Zero at the Bone (15 page)

I could juggle five oranges at once. I could cut a cartwheel around the living room and never break a single plate on the shelves beside the silver candlesticks. But around Kentia's slender presence, I felt like a large, poorly trained horse.

“And how are
you
doing?” she asked.

That proved it. She was just being kind. She had no real interest in me. But I appreciated her effort. It was easy for her, in a way. She had a soft voice and steady eyes, calm. She was peaceful inside, used to talking to graduate students and professors. But I knew she did not have to take these few extra seconds, books open on the floor beside a laptop computer with its bright screen.

Sometimes a person asks, and you sense the importance. It was a chance to share a part of myself. Her father was an executive with Clorox, something in the legal department. While he and my father were friendly, the contrast was always there, my father's glasses always glazed with sawdust. It brought out my loyalty, suddenly. I felt I had said something unfair about my parents, although I could not guess what.

“I'm doing pretty well,” I said, missing my chance.

She knew it. There was just a tiny shift in her eyes. I was no longer being honest. I was just talking, being social. Was I mistaken, or was she a little disappointed? “What can we do?” she asked.

Maybe she meant: What can any of us do, in a world like this. Maybe she was being philosophical. But I thought she was asking what she, Kentia Merriman, could do to help my family, to help find my sister.

“I always thought Anita was someone who could keep a secret,” said Merriman.

“She was always honest about how she felt,” I said, my voice suddenly thin, scratchy.

“Honest, no question,” he said, hesitating, knowing how painful the subject was. “It's just that I thought she could have a life nobody knew about.”

I couldn't talk for a moment.

Merriman sat with one leg stretched out an a leather stool. His arms were folded. Maybe I shouldn't have asked, but I had to know. Besides, I had to change the subject. I indicated his foot with my eyes and asked, “How did it happen?”

Merriman looked at my own feet, my own black loafers. We were sitting on the Merriman patio, at the edge of the patio, before us a perfect green lawn.

“I had this pistol,” said Merriman.

“An automatic,” I said. I knew all this, but I was trying to push the conversation ahead.

He used to be the kind of friend you just sat around with. Now he seemed to want to talk. I had noticed this on the telephone, and I noticed it even more now. I didn't know Merriman the way he was now.

“Those twenty-two-caliber bullets,” said Merriman. “They look so small. You could hold twenty of them in your fist, like this.” He closed his hand around an imaginary handful.

“They didn't put your foot in a cast?”

Merriman shrugged: cast, splint, what was the difference? He had his foot in a sort of sandal, something you would never wear to the beach, canvas and plastic. Only the crutches leaning against the potted cactus proved how badly injured he was.

“You didn't know the gun was loaded?” I asked. I hated myself, but I couldn't let the subject go.

“You know, if there is any kind of a gunshot wound you have to talk to the police,” said Merriman.

“They ask a lot of questions,” I said. I stopped myself. The line was something out of a movie, a television show. I had the dim memory of a dozen bad scripts, one bad guy complaining to another that the cops were asking around.

Merriman and I both seemed to recognize this. We smiled at each other.

“Are you going to play football?” he asked.

The question surprised me. Merriman was not assuming anything. He knew how different everything was for my family, and for me, until Anita came home again.

“I don't think I could have talked both my parents into signing the form anyway,” I said.

Maybe I expected an argument from Merriman, encouragement, or criticism. He had talked his dad into buying him a black Mazda sports car, a convertible, so he wouldn't have to drive the family Mercedes anymore.

“It's only a game,” said Merriman. I knew he didn't completely believe this. People had always talked about the Rose Bowl when they mentioned Oliver Merriman. They talked about the AFC and the NFC.

“That's right,” I said. “And people would just say that I wasn't as good at the slant pass as Oliver Merriman. I couldn't live up to that.”

“You'd be as good as I ever was,” said Merriman, and suddenly he sounded much older, a mature man, an uncle, giving me advice in a dreamy tone. Maybe being injured makes a person feel old for a few weeks, makes him wise until the pain wears off. “I could tell, Cray. I watched those jayvee games, how you had a touch on the football. Not too hard, not too soft. You were about to flower.”

And he put it in the past tense.

“I'll tell you how I shot myself,” he said.

25

Detective Waterman was late. I leaned on my elbows in the coffee shop in downtown Oakland, feeling out of place. Men in dark business suits plodded in carrying folders and briefcases, and women with tired eyes eased into chairs, slipping off their shoes under the table where they thought no one could see.

Detective Waterman was suddenly across from me, snapping her own briefcase shut. She noticed my surprise at her sudden appearance and smiled with her eyes. “There's a back entrance,” she said. “I always park on Franklin, zip up an alley. A shortcut.”

I felt into the big manila envelope and brought out the pile of papers, the photocopies of Anita's journal. I had overscored some of the words with yellow marker. It took a few minutes. I let Detective Waterman find these phrases herself, and waited while she leafed through the loose pages, then stacked them against the tabletop to keep them straight.

“We've interviewed her fellow employees,” she said at last. “They were all very generous with their time. They work people pretty hard at American Shelf and Filing. It's one of two American Shelf plants in the country,” she said. “The other one's in Toledo, Ohio.”

She gave me another smile, trusting her smile, knowing it had power, the white streaks in her hair catching the fluorescent light. “Her boss was very helpful. Showed us her workstation, let us sift through all the inventories she'd been doing. The security service, American Protection, has someone on-site twenty-four hours a day. We questioned their staff, looked through their logs for suspicious vehicles, loiterers. Almost every business has a problem in that neighborhood, having to ask someone in a sleeping bag to move aside when they open the office in the morning.”

I nodded, just to show that I was listening. I was a little impatient. Anita did not run off with someone who slept on the sidewalk.

“We got a list of her friends from your father. He called all them already, of course. She was in the French club, played tennis. It's been a slow process, driving out to see each of them. I hate interviewing people by phone.”

“It would save time.”

“How would they know I'm a real cop?” she said. “I could be a crank, calling up to be a pain in the ass. I could be the perpetrator, calling up to intimidate. Besides, people can lie over the phone better than they can when I'm looking at them.”

I liked this, a detective referring to herself as a
cop
, saying
pain in the ass
. She was being open, taking a little extra trouble.

“But I'm surprised there aren't more friends,” she said. “Anita is such an active, bright young woman.”

“We are both slow at getting to know people,” I said. “We're friendly, but not that close to our fellow citizens.” I phrased it this way to make it easier to say, like a joke. I didn't like this, feeling defensive about our choice of friends. “The French club didn't sit around speaking French. They corresponded with French students, took a group of people from Avignon down to Disneyland. Anita liked to go places.”

“Anita was president,” said Detective Waterman.

“It wasn't like being president of the student body,” I said.

“You sound jealous,” said Detective Waterman. “Like you didn't want to share Anita with anyone else.”

I didn't like the detective as much as I had.

“Your family is very important to you,” said Detective Waterman.

For some reason this brought tears to my eyes. “You can see that she was meeting somebody,” I said when I could talk. “Read the journal.”

“Her journal means more to you than it does to me,” she said. “Because you knew her.”

“She comes right out and says it, on paper.”

“I think that she knew we would be reading it, so she left out everything revealing.”

“You mean you don't want these,” I said, taking the stack of pages away from her. I had made them at the Copymat on MacArthur, not wanting the assistant manager to do it, standing there, putting the journal facedown on the glass, breathing that dry, chemical heat copiers give off.

She made her voice sound gentle, aware that my feelings were hurt. “I'll take them along. You're right. They might prove useful.”

I felt like breaking up the chairs around me, metal seats screwed onto metal legs. I would never manage to break one, although I could bend one up pretty well if I worked at it. “Look at these lines about the soul. Selecting its own society, and then shutting the door.” My yellow marker had slightly smeared the words, the Day-Glo yellow looking slightly greenish in the coffee-shop light.

“What do those lines mean to you?” she asked, an English teacher with handcuffs.

“It's Emily Dickinson,” I said, surprised at the bitterness in my voice.

“I recognized the lines,” said the detective. Her eyes slipped slightly out of focus. She was thinking. The lightning flashes in her hair were slightly yellow, the way white hair gets in the sunlight.

“And look at this,” I said, an edge to my voice, “from a poem about a snake.” I sat back, waiting while the detective read.

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone
,

Without a tighter breathing

And Zero at the Bone
—

“Yes, that's always been one of my favorites,” said the detective thoughtfully.

“The police sit around reading poetry, listening to the dispatcher,” I said. I sounded spiteful; I couldn't stop myself.

“I was an English major,” the detective said. “Cal State Hayward. My husband left me. I started working as a desk cop in Berkeley, got so I could knock my martial arts instructor down with one hand tied behind my back, so to speak, and now here I am.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

I didn't mean that her life story met with my approval. I meant that I was starting to feel a little better.

“How do you do it?” I said after we had both been quiet for a while.

“Find missing people? It's the computer that does it, really. We rake in names, numbers—”

“Knock a man down with one hand tied.”

“I use my radio, get backup.” She laughed, a private joke, something she knew and I didn't.

The restaurant was very neat, mustard and ketchup containers lined up with the napkin dispenser on every table.

“I see what you mean, though,” said the detective. “She might have had a secret boyfriend. You know what my next question is, don't you?”

I didn't.

“Will you tell me what you know, or do I have to figure it out myself?”

I couldn't talk.

“Brothers know things. They know a lot of things, without even being aware of it.”

“You mean—if I went to a hypnotist I could remember all the details.”

“I mean that you were used to covering up for her. And maybe—I'm not saying you are—it's possible you're doing it even now.”

A waitress had not come near us, ignoring us in our corner table. Detective Waterman had suggested this place. She had a court appearance, she had said, and she would be happy to see me. This was her usual spot, I realized. She sat here across from someone two or three times a week, talking kidnappers and sex slave masters into confessing.

I said, “The case is going pretty badly, isn't it?”

Detective Waterman gave me a professional look, no expression.

“If I'm your best hope,” I said, full of feeling.

“Okay, I'm sorry,” she said, looking around, briskly moving the briefcase a little farther away from her chair, sliding it along the floor, looking around for the waitress. Little lines had appeared in her face, in her cheeks, her forehead. When she held her face a certain way she looked fresh, pretty. When she made a thoughtful expression, she looked worn-out.

“If you want to knock someone down quickly,” she said, “you hit him in the back of the knee.”

“With your fist,” I said, not asking, just trying to get the mental image.

“With your hand. Or a weapon.”

“A nightstick.”

“I use a sap,” she said.

I didn't know what she was talking about.

“A leather strap, weighted at one end.”

I nodded, mystified but beginning to understand.

“You carry a gun,” I said.

“In here,” she said, reaching one hand down to her briefcase. She was businesslike, her smile gone, realizing she didn't know me very well.

“An automatic, or a revolver?” I asked.

“A Beretta. An automatic. All the police are gradually switching to automatics. Military cops made the switch years ago. Automatics are much more reliable than they used to be.”

“So you know a lot about gun safety,” I said.

Her eyes shifted briefly to one side, and I could tell she was wondering about my mental state.

I told her about Merriman.

Two nights later I finally called Paula. I needed to talk to her, but before I could, there was a question I had to ask.