Fool's Puzzle (25 page)

My last chance was a large, splashy country-western bar called Aunt Sudie’s Goodtime Emporium and Drinking Establishment. The sign had enough neon in it to make the grade in Vegas. It attracted a crowd younger than most country-western bars and there was a six-dollar cover charge. I went up to the crowded horseshoeshaped bar in the middle and asked for Suzanne.

“Called in sick,” the thin, gauzy-haired bartender said, laying a red napkin down in front of me. “What’ll it be?”

My heart dropped into my stomach. I ordered a Coke and tried to think of what to do.

“If her real name is Suzanne Hart, I need to talk to her,” I blurted out when he set the drink in front of me. My voice sounded more desperate than I intended.

He gave me a curious but guarded look. “What about?”

“It’s personal.”

He looked at me and shrugged.

“Were you the guy I talked to earlier?”

“I don’t know. When was that?”

“I called earlier and asked if there was a Suzanne working here. You, or somebody, said yes. Was that you?”

“Could be.” He wiped the counter in front of me. I started to speak again, but he held up a finger and took an order from three giggling girls wearing almost identical outfits of short black denim skirts, fringed Western shirts and large Hopi-style silver earrings.

“What do you want her for?” He turned back to me, his pale green eyes mild and watchful.

“I have some information she might want,” I said.

“You tell me the information,” he said. “And maybe I’ll pass it on to her.”

“I told you. It’s personal.”

With an indifferent look he started mixing the drink orders of a tired-looking waitress in silver boots. The house band struck up “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys.” He hummed along with the song, his eyes shifting over to me every so often.

“What makes you think she’s the Suzanne you’re looking for?” he asked about ten minutes later. He folded his towel and hooked it to his belt.

“Tell her Marla’s dead, and we’ll see if she’s the right Suzanne.”

That got a reaction.

“I’ll be right back.”

He called the other bartender over, whispered in his ear and then headed for the back of the bar, skirting the large dance floor filled with two-stepping bodies. I contemplated following, afraid he might take off and spirit her away before I could talk with her, but he was gone before I could get out of my seat. I poked at my ice and prayed he wasn’t lying.

A few minutes later he came back, an angry look on his face.

“She’ll see you,” he said, coming back behind the bar. “But not without me there and I don’t get off until midnight.”

“But ...” I started.

“Take it or leave it.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll be waiting back there.” I pointed to a small round table as far away from the dance floor and band as possible. Even so, I fought off dance requests all night, my refusals becoming more irritable as the night dragged on and the rhinestone cowboys got more obnoxious. After five hours of the house band’s repertoire of twenty country songs, I could have played lead guitar on any of them.

“Brown Jeep’s mine,” the bartender said as we walked out into the clear, cold night shortly after midnight.

I followed him to a neighborhood of inexpensive tract homes a few miles away. He pulled up in the driveway behind a light-colored Dodge Charger and waited for me to park in front and walk across the wet, nubby grass.

He opened the door with a key from a ring attached to a long chain on his belt and stepped in ahead of me.

“Suzanne, it’s Nick.”

I stepped inside the small, overheated living room. A redheaded woman, thick through the middle, with spindly legs in black stretch pants and a billowing zebra-print top rose from the green plaid sofa.

“What happened to Marla?” she asked in a low, grating voice.

I inhaled unevenly and told her about Marla and Eric. Her face paled when I finished. The tattooed dagger over her right thumb seemed to lengthen as her fingers danced with an unlit cigarette.

“I don’t want to cause any trouble for you,” I said. “Just tell me if any of this has to do with my husband.”

“Who’s your husband?” she asked.

“John Harper. Jack. He was killed in a car accident on old Highway One about nine months ago.”

“Oh, no.” She bent over and held her head in her hands.

“What?” I asked in a desperate voice, my pulse racing.

She sat up, gestured for a light from Nick, who shook his head.

“Just give it,” she said. “I’ll quit some other time.

“I worked with Marla at Trigger’s, but I guess you know that already.”

I nodded and she continued.

“One night we closed the place like we usually did, pushing the drunks out the door, counting the till. Then we decided to take a six-pack and a pizza and go down to the beach. Marla was having some man problems and we were going to talk.”

She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and gave a tiny, cat cough. “She knew of a beach where you could drive right out on the sand. We were going to watch the sunrise. On the way we passed someone stumbling along the road. It was the strangest thing. Not a car anywhere. Just this guy tripping on his own feet along this little road. All dirty and bloody. Big gash on his arm.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Some guy Marla knew from the bar. I only worked there a couple of months, so I didn’t get to know them like she did.”

“Why was he there?”

“I guess his car had broke down or something. We figured he probably wrecked it. I don’t know. The guy was drunk as a pig. Marla hauled him into the back of her van and we drove to some ranch house outside San Celina. He could barely walk, but she helped him up to the front door and went inside. She wasn’t in there but five minutes and then she took me home. The pizza was cold and the beer hot by then. Fool ruined our night.” She took another long drag off her cigarette.

“Go on,” I said harshly.

Suzanne eyed me coldly. “Hold your horses. Look, all I know is the next day she was reading the paper at the bar and told me she’d found a sure thing. I thought she was talking about a racehorse or something. A couple a days later she gave me five hundred bucks and told me not to tell anyone about what I saw that night. When I moved up here to be near my sister, she just kept sending money to me. Said she might need me to tell what I saw someday. It was no skin off my back. I took the money.”

“Why did you conceal where you were, change your name?”

“She just thought it was a good idea. This was like cops and robbers to her. I didn’t care. Just went back to my maiden name. Hart was my second husband’s name.”

“Could you find this ranch again?”

“It was past three in the morning after an eight-hour shift and four beers. I didn’t know my name, much less where we dropped that guy off at.”

“What did he look like?” I pressed.

“I don’t know. Like a guy. Middle-ageish. Good-looking. I don’t really remember.”

“Did he have a mustache?” Wade? Ray? I didn’t want to consider it, but I had to.

She thought for a moment, pulling absently at a strand of her thin red hair. “No, I don’t think so. Seems to me he was clean-shaven. Looked like something the cat coughed up, but he was a pretty good looking guy. That, I remember.”

“What did he look like?” I asked again, feeling desperate. This was all so ambiguous, like no real information at all. “Did Marla say his name at all? Did she talk to him at all?”

“Look, all’s I remember is when she helped him out of the van, she made some kind of joke, called him something that made him laugh.”

“What?” I said, my voice frantic. “What did she say? What did she call him?”

“Jimmy Olsen.” Suzanne gave a wet cough. “She called him Jimmy Olsen. Now, what do you think she meant by that?”

I WANTED TO drive. Anywhere. Coming to the freeway on-ramp, north and south beckoned with conflicting arms, like divorcing parents with an only child. I pictured myself speeding north through the pastel housing tracts of San Jose, the pumpkin patches of Half Moon Bay, over the Golden Gate Bridge, up the long cold northern coast of Calfornia, Oregon, Washington, to Canada; changing my name, my citizenship, dyeing my hair black.

I drove south. The shock of finding out Carl was in the jeep with Jack the night he died finally caused an uncontrollable trembling in me that made it impossible to drive. Outside Paso Robles, I pulled over and parked in a scenic turnout overlooking a dark field where a farmer was night plowing, the headlights of his tractor a long silver knife in the blackness. Unusual for this time of year. I wondered what problems drove him out of his warm bed to carve the long, even furrows. I sympathized with him. At least plowing a field was something you could control.

I climbed up on the hood of the truck, leaned back against the windshield, and stared up at the sky.

“Feelin‘ restless,” Jack would have said on a night like this, stars like white stitches in a navy quilt sky. We’d ride across cattle-cropped pastures, miles from the ranch, tie the horses to an oak tree, spread out an old wool blanket and look for planets.

“Like playing connect the dots with God,” he’d say, then turn to me and we’d make slow love, the lemony taste of his tongue, the husky rake of his calloused fingers on my neck, the sound of the horses blowing watery sighs in and out; nowhere to go, they seemed to say, all the time in the world.

I never knew myself capable of the kind of hatred I felt at that moment.

It became finally, as the dark sky faded into the gray-orange of morning, a blind, raging fury that threatened to explode like a dandelion at a child’s puff.

As the sun came up, I started toward San Celina. I had no idea what I was going to say to Carl. It never occurred to me to be afraid, even though he’d probably killed two people. I only knew that I had to hear the truth of what happened the night Jack died.

I stopped by his dad’s ranch first. The housekeeper informed me that both Carl and J.D. had been at the
Tribune
since three A.M. The computer had gone down and things were a mess. When I reached the newspaper, I used the employees entrance in back, walked through the empty lunchroom, past the unoccupied desks. The scent of a working office lingered: the crispy smell of old french fries, a mixture of sweet perfumes, the undeniable scent of a forbidden cigarette.

Carl sat in his office, his back facing the door as he talked on the telephone. I stood for a few minutes looking at him through the glass windows. The shininess of his blond hair, the very aliveness of it, angered me as he leaned back in his chair and laughed at something his caller said.

I paced in front of his office, not knowing how to start. Somewhere, a radio played softly. An oldies station. “Do you believe in magic?” the radio sang.

You remember the oddest things those moments in your life that are pivotal points of change.

I had been asleep in my childhood bed when Dove woke me that early morning nine months ago. For a split second, her hand on my shoulder, her voice sharp in my ear, I was a little girl again, time to get up, do my chores, run for the school bus, braids flying. My bare feet stung with cold as I stood in the kitchen where Wade told me, his voice tight with grief, choking out the words. The kitchen smelled of strawberries, onions and the steaks Dove had fried for dinner. I ignored Dove’s arms, backed up against the refrigerator, shivering as if I would never be warm again. The refrigerator cycled, a mechanical insect in my ear; Daddy cursed softly in the background. “Benni, Benni,” Wade had said.

I opened the office door.

“Benni,” Carl said. He turned his chair around and hung up the phone. He gestured to the brown office chair in front of his desk. “What’s wrong?” he asked when I remained standing. “You look like death microwaved.” He laughed at his own joke, then stopped when I didn’t respond.

“I’ve been up all night,” I said. “Driving.”

He furrowed his brows in concern. “Having trouble sleeping?”

“I went to Salinas. To find Suzanne Hart.” I waited for his reaction.

“Oh?” he said, his face blank. “Who’s Suzanne Hart?” He had to be the best actor in the world.

“A woman with a very interesting story.”

“Concerning what?”

I set my purse down on one of the chairs in front of his desk. “I wish you’d just tell me,” I said.

“Tell you what?” He tilted his head, perplexed.

“About Jack. Suzanne told me everything. Why keep pretending?”

He looked at me, his handsome features liquid with confusion. “Benni, I have no idea what you’re rambling on about.”

I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. At a time when I most wanted to stay in control, be strong, my emotions sold me out. The tears came in great torrents down my cheeks, wet, salty, hot. Losing control made me angry, which made me cry even more.

“Oh, honey,” Carl said. He stood up and came around the desk, holding out his arms.

“Get back,” I said, my voice soggy from tears.

“All right,” he said, his voice slightly hurt. He pulled some tissue out of the box sitting on his desk and held them out to me.

“No.” I reached into my purse to search for some. I didn’t want to take anything from him. My hands touched Jack’s pistol. I didn’t even think twice about pulling it out. I pointed it at Carl.

“Tell me about the night Jack died,” I said.

“That isn’t funny, Benni,” he said.

“It isn’t meant to be.”

He glanced up as the door of his office opened. Julio, the night supervisor, started to talk, then stopped cold when he glanced over in my direction and saw the gun.

“It’s okay, Julio,” Carl said in an easy voice. “Just a joke Mrs. Harper is playing. Go back to work.”