Moonbird Boy (14 page)

"No wonder you tore off the owl's claw," she whispered at Zachary Crooked Owl beyond the narrow bathroom door. "You're selling your father's legacy, throwing it down the sewer, and for what? Money?"

A darker thought crossed Bo's mind as she jammed her sunglasses over tear-filled eyes. Zach had found Mort's body at the edge of Yucca Canyon. He'd gone looking for Mort, Dura said, early that morning. But where had he been when a bullet tore through Mort's heart? Zach knew Mort would be at the canyon. And Zach owned a rifle, the same rifle with which he'd sent Ojo to guard Mort's body before the authorities arrived. Had Zach killed Mort Wagman? Why? What did Mort have to do with casinos or with the lodge's financial crisis?

Nothing made sense. But it would, Bo promised herself as the pilot announced their imminent landing. She'd follow Zach like a bloodhound, fit piece after piece of the puzzle together until the truth emerged. She could do it.

Unless he sees you, Bradley. If he killed Mort Wagman, what's going to stop him from killing you?

Andrew LaMarche was aware that he'd kicked the duvet off his narrow bed again. He'd had trouble with it every night since his arrival in Germany. The feather-filled comforter was too short for his six-foot body, and the big wooden buttons securing its cover dug into his shoulders every time he turned over. His feet were cold. The hotel room still, even with daily airings, smelled like wet cardboard. And he missed Bo.

"Vass ist Zeit?" he mumbled at the old-fashioned clock nailed to his nightstand, and then shook his head. He'd just asked, "What is time?", a philosophical conversation-stopper he was sure the clock would decline to answer. It was one-thirty in the morning, and a steady drizzle muted the sounds of Frankfurt outside his barely open window. A lonely, Victorian sort of night, he thought. A perfect night for holding Bo in his arms and listening as she told him tales of Irish banshees and haunted peat bogs.

The memory of her lying next to him in bed, talking softly after their lovemaking, made his heart pound. But Bo Bradley was thousands of miles away, and he had to finish this damned military child abuse project before he could return to her.

Grabbing the duvet off the floor, he turned on the bedside light and stomped to the electric wall heater. A confounding array of knobs with metric markings, he'd spent nearly a month trying to adjust it, to no purpose. It still refused to produce heat from midnight to six a.m., the only hours in which he wanted heat.

It would still be Saturday afternoon in San Diego. Bo might be home. He wanted to tell her why he hadn't called yesterday. She'd be pleased with the reason, he knew. Half joking, she'd asked him to go to Bremen and lay a pastrami sandwich on the grave of her first psychiatrist, Dr. Lois Bittner, who'd died and been buried by friends there while at a conference. He hadn't been able to bring himself to get the sandwich, but he'd flown to Bremen with a bouquet of bronze mums that he thought perfectly matched the color of Bo's hair, and laid them on the grave. In the mums was a note saying, "From Bo, who will bring the pastrami sandwich herself. Thank you for helping her learn to survive when she was young so that I could love her now. Andrew LaMarche."

Then he'd toured the city, enjoying himself thoroughly. At a bookshop he'd bought a charmingly illustrated edition of the Grimm story "The Bremen Town Musicians," which he and Bo would give to Estrella and Henry Benedict's baby when it arrived four months in the future. The text was in German, French, and English. Bo would be sure to approve. And maybe by then she'd agree to marry him. He was doing everything he could to promote that possibility, including remaining in Germany while she faced the demons of clinical depression alone.

In the dark he remembered an earlier tour, a day trip through the Lahn River Valley from Limburg to Wetzlar, where Goethe endured his doomed love for Charlotte. The procession of turreted medieval castles was delightful, but in a little town called Hadamar he'd seen something that froze his heart. Just an old hospital, still in use. A psychiatric hospital no different from any other except for its gas chamber and crematorium where thousands deemed "mentally defective" by Hitler's Reich had been gassed, their bodies incinerated. Thousands, any one of whom might have been Bo. And there had been, he'd learned, five other hospitals identically equipped. The trip ruined, he'd driven quickly back to Frankfurt and holed up in his room, sickened. He would never tell Bo what he saw in the nondescript Lahn Valley town, he decided. Neither would he forget.

After kicking the useless heater with his bare foot, Andrew flung himself back into bed and glowered at the rainy window. Bo had asked him not to fly to her side. She'd said it wouldn't make any difference, and Dr. Broussard had confirmed Bo's view. Only professional care, time and the right medications would make a difference, the psychiatrist had said. And emotional demands on Bo, demands that she could not meet while depressed, would only make her feel more inadequate, different, useless. In the transatlantic phone call he'd mustered enough courage to ask a final question.

"What about suicide?"

"Don't worry," Eva Broussard had answered with feeling. "Bo has no history of suicide attempts, and even Mildred's death isn't likely to prompt one. She may think about it; that's normal. But she'll never admit it. Bo has a spark inside that won't easily be extinguished, Andy. Some would say it's her manicky skew that makes her that way. You and I know it's more than that. But she needs downtime now, and some space from which to watch life from a remove."

So he'd stayed in Frankfurt and helped the military establish protocols for dealing with child abuse when it occurred among personnel based overseas. He'd worked sixteen-hour days for over three weeks, and the program was in place. All he was expected to do in the final week was to introduce academic authorities on various aspects of the problem at a series of formal seminars and dinners. Anybody could do it. He wanted to go home.

Bo's phone, when the rattling connection was complete, merely rang four times and then the answering machine clicked on.

"I miss you," he said simply, and hung up.

Then he strode to the room's little closet and began pulling his clothes from hangers. His suitcase was under the bed, already dusty. A sign he'd been away too long.

Within an hour he'd packed, sent a telegram to the adjutant in charge of the training program saying he'd been called home on an urgent personal matter, and arranged for a flight to Paris, from which he would fly to New York. The ticketing agent was working on a flight from there to California.

"Anywhere in California," he'd said. "I just need to get home."

Bo would later define her discovery in St. Louis as one of the strangest scenarios she'd encountered, including those whispered or shouted in psychiatric emergency rooms. But the strangeness would only reveal its entirety later, like a black-and-white photographic print in its pan of developer. Vague at first, just a ghostly outline. In the beginning Bo merely thought she was, at last, truly crazy.

It was surprisingly easy to follow Zach to his destination from the airport. She selected a cab from the row waiting at the terminal curb, and said, "Follow that car," as Zach's cab pulled away.

Her driver, a grizzled version of Santa Claus in an ancient orange shirt and plaid bow tie, grinned and said, "Lady, I've been waitin' thirty years for somebody to say that. I s'pose you don't want 'em to know they're bein' followed, right?" "Right? Can do."

Bo alternately marveled at the man's driving facility and at the Midwestern trees in their autumn color. Zach's cab, four cars ahead, kept a steady pace going south on Lindbergh Boulevard, skirting the city. And everywhere showers of golden cottonwood and sassafras leaves fluttered on trees or blew in clouds, tossed by the wind with the blood-red of maples and sumac or the brown-mottled orange of oak and hornbeam. She'd forgotten it would be fall here. A real fall where the sight and smell of dying leaves filled the air with courageous, doomed splendor.

"Everything is transient," she told the driver.

"I've noticed that," he answered. "Say, who's this fella we're followin', your husband?"

"No, it's a black Indian and a gangster, or at least a suspected gangster. The Indian may have killed a friend of mine. It's important that they don't see us."

The cabby rubbed his bulbous, bloodshot nose with a grimy index finger. "Black Indians? Gangsters? Lady, you crazy or somethin'?"

"There's some question about that at the moment," Bo replied, still mesmerized by the leaves. "But it doesn't matter. Just don't let them see us."

"It may not matter to you..." the man rumbled, and then fell silent. Zach's cab had swerved into a well-to-do older neighborhood of winding streets and widely spaced two-story homes. At a respectable distance Bo's driver turned as well. The neighborhood was not the destination she had imagined, which involved dim riverfront alleys or at least a garlic-scented Italian restaurant with a beady-eyed bouncer named Tony who would wear a tuxedo jacket over a torn undershirt. Nothing was making sense. Why would Zach and the gambling kingpin fly from San Diego to St. Louis only to do a house-and-garden tour?

From the curved porch railing of an expansive white frame house, a boy in school blazer and cap tossed peanuts onto the leaf-strewn lawn where several gray squirrels dashed to retrieve them. A block further, a young woman who looked like Audrey Hepburn pushed a black baby carriage briskly along the sidewalk. Bo couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a baby carriage. Bobbing on its thin tires it looked like a boat, she thought, or a little hearse, or...

Cut the weird imagery, Bradley. You're here on business.

"Where are we?" she asked. The area bore no resemblance to anything she'd seen in the last twenty years.

"Kirkwood," the driver replied, gauging his speed carefully to that of the car barely visible ahead.

"Oh," she answered. "I lived in St. Louis for a while. Kirkwood's pretty nice, right?"

"Everything's transient," he reminded her. "Hey, your gangster Indian's stopping." Smoothly he made a sharp right and braked on a side street in a rustle of leaves. "White brick on the right five houses up on the street we just turned off. That'll be fifteen fifty."

"Wait for me," Bo said, handing him a twenty from her purse and exiting the cab. Then she untied the blue sweater from her shoulders, pulled it on, and crossed to the other side of the wide street on which they'd entered the neighborhood. In her khakis and hiking boots she didn't look entirely out of place, she thought.

Retying the scarf Indian-style across her forehead, she removed her sunglasses, jammed the straw hat down as far as possible over her hair and began a serious walker's long stride and exaggerated arm swinging. Zach was going to see her. No way to avoid that. But with luck he'd just see a local matron out for a constitutional before her husband returned from his office in the city. To complete the image Bo stooped to gather a handful of bright leaves. Centerpiece for the dinner table. A nice touch.

Ahead, Zach and the other man had followed the winding flagstone path to a white brick colonial. The red of its bricks showed through the weathered paint, projecting a homey, quaint demeanor completely at odds with the two men on the raised doorstep. Only a block away now, Bo slowed to feign admiration of a narrow formal garden set in ivy and mums.

No one was answering the door of the white colonial, but the presence of Zach and the other man had captured the attention of several small dogs in a chain-linked run along the house's western side. Their frantic barking made Bo's palms grow clammy. Any one of them might have been the dog on her answering machine!

All small dogs sound alike, Bradley. It's ridiculous to think there's any connection. But what if there is...?

The manicured neighborhood felt like a set, a facade hiding secrets tangled like frayed electrical wire. Because of it Mort was dead and Bird was alone. Because of it a noble undertaking would be abolished and the last of an ancient people prostituted to the lure of easy money. But what was it? Bo couldn't still the trembling of her hands as she drew closer to the white brick house. Soon she'd be directly across from it, shielded from sight only by the idling cab waiting for Zach and his companion. But there was no way to turn around without attracting attention.

Zach was writing something on the back of an envelope he pulled from the mailbox as Bo drew closer, her heart pounding blood against her eardrums. He jammed the envelope back into the mailbox vertically so that it bent under the lid, its edge a visible tab against the matte black metal. Then he and Zach strode quickly toward the cab.

The timing couldn't have been worse, Bo realized. The two men were now facing her as she passed directly across the street from them. How could Zach not recognize her? He'd seen her jerky, loping walk a hundred times. And her hands. Freckled hands with long, knobby-jointed fingers. Bo sensed her hands announcing the identity of their owner like neon signs. "These big Irish knuckles are Bo Bradley's!" they yelled. "And the big Irish feet, too!" Bo felt as naked and shining as a fish in the pale Midwestern sunset.

But Zach didn't see her. She heard the cab doors slam and then saw it accelerate to turn at the next corner. Propelled by fear, she walked a block past the colonial just to be sure the men weren't going to return, seize her, and throw her bound and gagged into the trunk. But only one car drove by, a metallic beige station wagon full of Girl Scouts. Bo reined in her terror and crossed the street. Unless she died of a heart attack first, she was going to see what was on that envelope.

In minutes she reached the flagstone walkway and affected a casual saunter as she approached the mailbox. Cars were moving on nearby streets, but no one was watching as she pulled the white rectangle from its black box. "You'll get the boy when you call off your dogs," it said. "Back off if you want him alive." The note wasn't signed.

"Is there something I could help you with?" an icy female voice inquired from the dog run. "Dr. Keith isn't home at the moment."