Deception (39 page)

37

“It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian
.

I emerged as you see me. Mr. Woodley went home in a cart.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
T
HE
A
DVENTURE OF THE
S
OLITARY
C
YCLIST

T
HURSDAY
, D
ECEMBER
26, 11:00
A.M
.

I
STEPPED
OUT
for a brisk walk in the asphalt jungle.

Walking to the west side of the Justice Center, I looked across Third Street to Chapman Square, with its shade trees now skeletal and even its resilient evergreens flinching in the cold wind. I considered crossing to Terry Schrunk Plaza but instead turned around and headed east down Madison, toward the Hawthorne Bridge.

Despite the teaser on Christmas eve, the dream of a white Christmas hadn’t materialized. It seldom does in Portland. Now the day after Christmas, a heavy twenty-five-degree air pressed on my eyes, which watered, threatening to freeze. Tough as it can feel, winter has its own mystique, one of the reasons I like living in Oregon, where the seasons are well defined. Going out in the cold is an escape for me.

And perhaps a metaphor of my life.

I crossed Madison, then walked by two homeless guys, hands out. I ignored them. Then, on the corner of First Street, I came to a woman in bulky layers of old clothes under what looked like a Russian soldier’s survival coat. She stood, leaning on a rusted shopping cart, exposed to cold and wind, unprotected by buildings.

She didn’t look at me, didn’t ask me for anything. Turning to make sure no one saw me, I removed my wallet and gave her a five. “Get some hot coffee,” I said, pointing to Kaffee Bistro. She said a quiet “thank you,” but didn’t go for coffee. Maybe it was free somewhere in her world, at a rescue mission or something. I don’t usually give cash to street people, but on a cold day after Christmas, I couldn’t stand that she was out on the streets, with all she had to show for fifty years stuffed in a lousy Safeway cart.

I walked toward the southwest edge of the Hawthorne Bridge, knowing it would offer an arctic wake-up, especially with the twenty-mile-an-hour wind. In my four-block walk thus far, in one moment I’d inhaled absolute freshness, with all its promise, then the next exhaust fumes, then garbage, then urine, then a poor woman who hadn’t bathed in months.

It reminded me that this world has survived two thousand Christmases, but somehow the promise of Christmas hasn’t yet been kept.

I walked on to the bridge’s pedestrian path, where the wet air over the Willamette River, splitting Portland in half, assaulted my face. I looked east hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Hood. Nothing. I looked north at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, so alive in summer, so dead now. I looked west at the Justice Center and KOIN Tower, then southeast, across the river, toward the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I contemplated all the creativity, the ingenious design and countless man-hours invested in this great city.

I considered the paradox of its stunning outward beauty coupled with its stinking underbelly, two worlds impossibly coexistent. I thought about how great Portland could be if only things were different. If
we
were different. I thought it’s the same with every city, every town. And I thought about how every day our leaders, local and national, keep spouting off promises that never come true.

I still vote because I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t. But I don’t read the literature anymore, the latest blueprints for utopia. I refuse to listen to the campaign commercials that no longer stop in November. I can’t change the channel fast enough.

There must be sincere leaders concerned about justice and helping people who need help and stopping crime. There must be leaders who know what to do besides point fingers and make promises. But I can’t find them.

The political parties and talking heads serve up words that are shelled husks. I’m sick of them. I wished the cold east wind on my face would blow away empty words forever, or bury them beneath the icy river I peered down upon.

I wondered how many people had jumped off this bridge, how many finally gave up on a life that offers dreams only to kill them. I wondered how many jumpers had once believed that this world offers solutions to the problems of evil, suffering, and death.

I used to try sifting through the political rocks and mud, but I never found the gold. I can’t stand the wonks and opinion polls and PR automatons who conduct their stupid studies and put their finger in the wind to find out what they should say next. The world will never be rescued by opinion polls. And from where I stand, rescue is what we need.

For ten years I listened to Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher and others on every side. I’d agree with one, then the other, but I couldn’t stomach the arrogance and word-wrangling and oversimplification and disdain. I didn’t need help getting angry. I couldn’t see conservative rage or liberal rage doing anything more than propagating themselves into sanctified smugness, which smells no better on one side of the political aisle than the other.

So now I just say no to news. I try to catch killers by day, then retreat by night to Nero Wolfe and
24
and
Star Trek
reruns, leaving the universe to self-destruction or Borg invasion or spontaneous utopia, not putting my money on the latter.

I would never jump off a bridge
, I thought as I stood there. I recalled two occasions in the last year when I’d sat on my bed, Glock loaded, once having felt its muzzle on my right temple. That’s how I’d do it if I ever did.

I gazed east one last time, still hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Hood, outrageously beautiful, a giant snow cone this time of year. But what is to me the world’s most beautiful mountain remained hopelessly hidden in the clouds.

A hundred feet onto the Hawthorne Bridge, I leaned over the south side, raised my arms, and clenched my fists. I screamed into the cold wind, knowing nobody could hear me.

My scream lasted five seconds. When it was done, I put my hand to my raw throat, then walked back past other cold people, homeless and hopeless, to the Justice Center.

When I returned to detective division, I wasn’t the only one with a red face. Chris Doyle was on the prowl, face sweaty, a pale crimson, looking for someone to bump into.

Not just anyone. Me.

“You’re pathetic, Chandler,” Doyle shouted, posturing like a peacock without the goods.

Eight pairs of eyes locked on us. Apparently he’d let it be known that he was going to teach me a lesson. He could have let me thaw first.

“We don’t want you here anymore,” Doyle said.

“Does this mean you’re going to stop paying my salary, Chris?”

“We don’t deserve to be treated like criminals.”

“Suspects. Criminals are the ones we arrest. Nearly everybody here is innocent. Are you?”

“You think I did it?”

“I don’t know. Did you?”

His fists were clenched so tight his knuckles were white.

“I think you’re a disgrace,” he said.

“I don’t give a rat’s patootie what you think, chess boy.”

He took a step forward. I held my ground.

“That’s your opening move?” I said. “If the professor had been bored to death, you’d be my prime suspect.”

His fist connected with my jaw half a second later. I staggered backward.

“Over here,” Phillips yelled. “Chris and Ollie. Hog fight!”

It was like high school, everybody running to the end of the courtyard to see the fight.

I stood there fingering my lip and opening and closing my jaw, testing the hinges. I sized up the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“It’s smackdown!” Noel said, grinning like a moron.

“Take him, Doyle!” Cimmatoni called.

“Twenty bucks on Ollie,” Jack said. He pulled a Jackson out of his wallet and waved it. Jack had seen me head butt guys into tomorrow, so he figured it was easy money.

Doyle was waiting for me to make the next move while he caught his breath. I was waiting for the crowd to settle in at ringside.

“Chandler couldn’t take my grandmother,” Suda said.

“He’s not fighting your grandmother,” Jack said. “He’s fighting Doyle.”

“They should sumo wrestle,” Cimmatoni said.

“That’s not a pretty picture,” Phillips said.

“Nobody tell Tommi or she’ll call Sarge,” Suda said.

“Sarge is over there,” Barrows said, pointing, “pretending he’s not watching.”

I wiped blood with the Taco Bell napkin from my trench coat pocket. “Just a flesh wound,” I said, ditching the coat.

“He’s taking off the Sam Spade coat,” Phillips said. “He means business.”

Doyle ran four steps to me and took another swing. I smelled tobacco as it whiffed by. I ducked then punched him twice, first with a left, then with a right, both in his doughy center. With another right, I plastered the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, sitting him on the back of his lap. But the Doughboy rose again, asking to be popped back in the oven. Doyle surprised me with one more solid crack on my chin. I saw fog and stepped backward. Then I came back with two more stomach punches. I’ve learned from Jack Bauer not to leave a mark.

“Chess players are slow movers, aren’t they?”

He lunged forward, and I swung a haymaker with my right and dropped him like a manhole cover.

I was ready to finish him with my killer head butt, but your opponent needs to be standing to head butt him right. Doyle was rolling on the floor holding his jaw, then stomach, then jaw, then stomach. I wished I’d got him somewhere lower to give him a third choice.

I stood over him and leaned down. “Checkmate, bozo.”

Suda tended to Doyle and glared up at me like I’d jumped him with a two-by-four and stolen his lunch money.

I pointed both index fingers at her and bounced on my toes: “Your grandmother’s next, Suda.”

“My grandmother has a fourth degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.”

“Dog drugger,” I said without thinking. She looked surprised.

Chris Doyle’s what Nero Wolfe calls a nincompoop. But I gained some respect for him that day. He wasn’t the pushover I expected. The Pillsbury Doyleboy showed some game.

Things aren’t always what they appear.

T
HURSDAY
, D
ECEMBER
26, 12:30
P.M
.

Jake and Clarence and I planned to meet again at Powell’s City of Books, where an hour’s browsing gets me through about one percent of one of the nine color coded rooms with something like seventy thousand square feet. They boast 122 major subject areas and thirty-five hundred different subsections, about a hundred of which interest me. But that hundred contain tens of thousands of books. Powell’s buys three thousand used books a day over the counter, so if you can’t find it today, you’ll have twenty thousand new titles to choose from next week.

I spent my “hour early” in the Gold Room, where aisles 313–319 are mysteries, maybe ten thousand of them. On the other side of the Gold Room I spied a man reading
Green Eggs and Ham
to a five-year-old Sam-I-am sitting in a tiny wooden chair beside him. I froze, wondering if I would ever have the chance to read books to grandchildren and wondering why I hadn’t taken time to read to my own kids. Was reading to my grandchildren another dream that wouldn’t come true?

Next thing I knew, the hour had flown by and I’d moved through maybe five feet of books, which at Powell’s is like a quarter lap in the Indianapolis 500.

There were too many ears in World Cup Coffee and Tea, so after some chitchat over sandwiches and fabulous Sumatra Mandheling coffee (according to the sign) and a walnut sticky bun to go, Clarence and Jake and I searched the endless nooks and crannies for the right place to talk. We settled, appropriately, near religion in the Red Room, in view of philosophy and journalism in the Purple Room.

I’d caught him staring, but when we finally settled down in our place, Jake asked for a full explanation of the bruises on my face. I walked them through the brawl with Doyle, blow by blow, like it was Frazier versus Ali.

There in the City of Books, Jake handed me one he’d brought with him: Bertrand Russell’s
Why I am Not a Christian
.

I pointed to the philosophy stacks. “There’s twenty more of those over there. You didn’t have to bring your own.”

“It’s not mine,” Jake said. “Last time we talked about this, I accidentally took your book. I finished the final essay last night, and guess what I found on the back page.”

He opened it up to show a phone number: 555-570-6089.

“That’s the seventh number,” I said, halt in my voice.

“Something wrong?”

“It seems … vaguely familiar. Ray’ll check it out.”

“I had an interesting conversation with Raylon Berkley,” Clarence said. “He told me Lennox wants to pull you from the Palatine case.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear this secondhand, considering the source. “Why’d Berkley tell you?” I asked Clarence.

“He wanted to see how I’d take it.”

“I’m working on how I’m taking it. How did you take it?”

“I said you were smart-mouthed, opinionated, stubborn, outrageous, difficult to deal with. That you’re always stepping over the line. I didn’t mention that you confiscated from a crime scene self-incriminating evidence, lied about your alibi, and set a fire in an apartment complex.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” I said. “I also threatened a hamster, but when you tuck Brent in tonight, tell him I didn’t mean it.”