The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott

by Jonathan Lowe

  2

  The piece was brief. A notice, really. Like an obituary, minus the photo. Val's hand paused stiffly on the edge of page nine. Near the bottom of the newspaper the title read, Young Woman Murdered Under Bridge. With her free hand, she set down her coffee cup too quickly. It hit the edge of the saucer and tipped over. Coffee spread and was absorbed by the paper like a blotter. She lifted the paper before the stain could reach the article on which she focused. Then she read the two short paragraphs there, and released it. The newsprint sank and darkened. As did her heart.

  The girl suddenly had a name, now. It was Sarah Collins. She was 15. She would never be 16, Val realized, sweet or otherwise. Never go to college, have a career or children. Never again laugh or travel or eat chocolates or sit by the ocean with a book. Or anything else. Ever. It was all over for Sarah, because someone had cut her throat. An attempted assault, the act was interrupted by a passing motorist, who'd called 911 but couldn't give a description of the assailant. And it had all happened around 7 PM, right after Val's car had been towed. Right after she'd emerged from the same tunnel, walking up on the other side. Meaning the killer must have been behind her. Maybe even following her.

  You lucky thing, you.

  Val pushed herself back from the kitchen table. She tried to remember whether she'd seen the girl when she passed back again under the bridges in the towing service truck. Had she even looked? No, she'd forgotten the girl, being absorbed in her own problems. Yet in all likelihood this girl, this Sarah, had still been standing there, dressed in black, with no police cars yet, just that ominous lighting.

  Val reached for her cell phone. She flipped it open, intending to tell the police she'd seen the girl, at least. Almost talked to her. Give them a sense of her demeanor. But what had been her demeanor? Why was she waiting there? Was it for someone she knew?

  Her thumb hovered over the buttons. Then she realized that her cell was still dead. As broken as her relationship with David. She crossed the kitchen toward the wall phone beside the refrigerator, but then saw the clock above the sink, and imagined being grilled about whether she'd witnessed anyone walking in the girl's direction, along the eerie sidewalk flanking the road. And she'd seen no one. Maybe Sarah wasn't even the Goth girl she's seen, but someone else. There was no picture, after all. And she was almost late for work, already. Perhaps the best thing would be to ask Greg for his advice, before she called.

  Yes, the voice inside her head advised, you do that.

  Crossing the kitchen again, toward the door, Val dropped a dry towel over the damp newspaper on her way out.

  ~ * ~

  The tapping sound her heels made echoed hollowly down the hallway as Val walked toward the station's control booth, next to where a taping of Tucson This Week was about to commence. Station manager Greg Lomax joined her just before their engineer and cameraman began setting up in the adjacent studio. Greg was a balding man with thin red hair, a pot belly, and new bright white dentures on display in place of his former uneven nicotine-stained teeth. He had a birthmark on his neck that looked like the mother ship for a whole battle fleet of scattered freckles and pale discolorations. Although nothing looked malignant yet, time would tell.

  "What happened to you?" Greg asked her, nonetheless.

  "Car broke down last night," she replied, distracted by his noticing that she'd rushed in applying makeup. "Had to get a rental."

  "Uh huh."

  "Greg, I--" She paused, at losing his attention, to follow his gaze back to a young blond bimbo who sat beyond the glass opposite Cliff White, the show's handsome jock host. “Who is she?”

  “Actress from L.A.,” Greg informed her. “Has a role in the horror film shooting out in Starr Pass. Francine Rydel?”

  “Never heard of her," Val said, indulging the passing thought: not even from you.

  Greg didn't elaborate, although there was a hint of recrimination in his askance glance. Val suppressed the urge to remind him that she'd twice acquired the governor for the show, but then reminded herself that Greg wasn't favoring politicians anymore, and was also more likely to recall a guest she'd booked whose job was making balloon animals at street fairs. A man who kept popping an attempted giraffe out of nervousness. It was why he'd taken to preempting her choices by scheduling guests himself, sometimes.

  "I know we've got ratings problems," Val conceded, trying not to let her frustration show, "but I do have a story idea I think you'll like, this time."

  Greg made a rolling motion with one hand toward the engineer. "Can it wait?"

  "Actually, no. There was a girl killed last night under the bridge over on Park Avenue, Greg. No knife at the scene, so no suicide. But in another way, maybe it was. I mean, if she was fascinated with death. And I think she was. Maybe even wished for it." Val paused before embellishing her summation, "So death found her, and granted her wish."

  Greg turned to stare at her, briefly fascinated himself, just as she'd hoped. "You knew this girl?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Well, what, then? Where'd you hear about her?"

  "In the paper this morning."

  "I read the paper this morning. Didn't see any--"

  "Wasn't exactly page one. That's why I'd like to do a story. On her, and girls like her. Goth girls. As in 'gothic.' These girls dress in black, wear purple eye shadow, and hang out downtown after dark. They're also into vampires, and weird stuff on the internet."

  "By weird stuff you mean what. . . fetishes?"

  "I don't-- I. . ." She took a short breath. "Possibly."

  Greg seemed intrigued, then confused. "And you came up with this by reading some clip over breakfast?"

  "You like it?"

  "It's different, I'll give you that."

  "Then what does it matter?"

  "This is an interview show, is why. You'd need to talk to her family and friends on camera. Would they agree to that?"

  "I can find out."

  Greg shrugged and turned back toward the viewing window. "I'll need more than speculation before I run the idea by Claire," he concluded. He nodded toward where his B-movie star had begun describing her astonishing rise to mediocrity, then added, "I know you can't get Brad Pitt, Val, but do a little research first, okay?"

  Val thought about Claire Robinson, the station's owner. A society maven who lived in the foothills next to a country club fairway, Mrs. Robinson only came downtown once a month in her Lincoln Town Car, and usually only stayed ten minutes. If she was suddenly taking a more active interest, in an attempt to salvage the station's ratings from viewers who'd tired of politics, things were worse than she'd imagined.

  “In the meantime,” Greg said, focusing on blondie in the other room, "how about you interview a ball player from the Colorado Rockies?”

  "What?" Val winced at the idea. "I was hoping for something more meaningful."

  Greg chuckled. "Hey, you want meaningful, think about his fan base."

  "Whose?"

  "Ramon Vasquez. Even you've heard of him, right?”

  Val fidgeted, wondering if the suggestion was really his, or Claire's. Then she shifted stance, and came out with it. "What if I told you that last night, when my car broke down, I think I saw the murdered girl? Her name is Sarah Collins, by the way. Or was."

  Greg pivoted to face her directly. "You saw her?"

  Val nodded. "In the tunnel, under the bridge. Looked like she was waiting for someone. Or maybe not. I don't know. Maybe she was just there for the rush. The atmosphere."

  "The what?"

  "It's eerie under there. Kinda dwarfs you. Get the chills even now, just thinking about it."

  "What are you telling me, Valerie?"

  "I'm not sure. But tell me. What is it that you think I should do. . . call the police? Because I really didn't see anything. Didn't speak to the girl, either. Just walked past her."

  Greg put one hand on top of his head, as though to keep it attached. Then he did a slow 360, like a marionette. "Do they know the time of dea
th?" he asked.

  "Yeah. . ."

  "Well, does it jibe with when you saw this girl?"

  "Close enough."

  Greg crooked his jaw for an instant, narrowing his eyes. "And you read about this when?"

  Val rechecked her watch. "Less than an hour ago."

  "What about witnesses? Were you seen in the area?"

  Val remembered the man in the pickup, but dismissed the incident, shaking her head. "No, I don't think so."

  Now her boss let air hiss out between his teeth in giving a short, humorless laugh. It was a variation on his trademark guffaw--a foreshortened snippet of a longer version that sounded like marbles in a blender, going from grate to grind and back again. "Hell," he concluded, "I don't know what you're waiting for, Val, but never mind the story, just call the cops. Do it now."

  "And say what? That I saw the girl? That I walked by her? That I didn't say anything to her, just left her there to die?"

  Greg stared at her oddly for one long, tremulous moment. In disbelief, it seemed. Stared, until a tear blurred her vision, surprising her as much as it did him. When she turned away guiltily, she saw that the engineer and cameraman were now watching them both, paused in their testing of the equipment. At this, Greg made a motion for the others to continue, and then led Val out of the room by one arm, toward his office.

  She knew what was coming next, or thought she knew. But of course things never turned out the way one expected. If anyone remembered to chisel that phrase as an epitaph on her own career, it might even be fitting. In the meantime, there were adjustments to be made, if not a shuffling of personnel. John Q. Public, sitting in front of his television set, would decide those. By what he did with his time, or by what he didn't do.

  ~ * ~

  After calling a police detective to tell him what little she knew, Val went to the park that afternoon at Greg's insistence that she "chill out." Sitting on a park bench outside one of the practice baseball fields, where the Colorado Rockies were doing training exercises, she was dressed casually, this time, in a light blue pant suit. She took out a pair of compact binoculars from her purse to scout the various players, looking for Ramon Vasquez. She sighed in wistful abstraction at a few of them, then lowered the binoculars, startled to see that a homeless man was now unexpectedly seated beside her. The man had a beard, long dark hair and dark glasses. He set his rumpled backpack beside him on the ground, along with a long metal probe or cane, like those used by blind people.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi,” Val responded dutifully, her greeting barely audible.

  The man nodded toward her binoculars. “Who interests you?”

  She glared at him in surprise and disappointment, then started to get up. But he touched her forearm with one hand to stop her. She almost jumped at the intrusive grip.

  “Would you tell me. . .” he began.

  “What?” she asked, indignantly.

  “I. . . don’t have a watch.”

  Val withdrew her arm to check her watch, and with a slight jerk that she intended for him to notice.

  “It’s one-thirty,” she said.

  She rose to leave.

  “I’m not really blind, just sensitive to light for a while,” the man announced casually, stopping her retreat. “Staring at the sun too long, doctor says.”

  Val paused, glancing half way back in his direction. “Oh.”

  He pointed the probe up at the sky. She looked up reluctantly. A jet was passing high up in the pale blue azure, its sound just audible. “I need to be at the airport at six o’clock.”

  Surprised by this revelation, she asked, “You have a ticket?”

  “No, my dog does. He’s been on a trip without me.”

  The stranger turned toward the ball players as she studied him, intrigued now. On closer scrutiny, he seemed different, even than she'd first imagined. Peaceful, somehow. Unkempt, but clean. Oddly, she found herself wondering what he would look like without all that hair. He appeared to be about her age, which was something she guessed by his hands, and by what she could see of his unwrinkled face.

  “Don’t worry, I have money,” he told her. “So I can take a cab. The dog is not a seeing eye dog. His name is Picasso.”

  Judging him to be relatively harmless, Val finally sat back down. She started to ask more about his dog, then stopped herself, still uncertain if she wanted to engage him in a conversation at all. They were now both simply looking out at the ball players, who were prancing back and forth with short sideways shuffles, as if between bases. It seemed a bit silly, although neither of them said so. Or rather needed to.

  Finally the man said, “They hope to be children again, but they can’t here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She saw him look out at the field exercise, and then smile slightly. “Have you ever wondered why people love sports so much? It’s because time stops. The anticipation, it forces you into the present. Life seems real when everything else is forgotten. But here, when they practice, the players are thinking about the future again. The moment is lost.”

  Val nodded lamely, trying to imagine where a conversation as inane as this portended to lead. “Are you a fan?” she tried.

  “It’s the same for fans, too,” he explained. “They hope for the future, for that one moment when they can be free again.”

  “So you’re not a fan. You’re a Buddhist.”

  He looked at her, smiling easily again. Sincerely. Then he asked, “Do you think it's possible to feel alive all the time?”

  She looked back at the players, still unwilling to hold any stranger's gaze too long. “Like that? All the time, like your team just won? Who could do that?”

  “I could show you.”

  Without another word, the man got up, took his backpack and cane, then started away. She watched him walk across the grass, with no intention to follow. Instead, she looked back at the players, who now sprinted forward in lines to catch rolled balls. When she looked again at this peculiar man she'd mistakenly thought to be blind, he was nearing a distant bench beside a jungle gym, where children played. There he stopped and turned. Beckoning her to that bench.

  Val paused, and bit at her lip. She remembered her duty: to find Vasquez, set up an on-camera interview. It had been Greg's instruction, or suggestion. She didn't know the difference anymore, and curiously found herself starting not to care. If there was nothing more important than ratings to Claire Robinson, now, she had already wearied of such games. Both those games played by men, and those adopted--or secretly conceived--by women. With a singular sense of rebellion, she finally rose and walked deliberately toward the homeless stranger.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she told herself aloud, even as she did it. But even this self recrimination did not completely overcome her caution.

  ~ * ~

  When she neared the stranger, he motioned for her to sit first at the new bench. Then he joined her, but not too closely. His smile did seem real, unforced. Not a ploy at all. Still, considering recent events, she was beginning to distrust her own reactions.

  “It’s better if I’m with you,” he said, as though reading her mind.

  Stranger danger, popped into her mind, and she wondered if Sarah Collins’ mother had ever used the phrase.

  She smiled quickly, but nodded nervously as they looked out at the children playing.

  The kids seemed totally absorbed in swinging and sliding and making little mounds of sand. One boy dribbled some sand on a girl’s hair and laughed. The girl attacked him, but the boy escaped to the monkey bars.

  Val motioned. “I see they’re living the moment. With more like it in their future, too.”

  “They’re not thinking about that, though,” her companion said.

  “You sure?” She considered this, then felt a brief tinge of envy. “So you think when they grow up, their lives will be over?”

  He nodded. “It's what they will think, and why most people love to watch children.”r />
  “Because we’re jealous?”

  “Because we think too much, while they just live. For now.”

  She looked at him, then back at the children again. She nodded back. “We think for them, don’t we?” She shrugged away the thought, self-consciously, then finally asked, “What’s your name?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  Val held out one hand bravely, anyway. “Well, my name is Valerie. I’m a reporter. TV reporter. Mind if I call you. . . I don't know. . . David?”

  He took her hand lightly, and shook it once before letting go. “Whatever you like. I don’t have a TV, though. But I’m not sorry.”

  She smiled at her odd new friend, thinking, You're not a lot of things. Then she looked at his backpack more closely--at that rumpled green canvas sack with zippers. “Radio?”

  David shook his head. “I read the newspaper sometimes at the coffee shop.”

  She visualized her wet newspaper, waiting for her at home, on her kitchen table. “You like coffee?”

  “Tea. Green tea.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess there can’t be many serial killers who drink herbal tea, can there?” She paused. “Are you. . . I mean, homeless?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What’s. . . changed?”

  “I have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think about the past anymore. Except when I need to.”

  Val glanced down at her watch impulsively, reminded of her assignment, before wondering what on earth it might be like not to have a job or even a job history. “Must be hard to get a job without a resume.” She covered her watch with her sleeve, then smiled so he'd know she was kidding.

  “I don’t think about the future, either,” he added.

  “Really.”

  “Have you ever tried it?”

  She laughed, despite herself. The idea seemed inaptly comical in the way that the laughter of the homeless seemed incongruous, almost impolite. “That’s funny,” she said.

  A wary lady guardian walked by them, giving them a look of perplexed disapproval. David ignored her and asked, “Wouldn't you like to be happy too, like a child?”