Back in the car, jazz found its way into his bones, like the lingering warmth that follows a bath. It lived inside him. He let it out as often as possible, not often enough. He thought that people who lived without music lived tragic lives, but realized that others would say the same about modern art, or poetry, or even dog racing. Each to his own. For him it was jazz, sad and dreary at the moment, like the noon sky. He felt gray all over.
Bear Berenson owned and operated Joke’s On You, a comedy club and music bar with a fish-sandwich menu, a mirrored porthole behind the bar, and, during the evenings, several coeds in their late teens working the tables. On any given night, Bear could be found, slightly stoned, moving between his customers’ tables, one eye on the backsides of the coeds and the other on the bartender, to make sure he wasn’t failing to use the register. After a protracted legal battle with the federal government, Bear, although the victor, had failed to save The Big Joke, his first club and a longtime haunt of Lou Boldt and other cops. Joke’s On You was in Walling-ford, up on 45th, a long way from downtown and his former clientele. This time Bear was aiming jointly at the imports to the U, the young kids with their parents’ credit cards and loose change, and the yuppies turned parents who had abandoned the Beamers for the Caravans. Wallingford had changed a lot in the last ten years, and Bear was there to take advantage. The five-to-seven jazz and cocktail hour was for what Bear called the Headin’ Homes, the young professionals too tired to think, too tired to play mom or dad, but strong enough to stop for thirty minutes of courage. At nine the place rolled into stand-up, the drink prices dropped by a dollar, and the waitresses shed short skirts for black jeans and white tops with a logo of a laughing bear on the breast pocket. In jokes.
At three in the afternoon there were two barflies at the bar, a haze of smoke in the air, and a man behind the bar playing solitaire on a laptop computer. He was a barrel-chested guy but with droopy shoulders, black hair—lots of it—and thick lips. His eyes looked perpetually sad; his lips held back a cynical grin. Bear always looked like he knew something he shouldn’t.
“Rip Van fucking Winkle,” Bear said, the partial grin giving way to a full smile. “How goes, Monk?”
Thelonious Monk was Boldt’s favorite jazz pianist—he played the entire Monk book. Bear had called him this forever. “Just like the Energizer bunny,” Boldt said.
“Lots of dead people keeping you busy?”
That caused one of the two barflies to take note of Boldt. This man nodded at Boldt and Boldt said hello. “Enough to keep me busy,” Boldt answered.
“Obviously too busy to play,” Bear complained. Boldt, who had virtually owned the Headin’ Home happy hour piano slot, had passed it off to Lynette Westendorff, a friend who knew more about jazz than Boldt did police work.
“You don’t like her playing?”
“She’s fine. Better than fine. And she’s better-looking too.”
“And still you’re complaining,” Boldt said, reaching the bar then but not taking a seat on one of the vinyl stools.
Bear shrugged. “Gotta stay in shape,” he said.
Bear’s eyes were bloodshot. He’d been smoking pot already. He used to wait until eight or nine at night, but since the move he started midafternoon and smoked right through until closing. Boldt had tried several times to put him off the habit, but when the friendship seemed threatened he had backed off—he rarely even joked about it anymore. Bear was probably his most consistently loyal friend.
“How long?” Bear asked, meaning the investigation.
It was Boldt’s turn to shrug.
Bear poured his two patrons a drink on the house, locked the cash register, and led Boldt to a far corner table under a large black speaker cabinet from where the owner could keep one eye on the bar. “Afternoon business is really cooking,” he said, gesturing toward his two drunks.
“Lunch?”
“A little better. I don’t know: You like those curlycue fries or good old plank fries?”
“Curlycues.”
“Yeah, me too. You can get an extra quarter for them, but they come frozen, or else you gotta do ’em yourself and they’re time-intensive. The plank fries we can do fresh—simple, easy. I don’t know.”
“Fresh curlycues,” Boldt advised. “They add a touch of class.”
“Probably right. We could use a touch of something around here.”
“New location. It takes time.”
“It takes luck. And advertising. Good talent on stage, and a couple of babes working the floor. I don’t know; I miss downtown.”
“It’s going to work,” Boldt encouraged.
“Not so far it isn’t. People don’t want to part with their money, that’s the thing. It’s not like the eighties. And the stand-up humor has gone into the toilet—it’s all fuck this and fuck that. These kids don’t know anything about structure.”
“There’s always Monday Night Football,” Boldt teased. Bear hated football, refused to show any of the games.
“Yeah, and opera,” he followed quickly. “The subtitles certainly changed the experience for me.”
Boldt warmed and smiled, realizing that it had been a while since he’d done so, and this was followed by the thought that life is choices, not fated paths, and perhaps his choices had been misguided lately. This was exactly why he stopped to visit with Berenson occasionally: perspective.
“I’ve resorted to backgammon and Monopoly,” the bar owner admitted reluctantly. “Had a Monopoly tournament last Saturday and packed the place with college kids. Sold a lot of beer. The winner gets a free meal.”
“The loser gets two free meals,” Boldt quipped.
They exchanged grins and were silent a moment.
“Is it Liz?” Bear asked.
“You a mind reader?”
“A psychic.”
It reminded Boldt of the case. Of Daphne. The wrong reminders just at that moment.
“I say something,” Bear asked.
“Liz is okay.”
“That means things are fucked.”
“No, they’re okay.”
“Oh, yeah. I know you. Is that why you gave Lynette the gig? Listen, here’s the thing. My take on the problem with adulthood,” began the barroom philosopher who sought to remain as perpetually stoned as possible, as childlike as possible with his bawdy jokes and quick one-liners, “is that you grow up as a kid saying exactly what you’re thinking. You know the way kids do: ‘Hey, look, Uncle Peter’s not bald anymore, but his hair’s a different color in the middle!’ That sort of shit. And as a kid you do basically what you feel like—torture little sisters, take clocks apart. Only over time do you find out what’s acceptable and what’s not. Which is the entire problem; this way, we teach kids to get it wrong. Because as adults it’s just the opposite: We rarely say what we’re honestly feeling or thinking, and we end up doing a lotta stuff we’d just as soon not do. Someone at a dinner party asks how you’re doing, and you answer that everything’s fine, when in fact it might suck big-time but you’re not about to say it; you get up at six every morning, take the trash out, and drag yourself off to a job you hate, all for those three weeks of vacation a year. What’s that all about? How is it we end up getting it all so screwed up?” He added, “As a parent, Monk, you owe it to yourself to think about this.” Wide-eyed, he trained his attention on Boldt. After a moment he asked, “So?”
“Things with Liz are okay.”
“You or her?” Bear asked.
“Her,” Boldt answered.
“Serious?”
“Don’t know.”
Bear said, “It’s work. Your work, not hers. Right? That’s why Lynette; that’s why the long face and the heavy heart. This is the way you get when it starts to eat at you. I know you, Monk. You need to lighten up. You should come by and play a couple of sets. You should have never stopped drinking.”
Boldt laughed, amused that Bear always simplified unhappiness to a lack of appropriate drugs. “My stomach stopped me drinking, n
ot me.” He had never been a serious drinker anyway, and Bear knew this, but the two carried on a constant dialogue centered on Boldt’s taking up a few beers every now and again. Bear couldn’t stand the thought of anyone approaching life entirely sober. It frightened him, like a kid afraid of the dark.
“I’m hunting a guy who’s burning women to death,” Boldt said, using a verb he seldom voiced aloud. It cast him in the light of a predator instead of a protector. He preferred the latter. But the truth was that in an open-ended homicide case the detective often became a hunter, like a rancher trying to identify and trap whatever animal was decimating the herd. Bear looked shocked. He furrowed his brow and squinted across the table. Boldt answered the expression. “What went wrong, Bear? Where did we cross that line, and what drove us there? You know? It’s not the same as it once was. People will tell you it is, but it isn’t.”
“I agree,” Bear said in a soft voice; the comedian had left the room. “The rest of us read the headlines, Monk. You guys live with this shit.”
“I think it’s God,” Boldt said immediately, because he’d been thinking about this for a long time and Bear was the kind of friend he could say this to. “Or, more to the point, a lack thereof. I was raised with church. Sunday school, that sort of thing. You?”
Bear nodded. “Temple.”
Boldt continued. “Yeah, and in all those stories, all those lessons, you had good and evil, God and the Devil—no matter what significance you put in either—but they were there, and you had faith, some sense of faith, some belief in something larger than yourself, no matter how small or on what level. Maybe you look at the night sky a little differently or maybe you go to church twice a week, but it’s there, it’s in you. And without it, without that sense of God, there’s no flip side, there’s nothing to fear, and as much as I hate to say it, maybe fear is a good thing in this case. A sense of God—whatever you choose to call it—gives you a soul; without a soul you’re left with unfocused eyes and a sense that you’re at the top of the food chain and anything goes. And that’s what you see in a killer’s eyes: no humanity, no consciousness, no thought or concern for their fellowman. Some kid blows away his best friend over a pair of sneakers—so what? I’m telling you, it’s no act. They have no soul. I interrogate these guys, I look them right in the eye, and I’m telling you they’re beyond recognition. They aren’t human. I don’t know what they are.”
“I’ve seen it,” the bar owner said, nodding in agreement and pulling the skin on his cheeks so that his eye sockets stretched open and he looked slightly monstrous. “I think it’s television. The movies. It desensitizes us. All that killing, the blood, even the sex—and I gotta admit, I like seeing the sex; it’s about as close as I’ve gotten lately! But that’s what I’m saying about the fuck jokes, you know? We’ve bottomed out. The only thing that draws a laugh is bathroom humor about your mother and father’s sex life. You should hear some of the stuff.”
“I’m hunting this guy and part of me doesn’t want to catch him; I don’t want to know. Daffy, she’s all eager to interview this guy, see what makes him tick—take his clock apart. But what if you open up that clock and there’s nothing inside? Come to find out it’s only a face and hands disguising an empty shell? What then? What if there’s nothing to learn? Nothing to change? Nothing to gain? Nothing to do?”
“You need to lose this one, Monk. Pass it off to someone else. Spend more time with Miles. Come back and play happy hour for me.”
“He sends pieces of melted green plastic and notes that look like the work of an eight-year-old.”
“What’s with the melted plastic?” Berenson asked.
“No one knows.”
The melted plastic remained important to Boldt. He had given it to Lofgrin for analysis but had yet to hear back.
“Green plastic,” Berenson said thoughtfully.“You got a weird job, you know that?”
Boldt nodded.
“How big?”
Boldt indicated the size: smaller than a quarter, bigger than a nickel. Berenson loved puzzles.
Berenson speculated. “Not poker chips … whistles—they must make green whistles—jewelry?” he asked. “Some kind of jewelry? A trinket, a key chain, something like that?”
“Jewelry, maybe.” Boldt liked this idea.
They didn’t talk for a while. One of the barflies signaled Bear, and the bar owner served him another drink. Boldt went over to the stage, climbed up and opened the piano, and played a long, rambling mood piece in E minor. It released him.
In the corner, he saw a stack of six backgammon boards and a matching number of Monopoly games. And there was Bear, in a chair, arm resting on the stack of board games, eyes closed, listening.
Bear said, “You could have done it for real, you know? The music. You’re that good, Monk.”
“I’m not that good—you’re just that stoned—and I can’t feed a family on what you pay.” It was a sensitive issue; perhaps Bear had forgotten; perhaps not, Boldt thought. Boldt had taken a two-year leave of absence following the Cross Killer investigation; only Daphne had possessed the persuasive techniques to lure him back to the department. For those two years he had been a good father and a better husband. He had been a happy hour jazz pianist, and Liz had brought home the paycheck. Those times seemed like a decade ago, instead of the five years it had been.
Bear was a little too stoned. He leaned his weight on the stack of board games, and the pile went over and onto the floor, spilling with a racket. “Hey,” Bear said, his lap piled with play money, “I’m rich.” He held up the money. “I’ll give you a raise.”
Boldt knocked off the trumpet fanfare that starts a horse race.
“Then again,” Bear said, down on his hands and knees to clean up the mess, “maybe you won, not me.” He threw something toward the piano player, and Boldt caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye in time to lean back, swipe the air with his large right hand, and snag whatever it was.
He glanced down into his open palm and saw there a small green plastic cube in the shape of a building, complete with a peaked roof, used to mark the purchase of a house on the Monopoly board: green … plastic....
Boldt said, somewhat breathlessly, understanding the significance of the find, “A house!”
“A game,” said Berenson.
Boldt pocketed the small green house, gave his friend an appreciative hug on the way out, and headed directly to the police lab, where he met up with Bernie Lofgrin, who, anxious to leave for the day, nonetheless understood the possible importance of the rush job that Boldt requested.
With the sergeant looking on, Lofgrin ran a comparison analysis of the melted green plastic sent by mail and that of the game piece delivered by the sergeant. He did so on the lab’s Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer, a device Boldt could name only with a struggle and which Lofgrin referred to by its initials, FTIR. The results offered the first real sense of progress: The two green pieces of plastic were identical in chemical composition; he had a match. The torch was sending melted Monopoly houses as part of his threats. Boldt tried to reach Daphne, hoping to connect some kind of psychological significance to the find—he had a lead and he wanted to run with it; he felt an urgency, a need to follow this to completion—but she didn’t answer, either at her houseboat or at the Adler mansion.
As Boldt headed home, he barely focused on Aurora Avenue, slowing when the red taillights brightened, speeding up as they grew distant, following the other cars but not entirely conscious of them. His focus was on Steven Garman and Daphne’s suspicions that he knew more than he was letting on. He pulled into the drive and sat quietly behind the wheel for several long minutes.
Liz’s car was there—and suddenly he was flooded with an entirely different set of suspicions and concerns.
29
Daphne knocked on the door of the purple house with the neon sign in the window and then hurried off the front porch to get a look down the driveway. She was uncomfortable to be a whit
e woman, alone, in that neighborhood. Seattle was not a racially tense city like some other American cities, but gangs were of increasing concern: Asian against Asian, black against black. Women were occasionally gang-banged, sometimes to death. Car jackings were on the rise. And there was Daphne, white, attractive, driving a red Honda Prelude with aluminum mags, suddenly well aware of the ghetto surroundings.
He was small, and he was fast. A white boy, ten or twelve years old. He dodged around the corner of the house, froze as he saw Daphne, and then took off like a shot.
The front door came open and Emily Richland stood there in a black pants dress with an embroidered yellow robe over her shoulders. It took her a second to locate Daphne in the driveway.
“Is he your son?” Daphne asked.
“Leave him out of this,” Emily protested.
“Is he?”
“No.”
Daphne approached the woman, who stepped back inside and made an attempt to shut the door. “I wouldn’t,” Daphne warned.
Emily considered this and hesitated, the door still partially open.
“I haven’t heard from you,” Daphne told her.
“I haven’t heard from him.”
“How do I know that?” Daphne asked.
“I would call you.”
“Would you? I don’t think so.” Daphne forced her way inside and closed the door. “Who’s the boy?” she asked, pushing past the psychic into the lavishly painted room. “And don’t play with me, or you and the boy will end up downtown, having your pictures taken and rolling your thumbs and forefingers in little boxes. The press loves to destroy people like you.”
“You do whatever it is you have to do. You’re pathetic. You know that? He hasn’t been back. I would have called.”
“You con people for a living. How am I supposed to trust you? The boy is part of it,” Daphne said, keeping the boy’s role in the foreground. The boy was clearly the wild card, the way to get at the woman. “Maybe you lied about this man with the burned hand.”
Beyond Recognition Page 18
