“Am I?” Jane asked, trotting after Boomer with curiosity.
“Are you what?”
“Your sister?”
“Sister? Noooo. That’s jest what I call all the ladies. Had a sister. Had four of ’em. Bitches, every last goddamn one. Glad to never see ’em no more. Years it’s been. ’Course, maybe, they’re jest as glad not to see me.” He dug an elbow into Jane’s side.
She stepped farther away and persisted. “I had a… sister once. Maybe. I never met her, though.”
“Busted family, huh?” Hattie had caught up and pulled on Boomer’s arm, stopping him. “Boomer, give us a sip. It’s damn cold.”
“Won’t be cold at my place,” he boasted, pulling his brown paper bag closer. “You’re taking liberties, Hattie.”
“I put a buck in for that bottle!”
“Cost three,” Boomer taunted, turning and stomping away on oversized boots.
Hattie hurried after, but Jane paused to look back.
The tall downtown buildings were aglow, their glass walls reflecting the lurid red-orange sunset. The wind made Jane’s eyes water—or something did. She thought of Kevin and the bank building lobby they had stood in together only hours earlier… twenty-eight hours and thirty-seven minutes and three seconds and one millisecond earlier.
Time, she realized, was strange, because it didn’t feel like that long ago. It felt like she and Kevin had been together only instants before, as if he would come around the corner and say, “Jane, what are you doing way over here by yourself? Come on”—and she would say, “I’m not by myself, Kevin, I’m with Boomer and Hattie, and Boomer’s my brother only he doesn’t like sisters and Hattie’s so nice, just like Mrs, Bellingham at the dorm, and I was in a place that felt like Zyunsinth—you know, Kevin, Zyunsinth, the place I was that I forgot, only I remembered it for just a moment, and it was nice there—close and warm and not, not lonely…”
Jane stood and stared at the alien city, in the descending dark, in the cold and the wind. She ripped off her gloves and wiped the water from her eyes to see the skyline better, to see it clearer—hard-edged and distant.
“Janey,” Hattie called from behind, as if the old woman knew her, had always been calling her name.
“Come on, sister, get movin’; gotta keep movin’,” Boomer shouted. Jane got moving.
Chapter Twenty-one
* * *
They came for Kevin after dinner sometime, he couldn’t tell exactly when. They had his watch.
“Come on, Blake,” they said, and he went. Happily.
The last thing he noticed in the cell was Harry’s pale eyes turning lighter in panic. It amused Kevin, bitterly, that his presence there could seem protection to anyone.
“Where are you taking me?” Kevin asked as politely— or maybe just as neutrally—as he could manage. It was their world; treat them rudely and you would get it back in spades.
“Questioning,” one cop gruffed back.
In another anonymous cinder-block hall painted some pastel shade so bland it melted from the memory instantly, the cops deposited Kevin outside a door inset with window glass, one of many lining the hall.
One cop opened the door and escorted Kevin into an official interrogation room—or half of one. What began as a small square room had lost ground where a sharp angle of intersecting hall wall cut across one whole corner.
Beyond the stark table and plastic molded chairs, the walls arrowed toward a vanishing point, stopped by an end wall maybe eight inches wide. The trapezoidal shape lent the room a skewed perspective. Kevin felt like a swollen Alice in Wonderland crammed into a room grown far too small.
Was the room’s claustrophobic shape intended, he wondered, to increase the prisoner’s anxiety? Or was it just a fact of overcrowded life in the Big City Jail, where corners were quite literally cut? Or was he all too easily turning paranoid? When the cop nudged his shoulder, he sat at the table, back to the door. A pair of metal ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts kept formal company along the wall, like salt and pepper shakers in a perverse café.
The door opened. Kevin forced himself to stare into the vanishing angle of the room. At last a face—homely, world-weary and familiar—lowered itself into the opposite chair.
“Detective… Smith, isn’t it?”
“Dr. Blake, I presume.” Smith’s leaden features flickered a smile. He pulled a crushed cigarette pack from his coat pocket and offered Kevin one.
Kevin automatically glanced at the full ashtrays before shaking his head.
“I know.” Smith rasped his battered Zippo to life against the dark end of his Camel filtertip. “You warned me once to stop smoking. I guess I warned you then, too.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“So.” Smith regarded Kevin closely. “Greens become you, Doctor. Beard gone. Look like a surgeon. You don’t look like the scum in here, that’s for sure.”
“I am the scum in here.”
“Who would have thought it?”
“You, for one,” Kevin returned. “I don’t think you buy anybody at face value. Must be a professional failing.” Smith inhaled so long on his cigarette that Kevin thought he was going to swallow it. The detective spit out smoke, coughed delicately and opened a manila folder.
“Anyone read you your rights?”
“No, and isn’t that illegal? I’ve been in custody since morning—”
“Nobody has to read your rights unless we interrogate you. Anybody interrogate you yet?”
“No.”
Smith sighed. “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, you have the right to have an attorney present…” On he went, reciting the formula with bored familiarity.
“You got a lawyer?” he asked when he’d finished.
“No.”
“Who’d you call?”
“A friend.”
“And… ?”
“I don’t know. He’s looking into it.”
“Call anybody else?”
“They only let me have one call.”
Smith’s eyes rolled. “They really have it in for you, don’t they? You’re gonna have a tough time in here.”
“What do you mean? One call’s all that’s allowed, isn’t it?”
“TV stuff.” Smith waved the smoke away from his face toward Kevin’s. “You get up to three, at the officer’s discretion, of course.”
“Apparently I didn’t get the benefit of any discretion,” Kevin said bleakly. “So I could have called a lawyer—”
“Lawyer won’t help you.” Smith crushed his already smoked fag into the piled ashtray. A stink of smoldering filters wafted into Kevin’s nostrils. “You’re in for the duration. Damn unlucky to have hit a holiday weekend. You don’t have to talk to me, of course.”
“Maybe I won’t.”
Smith’s eyes narrowed. He leaned across the table. “You know, I’m not surprised to see you here, Doctor. I knew something weird was going on at the University Hospitals, with that cop from Crow Wing jumping out the window and that patient of yours, that girl he found, all curled up in her bed comatose, you said.”
“Is that what I was arrested for—Kellehay’s death?”
“Maybe. Maybe Matusek’s, too—”
“Come on! That was up in Crow Wing. I wasn’t even there!”
“And a couple of detectives are coming down from Duluth after the holiday. Those two… deer hunters… that died in a questionable car crash—you were in the vicinity then. They want to question you. Also, an old lady—an ex-professor of yours named Neumeier—”
“Neumeier! Jesus Christ, what else are they going to hang me for—Jimmy Hoffa?”
“Don’t kid, son. North woods wouid’ve made a nice place to bury him.”
“Look, Smith, I’m not even talking to you. No lawyer, no talk. All right? You’ve got me here for five days anyway.”
“Okay. This is off the record.” Kevin eyed the manila folder suspiciously. Smith cracked it open.
“Window dressing, Doctor. I guess you know a little about that.” The folder was empty. Smith watched Kevin register that and smiled. “I guess you know a little about shaving regulations, too. One-man band at that Probe unit, weren’t you? Only you finally got ahold of something too hot to handle. Her.”
Kevin kept silent.
Smith shook out another cigarette, lit it, sat back. “See, I never bought that she was what you said she was. I never figured she was… normal. It never added up that someone as smart as you would dance so hard to protect someone who didn’t really need it.
“So now they’ve got you on warrants for probable cause in maybe… three, four unexplained deaths. You kill someone? Tell me to clap for Tinkerbell, and I’ll believe that first. No, not you. Her.”
Kevin’s muscles tensed from the top of his scalp on down.
“Never forget the first time I saw her,” Smith mused over wisps of cigarette smoke, “lying in that white hospital bed looking like something from someplace they liberated in Germany after the war. Thin, her hair more butchered than cut. Asleep, you said. No, Doctor, she wasn’t asleep that night; she was faking it, faking it good. You know that as well as I do.”
Kevin looked away, to the butt-glutted ashtrays.
“So some people are dead now. You’re here. And she’s scot-free. Look, if she isn’t responsible for her acts—if you can get somebody a little less involved than you to testify to that—the courts can’t hurt her. You’re a different matter.”
“Why the hell do you care?” Kevin blazed.
“I do my job, just like you thought you were doing yours. I want to solve Kellehay’s murder. And I smell a frame. ‘The feds found you.’ Hell, do you know the last time the feds went out of their way to help the locals on a bust? Oh, sure, everything’s cosy-rosy on the drug stuff lately, but on anything else, it’s the same old cold shoulder.”
“You warned me,’” Kevin interjected, fearing that Smith was ruminating too close to the bone now. The detective went on talking.
“So I wondered, why would the feds put you on ice on a bunch of PCs that any semismart lawyer could crack you out of in no time? Pressure? Sure. Get you out of the way, even surer. I want whoever killed Kellehay. That’s my case, my jurisdiction. I don’t give a flying crap about Matusek or the two gentlemen outside Duluth—”
“Government men,” Kevin put in.
Smith smiled. “That’s mighty fine gold-leaf they’re wrapping around your frame. The records show the men were just average citizens. Tourists, you might say—”
“Nothing will stop me from protecting my patient,” Kevin interrupted.
“What d’you think you are—a priest? Maybe… and I just say maybe… God’s on their side, but nobody’s on yours, Doctor. Nobody. Not even your Jane Doe. You think she needs you. What about you needing her? Where is she? If she’s so tough cops jump out of windows to get away from her, why doesn’t she help you now?”
“She’s helpless,” Kevin ground out between his teeth, pushed against the wall of his own guilt for having failed Jane. “Damn it, don’t you see? She’s helpless!”
Smith dropped his cigarette to the concrete floor and ground it out under his size-twelve shoe. He gave Kevin a look more resigned than angry.
“No, Doctor. You don’t see. Jane Doe’s not helpless at all. Never was. You are.”
* * *
“Here we are, snug as the three Billy Goats Gruff.” Boomer grandly indicated an overturned dumpster under the Northern Pacific Railway bridge.
“You’re an old goat, all right,” Panama Hattie grumbled good-naturedly, setting down her overloaded shopping bag.
In the deep twilight, the downtown Minneapolis skyline lurked black against fading burnt-peach clouds. Jane turned to the west, where the trees laid bare their midnight veins against the sunset. The snow all around gleamed faintly pink, and railroad tracks thick as ganglia bristled through the deserted river flats.
Boomer’s “home” was the abandoned dumpster he’d managed to jam under the root of the railroad bridge. On its side it made a three-walled lean-to. Old blankets fluttered at its open mouth.
“It’s warmer than they got.” Boomer waved at the shadowy figures crouched elsewhere on the inhospitable snowfields around sparks of fire.
“And what keeps ’em out of it?” Hattie wanted to know.
“A pickax blade I found.” Boomer wheezed rather than laughed. “And they know I found this dumpster, hell, some of ’em helped me drag it over here. They know it’s mine. Rule of the road. I let whoever there’s room for come in, ’course. Never entertained two ladies before, though.”
“Better be warmer,” Hattie warned, dragging her bag into the dumpster’s lee, “or we won’t be ladies.”
“It will be.” Boomer hoisted his brown paper bag by way of a promise.
“Come on,” Hattie told Jane. “Get in before your tail freezes.”
Jane started to move, then stopped. “I don’t have a tail.”
“You will if you don’t get in here.”
Jane shrugged and joined them inside, sitting cross- legged beside Hattie while Boomer stretched up to pull down the tattered blankets.
Before he shut out the last of the light, he lit a match to a pile of sticks and newspapers piled in a cast-iron skillet at their feet. The fire crackled into life, dancing in the convex mirrors of their eyes.
“Keep-fire,” Jane said suddenly, kneeling to extend her bare hands over it.
“Sure, I keep it going,” Boomer said. “Long as I can scrounge somethin’ that’ll burn.”
“Stay away from my bag,” Hattie warned.
She doffed her two upper hats, leaving only a dingy, sequined turban on her head. She was busy emptying the varied contents of her bag, producing a white mug announcing that “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” and a chipped china cup. These she lovingly wiped on her sagging sweater pocket and offered to Boomer.
In moments he had filled them with a clear stream from the lip of his brown paper bag. While Hattie passed the dainty cup to Jane, Boomer swigged directly from the bag.
“Nothin’s warmer than South Dakota Everclear, Janey. A hundred and fifty proof. Even ole Jack Frost warms up to South Dakota Everclear.” Boomer’s lips smacked appreciatively.
“Right good stuff,” Hattie agreed, allowing her seamed face to split even further into a smile.
“Kevin gave me something like this to drink once,” Jane said.
“Only once! A babe in arms jest like you said, Hattie.”
“Who’s Kevin, honey? Your boyfriend?”
“Oh, yes…” Jane liked the idea. All the girls at Willhelm Hall had boyfriends—or wished they did. Jane sipped again from the burning clear liquid, feeling the flames lick warmly at the edges of her chilled body.
“Where is he? How come he lets you wander around alone without any money? Bad things happen to girls who do that. Some boyfriend.”
“No, Hattie. He was with me, then—” The fire’s rhythmic leap hypnotized Jane. Her eyelids fluttered. “I think the, the police came for him.”
Boomer snorted. “Lucky him. Warmer in jail.”
“Jail?” Jane asked.
“County jail, little lady. That big mean-lookin’ gray building with all the towers over and back from House of Charity. If you want to visit your boyfriend, we’ll show you where tomorrow.”
“I could see Kevin?”
“If he’s in jail, sure.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Jane thought. “Tonight?”
“Naw, not tonight. Even jail closes down at night.
Tomorrow. Say, this is good stuff. Want some more,
Hattie?”
While Boomer refilled Hattie’s mug, Jane crept to the blanketed opening and lifted a corner. Dark had claimed even the whiteness of the snow; it reflected nothing now but the night.
Jane stared up. Looming in the east against a sky nearly as dark hung the basalt towers; one mus
t be the county jail. Tomorrow.
Above her, snagged like one of the sequins in Hattie’s turban, a full moon shone down on the bottomless black of the earth below. Jane had never noticed a full moon before. It broadcast the bright, chill light of something that she had seen before.
“The silver sun…” she whispered. “Zyunsinth.”
A scene flashed into her memory, complete and yet more remote than a photograph in a history book. Jane remembered the cold world where the well-haired creatures she knew as Zyunsinth fed their keep-fires and stared up at the silver sun, toward the basalt towers.
She remembered, her impressions colliding and falling into place like something that had broken and then defied nature to reassemble itself.
She saw it as she had seen the University of Minnesota campus all the previous fall, the Volkers’ house in Crookston a few days before, the Upper Midwest Savings & Loan building only yesterday.
Jane’s naked fingers clutched the chill blanket, her mind pasting image after recalled image into its rapidly turning pages, her thoughts leaping ahead to blanks where only raw possibility waited. Kevin, she thought, would want to know, would be so glad to know that she finally was remembering events that had happened in real time—
“Shut that drape, Janey! We’re freezin’.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I was thinking.”
“Think in here where it’s warm. Ain’t it cozy? Boomer’s right, he’s got a real nice place here.”
Jane let Hattie pull her back into place between the two of them. She liked the pungent warmth of this metal cave,
the crude familiarity of Boomer and Hattie’s faces, the acrid scent of tongues of flame licking away all the afternoon’s overbearing odors…
Hattie and Boomer were swaying a little around the fire, their eyes glistening happily.
“A-way in a man-ger no crib for His bed,” Boomer began singing.
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