the fillets for the final moments of cooking, which I knew to be the make-or-break point. Rachel had taught me the skin-on, whole-fillet method with salmon, doing most of the grilling with the skin side down so the lime juice, butter and cilantro could do their work with the flesh, then flipping the fillets for a couple of minutes at the end for a crisp top.

  ‘JB, that aunt of yours must be a fucking witch,’ said Abby, forking up another bite of fish. ‘This is almost as good as away-from-home sex.’ She cocked a wicked eye at Jonas. ‘I guess.’

  Watching Johnny pick at his food, I thought about Jana and the girls, the vision of Kat, and the image of the crosshairs, then when that took me nowhere I thought about the Gold case, now the Gold-Frix case, telling myself what I usually did at this stage of an investigation: the bad guys could run – they could even hide – but only until we came for them. And Hazen’s interest in the case was a loose end. I didn’t understand it, and for me that made it unignorable.

  And then there was Johnny himself. Having once been grilled for six hours in a really nasty homicide trial, every word potentially a matter of life or death, I knew that being cross-examined by a good lawyer was not an afternoon at the park, and I wondered whether Johnny might end up representing the killers in court.

  By now the changer had moved on to some vintage CCR, a bad moon rising, trouble on the way. Listening to it, I thought about how Jana, always a fan of swamp rock, and Fogerty in particular, talked about him as a fellow artist. Suddenly her absence became an impossible weight on my chest, a sensation of suffocation and loss and an almost physical need to talk to her the way I used to, about the case, the girls, our marriage. The National League standings. Corn futures. Anything. Any damn thing at all.

  I tried to reorganise my thoughts, recognising this for what it was – the kind of useless raking over of the past that had never led me anywhere except the twilight country of depression. I needed to stop worrying about getting hammered in court by my oldest friend and focus on what this case might do to the people who mattered most to me.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The ex-patient of Gold’s Benny put me in touch with was Heather Obenowsky. I collected LA after her mid-morning AA meeting and we drove up to meet Heather at Muggs for cappuccinos. She was sixteen or so, dressed in tight black pants, high-heeled boots and denim jacket over a red T-shirt – a sharp-faced but pretty girl with dark spiky hair, untrusting brown eyes and seven silver rings in her ears, right eyebrow and left nostril. I didn’t doubt there were others I couldn’t see. She’d agreed to the meeting on the condition that I wouldn’t ask any questions about why she was in therapy.

  When I introduced LA, and the two made eye contact, I felt something happen between them that at the time I didn’t understand, though I realised we’d just crossed an invisible line of some kind.

  After asking what we wanted, LA walked over to the counter, eventually returning with three cups.

  I said, ‘Thanks for talking to us, Heather.’

  ‘Dr B told me you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘Coming from him, I think that means you tell the truth and you don’t let people down. And he said I could trust Dr Rowe too.’

  LA said, ‘Please call me Lee.’

  I said nothing.

  Heather gave LA a brief nod, held her eyes for an extra microsecond, and returned her attention to me. ‘So I guess that’d make you kind of like, what, king of the good guys?’ she said.

  Checking to see which cup was mine, I picked it up and took a cautious sip to gauge its temperature. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m workin’ on it.’

  ‘How’d you get your nose busted?’

  ‘Not ducking in time.’

  Almost but not quite smiling, she seemed to be thinking me over. I waited.

  ‘I’m trying to figure out how you do that,’ she said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Look like you’re’ – she searched for the words – ‘I don’t know, I guess like you’re seeing and hearing more than other people. Or at least like you could if you wanted to. Kind of like my cat.’

  LA said, ‘What’s your cat’s name?’ She took a sip of her latte.

  ‘Smackie. She’s a girl, a calico.’ Heather glanced around the room, saying, ‘All calicos are girls.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Do you have a cat?’ Heather asked me.

  ‘In a way,’ I said. ‘Mostly I think he’s got me.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Mutt,’ I said.

  ‘How’d he get a name like that?’

  ‘That’s what the kid next door called him.’

  ‘Doesn’t that confuse him?’

  ‘With him, I’m not sure how you’d tell,’ I said.

  The half-smile came back. ‘You seem pretty tough for, uh – ’

  ‘For an old guy?’

  An actual smile this time. ‘I was gonna say for a guy who has good manners,’ she said. ‘You’re not even that much older than me, really – just kind of in the middle there somewhere, like Dr B.’ The smile went away. She looked down. ‘Sorry. I try not to say stuff like that, but – ’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Just dumb shit,’ she said. ‘Talking like a kid.’

  ‘That’s not how it sounded to me,’ LA said.

  ‘Do you have any? Kids, I mean.’

  ‘No,’ LA said, then nodded toward me, ‘But he does.’

  ‘Two daughters,’ I said, drinking cappuccino, this time feeling the sugar and caffeine parachute all the way down, hit bottom and begin deploying among my red cells.

  I saw a brief shadow pass in Heather’s eyes. She swallowed with a small dry sound, and after a minute said, ‘How old are they?’

  ‘One’s close to your age, the other’s a little younger.’

  Now her expression took on a kind of dullness, something about the look catching at me.

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Casey and Jordan,’ I said, experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu but having no idea where it was coming from.

  She looked away, gazing through the window toward the mall, took in a deep breath and let it out. Her eyes –

  I glanced at LA’s expression as she watched Heather, and it came to me. It wasn’t in the eyes, it was deeper than that. I’d grown up seeing it in LA, and still sometimes caught glimpses of it in Rachel, a thin fracture line running through the centre of the soul. No matter how far these women moved beyond the past, no matter how strong they became, the discontinuity would always be there, and none of the
m would ever be completely present in my universe. They belonged to a sisterhood whose reality was closed to me.

  ‘Heather,’ I said. ‘I get it that bad things have happened to you. I’m not going to ask you about that, and I’m not going to pretend to understand what it’s like. But please listen to me here, because there’s something I need for you to know. I love my daughters very much, but to me they’re kids, not women. And there’s no way in hell I would ever let them be hurt like you were. Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect them. Nothing at all.’

  She watched me for a long moment, then glanced at LA, something gradually relenting in her expression. Finally she nodded. ‘What do you want to know about Dr Gold?’

  ‘How long did you see her?’

  ‘About six months. She was on Mom’s insurance plan. I didn’t want to go, but Mom made me.’

  I said, ‘What did you think of her at first?’

  ‘I guess I thought she was okay. She talked on the phone a lot when I was there, like with other patients and stuff. She was weird, but then I didn’t know how those kind of doctors are supposed to act.’

  ‘Weird how?’ asked LA.

  ‘She had these big old bugged-out searchlight eyes that seemed to look right through you, and she asked funny questions, like did Mom’s family have money and how big was our house, stuff like that. Then later on it got stranger and stranger until finally I quit going to the appointments.’ She swallowed again.

  ‘Can you tell me a little more about that, Heather?’

  She fiddled with her cup. ‘Uh . . . she wanted to know if I was having sex with anybody and what it was like, whether I, you know, touched myself, how I did it and how it felt. How much I liked it. Did I think about him when I did it.’ She looked away at nothing that I could see, her eyes spiking invisible fire.

  ‘But you still didn’t know if that was how therapists are supposed to talk?’

  She nodded once. Looking at LA, she said, ‘I mean, it isn’t, is it?’

  ‘No,’ LA said, her own eyes hard.

  Heather nodded again. ‘Then she, um, she said I was beautiful, made a lot of comments about my figure and had me show her my breasts.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked LA.

  ‘She made me take off my shirt and bra. I sat like that for the rest of the session. She just kept looking at my chest.’

  ‘Did she touch you?’

  ‘No. But it was obvious she wanted to. I could tell by her eyes and the way she was breathing.’

  Silence for a few beats as we all thought about this.

  Then Heather said, ‘She kept talking about these friends of hers that she wanted me to meet. She asked me if I’d been introduced to submission, if I understood that pain was only another kind of pleasure, if I knew what bondage was and did I like being restrained, things like that.’ Heather glanced down at her breasts and quickly pulled her jacket over them. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  LA, who never missed anything, somehow made it clear, without saying or doing anything at all, that she’d noticed nothing.

  I said, ‘Is that when you stopped going?’

  Heather cleared her throat. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘You know how sometimes when people talk on the phone you can hear the person on the other end real clear? Well, one day she was talking to this official-sounding guy who called a lot – ’

  ‘Official-sounding?’

  ‘Yeah, a voice kind of like somebody making a speech or something. Like with microphones in front of him. So she’s talking to him and she says, “We may have to consider an increase in your fee. I have expenses, you know, and there’s a lot involved. These girls have ideas, they watch TV just like we do, they think about things – it’s a constant issue whether they might talk to somebody, say something irresponsible.”’ The corner of Heather’s mouth twisted.

  I said, ‘And you knew what that meant.’

  She looked out the window again. ‘Oh, yeah. I knew what it meant. That was when I made up my mind not to go back.’

  ‘Was Dr Pendergrass working there when you were seeing Dr Gold?’

  ‘Uh huh, for a while.’

  ‘Do you think he knew what was going on?’ LA said.

  ‘If he had eyes, he did.’

  Later I asked for LA’s impressions.

  After thinking about it for a minute she said, ‘In a lot of ways Heather’s who I once was. Does that tell you anything?’

  Now I took some time to think. Finally I said, ‘Yeah, enough.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Looking disgusted, Mouncey sat in the chair in front of my desk, sipping Sprite as she finished outlining her alibi findings so far.

  ‘ – Feigel in San Antone doin’ a deposition,’ she said. ‘Talked to a couple lawyers down there where he at, look like that one gonna hold up, so he clean for the crucifyin’. Last one, Pendergrass, tole me he at the movies – maybe we call in a alibi professor, tell us what that one worth.’

  ‘Not much help there,’ I said. ‘But you’re right, I think we can at least cross Feigel off our list for Gold. Now all you’ve got to do is run them all over again for Frix. And we need to find out what they knew about any kids getting involved with the group. Also, let’s go ahead and track down Pendergrass’s ex, see what she can tell us.’

  ‘You startin’ to like him for Gold?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘Pretend we’re beagles,’ I said. ‘No theories – we just follow the trail.’

  ‘Getting to be a smelly trail, Lou.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Truest thing I’ve heard all day,’ I said. I stood up and stretched. ‘Quitting time for me. I’ve got a date.’

  Up went her eyebrow, the left one, which usually meant a combination of curiosity and disapproval.

  ‘With my wife,’ I said.

  Down came the eyebrow. ‘Time you seeing to that,’ she said. ‘Good woman like her ain’t gone wait for ever.’

  Driving north on Border, I visualised the three-storey A-frame – built in the sixties by a truck-stop millionaire and the biggest I’d ever been in – seeing on the low-definition screen of memory the furnishings and wall art, the girls, Jana herself. Even the cat, a semi-runty, white, notch-eared female who’d adopted them and who roamed all night, yowling and fighting like a welterweight tomcat. The girls called her White Trash, and she seemed to like me, but she always sniffed my shoes and cuffs suspiciously whenever I showed up, collecting no-telling-what intelligence about Mutt with that blunt little nose of hers.

  Standing on the welcome mat at the front door of the house, fifteen yards or so behind the gallery, I took a deep breath, lifted the brass butterfly knocker and rapped twice. Thirty seconds later Jana opened the door, her glasses on her forehead and her short auburn hair sprigging untidily up like a woodpecker’s topknot. She wore red workout pants, orange flipflops and a white pullover studio smock smeared and spattered with several shades of clay and bisque. Behind her the studio end of the house was lit up and in working mode, with several pigs of clay out and the wheel wet. The girls were obviously not here, and I didn’t see any sign of White Trash either.

  ‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Shit, come in.’

  ‘Make up your mind,’ I said, stepping in onto the nubbly Berber rug.

  ‘Idiot. You don’t have to knock. It made me think you were another reporter.’ As she stepped aside to let me in I caught the spicy scent of the cinnamon sticks she chewed on as she worked. ‘Did you catch those horrible people yet?’

  ‘Working on it,’ I said.

  ‘I just don’t understand who could do such a thing. People are saying it was because she was Jewish – can that be true?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows yet.’

  She looked at me closely. ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘Want anything while I get cleaned up?’

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  She locked the door behind me and turned off the outside lights. ‘Lee Ann took the girls down to spe
nd the night at the farm,’ she said. She disappeared into the bedroom, and I walked into the tiled kitchen, which was green with potted herbs, chives and peppers and gleaming with copper cookware hanging from overhead racks. Beside the refrigerator was a cabinet stocked with chips, salted nuts, beef jerky and other health-destroying snacks, and in the freezer a whole shelf stacked with sirloins, T-bones, boudain, kiel-basa, bratwurst, hot links and fajita steak, all of it mine.

  Opening the fridge door, I reached in past the carrot juice and tofu on the top shelf for a bottle of Corona, uncapped it and walked over to sit on the couch near the Swedish fireplace. There were several magazines on the coffee table: American Art Review, Southwestern Art, American Artist. I leafed through one as I sipped beer, noticing a reproduction of a Frederic Remington I remembered from the Amon Carter in Fort Worth. Farther into the journal I found an ad for a gallery in New York that was showing several Van Goghs from the Arles period. Feeling a twinge in my ear, I flipped ahead to a full-page layout for a one-man show by John Hanna at Whistle Pik in Fredericksburg. To my innocent eye his paintings looked strong, deep and alive.

  A couple of pages later I learned the Charles River Plein Air Society was sponsoring a week-long retrospective in Boston. Still lifes, pastorals, seascapes, harbour scenes. I felt a chill and looked around for any source of a draught but saw nothing. I flipped a few more pages and was looking at a painting of a Polynesian girl in a topless outfit with red flowers in her hair when I heard the faint sound of the shower off the master bedroom coming on. Instantly a vision of Jana under the hot spray replaced the island girl. After thinking about it for few seconds, I got up and went back to cover the exposed clay and flip the switches that shut down the studio, then walked into the bedroom, kicking off my shoes and shedding my clothes as I went. In the huge orchid and cream bathroom I saw Jana’s naked shape through the frosted glass door of the shower as she washed her hair. She said, ‘Come in.’