Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species

by Endangered Species(lit)

  "Looks like she's home , Anna said." Shall we?"

  "What'll we say we're here for?" Dijon asked, suddenly shy.

  "Just being neighborly."

  "You do the talking," he said, and climbed from the truck. He took a last glance in the side mirror. Still looking for the tick.

  The biologist had to know they were there. Not more than a vehicle or two passed her place on any given day. And Anna and Dijon had waited in their truck the requisite few minutes required when paying calls south of the Mason-Dixon line, but Marty hadn't come out on the porch to greet them. Schlessinger forced everyone to do things the hard way.

  Walking several yards apart, Anna and Dijon approached the ratty dwelling as if John Dillinger waited within. Schlessinger had that effect on people.

  " You knock," Dijon said. He was whispering.

  Anna had to force herself not to follow suit. Rapping on the doorframe, she called: "Hi. Anybody home?"

  "Yeah," came a sharp voice. Anna took that as an invitation and pulled the screen open.

  Marty's home wasn't air-conditioned and, though her windows were open, the shades were all drawn. The air was close and heavy with innumerable odors, all of them vile: rotting animal parts, formaldehyde, grilled cheese, dirty laundry, coffee, mildew.

  Anna covered her nose with her sleeve, then, realizing it was the height of rudeness, lowered it and tried to breathe normally.

  Clad in a dingy brassiere and sweatpants cut off above the knee, a bottle of Nestea in one hand, the biologist sat in an overstuffed chair tucked back in a corner. Stuffing showed through on both the arms where the fabric was worn away. She didn't move when Anna and Dijon came in. Her eyes were narrowed against the light. She looked as if she dared either one of them to comment on her wardrobe or her lifestyle.

  Blind from the sunlight, Anna saw everything, including the half-naked biologist, as mud brown. The house was kept worse than the pigsty. Every surface was covered in chunks of shell or bone.

  Papers littered the floor and were piled haphazardly among books and magazines. 1rays and dissecting equipment, smelling as if they'd not been cleaned since the last adventure in marine pathology, were pushed to one side of a wooden table just outside the cooking area.

  Through a wide arch was a bedroom, also furnished in Early junkyard, and the back door.

  Schlessinger had her feet propped on a lobster trap with two one-by- twelves nailed across it. Open and unopened mail was piled on this makeshift coffee table. More spilled from the shelves of an unstable bookcase next to the front door.

  " Hey, Marty," Anna said pleasantly.

  Undone by the brassiere and the aging flesh it failed to adequately conceal, Dijon mumbled something and became instantly engrossed in reading the spines of the books.

  "Are you lost?" Schlessinger asked. Her attitude was the only cool spot on the island. Sweat was starting and Anna felt it crawling through her hair.

  "No. Just on patrol and thought we'd drop by."

  Schlessinger took a swig of her tea and said nothing.

  Anna's eyes were adjusting to the dimness. Marty's face was pale. Her blue eyes looked unnaturally large because the pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. Her feet, elevated on the coffee table, tapped the air rapidly as if keeping time to a hot jazz beat in her brain.

  Hostility radiated from her. She didn't seem frightened or nervous, just swelled with ambient anger, like a pit bull looking for somebody to chew on.

  Clearly this wasn't going to be passed off as a social call. Interest piqued, Anna began her questions with a feeling akin to excitement. Maybe cops smelled emotional violence the way fire horses scented smoke: pulses quickened, hooves stamped to be in on the chase.

  "We had a few minutes," Anna began, as if Marty had welcomed them with open arms, "and I thought I'd pop by and see if you remembered any more about those shots you heard."

  "Shots?" Marty echoed, and Anna believed she'd genuinely forgotten. Then the biologist's face hardened with returning memory and she said, "What shots?" like a bad actor.

  Anna outlined the roadside report Marty had given, just as if Schlessinger's question had been an honest one.

  "That's not how I remember it," Marty said when Anna had finished." I asked you if you had heard anything. You weren't listening." She took her feet from the lobster trap and leaned forward, elbows on knees. Tufts of white hair curled from her armpits. Without even wanting a peek, Anna was afforded full view of generous cleavage, all deep brown. Marty tanned in the nude. Schlessinger's eyes followed Anna's to her own chest, apparently noticing for the first time that she was only half dressed. The realization left her unmoved.

  "Now that's settled, maybe you should get back to work. That's what you're here for, aren't you? Work? Or is that concept too complex for government employees?" The pale eyes fixed on Anna's face.

  Uneasiness began somewhere in the vicinity of her heart and was pumped out along her arteries like poison.

  "Yeah," Anna said, rising from the edge of the chair where she'd perched." Thanks for your time. We'd better get-"

  "Hey," Dijon interrupted." I used these things all through college. No wonder I got C's."

  Both women had forgotten Dijon. While they conducted their tdte-&- tdte he'd continued his perusal of Schlessinger's bookshelves.

  " What?" Anna said.

  Dijon held up a letter, obviously mass-produced with lawyerly letterhead and a to-whom-it-may-concern look to it." They recalled the Lewin electron microscopes. Major flaw. The readings are warped on about ten percent of them."

  " Put. It. Down."

  Schlessinger's voice was so deadly cold Anna backed a couple steps toward the door. The biologist was standing, her white hair, free of its braids, falling over her breasts like spiderwebs.

  Frozen in his tracks, Dijon continued to hold on to the paper.

  "You barge into my home"-Schlessinger stepped over the mess of the coffee table with the speed and grace of a young athlete"you badger me with bullshit"-she stalked across the narrow room toward the paralyzed firefighter-"and you snoop through my mail."

  With that, she snatched the letter from Dijon's fingers." Out. Get out. Out of my house."

  Anna turned and fled, the unsubtle pounding of Dijon's boots half a step behind her.

  "Holy shit, what was that;?" Dijon asked when they'd completed their ignominious retreat and sat again in the sanctuary of the pumper truck." She's crazy as a loon. Mrs. Ted Bundy. Like I'd want to read her frigging mail. It was laying there. Christ, a blind man would have been able to read it. What is her problem?" Dijon was babbling, creepy laughter mixed with his words.

  "She was higher than a kite," Anna said.

  "On Nestea? That's all it was. I've got a nose like a bloodhound."

  "Not alcohol. Cocaine, maybe. Crack. Could be meth or just old- fashioned speed. Something. Her pupils were almost invisible and she was wired so tight she hummed."

  "Damn," Dijon said." I didn't think old people did drugs."

  "Old people invented drugs."

  "Witches and shit." Dijon shuddered.

  Anna crossed herself." Just in case you're right," she said when he looked surprised. She fired up the truck and backed out the fifty yards of driveway. There was room to turn around but she wasn't comfortable with her back to Marty Schlessinger.

  Only once before had she had such a sense of malignancy. It was when she worked in Texas at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. She'd pulled over a blue sedan for speeding. The sun was high, the road public, and Anna well armed. The sedan had two occupants. The driver was a woman in her late thirties, weighing close to three hundred pounds, with small, very dark eyes. The passenger was a wisp of a woman somewhere between seventy-five and a thousand years old. Her eyes were the same beetle-back black.

  As Anna approached the driver's-side door, she'd gotten a real bad feeling, as if some odor of pure evil poured out the open window. She didn't even ask the woman for her driver's license. All she said was: "Slow i
t down please," and, "Have a nice day." God knew what was in their trunk and Anna didn't want to.

  Whether it was ESP or PMS, she never found out, but she'd never been sorry she turned tail and ran. Today she'd gotten a whiff of that same scent in Schlessinger's shack.

  GNOI%ING the blaring headline, "POLICE CAPTURE SUSPECT IIN BABY KILLING" shouting up from the paper on the table in front of him and nearly every other rag in the room, Frederick sat in the pub on Ninth Avenue waiting for Molly. In the three days he'd been in New York it had become "their" place. At least in his mind.

  Along with titillating excitement was a rising tide of self-contempt.

  He'd found a reason to lunch with Dr. Pigeon Saturday, meet her for dinner Saturday night and brunch Sunday. Today he'd called the Chicago office pleading the flu and, to the tune of $220 a pop, reserved another couple of nights at the Parker Meridien. He'd worked harder than a roomful of hot new recruits tracking down the leads he had on the threatening letters.

  In seventy-two hours he'd lost control. It started over drinks the first night. Sometime between salad and coffee at Saturday's lunch he'd slid over the edge. Love at first sight? He scoffed, making a small noise he passed off as a cough, not wanting to call attention to himself. As if talking to oneself were cause for comment in Manhattan. There was an apt definition of love at first sight floating around the Enmail circuit: when two horny but not particularly choosy people meet for the first time.

  Chemistry? Biology? Maybe simple neurosis. Anna was getting too close-and at his ardent behest. Promises had been, if not made, certainly implied: letters written, laughter shared, a future together strongly hinted at. Was this just panic, this sudden infatuation that gripped him as if he were a boy of fifteen? And not merely over a jean or a Janet or a Judy, but with Anna's sole and beloved sister.

  Not aware he did it, Frederick buried his face in his hands, a parody of the tortured soul. Though he was aware logic-not to mention everyone he knew-would see this dramatic shift of affections as a psychological blip on his aging radar, in his heart there was a romantic arrogance demanding it be True Love.

  He was ashamed. On some level he was aware of that. The telitale sign was secrecy. Like a lovesick coed, he wanted to talk al)out Molly but kept her name a mystery, even when he talked with his daughter, Candice.

  Frederick lifted his head and took a long pull on his Scotch, then checked his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace to see if his histrionics had made his hair clownish. He downed the rest of his drink and signaled the waiter to bring him another.

  Soon, he knew, the process of his exoneration would begin. Bit by bit he would change what needed changing. Each time he told himself the story he would come out looking a little cleaner. Frederick's judgments were cruel, damning. Years before, he'd learned how to keep them from turning and cutting him. After the process was complete and he was once again whole, there would be only a scar.

  Anna would hate him.

  She was proud. She'd never let on. Like Mary Tyrone in A Long

  's Journey into Night, she would forgive but she would never t. Respect would die. Touched by betrayal, memories would be smuted from gold to lead.

  With something akin to desperation, he pawed beneath the paper he'd been pretending to read to find the folder. When selfanalysis came close to an unpleasant truth, Frederick turned his mind to his work. It was what he was good at.

  None of the leads Molly provided him with went anywhere.

  James Lubbock, the man angling for disability, had sued and won, this time claiming a back injury. His hostile wife, Portia, had been happy to tell Frederick more than he'd ever wanted to know about the Lubbock union. The money, not surprisingly, was still not enough, but the Lubbocks were on to other scams and had forgotten Molly Pigeon's unprofitable sense of ethics.

  Sheila Thomas, the not so gay divorcde, was head over heels in love with the lawyer who had gotten her such a lousy settlement, and quoted Dr. Pigeon the way the newly converted quote Jesus.

  Thomas bored him. The page tired his eyes. His concentration splintered. Though his head didn't ache, Frederick rubbed his temples. His train of thopght was derailing, Molly Pigeon, or his sudden attraction to her, filling his mind.

  When emotional lightning strikes once, it's easily passed off as the real thing. By the third or fourth hit, the possibility it's a neurotic pattern and not love had to be considered.

  There'd been a woman in California, a married woman, he'd made a fool of himself over. Much, he suspected later, to her great if adamantly denied delight. A lawyer in Oregon he'd thrown himself at, only to run like a scalded cat when she began to talk commitment. Then Anna: Anna had been slow and sure. Time had passed, they knew one another. It had been, he'd told himself, Real.

  And it had been blown away over lunch by this new wind that Molly breathed through his soul. Frederick laughed aloud, no longer concerned that others might stare. Maybe the Scotch was kicking in. "Soul" might be a little less specific a part of the anatomy than that which was acting as lightning rod. Intellectually, he knew Molly might be another symptom of whatever: a choice between the tedium of having and the endless potential in wanting. What saddened him was that he didn't give a damn.

  Anna was fading. just like that, dissipating into a vague fog the way a dream will on waking. A memory that ached only occasionally, like a bad tooth when he bit down on it.

  The light Frederick saw himself in was rapidly becoming less than flattering. Forcing himself to sit up straight, he fixed his mind on the work before him.

  Nancy Bradshaw, the smasher of lamps, had proven a bit more of a challenge, but the end result was no more promising. She'd moved to Vermont. Assuming correctly that someone as volatile as Molly had said Bradshaw was would have little patience with posted speed limits, Frederick had traced her through outstanding traffic tickets.

  Miss Bradshaw's new employer told him she had been vacationing in Ireland for three weeks and wasn't due back till Thursday.

  That effectively let her out of the picture unless the plot was ridiculously convoluted, which was seldom the case.

  Nancy Bradshaw's defection left Frederick fresh out of ideas. In his mind's eye he'd seen himself hauling the perpetrator off in chains after a suitably Schwarzeneggeresque rescue of the imperiled heroine. Failing that, he'd hoped to have a fait accompli to lay at Molly's feet.

  The pub door opened and Dr. Pigeon walked in. Frederick saw her through a haze of Scotch and rose-colored glasses. Her suit ?"as perfect, cool white linen with a salmon blouse of what was undoul)t edly silk, soft to the touch. Despite the heat and the time of day, she looked fresh. In the moment that she paused, scanning the tables for his face, he noticed how pale she was, the slight crumpling of her features. Molly Pigeon looked afraid.

  Frederick's first rush of feeling wasn't compassion, it was satisfaction: she needed him.

  wA WAS 17EELIN(; bereft. The guys, including the usually raational AI, had gone jogging. Anna had escaped, though not unscathed. Gender and age had been touched upon with good-natured ridicule. Rick had been closest to the mark; Anna wasn't so much lazy as genetically skinny and congenitally opposed to profitless exertion. Dijon had offered to chase her with a girl-hating reptile of some sort to give the exercise a point. Anna had declined his generous offer and slipped away to the ranger station for an uninterrupted evening with AT&T.

  Neither Molly nor Frederick was home.

  She'd called both three times over the past hour and three times had hung up without leaving a message. A message was a commitment. If she called again afterward it would prove she was (lesperate, or worse, pathetic. The etiquette of phone tag had grown more complex with the advent of the answering machine.

  Anna broke off another chunk of a Nest]& Crunch and chewed it slowly. Lights off, she sat in the chief ranger's office, her feet on his agonizingly tidy desk. It wasn't merely cleared of debris; everything was lined up in precise rows, like men on a chessboard: tape dispenser, stapler,
electric pencil sharpener, each a careful two inches apart and square with the blotter. Lined up on the opposite side of the desk, the opponents faced off in the same two-inch formation: stamp dispenser, pencil holder, paper clip magnet.

  Alone in the center of a rectangle of unmarked green, Anna's candy wrapper looked craven, a malicious act of vandalism. Finishing the last of the chocolate, she folded the leftover paper neatly and set it two inches from the pencil sharpener.

  Squat and colorless in a faint spill of moonlight, the phone sat like a malevolent toad at the edge of the desk. Years of isolation, of distance from family, friends, and lovers, had created in Anna a love/hate relationship with telephones. They were often her only contact with the people she cared about, and at the same time not only pointed up how fragile that connection was but, she was sure, in some arcane way managed to warp the very relationships it made possible.