The Hidden Man (27 page)

“That’s fine for a young guy. But what if arthritis starts to settle in your hands, your wrists, your leg joints? What are you going to do then? If you don’t have working skills?”

“Randall,” Vignette interrupted, “I don’t see what any of this has to do with Miss Freshell.”

“It doesn’t. It has to do with me realizing you both need a livelihood that lets you be yourselves, that doesn’t force you into some kind of a mold.”

“You’re just now realizing that?”

“Vignette…”

“Sorry.”

“Tell me, does either one of you think that if something happened to me, I could rely on any help from the department for you?”

Vignette started to answer, but her throat seized up. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the floor.

“Shane, I’m proud of you for taking on an honest job. It’s just that, to me, your temperament does not seem suited to restaurant work. I think that in order to make it through a shift, you have to become like a sleepwalker, and not feel anything.”

“Jesus, Randall…” Shane muttered.

“No, come on now, I’m not saying this to rub your nose in it. I’m telling you that yesterday might have been the worst day of my life, but it forced me to ask hard questions.

“You both need to get out of the traps you’re in, just like I do.”

“What ‘trap’ are you in?” Shane asked.

“In one more year, I get a twenty-year pension. Good for life. And it’s a stupid goal to throw away your soul for.”

“Randall,” Vignette began, “what are you getting on about?”

“You just look at the kind of danger both of you were in, yesterday, because of my line of work.”

“We never said that we—”

“Each of you came close to getting killed, for no reason but for me being a police detective.”

“So what? That wasn’t your fault. You always wanted to be a detective. It’s why you walked that beat all those years,” Shane said.

“Here’s what would be my fault: If I let you two go on out into the world without being better prepared for it than you are.”

“Oh, well then. You’ll put in a good word for us at City Hall?” Vignette sweetly asked.

“Too late,” Shane said with a grin.

Randall stood up and took a deep breath. “No, right now I’m going on in to the station.” He picked up his boots, sat in a chair, and pulled them on. Shane and Vignette watched in puzzled silence. He opened the closet and took out a topcoat and a heavy felt hat. “I won’t be gone too long.”

“Who’s in, today?” Shane asked.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” He put his coat on.

“You mean you’re not going in to see somebody in particular?” Vignette asked.

Randall stood holding his hat and looked her straight in the face. “I have a letter of resignation in my pocket, here. Actually, a note. There are three lines. I only needed one. So I’ll give it to the desk sergeant. Doesn’t matter who’s on the desk. Long as I turn it in, that makes it official.”

“Randall,” said Shane, “I have a bad feeling that you’re still in shock. You shouldn’t be making this kind of a decision. Not now, anyway.”

“Yeah. I’m in shock, all right. But waiting around isn’t going to change anything.” He turned to go.

Shane grabbed his arm and turned him back around to them. “Wait, I mean it. Please. Just wait.”

Vignette jumped in, saying, “Wait
ten minutes
! You can always do it after ten minutes, can’t you? You can wait ten minutes, right?”

He gave them a tired smile, and did not start for the door. “What will change in the next ten minutes?”

“Nothing, maybe,” Vignette replied. “But you might find that after you more or less count to ten, things start to look different.”

“Nothing will look different. I already wrote the letter. I even used so much tact that it took up three lines. Did I mention that I could have done it in one?”

“Randall,” Shane used his most serious tone, “you also just mentioned your twenty-year pension. If you quit—”

“I know.”

Vignette spoke though a pensive frown. “I’ve known you all this time, Randall, and I don’t ever remember hearing you talk about anything with the kind of enthusiasm that you always show. I mean, when you talk about figuring out crimes and outsmarting bad guys. Doing your work.”

“Playing their game better than they do,” Shane added.

Randall stood looking at both of them, overwhelmed by their attempts on his behalf. They meant the best, but they also had no idea.

“Because of my
job,
you two. It would have been amazingly easy for them to blow us apart. Look how close they came.”

“Hey,” Shane protested, “we are not children! I’m not so sure what it is that you’re afraid of, with us.”

Blackburn quietly regarded Shane while answers flashed through his mind. He had no doubt that both of these young people were capable of having fine lives, if they could keep using the special individual skills that they each possessed while they learned to compensate for social skills they lacked. Without such a chance—without some sort of protective place where they could finish developing fundamental things that they needed—he could hold out little hope for them in a society like theirs, so quick to judge and quicker to condemn.

Shane’s awkward social behavior kept him isolated. And Blackburn thought of Vignette’s strange need to reject any attempt to treat her as a feminine creature, her constant state of battle with the world. They would both be lucky to scrape by and keep out of jail.

The world itself was a slaughterhouse, for them, even when it was safe and serene for others. Its terrible mechanisms would be activated by their eccentricities, the process powered by the inevitable hostility that would eventually corner each of them, visiting destruction in any of countless ways.

He took out his weathered silver pocket watch and flipped open the case. The crystal was cracked again—for, what was this, the seventh time? He dropped it back into his pocket.

“Makes sense,” he said. “Time for a new watch.”

Because the flow of time was not on his side. Ten minutes, ten days, or ten years, there would be no fixing this one through the mere passage of time, unless he found a way to fix it himself.

He put his hat on. It helped make the point to them—and to himself—that it was time for him to leave and get this thing done now, no matter how many minutes it had been.

ONE MONTH LATER

THE BLACKBURN-NIGHTINGALE HOUSE

T
HE ROUTINE DETAILS WENT
by in the fashion of final rituals: the wrap-up on Miss Freshell’s murder by James “J.D.” Duncan’s maniacal bastard son, the burial of Miss Freshell’s remains. When they were done, Shane went back to working at the restaurant. Vignette went back to burying herself in her books. Randall spent a good deal of time outside, taking long walks. His legs had spent so many years walking a beat that they demanded regular use.

Over on the exposition grounds, the water in the dead space behind the life-sized Cave Dwellers exhibit never rose high enough to spill out and repel the visitors. Not that the problem went away; rather, the further crumbling of the hastily man-made six hundred and twenty-five acres of land allowed the leaks to spread throughout the landfill. The phenomenon distributed the water load so well that it would conceal the problem until the next major earthquake, at which point the land would liquefy and swallow large homes up to the second floor within a matter of seconds.

The rest of the exposition was thus able to play itself out for the full ten months without the embarrassment of a spontaneous geyser in the middle of the fairgrounds—and without the embarrassment of a collapsed balcony at the Pacific Majestic Theatre. The minor fire story played for a couple of days, but since nobody died, it faded like a spent match.

Blackburn especially enjoyed the experience of having Captain Merced show up at their home in an attempt to dissuade him from leaving the force. Shane and Vignette hung in the background to eavesdrop. The men were behind closed doors, but it became clear to them that Blackburn was continuing to refuse Merced’s offer, while the captain’s voice grew louder.

When Captain Merced finally opened the office door and stomped out, he shouted that Blackburn was finished at the department. He marched to the front door, stopped just long enough to announce that there would be no second chances, then glared at Shane and Vignette with disdain and slammed the door as he left.

Shane and Vignette sat without moving. They both wanted to know how Randall was taking this, but neither was going to be the first to interrupt him.

Their caution paid off. He walked out of the study a few seconds later wearing a broad smile, and made no mention of the captain at all. Instead he cheerfully offered to take them out somewhere fancy for dinner. They both lunged at the chance to get back to normal footing.

After everyone got into their going-out-to-dinner clothes, he opened a closet and produced a small package wrapped in brown paper. He refused to tell them anything about it until later in the evening.

They all hopped into the Model T, with Vignette enthusiastically piloting them on the journey between the other motorized vehicles, the horse-drawn wagons, countless random pedestrians, and the ubiquitous piles of fresh horse flop. The destination that Blackburn navigated her toward turned out to be an upper-class seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. The place was so overpriced that the locals generally avoided it, but he insisted that it was a good choice for a special celebration.

It was only after they went in and got their table, placed their orders, and sat enjoying their dinners that he pulled out the package and placed it on the table.

“What’s that?” Shane asked.

“I guess one of you better open it. Either one. It’s for both of you.” He smiled and softly added, “And for me.”

Shane shot Vignette a puzzled look, but she gave him a hurry-up push, so he grinned and went ahead and tore off the paper. When he pulled it back, it revealed a carved wooden sign. The sign was about eighteen inches long and a foot high. It was just the right size to mount on the exterior door of an office.

“Blackburn & Nightingales—Private Investigation.”

“You’re ready to learn a detective’s skills, Shane. You just don’t need to be a policeman first.”

He saw the confusion on their faces, and added, “I don’t need to be a policeman anymore, either.”

“It says Nightingales, plural,” Vignette pointed out.

“It does. Hell, Vignette, you’ve already got most of the skills of an undercover investigator, anyway. So now you’ll formally learn a trade that you can use anywhere in the world.”

“Hey! If I get good enough,” she enthused, “maybe we’ll make it Blackburn & Nightingale & Nightingale. Or Blackburn and the Two Nightingales. We need some kind of an emblem to stand for us. A crest, or something. Do we have to wear uniforms?”

One thing at a time,
Blackburn reminded himself.

He had made it his credo for a long time. It delivered him to this place. What mattered was that Shane and Vignette had both caught on to the idea. He spotted the recognition in their eyes; they saw that this could be a way for each of them to continue in this highly impractical little family. Their enthusiasm for it was a tonic for him. He felt as if he had just gained back ten years and lost fifteen pounds.

“Do we carry guns?” Shane asked. “You know, I can’t honestly say whether I care to or not. Maybe I could try it both ways. There ought to be other sorts of weapons that—”

Vignette leaned in front of him to interrupt. “Do we really have to have a telephone, though? If we do, I’m not going to answer it. Would I have to answer it? Do we even need one?”

“One thing at a time!” Randall grinned and raised both hands. “Right now, all we can do is have dinner. After that, dinner will be over but the answer stays the same.”

“We agree on what we’re doing and we’re going after it,” Shane said, raising his glass.

“I like the sound of that,” Randall responded.

Vignette nodded, raised her glass, and added, “One thing at a time.”

THE END