But you never know. He wouldn’t kick her out of bed. An upholstered lady might be a change.
Smile more, he thought. Add a little make-up, change the hairdo, a touch of colour – sienna, say, or something outrageous and bright. Blond with a small pink streak. Turn a few heads.
She needed to pay attention to her posture. Too many years hunched over law books, hunting down precedents. Pick yourself up, inject a little elegance, ditch the blue jeans, and navy isn’t your colour anyway. Get the best out of yourself. Nice ass, all the same. Usually at her age asses drooped, but hers looked firm.
He thought, I don’t want to bring anything bad into your life, so don’t make me. You’re probably intelligent, concerned, dedicated. Don’t be dedicated to the wrong things.
He leaned forward against the wheel, watching. She’d stopped again, like she was reluctant to go inside the house. What was it? Indecision? A forgotten door key?
A guy came out of the house.
Dansk was surprised because he’d somehow thought the place empty. The man was tall and on the lean side. Black jeans, a white shirt, thick dark hair going grey at the sides. He said something to the woman and she shook her head and Dansk sensed friction. The guy took a few steps towards her. The woman didn’t move.
Who was the guy? Her lover?
On the one hand that might be problematic, on the other it might be nothing. It depended on the woman. Everything depended on her.
They were embracing now, repairing whatever was damaged between them. Dansk watched the guy’s hand drop to the woman’s ass. An easy intimacy. Dansk wondered how her laugh would sound. He imagined smoky and sincere, something you might hear at a crowded party and it would take your attention for a moment because of its hearty, good-natured quality.
Dansk never went to parties, never received invitations.
He watched the man slip an arm round the woman’s shoulders and then they kissed, which involved an awkward craning movement downwards for the guy. They went inside the house – heading for the bedroom, he imagined. He zoomed in on an image of clothes cast aside, a clasp of bodies, the hot damp flesh of love, and the smells.
He drove out of the cul-de-sac. He went through downtown Scottsdale, took a turn off the main drag and found himself in a street of art galleries. Overpriced canvasses in windows, Native American Indian influence everywhere, Navaho and Hopi art, beads and goodies plundered from the reservations.
He kept driving. The early evening sky was leaking light.
Eventually he found the place he was looking for. It was a bar called Floozies that advertized topless girls. Inside, he found a big gloomy room doing nothing in the way of business – it was too early for the topless crew. The place smelled of spilled beer and the floor wasn’t clean. Typical.
McTell and Pasquale occupied a table close to the stage, which was concealed behind a silver curtain decorated with naked women. Dansk sat down near a set of spangled red drums and a Yamaha keyboard.
McTell stroked his beard and said, ‘She was at Florence for three quarters of an hour, I timed it. She drove down there on her own. I didn’t see any sign of this Drumm character. She went straight inside the slammer unaccompanied.’
Dansk looked round for the bartender and couldn’t find him. There was no decent service in this country any more, everything was bad manners and have-a-nice-day insincerity. He said, ‘She saw Sanchez.’
‘That a question?’ McTell asked.
‘She goes down to Florence. Who else is she going to see?’ He thought of the woman visiting Sanchez. So she was working up an interest. She was pursuing something she should leave alone. Too much persistence. Probably engrained in her. Her world hung by a thread and she didn’t even know it. Drumm hadn’t gone with her, so maybe she was just poking around on her own.
Pasquale fiddled with a paper napkin. He folded it once, then a second time, and suddenly he had a little paper animal which he set on the table. It might have been a horse or a tiger, you couldn’t tell. Whatever, it was sturdy, well-made. Dansk observed Pasquale’s dark suit and white open-necked shirt. He had a thick lower lip and was overweight by about 15 pounds. He had long elegant fingers and his hair was grey-yellow, with sideburns. He wore a gold pendant round his neck.
Dansk watched a guy come in and sit down behind the drums. He tapped the cymbals then cracked his knuckles one at a time. Dansk closed his eyes. Here he was in this tit and ass joint in the company of killers and a guy was cracking his knuckles, which was a sound that affected him like chalk squealing on a blackboard. Here he was sitting in a goddam drain with a sleazy curtain tattooed with nudes. He thought, This is what I do. This is how I make my nut.
McTell said, ‘Why don’t we blow the whole thing off and split? Why are we hanging here anyhow? You said we had other work.’
Dansk’s patience was approaching meltdown. ‘We need to know what she does, who she sees. How her behaviour might affect us. Information, Eddie. Know who you’re dealing with. The more you know, the less likely an error of judgement. Suppose we split right now. Suppose we just get the fuck out. We don’t have a clue what she and the cop might get up to behind our backs, do we? You see the problem?’
McTell nodded. He had a flat, almost concave forehead. He said, ‘So she saw Sanchez. What’s he gonna tell her? He’s gonna laugh right in her fucking face.’
Dansk, hugely irritated by the world in a general way, turned to the guy at the drums and said, ‘You intend to sit there tugging on your bones all night, fella?’
The knuckle-cracker had a weak lopsided smile. ‘What’s that?’
‘That knuckle business,’ Dansk said. ‘It’s frankly irritating.’
‘Yeah? You got a problem with it?’
‘I won’t, soon as you get out of my sight.’
The knuckle-cracker looked at Dansk. If he was contemplating a verbal come-back, whatever he saw in Dansk’s eyes made him change tack. ‘OK, sorry, sorry, man. No sweat. I’ll go sit on the other side of the room. Sorry.’
Dansk watched the guy slink away. The world was filled with nuisances, fringe disturbances, little whirlpools of agitation. All kinds of stuff he just didn’t need.
He looked at Pasquale and McTell. They were watching him, waiting for instructions.
He said, ‘I’ll work the woman myself. Pasquale, you stay in your motel and watch cartoons until I need you.’
McTell asked, ‘What about me?’
‘There’s a guy in her life, find out about him. Who he is, what he does. Just go gentle, if you know how.’
‘Got it,’ McTell said.
‘OK.’ Dansk rose. He wandered outside into the heat. A mandarin moon was suspended in the sky. He walked to his car, remembering the way Amanda had sniffed the eucalyptus leaf. He wondered if he could change the direction of his life through some perfumed avenue.
Dream on. Once you were in this line of work there was no way out. You made your living out of the dead.
23
The restaurant in north Scottsdale was French. Rhees had suggested the place. He liked his meat rare, bloody juices swimming on the plate.
Amanda saw a misty reflection of herself in the mahogany panel behind Rhees’s head. They’d made love earlier and she’d detected in him a certain restraint. He’d been tense, and the absence of his usual verbal passion bothered her. Rhees never made love silently. Speech, even whispered in the incoherent language of lovers, was integral to the act where he was concerned.
‘Are you still annoyed?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I’m still annoyed. You sneaked off to see Sanchez without telling me.’
She looked down at the remains of her saffron rice, bright yellow on the plate. ‘OK, I sneaked off. I knew you’d disapprove, so I didn’t tell you I was going.’
‘Share things with me, that’s all I ask.’
She rubbed the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t ask for this situation, John.’
Rhees folded his napkin and placed it over the lamb bo
nes and stared at her. ‘So why bother with it?’
‘Because it just fell in my lap and it’s messy.’
‘But not your mess. You gave your word to Isabel, fine, admirable, honorable. But she quit being your responsibility as soon as the trial was finished. What were you supposed to do? Hold her hand for the rest of her life? Maybe she should have moved in with us and you could have kept an eye on her twenty-four hours a day. Besides, I seem to remember all you were going to do was talk to Bascombe. In and out, you said. Toot sweet.’ Blood seeped through Rhees’s napkin. ‘What did Sanchez tell you anyhow?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. She hadn’t described the meeting to Rhees because she knew he’d react with horror. She played with a spoon, turning it over and over, remembering the way Sanchez had acted, bringing back the disturbing shock of the moment, focusing on the violence of the encounter: Sanchez forcing her against the wall, the blow of the gun on his head, the rap of a night-stick.
She thought about his threat, and suddenly there was an underlying strata of vulnerability. Faces in this restaurant, for instance. How could she know they were harmless? For all she could tell, at least one of them might be a Sanchez operative, watching, waiting.
She stopped herself. She let Donald Scarfe’s words play through her head as if they were a kind of balm. He says things just to make your head spin. A pinch of salt. But Sanchez returned unprompted. Bad things come in threes. What credence could she give Victor Sanchez’s threat?
‘He’s into games,’ was all she finally said.
‘Did you expect anything else?’
‘Not really.’
Rhees caught a waiter’s eye and asked for the dessert menu and chose a meringue basket of pears baked in sherry. Amanda wanted only coffee. The waiter came back and Rhees plunged his spoon into the dessert. She enjoyed watching him eat. He did it with gusto.
‘That’s a mountain to get through, John.’
‘I somehow worked up an appetite earlier.’
Amanda said, ‘I don’t understand why he hadn’t been interviewed by anyone from the Program when I saw him.’
‘You’re dealing with a bureaucracy.’
‘But this is a situation where you’d expect rapid response.’
‘Maybe they’re talking to him even as we sit here.’
‘What I’d really like is to talk in person to somebody who works inside the Program,’ she said. ‘Get some straight answers, if there are such things.’
‘You think that kind of access is possible?’
‘Anything’s possible if you go at it the right way,’ she said. She picked up her napkin and dabbed Rhees’s lower lip. ‘You’ve got a stray morsel there.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘I can request a meeting,’ she said. ‘It’s not like I just drifted in off the streets and I’m sticking my nose in. I’m an interested party.’
She dropped a cube of sugar into her coffee and stirred. Rhees said, ‘Here, sample this.’ He held his spoon to her lips. She tasted, found the meringue sickeningly sweet and the pears heavy on the sherry.
‘Unadulterated cholesterol,’ she said.
‘Clogs the arteries. Slows the rush of blood to your head and makes you sluggish in your thinking.’
‘Which is what you want, of course.’
‘You know how I feel, Amanda.’ He called for the check then went off to the men’s room. He was gone a long time. When he came back they walked outside to the parking-lot. The night was filled with hot dark enclosures beyond the beacons of lamplight that streamed up into the palm trees around the restaurant. There was the illusion of an electrified oasis. She didn’t care for the shadows between the lights.
Rhees said, ‘I think you’re happy back in the swing again. The old pizazz. You never really wanted out of it in the first place, did you?’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ she said.
‘You haven’t forgotten that the razzmatazz comes at a price, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Just keep that in mind before you start digging deeper into this whole wretched business.’
Digging: it was what she’d been trained to do in law school. Spade and shovel, examine the debris that came out of the earth, discard what was irrelevant and store what was useful. Legal archaeology. She hooked her arm through John’s and, raising her face, kissed him. She found some very slight resistance in the kiss, almost as if he were trying to distance himself from her, but then he yielded, put his arms around her and drew her against him.
24
First thing in the morning, Amanda telephoned Donald Scarfe. ‘Has Sanchez had any visitors yet?’ she asked.
‘You were the last,’ he replied.
‘No requests? No enquiries?’
‘None so far.’
‘That’s all I wanted to know, Don. Thanks.’
‘How are you today anyway?’
‘I’m over the shock,’ she said.
‘I still blame myself, Amanda.’
‘I absolve you totally, Don. I was the one that asked to go into the lion’s den.’
Next, she punched in Bascombe’s number.
‘I haven’t had my coffee,’ Bascombe told her. ‘I’m a goddam bear before that first cup.’
She was using the phone in the kitchen. The morning was rainy and humid and the long stalks of grass in the backyard buckled. A break in the weather. She liked rain.
‘Explain this, Lew,’ she said. ‘Why hasn’t anyone been down to see Sanchez? Has somebody at Program control overlooked the connection between Sanchez and the two allegedly “safe” witnesses?’
Bascombe said, ‘I sent the messages, Amanda. I don’t have any say in the follow-up.’
‘It’s not acceptable, Lew.’
‘You’re speaking with your prosecutor’s voice, Amanda.’
She watched Rhees, in a knee-length robe, put two slices of bread in the toaster. He poured a cup of coffee and sat at the table gazing out of the window.
‘Lew, you might be quite comfortable working away in the dark, but it isn’t a situation I find conducive to my peace of mind.’
‘I’m not sure your peace of mind matters a damn to the people in Arlington,’ he said.
‘Did they acknowledge your messages?’
‘We’ve been here before, Amanda.’
‘I understand that. I’m just not very happy. In fact, I’m pissed. I don’t like the way this thing works, if it works at all.’
‘I hate it when I have to deal with shrill women first thing.’
‘I am not being shrill, Lew.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘This is like trying to get through a brick wall,’ she said.
‘I can send off another message, see what happens.’
‘Make it different this time. Add this rider: the former prosecutor wants a face to face with somebody in the Witness Program admin. And I’m not kidding, Lew.’
‘You don’t know what you’re asking.’
‘I know exactly what I’m asking.’
‘They’ll refuse.’
‘Not if you mention that I intend to raise holy hell about the whole thing.’
‘Meaning?’
She took a deep breath to ease the knot of pressure in her chest. ‘It’s really simple, Lew. Galindez has already made the papers, but the story didn’t say anything about how he was supposed to be in the Program, nice and safe. And Isabel hasn’t made the papers at all yet. All it takes is for me to phone some avid journalist and give an in-depth, behind-the-scenes account. Big problem with the Witness Protection Program, it leaks like a goddam sieve.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.
‘Oh, try me.’
‘You’d be jeopardizing criminal prosecutions all over the country, Amanda. A story like that –’
‘A story like that is hair-raising, Lew,’ she said.
‘A story like that is going to make potential witnesses think long and hard about testifying. You’re not giving this proper thought, Amanda.’
<
br /> ‘Au contraire.’
‘You’re obsessing over Isabel Sanchez. This is a personal thing and it’s also blackmail.’
‘It takes what it takes, Lew. Get back to me before the end of the day. That’s an ultimatum. I’ll be waiting.’
Rhees looked up from his coffee. ‘Hardball,’ he said, with a sharp little note in his voice.
‘What else works?’ she asked.
She poured coffee. She felt a healthy vibrancy run through her like the struck strings of a zither. ‘Goddam. I can’t tell you how satisfying that was.’
‘You think it’s going to achieve anything?’ Rhees asked.
‘We’ll see.’ She clasped her hands round her cup and listened to the rain. It pattered on the roof, slinked over downpipes, stirred the grass. The doorbell rang. The sound made her jump. Rhees went to answer it. She heard him open the front door and after a couple of minutes he came back. ‘Some guy selling magazine subscriptions,’ he said. ‘I felt sorry for him in this rain.’
‘They count on your sympathy,’ she said.
Rhees smiled. ‘I told him I’d take Sports Illustrated.’
‘You don’t like sports.’
‘The poor bastard was dripping. Besides, there’s always the swimsuit issue. In any case, he didn’t have the New York Review of Books. So what was I to do?’
‘You’d give your last dime to any guy rattling a tin cup.’
‘It’s called charity,’ Rhees said.
She paced the room. She wondered if Bascombe had telephoned Arlington, if she’d made him sweat enough to go that far.
The telephone rang. She reached for it at once. It was her father.
‘I tried the cabin,’ he said. ‘Obviously you haven’t gone back yet.’
‘Not yet,’ she said.
‘I go out of town one night and I come back and there you are mentioned in the newspaper. You didn’t say anything to me about this corpse.’
‘Dad, I’m waiting for a call. I’m going to hang up and I’ll get back to you.’
‘You’re back in business again, right? That’s what I smell.’
‘No, I’m not back in business. I’m only doing what I think I have to.’
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