Blackbird (20 page)

After everything was on the grill Johnny showed us a couple of his new card tricks. When Mutt pawed at the palmed diamond queen in Johnny’s left hand, Johnny tried to wither him with a fierce glare, but he only licked his chops. LA, kicked back in the chaise longue with crossed legs, sipped ginger ale and took it all in with an absent little smile.

After the card tricks Abby, watching Mutt groom himself, mused, ‘In another life I was a mouse.’

‘You were a mongoose,’ said Jonas. ‘And I the hapless cobra.’ Locking his beady gaze on her, he began to hiss and sway in his chair. She snorted. Johnny raised a lawyerly eyebrow and took another swig of Dos Equis. Li went to the stereo I’d set up on the potting table against the back wall of the house and found an old collection of dance-friendly numbers from the seventies and eighties about love, loss and yearning. Seeing fire and seeing rain. Seeing sunny days that never end.

Johnny stubbed out his cigarette, stood and held out his
hand to LA, inviting her to dance. I watched them for a minute, even after all these years half-stunned by LA’s absolute possession of her physical being. It was one of the things that had made her a world-class diver, and as always conveyed a sense of the warp and woof of the universe somehow ordering itself around her as she moved, even Johnny’s limp almost completely lost inside the force field of her grace.

Li, a terrific dancer herself, slid her arm around my waist, said ‘You okay for a turn?’, and fell smoothly in with me as I swung us across the deck and into the music, the two of us weightless as a couple of shadows, my knees so free of pain that I actually forgot about them. It reminded me of how much I had liked dancing before TCU and the injuries, and of the lessons with LA and her girlfriends back in Oak Cliff a thousand years ago, the summer they’d recognised that it was time for me, a male and therefore in need of remediation, to learn the essential skill of slow dancing. Li wore a slightly flowery, after-the-rain scent that suggested green spaces and clean air.

But then suddenly the flow of time seemed to ripple and double back on itself, and I was dancing with Kat Dreyfus, her image brighter and clearer than anything real could be as she gazed at me across the years. ‘Soon,’ she said softly.

‘Ooh,
Dancing With the Stars
,’ Abby said.

Kat faded, to be replaced by a surreally brilliant image of the dead-black crosshairs of a mil-dot sniper reticle against a featureless grey background.

I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, my heart slamming in my chest. When I opened them again Li was back.

The number ended, Li curtsied and I applauded her,
swallowing hard against the sensation that I’d just ingested a bellyful of angle iron. Trying my best not to look the way I felt, I made my way back to the grill, scooped the browned pineapple and plantain slices onto a plate and turned the fillets for the final moments of cooking, which I knew to be the make-or-break point. Rachel had taught me the skin-on, whole-fillet method with salmon, doing most of the grilling with the skin side down so the lime juice, butter and cilantro could do their work with the flesh, then flipping the fillets for a couple of minutes at the end for a crisp top.

‘JB, that aunt of yours must be a fucking
witch
,’ said Abby, forking up another bite of fish. ‘This is almost as good as away-from-home sex.’ She cocked a wicked eye at Jonas. ‘I guess.’

Watching Johnny pick at his food, I thought about Jana and the girls, the vision of Kat, and the image of the crosshairs, then when that took me nowhere I thought about the Gold case, now the Gold-Frix case, telling myself what I usually did at this stage of an investigation: the bad guys could run – they could even hide – but only until we came for them. And Hazen’s interest in the case was a loose end. I didn’t understand it, and for me that made it unignorable.

And then there was Johnny himself. Having once been grilled for six hours in a really nasty homicide trial, every word potentially a matter of life or death, I knew that being cross-examined by a good lawyer was not an afternoon at the park, and I wondered whether Johnny might end up representing the killers in court.

By now the changer had moved on to some vintage CCR, a bad moon rising, trouble on the way. Listening to it, I thought about how Jana, always a fan of swamp rock, and Fogerty in particular, talked about him as a fellow artist.
Suddenly her absence became an impossible weight on my chest, a sensation of suffocation and loss and an almost physical need to talk to her the way I used to, about the case, the girls, our marriage. The National League standings. Corn futures. Anything. Any damn thing at all.

I tried to reorganise my thoughts, recognising this for what it was – the kind of useless raking over of the past that had never led me anywhere except the twilight country of depression. I needed to stop worrying about getting hammered in court by my oldest friend and focus on what this case might do to the people who mattered most to me.

TWENTY-TWO

The ex-patient of Gold’s Benny put me in touch with was Heather Obenowsky. I collected LA after her mid-morning AA meeting and we drove up to meet Heather at Muggs for cappuccinos. She was sixteen or so, dressed in tight black pants, high-heeled boots and denim jacket over a red T-shirt – a sharp-faced but pretty girl with dark spiky hair, untrusting brown eyes and seven silver rings in her ears, right eyebrow and left nostril. I didn’t doubt there were others I couldn’t see. She’d agreed to the meeting on the condition that I wouldn’t ask any questions about why she was in therapy.

When I introduced LA, and the two made eye contact, I felt something happen between them that at the time I didn’t understand, though I realised we’d just crossed an invisible line of some kind.

After asking what we wanted, LA walked over to the counter, eventually returning with three cups.

I said, ‘Thanks for talking to us, Heather.’

‘Dr B told me you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘Coming from him, I think that means you tell the truth and you don’t let people down. And he said I could trust Dr Rowe too.’

LA said, ‘Please call me Lee.’

I said nothing.

Heather gave LA a brief nod, held her eyes for an extra microsecond, and returned her attention to me. ‘So I guess that’d make you kind of like, what, king of the good guys?’ she said.

Checking to see which cup was mine, I picked it up and took a cautious sip to gauge its temperature. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m workin’ on it.’

‘How’d you get your nose busted?’

‘Not ducking in time.’

Almost but not quite smiling, she seemed to be thinking me over. I waited.

‘I’m trying to figure out how you do that,’ she said.

‘Do what?’

‘Look like you’re’ – she searched for the words – ‘I don’t know, I guess like you’re seeing and hearing more than other people. Or at least like you could if you wanted to. Kind of like my cat.’

LA said, ‘What’s your cat’s name?’ She took a sip of her latte.

‘Smackie. She’s a girl, a calico.’ Heather glanced around the room, saying, ‘All calicos are girls.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Do you have a cat?’ Heather asked me.

‘In a way,’ I said. ‘Mostly I think he’s got me.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Mutt,’ I said.

‘How’d he get a name like that?’

‘That’s what the kid next door called him.’

‘Doesn’t that confuse him?’

‘With him, I’m not sure how you’d tell,’ I said.

The half-smile came back. ‘You seem pretty tough for, uh – ’

‘For an old guy?’

An actual smile this time. ‘I was gonna say for a guy who has good manners,’ she said. ‘You’re not even that much older than me, really – just kind of in the middle there somewhere, like Dr B.’ The smile went away. She looked down. ‘Sorry. I try not to say stuff like that, but – ’

‘Like what?’

‘Just dumb shit,’ she said. ‘Talking like a kid.’

‘That’s not how it sounded to me,’ LA said.

‘Do you have any? Kids, I mean.’

‘No,’ LA said, then nodded toward me, ‘But he does.’

‘Two daughters,’ I said, drinking cappuccino, this time feeling the sugar and caffeine parachute all the way down, hit bottom and begin deploying among my red cells.

I saw a brief shadow pass in Heather’s eyes. She swallowed with a small dry sound, and after a minute said, ‘How old are they?’

‘One’s close to your age, the other’s a little younger.’

Now her expression took on a kind of dullness, something about the look catching at me.

‘What are their names?’

‘Casey and Jordan,’ I said, experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu but having no idea where it was coming from.

She looked away, gazing through the window toward the mall, took in a deep breath and let it out. Her eyes –

I glanced at LA’s expression as she watched Heather, and it came to me. It wasn’t in the eyes, it was deeper than that. I’d grown up seeing it in LA, and still sometimes caught glimpses of it in Rachel, a thin fracture line running through the centre of the soul. No matter how far these women moved beyond the past, no matter how strong they became, the discontinuity would always be there, and none
of them would ever be completely present in my universe. They belonged to a sisterhood whose reality was closed to me.

‘Heather,’ I said. ‘I get it that bad things have happened to you. I’m not going to ask you about that, and I’m not going to pretend to understand what it’s like. But please listen to me here, because there’s something I need for you to know. I love my daughters very much, but to me they’re kids, not women. And there’s no way in hell I would ever let them be hurt like you were. Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect them. Nothing at all.’

She watched me for a long moment, then glanced at LA, something gradually relenting in her expression. Finally she nodded. ‘What do you want to know about Dr Gold?’

‘How long did you see her?’

‘About six months. She was on Mom’s insurance plan. I didn’t want to go, but Mom made me.’

I said, ‘What did you think of her at first?’

‘I guess I thought she was okay. She talked on the phone a lot when I was there, like with other patients and stuff. She was weird, but then I didn’t know how those kind of doctors are supposed to act.’

‘Weird how?’ asked LA.

‘She had these big old bugged-out searchlight eyes that seemed to look right through you, and she asked funny questions, like did Mom’s family have money and how big was our house, stuff like that. Then later on it got stranger and stranger until finally I quit going to the appointments.’ She swallowed again.

‘Can you tell me a little more about that, Heather?’

She fiddled with her cup. ‘Uh . . . she wanted to know
if I was having sex with anybody and what it was like, whether I, you know, touched myself, how I did it and how it felt. How much I liked it. Did I think about
him
when I did it.’ She looked away at nothing that I could see, her eyes spiking invisible fire.

‘But you still didn’t know if that was how therapists are supposed to talk?’

She nodded once. Looking at LA, she said, ‘I mean, it isn’t, is it?’

‘No,’ LA said, her own eyes hard.

Heather nodded again. ‘Then she, um, she said I was beautiful, made a lot of comments about my figure and had me show her my breasts.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked LA.

‘She made me take off my shirt and bra. I sat like that for the rest of the session. She just kept looking at my chest.’

‘Did she touch you?’

‘No. But it was obvious she wanted to. I could tell by her eyes and the way she was breathing.’

Silence for a few beats as we all thought about this.

Then Heather said, ‘She kept talking about these friends of hers that she wanted me to meet. She asked me if I’d been introduced to submission, if I understood that pain was only another kind of pleasure, if I knew what bondage was and did I like being restrained, things like that.’ Heather glanced down at her breasts and quickly pulled her jacket over them. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

LA, who never missed anything, somehow made it clear, without saying or doing anything at all, that she’d noticed nothing.

I said, ‘Is that when you stopped going?’

Heather cleared her throat. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘You know how sometimes when people talk on the phone you can hear the person on the other end real clear? Well, one day she was talking to this official-sounding guy who called a lot – ’

‘Official-sounding?’

‘Yeah, a voice kind of like somebody making a speech or something. Like with microphones in front of him. So she’s talking to him and she says, “We may have to consider an increase in your fee. I have expenses, you know, and there’s a lot involved. These girls have ideas, they watch TV just like we do, they think about things – it’s a constant issue whether they might talk to somebody, say something irresponsible.”’ The corner of Heather’s mouth twisted.

I said, ‘And you knew what that meant.’

She looked out the window again. ‘Oh, yeah. I knew what it meant. That was when I made up my mind not to go back.’

‘Was Dr Pendergrass working there when you were seeing Dr Gold?’

‘Uh huh, for a while.’

‘Do you think he knew what was going on?’ LA said.

‘If he had eyes, he did.’

Later I asked for LA’s impressions.

After thinking about it for a minute she said, ‘In a lot of ways Heather’s who I once was. Does that tell you anything?’

Now I took some time to think. Finally I said, ‘Yeah, enough.’

TWENTY-THREE

Looking disgusted, Mouncey sat in the chair in front of my desk, sipping Sprite as she finished outlining her alibi findings so far.

‘ – Feigel in San Antone doin’ a deposition,’ she said. ‘Talked to a couple lawyers down there where he at, look like that one gonna hold up, so he clean for the crucifyin’. Last one, Pendergrass, tole me he at the movies – maybe we call in a alibi professor, tell us what that one worth.’