Accustomed to the Dark (8 page)

“
I think McBride was telling the truth,” I said. “He was pretty motivated at the time
.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What provided the motivation, exactly?
”

“
I leaned on him a little
.”

“
That must have been very rewarding for you
.”

“
No. Not very
.”

She nodded. “Do the police know about Miller?
”

“
I don't think so. Jimmy McBride says not
.”

“
And Jimmy McBride was motivated
.”

“
Yeah. It doesn't matter whether they know, Rita. If they do know, they won't be telling me. The only option I have is go ahead with what I've got
.”

“
Why not give it to them? Tell them about Miller?
”

“
They've already screwed up. Twice. First, they let Martinez get loose. Then they didn't tell us about it
.”

She frowned. “Joshua, Hector didn't let Martinez escape. Neither did Robert Hernandez. Why punish them by withholding the information?
”

“
I'm not punishing anyone
.”

“
No? Then what are you doing?
”

“
I'm trying to locate Martinez and Lucero
.”

“
But why you, Joshua?
”

It always came down to that. Why me?

The cops had more resources. They had more equipment, better communications.

But that didn't matter, finally. I was searching for Martinez and Lucero because right now it was the only thing I could do. I would've gone insane sitting around the house, sitting around the office, waiting to hear from Hector or Hernandez.

And it was Rita's life, and mine, that had been violated by that rifle bullet. It was up to me, so I told myself, to find the men responsible.

And perhaps I sought them because a part of me believed that if I found them—if I found Martinez, as I'd done five years ago—I could somehow guarantee Rita's recovery.

I was thinking such thoughts as I drove along that empty highway when, with no warning at all, the world abruptly shifted and it occurred to me that this was nonsense. That nothing would guarantee Rita's recovery. That, no matter what I did, no matter what anyone did, Rita was not going to recover.

The thought of her death took on a sudden inescapable weight and reality, and I was hit in the center of the heart by a blackness that was unbearable.

I pulled over to the shoulder and I stopped the car. Once again, I couldn't breathe.

For a few moments I was lost deep within a bottomless pit. Rita was gone, forever, and everything had changed.

Grief revises life, rewrites it forward and back. Evoke a small brittle hope, and grief blots it out. Summon a bright remembered joy, and grief twists it, transforms it into a dark swollen pain that seems, through some venomous magic, preordained.

Grief grants you only the aching timeless present, this wretched inescapable moment, and it insists that you will be snared within this, alone, for the rest of time.

All you can do is slog your way through. Or try to.

I told myself that Rita was still alive. That the doctor believed she
would
recover.

I got my lungs working again, and I filled them with air once or twice. I had put Leroy's telephone on the passenger seat. I picked it up, flipped it open, dialed the number for the hospital.

Rita was in a coma still. But she was alive.

I flipped the telephone shut, put the car into gear, and I drove back onto the highway.

I was just passing the Ribera turnoff, about twenty miles south of Las Vegas, when the telephone began to chirp. It had chirped three or four times before. Friends, offering condolences and help, and one caller who had simply hung up.

I lifted it from the seat, flipped it open. “Hello.”

“Joshua. Where are you?” Hector Ramirez.

“On the road,” I said.

“You're using a cellular phone.”

“Yeah.”

“I just got a call from the Staties. From Hernandez. He says he got a report that you're heading north on the Interstate.”

I hadn't recognized the trooper, but apparently he had recognized my name.

“So I called the office,” he said, “and I got you. But you're not at the office. Call forwarding?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you going?”

“North. Like the trooper said.”

“Why?”

“To check something out.”

“What?”

“Not sure yet. I'll fill you in when I am.”

“Jesus, Joshua, do you always have to be an asshole?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” he said. He paused.

I glanced around me. Foothills to the left, pasture to the right, clusters of fat cows happily grazing on emerald grass.

“I talked to the hospital,” he said. “There hasn't been any change.”

“I know. I just called.”

He paused again. “All right. Listen. Keep in touch. Asshole.”

“I'll do that, Hector.”

I reached Las Vegas at about one o'clock that afternoon.

Money had come in with the railroad, back in the 1880s, and the people who brought it out here to the Wild West had used it to re-create the East they'd left behind. They had built the grand Victorian houses of wood and brick and stone that still sat back on bright green lawns, spacious verandas cooled by towering oaks and elms. Driving down those broad shaded streets, I could have been in Vermont or New Hampshire or upstate New York.

The address I had for Sylvia Miller was on a small side street. The house was smaller than the Victorians on the main drag, a white frame bungalow with a screened-in porch. There was no garage, and no car in the narrow asphalt driveway. A hedge of juniper ran down each side of the neat rectangle of lawn, hiding it from the houses on either side. The house across the street, a small brick cottage, seemed empty.

I drove past the house and parked a couple of blocks beyond it.

I was wearing a blue oxford shirt, a pair of tan corduroy slacks, a pair of Tommy Mahan ostrich-skin boots. I swiveled around, reached over the console, wrestled my carryall to the backseat, opened it. Slipped out the flat leather wallet that held the picks, stuck in it my back pocket. Slipped out the blue blazer, and then a tie of red and navy blue silk. I shut the suitcase.

I turned back around and admired myself in the rearview mirror as I wrapped on the tie. I looked a bit less degenerate than I'd looked this morning.

I put on the blazer. Then I bent down and retrieved the Beretta from beneath the passenger seat, shoved it between my belt and the small of my back. I picked up Leroy's phone, flicked the switch that turned off the ringer, dropped it in my blazer pocket.

The clipboard was beneath the driver's seat. I bent over and pulled it free.

Carrying the clipboard, I got out, locked the Jeep, and walked down the shaded sidewalk to Sylvia Miller's house. I ambled up the driveway, up the cement steps to the porch, pulled open the screen door, stepped inside, rang the bell.

No one answered it. I could see nothing through the heavy lace curtains that hung like veils beyond the window. I tried the door. Locked.

I left the porch and walked around back. The hedge concealed the entire rear of the yard. Unless someone had seen me approach the house, I was fine. I didn't think that anyone had seen me.

A tall galvanized metal garbage pail stood to the right of the rear door. I lifted the lid. A bulging black plastic bag, its top tied with string in a tidy square knot. I put back the lid.

I went to work on the lock at the door. I'm not very good with locks, but this one didn't take me long. In only a few minutes I was inside the house, standing in the kitchen. I lay the clipboard on the counter, pulled out the Beretta, and I listened for a while. I heard nothing. After a few moments, I started to poke around.

The kitchen was an exhibit dedicated to the 1950s, stocked with aging artifacts, all well preserved and spotlessly clean. Floors of dark green linoleum. Cabinets of pale wood, yellowed now by countless coats of varnish. Crouched along countertops of red Formica were bulbous appliances—a fat toaster, a squat waffle iron, a huge old Mixmaster, its circular stand supporting three porcelain bowls carefully nestled one within the other.

The gas stove and the refrigerator were bulky and their once-white enamel had cracked and yellowed, but they were as immaculate as everything else. On one of the stove's burners sat an old coffee percolator. It had been scoured inside and out. In the refrigerator I found only a few jars of condiments. No milk bottles, no leftovers, nothing in the vegetable crisper except a single limp gray shred of lettuce. The freezer compartment held two empty aluminum ice trays and three Weight Watchers TV dinners. There were no dishes in the rack beside the sink. Sylvia had tidied up before she left.

So did I. I lifted the wash towel that hung from a hook attached to the refrigerator, and I used it to wipe off the prints I'd left.

Carrying the towel in my left hand, the pistol in my right, I moved from the kitchen into the tiny dining room. The light filtering through the lace curtains was dim, like light at the bottom of an ancient well. There was a scent of lemon oil and pine in the air, but lying not far beneath those was a musty smell, a smell I associated with maiden aunts and dried flowers.

Atop the dark hardwood floor, four mahogany cabriolet dining chairs stood rigidly at attention around a shiny mahogany table. The table was draped diagonally with a scallop-hemmed lace tablecloth, and perched in the exact center of that was a mahogany bowl piled with wax fruit. I wiped the towel lightly along one of the apples. No dust.

The living room was the same. Murky light, the smell of lemon and must. Embroidered throw rugs, an upholstered brown sofa, square mahogany end tables supporting shiny brass reading lamps shaded with parchment. A plump leather club chair aimed comfortably toward an old boxy television console. I had the feeling that if I turned on the TV, it would be playing
The Honey-mooners
.

Beneath the window ran a low, glass-fronted mahogany bookcase that held what looked like every
Reader's Digest Condensed Book
ever published. Positioned in the center of the lace runner that protected the top of the bookcase was a framed black-and-white photograph. A man, a woman, a young boy, a young girl, all in their Sunday best, standing out on a lawn, a thick hedge forming a backdrop. Probably the hedge that surrounded the house.

The woman, in her early thirties, slight and short and wiry, grasped the girl's hand in her right, the boy's in her left. The boy was looking up toward her, expectantly, his mouth parted. The girl was staring at the camera, and the expression on her round bland face was unreadable. The woman was gazing steadily in the same direction with a smile that seemed fixed and maybe a little forced. A long-ago breeze was ruffling her permed dark hair and fluting the hem of her white summer dress.

The man stood apart. Stocky and powerful, he wore a dark two-piece suit and a dark tie. His arms were crossed over his chest and his heavy jaw was upraised, as though his patience with all this were beginning to wear thin.

Presumably the children were Sylvia and Ronny Miller, and the adults were their parents.

It didn't look like a happy family to me. Everyone in it seemed somehow isolated from everyone else.

But maybe I was reading too much into a single photograph, a single moment snipped from a long history of moments.

I glanced around. There were no other photographs in the room, no pictures on the ivory-colored walls. No knickknacks anywhere. No magazines on the end tables. No books other than those trapped behind their glass cage.

It was the kind of house that seemed to be designed not for inhabitants, but for custodians and curators. I got the feeling that it had been kept this spotless and sterile for years.

I set down the photograph and I went down the hallway.

In the master bedroom there was a big brass double bed, a mahogany dresser, a walk-in closet crowded with clothing and the smell of camphor. The right half held a man's clothes, the left half held a woman's. All of them had been manufactured before the eighties. If Sylvia Miller lived alone, and I believed she did, then these topcoats and suits and dresses and frocks must have belonged to her parents.

In the small adjoining bathroom, on the counter beside the sink, someone had arranged, carefully and recently, a man's toilet items—an old Gillette safety razor, a badger-bristle brush, a round cake of cracked shaving soap nestling on a wooden plate. They looked like relics in a shrine, and they made me uneasy.

The bedroom opposite had probably belonged to Ronny Miller, at some time before he became a guest of the state. The single bed was spread with a cotton print of the American flag. Thumbtacked to the walls were posters from horror movies. Vampires, werewolves, knife-wielding killers wearing hockey masks. The dresser drawers were empty, but in the footlocker at the base of the bed, among the plastic guns and the metal trucks, I found an old stash of battered wrestling magazines, the covers bright with spurting blood from squashed noses and ripped scalps. Ronny's interest in violence had evidently begun early.

I went back into the hallway. Looked into the second bathroom. Clean, functional, and at least thirty years out of date.

No soap in the soap dish. No shampoo, no conditioner along the rim of the gleaming bathtub. I glanced into the medicine cabinet. No perfumes, no cosmetics, no hairspray. No toothbrush, no toothpaste. No aspirin, no tampons, no diaphragm. Either those things had never been there or Sylvia had cleaned them all out.

The entire house made me uneasy. Despite its almost manic cleanliness, there was nothing that suggested that it had been occupied recently. There was nothing that suggested that a young woman had recently been taking up space here. It could have been buried beneath ashes and lava since the seventies, then excavated and painstakingly cleaned so we moderns could marvel at the everyday details of a distant reality.