From Herring to Eternity (21 page)

“Hey,” I said. I felt pretty neutral, maybe a little guarded; that was the least provocative word I could think of.

He looked around. First at the adjoining seats and bar, then at the room. “You here alone?”

“I was,” I said. That was the apricot sour answering. My brain didn’t want to extend the invite. Or did it? I was confused.

He dipped his forehead toward the stool beside me. “May I?”

“Only if you promise not to buy me a drink,” I said. “One’s my limit.”

“I know,” he said.

There it was
—a trace of bitterness. Hopefully, he got it out of his system. Otherwise, this was going to be a very short reunion.

“You okay?” he asked. “I saw the police report.”

Before I could answer, the bartender wandered over. He was no longer texting, seemed ready to do his job. Grant ordered a light beer. “I’m all right,” I said. My ears heard my voice and I didn’t like how glum I sounded. I cleared my throat. “I spoke to a detective after the NPD decided I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.”

“I heard. Detective Egan’s very thorough—she even asked where I was that night.”

“Sorry.”

“No need. I told her I was at the movies.”

I didn’t press. I didn’t care if he went alone, with a fellow officer, or with Miss Tennessee.

“Anyway, Detective Egan scraped the boiler-room floor,” he went on. “Concrete is pretty absorptive and she said that room is hot. She’s convinced they’ll find some DNA. That’ll rule me out.”

“Will it rule anyone
in
?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “It’s good to have, see if it matches anyone on file. But you can’t subpoena samples without probable cause.”

God bless the ACLU
, I thought insincerely. I was all for due process, but not for laws that protected the perps at the expense of the victims.

“So,” I said, “what are you doing here? If I may ask.”

“Following up on some forensics of my own,” he said with uncustomary reserve.

“Officially, but not,” I said, looking his wardrobe up and down.

“Yeah. Some people—you don’t want to come at them head-on.”

“Or they lawyer up.”

Grant just smiled a little as his beer arrived. I thought hard, pushing past the thin scrim of the drink. Something he found in the trumpet case brought him here. What and why? It had to be something too small for me to have noticed. I glanced at the bartender. Hair? Cigarette ash from outside? A spilled drink in some crusted-over corner of velvet, maybe one of the house specialties?

“So what do you make of your home invader?” Grant asked. “Something Sally worked up?”

“To become my savior?” I shrugged. “I suppose she could have rigged a door or window when she was inside. And she shops where they sell belladonna.”

“At that nutjob Spud’s place?” he laughed. “He’s got the drill down pat.”

“What do you mean?”

“We think he grows and stores his ‘misdemeanor drugs’ in a van. He knows what a team with a search warrant looks like and he moves the van to a spot off-property, where it can’t be searched.”

“Can’t you just get two search warrants? One for the building and one for the van?”

“We tried that,” Grant said. “Joint NPD and FBI investigation two years ago. He figured that out, too, from the jackets. He had his girlfriend spray the interior of the van with Agent White.”

“Who is that, a mole?”

Grant nearly spit a mouthful of beer. “Good one.”

“What was?”

He stared at me. “Agent White. You made it a person.”

I looked back at him, totally confused. “Isn’t it?”

“You’re serious,” he said. “No, Agent White is a powerful defoliant, one of the ‘rainbow herbicides’ used by our armed forces until the mid-1980s. It’s a deadlier form of Agent Orange. Spud got his hands on a drum of the stuff and keeps it to kill the pot. Legally, a dead plant is not evidence of intent to sell, which is the real crime. Just getting into the vehicle to get it out would have required HAZMAT equipment—PD and Bureau rules—which enters into a new area of legal wrangling. We would have to declare a state of emergency, close down several blocks of the city, put choppers in the air in case the suspect attempts to flee . . . just not worth it for a few pot plants.”

“Or belladonna or bamboo cyanide,” I said.

He was still looking at me. “You’ve been doing your homework.”

“I’ve been scrubbing my name clean. Again.”

He turned to his beer. “Your name was never really in danger. Not for that.”

There was bitter dig number two. The apricot sour gave him a pass. I looked at the dark wood of the bar. The lights were a hazy smear, reflecting my thoughts.

Grant took pity on me. “The officers didn’t find any indication of forced entry at your place. Did anyone—”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I truly am. I circled the wagons. I don’t know why. Well, actually, I do—but they were my wagons, my cowboys, and also my Indians.”

“Look, I was a little over-eager, I know that. I didn’t allow for the fact that maybe I’m not what you want.”

I snickered. “How many drinks did you see me take in the months we dated?”

“One. It was sherry.”

“Right. Do you think I’d be sitting here by myself if I knew what I wanted? Half of me wants to run back home—I mean home-home, New York—and the other half of me wants to take on every challenge that’s facing me here.”

Grant swallowed more beer. “I wish you the best of luck with that,” he said. “I do. Because some of what you think are challenges are—
were
—allies who happened to be in the line of fire.”

I hate it when pronouns are used to discuss proper nouns whose identities are perfectly well-known. I finished my drink and put a twenty on the counter. I wanted to say, “Some allies are like Lichtenstein—neutral and dull.” But I didn’t. I wanted to leave things somewhat sociable.

“I should be going,” I said. “I have a couple of messes to deal with.”

“Two questions before you go?” Grant said-asked.

I turned to him with a wary “go ahead” look on my face. I had no idea what subject he was about to broach.

“Did you pick at the lining inside Lippy’s case?” he asked.

I wasn’t happy with that, but it was better than a question about “us.” I asked him why he asked.

“Because we found slight scrape marks, like a knife or letter opener would make.”

“Did you?” I asked. Which was as good as a confession.

“Tampering with evidence is a felony,” he said. “But let’s pretend we’re not concerned with silly details. Did you find anything there?”

“I’ll answer that if you tell me what you found that brought you here,” I said.

He considered the offer. “A strand of facial hair.”

“Strong is clean shaven.”

“A lot of the musicians here aren’t,” Grant said. “He’s not happy about a criminal investigation that could have blowback on him. Your turn. What did
you
find?”

“Ink,” I replied. “A couple of lowercase letters might have been—a ‘p’ and a ‘p’ at least that is what I thought it looked like. I’m sure you saw them, too.”

“That’s all?” he pressed. “No letter that went along with that?”

“I would’ve told you if I had,” I said. “I want you to find whoever killed Lippy and Tippi.”

“Was there any reason in particular you looked there?” Grant asked.

“Tippi had mentioned that her brother had some kind of treasure. I thought she meant a map and that it was something he may have mentioned to Robert Barron. Y’know? A map from Hawaii, something leading to a sunken galleon, an old piece of paper tucked in the case he bought there.”

“Worth killing for?” Grant asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I have no perspective on what motivates anyone. I mean, Wall Street gets dumped on, but who isn’t greedy? Is a buried campsite worth more than a person’s home? Is a
farkakt
religion that put down roots in my boiler room more important than bona fide historical research? Is a bad boy more appealing to me than a good boy? Like I said before, I have no answers.”

That last one was for him, and he knew it. He finished his beer.

“You had a second question?” I said. “Or was it buried in the others.”

“You cut me off earlier,” he said, slipping from the stool and paying for his beer.

“Apologies.”

He dismissed it with a little shake of his head. “I was going to ask—since there apparently wasn’t a breakin—if anyone besides you had a key to your home?”

“Just my dear, dear friend Dr. Reynold Sterne,” I said. “At least, that’s what K-Two told me.”

“Sterne is the professor in charge of the dig?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he really your dear friend?” Grant asked. The question was in earnest and slightly wounded. It was almost sweet.

“I can’t stand the
shmuck
,” I assured him.

Grant relaxed into a smile. “Well, you might want to find out where that key was. Or I can, if you’d like.”

“Thanks, but I’ll let Detective Egan do it,” I said.

Grant’s expression shifted from neutral to mildly distressed. It reflected the frustration he obviously felt at his lack of progress in recovering lost territory. “Just trying to help,” he said weakly.

“I know. And I appreciate it.”

“Right. Great.”

He forced a smile and left. I moved slowly to give him time to get away. I wanted to be alone when I went back to my car. This relationship was like a yo-yo that kept hitting me in the chin each time I pulled it up. If it couldn’t be the way he wanted, then it couldn’t be. I’d already had one of those. I didn’t want another.

Chapter 21

The Wiccans convened that night at around eight and decided that a prayer meeting, with chanting, was a good idea.

There were about a dozen of them. I watched through my living-room window as they arrived in a van—except for Sally, who came on her bike. I didn’t know anyone other than her and Mad; I certainly didn’t know there were that many witches in Nashville. Or maybe they’d been bussed in to make the case that my property was a working temple. I also noticed a sedan with smoky-black windows parked across the street, in front of a house that had been foreclosed about six months ago. My guess—based on nothing but mistrust—is that it was Attorney Andrew A. Dickson III, recording the comings and goings of Wiccans.

I wasn’t worried about any noise the Wiccans might make. Given the amount of chainsawing and motor overhauling my neighbors did at all hours, they weren’t likely to call the cops on some pagan dissonance.

I was tired from my little adventure—and the stressful week—and later as I lay in bed, half drowsing, I heard the nonmelodic, minor-key
dovening
that drifted into the room.

No, that’s not right
, I thought.
It’s more like
kvetching;
a bunch of women whining
. The difference was a kind of tension that came from the back of the throat. You grow up in a home like mine, you become aware of how women complain.

Lying in bed, my eyes shut, I hovered between sleep and wakefulness as the chant hung faintly in the air around me, like a mosquito net. I thought about how much I had enjoyed the day and how I needed more of those and how much I didn’t want to go back to the deli. When I wasn’t walking the floor or cutting things up in the kitchen, I was stuck in an office that was stuck in the past—except when I was examining the trumpet case, I smiled. That was fun, that was different. It was a challenge. It had a purpose. It— Wait a minute.

My eyes opened and I looked at the dark ceiling. I was surprised that I had remembered a word from high school geometry. It was pretty impressive what the mind could do when it wasn’t focused on a subject. Like thinking about the trumpet case.

Why didn’t I see that before?

Because you’re an accountant-turned-deli-manager, not a musicologist, I told myself.

I wondered if Grant had picked it up. I turned on the light beside my bed, switched on my charging cell phone, and sent a text to Raylene. She probably wasn’t asleep yet and, sure enough, she wrote back in less than a minute. Just two words:

I’ll check.

Perfect.

I turned off the light, lay back, and hoped I could sleep. I did, easily and deeply. My subconscious had done its job and was as eager for rest as the remainder of my brain.

I was full of enthusiasm the next morning because there was a sense of proactivity and discovery in my soul. I was looking forward to something with a different set of challenges.

Raylene arrived with what I’d asked for—one of the business cards Fly had given her, with his personal phone number written in gold Sharpie on the back.

“Are you expecting him not to be here?” she asked as we did the morning prep, checking napkin holders and filling the ketchup and mustard jars.

“That’s always a possibility,” I allowed.

“So what’s up? Are you thinkin’ of
dating
him? Because if you are, I’d say you haven’t got enough of what he wants.”

“What would that be?”

“
Tookas,
” she said, slapping her own rump.

“It’s
tuchas
,” I said with a guttural
ch
, “and isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Call it what you want, I see him checkin’
me
out when I walk away.” Raylene pointed to the mirror above the counter. “He likes my
toochas
.”

“Well, don’t worry about mine,” I said.

“Will the two of you please change the topic?” Thom asked from behind the counter. She seemed mildly but sincerely offended.

“Hey,
butt
out, Thom!” Luke shouted from the back.

It was definitely time to get to work.

We didn’t open until ten on Sunday mornings. It was our lightest day, a drizzle of tourists from opening until we closed at six. It was typically just a break-even day but I stayed open because it gave everyone an extra shift.

I wasn’t willing to go so far as to say it was Fly Saucer’s facial hair the police lab had found in the trumpet case and that he’d gone into hiding—that wouldn’t have done him much good—but I was willing to bet that Chimanga Strong got him on the phone the night before to ask him if it might be. And if so, why. Which meant that Fly had probably spent the morning talking to an attorney. It was sad that even if someone were innocent, it was necessary to hire a lawyer.