Interface (31 page)

He hadn't heard her yet. She raised her head for a second and looked at his car. It was a beat-up old sedan with no one else in it.
The man had come alone. His mistake.

"Freeze! I'm covering you with a .45," she said. "I'm an Army
veteran and I have fired hundreds of rounds into targets that were
a lot smaller and farther away than you are."

"Okay," the man said. "Can you see my hands? I'm holding
them up."

"I see 'em. Why don't you lace them together on top of your head and then turn around to face me."

"Okay, I'll do that," the man said. He did.

"What are you doing here?" Eleanor said.

"My job."

"You a robber?"

"No. I'm a cop. Detective Larsen of the Commerce City Police
Department."

"Can you prove that?"

"I can prove it by showing you my ID," Detective Larsen said.
"But in order to do that, ma'am, I'll have to take it out of my
pocket, and it would be a shame if you misinterpreted that as
reaching for a gun. So let's talk about this for just a second and see
if we can negotiate a way for me to extract the ID from my pocket
without giving you the wrong idea."

"Don't worry about it," Eleanor said, pointing the gun up at the
sky and coming out from behind her cover. "Only a cop would talk
like that."

"Well, let me show you my ID anyway," Larsen said. He turned sideways so that she could see his butt. He slowly reached around
into his back pocket and took out a black wallet. He underhanded
it twenty feet to Eleanor, then left his hands well away from his
sides while she opened it up and looked at it.

"Okay," she said, tossing it back. "Sorry if I spooked you."

"Normally I'd be real pissed," he admitted. "But under the
circumstances, ma'am, it's all right. You Eleanor Richmond?"

Larsen's face went all fuzzy and out of focus. Eleanor's eyes were
filling up with tears. She didn't even know why, yet. "I got the
feeling something real bad happened," she said.

"You're right. But it's going to be okay, considering."

"What happened?"

"You son is in the hospital in serious but stable condition. He's
going to be all right."

"Car crash?"

"No, ma'am. He was shot."

"Shot!?"

"Yes, ma'am. Shot in the back by a suspected gang member, in
downtown Denver. But he's going to be okay. He was very lucky."

Suddenly Eleanor was seeing clearly again. The tears had gone
away. It was so shocking that just for a minute, curiosity overwhelmed everything else.

This was terrible. She should have been freaking out and
panicking. Instead, she felt eerily calm and alert, like a person who
had just been sucked out of an airliner into a cold, scintillating blue
sky. Her life was completely falling apart now. She felt the
complete abandon of a person in free fall.

"My son was shot and you're saying he's lucky?"

"Yes, I am, Mrs. Richmond. I've seen a lot of people shot. I
ought to know."

"Detective Larsen, is my son in a gang and I don't even know about it?"

"Not as far as we can tell."

"Then why did they shoot him?"

"He was using a pay telephone downtown. And they wanted to use it."

"They shot him over a pay phone?"

"As far as we can tell."

"What, my son wouldn't let them use it?"

"Well, no one uses a pay phone forever. But he didn't give it up
as quickly as they wanted him to. They didn't want to wait. So they
shot him."

She frowned. "Well, what kind of a person would do something like that?"

Detective Larsen shrugged. "There's a lot of people like that nowadays."

"Well, why are our presidential candidates running around
having sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses when
we have people growing up in Denver, Colorado with no values?"
Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered.

"Presidential politics aren't my speciality, ma'am."
"Well, maybe they ought to be."

A few weeks later, Eleanor found herself sitting on a rather nice,
brand-new wrought-iron bench in front of the Boulevard Mall in downtown Denver. She was in no mood to be at a mall, but
circumstances put her here a couple of times a day.

Her son was convalescing, and taking his sweet time about it, at
Denver County Hospital, which was a mile or so down south of
the state capitol and the high-rise district. This part of town
included the hospital, various schools, and museums - all of the
municipal stuff. It also included the old downtown shopping
district, which had been badly in need of some really devastating
urban renewal for quite some time.

Just recently the urban renewal had come in the form of the
Boulevard Mall, a brand-new pseudoadobe structure built on the
bulldozed graves of more traditional retail outlets. It was near Speer
Boulevard, only a few blocks from the hospital. A lot of bus lines converged there. Denver had hired some publicity genius who had
come up with a catch phrase for the bus system: The Ride. This
being the automotive West, where only tramps and criminals were thought to take public transit, the buses were slow, few, and far
between, and so Eleanor had been spending a lot of time taking
The Ride lately, or waiting for it, which was even more
humiliating.

She consoled herself with the fact that it made sound financial
sense. Sitting down with her calculator, like the banker she had
once been, and weighing all the alternatives, she eventually figured out that the most logical way for her to spend her time was to take
The Ride downtown twice a week, to this neighborhood. Along
with all of its municipal buildings, it included a few big old
mainline churches, several of which had gotten together and started
up a food bank. Originally it was just to help Mexicans live through
the Rocky Mountain winter, but in recent years it had started to
attract a more diverse clientele. So while Eleanor was out of the
house picking up cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal, and beans, Doreen was keeping an eye on Mother. In return, Eleanor gave Doreen some of the food and watched Doreen's kids for a couple
of hours a day. This was known, among intellectuals, as the barter
economy.

Since the shooting, she had added an additional stop: she would
go out and visit Harmon, Jr., at Denver County Hospital. Harmon
had learned, from his father, to hold his feelings inside and not
complain about things, so sometimes it was hard to tell how he
really felt. But he seemed to be doing okay psychologically, much
better than Eleanor would have been if she had been shot in the
back for no reason. As Harmon, Jr., came out from under the shock
and the effects of the drugs, he got his old spark back, plus a little
bit of a macho swagger that had not been there before. He had been
shot and he had survived. That was one way to get a name for
yourself in high school. The macho bit was cute, as long as he
didn't take it too far.

Thinking of her son made Eleanor smile to herself as she sat on
the bench in front of the Boulevard Mall. Across her lap was a large
brick of orange cheese encased in a flimsy cardboard box, and
several pounds of rolled oats and pinto beans in clear plastic bags.
Above her head was a large sign in red metal saying THE RIDE.

All around her, people were strolling in from the parking lots,
converging on the front entrance of the mall. These people had their very own rides, many with licence plates from outlying
counties. She got more than one dirty look from these people. This
was not unusual in Denver, which now had its ghettos at the
outskirts of town, but even for Denver it seemed like she was
getting a lot of dirty looks. Then she realized that every other one
of these people was wearing a T-shirt or a baseball cap emblazoned
with the slogan EARL STRONG COMES ON STRONG.

Everybody knew that Earl Strong's real name was Erwin Dudley
Strang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off.

Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name.

But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing far
less significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed to
get away with murder.

He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong.
To change your name, and then use the name's double meaning as
part of a campaign slogan
...
it was a little much. As if he were
nothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knew
exactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.

Maybe one reason Eleanor felt bad when she heard of the man
was that she had known of him from way back and she had never
taken him seriously.

The first time she had ever seen the name Erwin Dudley Strang,
it had been printed across the laminated face of a photo ID card. She had seen it through the distorting lens of the peephole on the
front door of the house in Eldorado Highlands. She was on the
inside of the house, by herself, waiting for the cable TV installer to show up; the cable company had promised that an installer would
arrive between nine and five, and so she had spent the whole day
waiting in an empty house. He had finally rung her doorbell at 4.54
p.m.
and stood out on the front doorstep holding up his official
cable TV installer's ID card so that it was the only thing she could
see through the peephole when she looked out.

She could at least pride herself on one thing: she had known, just
from that one little gesture, that Erwin Dudley Strang was a creep.

She opened her front door. Erwin Dudley Strang lowered the
badge to reveal a narrow, concave face, cratered like the surface of
the moon. He looked Eleanor Richmond in the eye, and his jaw
dropped open. He stared at her without saying anything for several
seconds. It was the look that white people gave to black people to
let the black people know that they didn't belong there. To remind them, just in case they'd somehow forgotten, that they were on the
wrong continent.

"Can I help you?" Eleanor said.

"Is the lady of the house in?" he said.

"I am the owner. I am the lady of the house," she said.

Keeping that fixed stare on her face, Erwin Dudley Strang
blinked a couple of times and shook his head melodramatically. But
he never said anything. It almost wouldn't have been so bad if he
had said, "Shit, I never thought I'd see a black person out here."
But he didn't do that. He shook his head and blinked, and then he said, "Yes, hello, I'm here to install your cable TV."

In the course of installing the cable system he had to go in and
out of the house half a dozen times. Each time, he was careful to
stare her down while standing in the corner of her peripheral vision
so that she would know that he was there. Each time, she felt
herself getting hot under the collar and turned squarely toward him,
and each time he glanced away just a moment before her eye met
his, blinked, shook his head, and continued about his work.

He walked around the house brandishing a power drill with a preposterously elongated bit, which he used to drill holes all the
way through the exterior walls wherever she told him she wanted
a cable TV wire. Even the way that he handled this tool raised
Eleanor's hackles; it seemed clear, somehow, that a large portion of
Erwin Dudley Strang's ego was bound up in this tool, and that
penetrating the walls of total strangers' homes was the really swell
part of the job as far as he was concerned.

And consequently he always pushed on the drill a little bit too
hard, tried to make it happen a little bit too fast, and ended up
shoving the drill bit through the wall with brute force rather than waiting for it to cut cleanly; everywhere he poked a hole through
the wall he managed to burst a sizable hole through the drywall, and
every time he did it, he came back in and shook his head in
astonishment as if this were the first time it had ever happened. As if defective drywall had been used to build the Richmonds' new
house, the Richmonds had been foolish enough not to notice, and
there was not a thing he could do about it.