Weiss shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Dangerous. The police. Jesus. He nearly groaned aloud in his shame and remorse. Not that the hookers had minded or anything, not that they’d complained in the least. They’d giggled at his apologies, in fact. They said he was silly; they were glad to do it. And they sure as hell hadn’t minded the tips. In his guilt and embarrassment, he’d thrown so much cash at them, it’d be months before he could afford to call Casey again.
With a great sigh, he sat up, folded his hands in his lap. “She says she doesn’t want the police,” he said heavily. “She was pretty clear about it. And the cops won’t have time to deal with this like we can, anyway. It’s not just a matter of running a trace. Hwang says the guy used some kind of system where he routed the mail through a screening center—an anonymizer, I think he called it. We’re gonna have to track him down some other way.”
“Well, can we get in touch with him ourselves?” Sissy asked. “I mean, if he got an e-mail from us, that might scare him off.”
“No, we just missed our chance. Apparently he shut down this address a week or so ago.”
“I don’t blame him,” Sissy said. “I’d hide, too, if I were a creep like that.”
Weiss nodded. He sank back down again, leaned his face on his fist again, forlornly. He swiveled back and forth in his chair. He thought about the whores. What he’d done with the whores. Those damn letters. Those damned images.
Eesh, he thought.
Fourteen
Now, I’d been silent up to this point. There were several reasons for that. I was scared, for one thing. I had made such a fool of myself my first chance as an investigator. I knew if I messed this chance up it would be my last.
For another thing, I felt suddenly unsure of what I wanted to say. Over the weekend, as I’d perused the letters, parsed them as I would’ve the English literature I’d studied in school, I’d been absolutely certain of my conclusions. My insights seemed rock solid to me, not to mention positively brilliant. But sitting here, sunk in the monumental chair, in front of Weiss’s monumental desk, before the monumental figure of Weiss himself, it occurred to me again how biased I was, how much ill will I bore against feminists like M. R. Brinks. Maybe that had caused me to sympathize with the author of the letters. To give him too much credit. Maybe he was nothing but a sick, sadistic creep like Sissy said. I began to feel I should just nod amiably and agree that we ought to check out the police list of sex offenders.
And then there was Sissy herself—she was the third thing. I was crazy about her. Oh, not in any serious, long-term way, but when you’re as young as I was, it’s pretty tough to tell the difference between an erection and undying love. Looking back, I think I could sense how neurotic she must’ve been. I mean, why the hell did she dress like a little girl all the time? And what was with that treacly tone of voice she used, as if she were Mommy and everyone else was two years old?
Still, I really was young, and I was three thousand miles away from home to boot. And when she tilted her head at me and gave me the full blast of warmth in those moist blue eyes, and when she put her hand on my cheek as she sometimes did, and called me “sweetheart,” as she also sometimes did, and asked me about my day or whatever, I wanted to hurl myself at her feet—and other anatomical targets as well.
In any case, I sure as hell didn’t want to contradict her, and I really sure as hell didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of her. So with every second that passed I was becoming more and more convinced that silence was the way to go. Silence and a lot of amiable nods.
Then Weiss, with another enormous sigh, shifted his baleful gaze to me and said, “What about you, genius? What do you think?”
“Well—” I shot up ramrod straight. I cleared my throat. I cast a quick glance at Sissy, which I hoped conveyed the fullness of my submission to her every whim combined with a certain smoldering sensuality. Then I cleared my throat again. “Um…I think, actually, there might actually be more to these, uh, things than, uh, meets the eye at first, actually.”
“That’s a lot of actuallys,” said Weiss. He never lifted his cheek from his fist.
Sissy giggled—in a warm, loving sort of way. I felt my cheeks get hot. “What I mean is—” I scooted forward in my chair. I twisted my hands together. “I’m not saying the letters aren’t, you know—obscene or whatever.” I swallowed, stealing another quick look at Sissy. “But I don’t think the writer means to be…threatening exactly. I think he’s actually trying to make a very…intelligent point.”
“Oh, that’s silly, sweetie,” whispered Sissy. It was a fierce rebuke coming from her. And believe me, under most circumstances, she could’ve had my complete surrender for the price of a kind word and a kiss. But there was Weiss to think about also. I was in too deep to pull back now.
“No, I mean it, I mean it,” I said quickly. “If you just…don’t think about the four-letter words and all the graphic stuff. If you put those out of your mind for a second, the things he’s saying underneath that are really centered in a very respectable mystic tradition.”
“ ‘The world craves you naked on your knees with your round ass and your wet purple pussy lifted to me?’ ” Sissy read from the top page of her folder. “That doesn’t sound very respectable to me. Or very mystic.”
For a moment, the electric charge of hearing those words read aloud in her sweet, maidenly voice caused me to forget everything I wanted to say. Openmouthed, I stared at her, fighting down the fantasy of her naked on her knees herself. Then I blinked, glanced at Weiss. His impatient glare brought me back to myself.
“Um…um…um,” I think I said. “No, but the point is, the rest of it, without, like I said, the graphic stuff, is…well, the thing is…it’s William Blake.”
“Who?” said Sissy. “Wasn’t he a poet?”
I was clumsily fishing a crumpled page of notes from my pants pocket. “Yeah. And artist. English. Mystic, Romantic. Around the turn of the nineteenth century.”
“Oh…” I heard Weiss murmur. And I knew he would’ve said for fuck’s sake if it hadn’t been for Sissy’s presence.
But, fighting down panic, I pressed on. Smoothed the page of notes on my knee. “Remember in the e-mails where he says, uh, he says Brinks can’t tolerate the moment of desire? And then he says it again, ‘The moment of desire, Marianne!’ That’s from a Blake poem called Visions of the Daughters of Albion. ‘The moment of desire! The moment of desire!’ And that fantasy in the e-mails where all the, all the girls are naked in the river and he’s on the bank with Brinks watching them. That’s from that poem, too. Um…I’ll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play in lovely copulation, bliss on bliss.’ ”
Slowly, Weiss’s face lifted from his fist. “That’s in a poem?” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah, and another part in the e-mails, right above that, where he, where he says, ‘Why do you cling to your theoretical religion? Is it because actions themselves aren’t beautiful?’ Well, that’s, that’s in the poem, too. ‘Why dost thou seek religion? Is it because acts are not lovely?’ ”
“Hey,” said Weiss softly. He looked at Sissy, made a face as if to say, Hey. “That’s pretty good.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Oh, it’s very good. And everybody knows you’re very, very brilliant,” she added to me with the kindest of smiles. “And that’s one of the reasons we all love you so much. But all it means is this guy has read some poetry. A person can read poetry and still be a dangerous pervert.”
“Oh hey, reading poetry is one of the first signs,” I said.
She laughed that laugh like music. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“All I’m saying is you have to put this in the context of Brinks’s philosophy. I mean, you know, Brinks claims to have nothing against sex per se, but all her work casts normal, healthy male sexual behavior in a negative light.”
“Oh now,” said Sissy.
“Well, she does. She does. Believe me. I dealt with these people at Berke
ley for four years. You can’t believe what they’re like. Really. Read her stuff. She draws absolutely no line between normal courtship and sexual harassment—she basically thinks they’re the same thing. And she basically thinks heterosexual sex is a slightly less violent form of rape. I mean, as long as we’re talking about being twisted, Sissy.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Sissy said, as if I’d spilled my finger-paints on her new gingham tablecloth. “Now, come on. You’re not really saying that these filthy, filthy letters are some sort of…intellectual argument. I mean, you would never write something like this. Would you?”
I did not know very much about women when I was young—only a little more than I know now, in fact. Even so, I knew enough not to answer a question like that one.
“That’s not the point” was all I said. “We’re trying to find this guy, right? I mean, that’s what Brinks hired us to do.”
“Right. That’s right,” said Weiss. He had brightened up considerably. I guess it was a lot more pleasant for him to see his weekend debauch as less assaultive and disgusting and more in the mystical tradition of English Romantic poetry.
“See, the thing is,” I went on before Sissy could object, “there used to be this guy at Berkeley, this professor, named Wilfred K. Green. Okay? And Green believed that our fear of death alienated us from our bodies, forced us to cut off our consciousness of sensuality.” I could see Weiss starting to roll his eyes, so I hurried on. “Anyway, Green started out as an English professor. His original subject was Blake and the Romantics, and he used a lot of Blake imagery in his books. He got very popular for a while in the sixties when he became an advocate of free love and mind-expanding drugs and all that.”
“So you think this might be him writing?” Weiss asked.
“Oh no, no, he got AIDS way back in the eighties and finally took some PCP and threw himself out of his hospital window. He’s been dead for years. But, as I say, he was very popular for a while, and he still has his disciples—especially at Berkeley. There even used to be a Wilfred K. Green society out there, though I think the feminists have forced it underground.”
“So they’re at Berkeley and Brinks is at Berkeley,” said Weiss.
“I think the guy who wrote these e-mails is one of her colleagues.” I blurted this out in my excited defense of my ideas. I hadn’t really meant to go quite so far, to commit myself quite so much. But there was nothing I could do about it now. I sat back in my chair and shut up.
For what seemed an era after that, Weiss sat silent, considering. At long last, he cocked his head. He raised a bushy eyebrow Sissy’s way.
She laughed again, that lovely laugh. Her eyes sparkled. “Well, like I said, Scott, he’s a brilliant boy. That’s why we love him.”
“You still got contacts out at the university?” Weiss asked me.
“Um, uh, yeah,” I said eagerly. “Sure.”
“You think you could manage to talk to them, ask around, be discreet? Get a possible name or two without giving away any client confidence?”
“Sure! Sure! Absolutely. Sure.”
“Okay,” said Weiss. “Report to Sissy. Let her know the minute you find anything.”
Simple as that. I had to work hard to force down a grin. I was an investigator again.
Sissy reached over from her chair to mine. She patted my wrist. I caught my breath. Her cool hand lingered on me.
“Good job, sweetheart,” she whispered sweetly. “Well done.”
Fifteen
Sissy and I left the office—and the moment the door shut behind us, Weiss’s computer sang its chirpy little three-note song. An e-mail had arrived. Weiss swiveled to the machine and clicked the mail open. It was from Bishop.
Weiss. New stuff. Have info that Tweedy and his boys are the gang who took out the Bayshore Market…
Weiss let out a hiss like a radiator releasing steam. He followed local crime stories religiously, and the details of the Bayshore Market massacre were still painfully fresh in his mind. The girl with her neck broken. The boy shot in the store, the boy shot as he waited behind the wheel of his car. The market owner—what was his name?—Joe Something—shot where he stood, leaving behind a pregnant widow and a two-year-old child…
…I don’t know yet if the girl was into it too. I’m going forward per the client’s wishes to get her out on the down-low. Which’ll take time, cause she’s hooked up hard. Meanwhile, Tweedy’s planning a big money job and wants me in, which will keep me close to the girl, and could give the cops a chance to pull these assholes in. The bad news: Tweedy also wants me to make my bones by whacking one of his guys. Kind of a rock and a hard place situation, since the guy in question likewise wants to whack me first. Got any suggestions? JB
Weiss snorted loudly. That last bit was meant to piss him off and it did. Got any suggestions? That was Bishop all over. That was Bishop needling him, provoking him, trying to get a reaction. Got any suggestions?
Yeah, Weiss wanted to write back, I’ll give you a suggestion: Don’t whack anyone and don’t get whacked. That’s my suggestion.
Well, it took his mind off the weekend, anyway. Took his focus off his guilt-ridden old heart and put it right back on his acid-ridden stomach. He knew he ought to pull Bishop out. He knew that was the right thing to do. He couldn’t leave an operative in a situation where the sole choice was to do murder or die. He ought to pull Bishop out right now, right away.
But he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t. He wanted the justice—and he needed the business.
See, in his mind, Weiss was still a cop: an ex-cop, an old cop, but a cop. If Cobra and the Outriders were really the gang who’d done the Bayshore killings, then he wanted to take them down. He would take them down, come hell or high water. That was the justice angle.
The business angle? This was a big assignment for Weiss, for the Agency. Philip Graham was a top-flight client, and he was paying double rates for dangerous work. If the Agency handled the case well, brought his daughter home safely, it could mean more top-flight clients and more double rates to come. Weiss couldn’t afford to walk away. He couldn’t even afford to wonder just then if the girl was into it, too.
So he wouldn’t pull Bishop off the case. And Bishop knew he wouldn’t. That was the whole nasty joke behind the “any suggestions” crap. He was making it clear: Whatever happened next was not just Bishop’s responsibility, it was Weiss’s as well. Any protest from Weiss after this point, any lectures, any silent looks of reproach, would be pure hypocrisy.
Weiss let out a gravelly groan. He shifted the computer’s mouse, clicked Reply on the e-mail form. He set his fingers on the keyboard, thought a minute, then typed:
JB. Stay in if you can. Don’t cross the line. You know what I mean. Weiss.
He hesitated, then sent the mail. He swiveled away from the machine, his belly sour with discontent.
It was a complicated thing. All part of the psychology between them, this silent, father-son sort of struggle over which way Bishop would go, what kind of man he would be. It went back a long way in their relationship. It was probably there from the first minute they met.
This was years ago now. Bishop had just gotten out of the service, just gotten back from overseas. What he did for the government was a highly classified secret, but I heard little pieces of it over the years and deduced a few others. I know he flew helicopters. I know he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a Distinguished Flying Cross. I know he killed people face-to-face and hand-to-hand.
I don’t know why he left the service. And I don’t know why he came home such a lost soul. But by all accounts, his interior world was practically a vacation spot for personal demons. He went wandering from one job to another, one town to another. Drunk sometimes, often disorderly, run out of several counties by the local law.
Until finally, in San Francisco, he fell under the sway of an older veteran, a violent little ratbag by the name of Ed Wolf.
For a while, Wolf and Bishop were just drinking comp
anions and whoring companions around the city. But then, one day, Wolf told Bishop about a burglary he was planning—one of those in-and-out, can’t-go-wrong, set-you-up-for-a-lifetime scores these scumballs are always dreaming about. He invited Bishop to come along. Bishop said he would.
A few nights later, the two men broke into a mansion out near the Presidio. For all it was supposed to be an easy piece of work, both of them were carrying guns.
Of course, it turned into one of those typical bad-guy fuckups. There was supposed to be some fantastic mother lode of cash hidden in the house. There wasn’t. The family was supposed to be away on vacation. They were home.
Bishop and Wolf soon found themselves tying up four terrified people with electrical cords, gagging them with duct tape, dragging them out into the living room. Mom and her two daughters were sobbing and choking. Dad was shaking his head again and again, trying to insist through the duct tape that there was no secret treasure in the house, so help him God.
Wolf went nuts. He tore the place apart, looking for the big payoff. He ransacked drawers, busted jewelry boxes, ripped open cushions, punched holes in the walls. All he came up with in the end was a couple of hundred dollars and a handful of Mom’s rings and necklaces.
He got angrier and angrier. He screamed at the father. Where’s the money? He kicked him in the thigh.
Bishop said, Forget it, man, let’s just go, let’s just get the hell out of here.
But Wolf wouldn’t stop. He was in a fury now. His gun was drawn. Foam was flying from his lips. These fuckers aren’t making an asshole out of me!
Finally, his wild eyes lit on one of the girls. He had an idea. He bared his teeth in a smile.
Let’s just go, Bishop said. Come on, man, it’s a bust, let’s ride.
I’m not gonna walk away with nothing, said Ed Wolf.
He leered at the girl some more. She was the older of the two daughters. She was twelve. Tied with electrical cord, gagged with duct tape. Wearing a cotton nightgown with valentine hearts on it. Ed Wolf grabbed the cord around her ankles. He dragged her out into the middle of the living room. Mom and Dad and the other daughter struggled wildly against their bonds, screaming and pleading through their gags.
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