Dead Letter (22 page)

"You can’t go in, yet," the surgeon said
as we walked up to the room. "But you can see her through the
window in the door."

I peered inside. She was lying stiffly on the bed.
Her head was wrapped in a turban. The flesh around her eyes was a
sooty black. Cords ran from different places on her arms and torso to
a big bank of monitors and screens. I was sorry I ’d looked. She
seemed irreparably wounded lying there, so far from help.

We went back to my apartment. Lurman sacked out on
the couch and I tried to get some sleep in the bed. But I kept
feeling her beside me, as she’d been the previous morning, and
seeing her in that hospital room—wired like a failing motor to that
bank of machinery. Before dawn, with the wind shaking the windows in
their frames, I got up and called the hospital to check on her
condition. It was the same. There wouldn’t be an update until nine.
I set the alarm for nine-thirty and fell into an I exhausted,
dreamless sleep.
 

19

One drunken night many years ago, a friend of mine
and I were sitting at a bar talking nonsense and he said to me, in a
voice full of liquor and the pompous silliness of the moment, "If
you could only choose who you end up caring for." I forget what
I said. And he probably would have been happy if I’d forgotten the
whole discussion. Because it was one of those mock-epic nights that
men treat themselves to instead of to a good cry, and the
conversation was filled with that self-satisfying bathos that sounds
stirring when you have a few drinks in you and just plain dumb when
you don’t.

Still, it was a good question. For which I didn’t
have an answer. And as I sat in bed, with the pale morning light
streaming through the dormer window, I wondered if I had chosen the
girl or she had chosen me or whether it was just the usual sort of
disastrous pairing that scientists attribute to auras and body
language and the rarities of scent. It shouldn’t have happened—not
after the way we’d begun. Not after Kate and Sean. And it might not
last after the Lovingwell case was finished. I might not be able to
tolerate her theatrical style or she my dogged earnestness. But when
I called the hospital and found that she was improving, I felt a rush
of affection for Sarah L. and a sense of relief that was not just a
matter of guilty conscience or fellow-feeling. She’d made me feel
alive again the day before—after six months of emotional
hibernation. And I wanted her to be well again. I wanted to make her
well again. Which, I knew, was dangerous and possibly degradingly
sexist. But it was what I wanted early that Saturday morning.

And mixed with the affection or the relief was a
terrible sense of anger and a vicious desire to be revenged on Lester
Grimes. Of course, I probably knew that it was me I was angry with—I
mean, at some level, I knew that I was, in part, to blame. But you
don’t need a psychiatrist to learn that that kind of guilt gets
transferred quickly to another party. And after the way she’d
trusted me and confided in me, I felt an awful need to find that
other party fast. To find him and to kill him, as he had tried to
kill Sarah and me. I guess it was the misplaced confidence, or what
had turned out to be misplaced confidence on Sarah’s part, that
infuriated me the most. After all the betrayals, all the injuries she
had apparently endured at the hands of her father and mother, she
didn’t need the final injustice of Sean O’Hara’s death on her
conscience. Of course, we all have a life, Harry, I told myself. We
all catch our share of the crap. Only the night  before somehow
went beyond the notion of a "share" toward some sort of
dreadful fatality that I couldn’t abide and that Sarah couldn’t
live with. Not and remain sane. So Grimes had to be found;
Lovingwell’s killer had to be found; and the girl had to be
convinced that she was not to blame in either instance. Not for the
death of a friend or for having hated a man who might well have
deserved her hatred.

I started the day with a sense of mission—dressing
and shaving quickly—and found that Lurman, who had less reason, was
already dressed and sitting on the recliner.

"I’ve had better accommodations," he said
acidly and stared at the couch as if it were a bed of nails.

"Next time, guard somebody with a bigger
apartment."

"How’s the girl?" he said.

"Good."

He smiled and sat back on the chair. "I don’t
suppose you’ve got anything to eat around here?"

When I said "no," he got to his feet and
walked over to the door. "Then allow the FBI to treat you to
breakfast. As the saying goes, it’s the least we can do."

We drove to a pancake house on Clifton and planned
strategy over waffles and coffee. It was a crisp, clean morning. The
night’s snow was banked high on the curbs. We could see it through
the restaurant window, where it sparkled at the feet of the oaks and
maples in Burnet Woods.

"At least, we’ll have the weather with us
today," Lurman said. "At least, we’ll be able to see what
we’re up against."

"I doubt if he’ll show today. He’ll keep a
low profile—for awhile, at least. Maybe by tonight we’ll be the
ones in control."

"Your idea——about contacting Chico
Robinson—you still want to follow through with it?"

I nodded. "I figure you can take the club and
the Friends of Nature. And I’ll take Chico and the Muslims. Between
the two of us, we ought to come up with somebody who’s willing to
help us find Lester Grimes."

"I don’t know about splitting up," Lurman
said. "Alone, Harry, you’ll make an easy target."

"Not in the West End or in Avondale or wherever
the hell the Muslims make their home. A six-foot, nine-inch white man
won’t be hard to spot on Twelfth Street. Anyway, contacting
Robinson is a long enough shot as it is. With an FBI man along, it’ll
be impossible."

"I still don’t like it," he said bluntly
and made a serious face to indicate that he’d meant what he said.

I knew that, behind the face, Lurman was telling
himself that if I got myself killed the FBI would be out of clay
pigeons and he’d probably be out of a job. But that was all right.
I’d come across that same combination of decency and self-interest
in other cops. It was no different in kind than the back-slapping and
back-stabbing that goes on among the personnel of any highly
competitive organization. As ambitious men went, Lurman wasmore
likeable and more honest than most. The concern wasn’t all show.
But he was an ambitious man, who’d suffered a bad black eye the
night before. And that part of him knew that splitting up would give
him some time to mend fences. It would also give him the chance to
look into Lovingwell’s security file. Nobody loves a spy more
dearly than the FBI does; and digging one up, even a dead one, would
get Lurman back into grace quicker than prayer.

He searched his soul for a few minutes and stared
moodily into his coffee cup and finally said, "Al1 right. We’ll
split up. But, for chrissake, Harry, don’t get yourself killed!"

At ten-fifteen I followed Lurman over to the
clubhouse on Calhoun. He went in and I stayed out in the Pinto,
waiting for Chico Robinson to arrive or depart. It was a long wait in
the cold; but around eleven-thirty, he pulled up outside the club in
an old Caddy with Hermes as a hood ornament and a side panel that had
been stripped and primed in gray. He looked virtually the same as he
had on Tuesday afternoon—a light-toned black man in his early
twenties with a thin, wispy beard and mean eyes. He was wearing a
black arm band over his green combat jacket. And that gave me hope.

Robinson ducked into the club and came scurrying out
once he’d spotted Lurman inside. He stood beside the car for a
moment, making up his mind, then hopped back in and headed west on
McMillan. I followed him in the Pinto at a dead pace, crawling down
the street the way security cars do when they make nightly rounds.
Robinson worked his way down McMillan to the Parkway, then south on
Liberty into that region of worn houses and low brick projects that
is the westside ghetto.

As many times as I’ve driven through it, the place
still chilled me. It was a place to chill any good burgher’s soul.
Cinder lots and broken fencing. Rubbish piles full of pint bottles,
cigarette packs, and rotting refuse. The brick tenements not just
run-down, but exhausted of hope—like houses in Hell. And, of
course, the faces—black and vacant as the abandoned cinder lots.
The old-young faces of the boys on Liberty, playing hockey on the ice
with sticks and a can. Old men at a bus stop whose tired faces had
begun to peel away, the way dark paint flecks away from weathered
wood. Fearful and fearsome types. The effects or the talents of fear
everywhere. Even in the children playing in the snow.

In time I got to the heart of it—Central Avenue at
Twelfth Street, like the worst studio mock-up of a slum. Gutted
buildings and tired shops, all of them like abandoned kiosks, dotted
everywhere on their facades with old posters and snow-matted
advertisements.

Robinson pulled over in front of one of them and got
out. The sign above the door read "Pool." I kept driving,
up to a gas station at Eleventh, where the tough black gas jockeys
looked at me as if I’d dropped from a star.

There was a phone booth on the south side of the
station. I got out of the Pinto and made my way through the pieces of
scrap and snow-covered tires to the booth. Once inside, I felt oddly
secure—out of the weather and that other, fiercer weather, like a
season within the season, that I felt all around me. I dialed the
Hi-Fi Gallery and, when Bullet came on the line, I told him where I
was and what I wanted him to do.

He didn’t say anything for a minute. "You want
me to come down there?"

"That’s it," I said.

"How long you been knowing me, Harry?" he
said. "Six, seven years? All you ever see is me in the store or
me in the bar. Just like a white man. Right? That’s the way I
wanted it. When I go back down there, man, I go alone. And I don’t
ever go white."

"It’s my life we’re talking about, Bullet,"
I told him. He thought it over—what it would cost him in pride and
credibility against what it could cost me in blood.

"I’ll meet you at that gas station in ten
minutes," he said. "And don’t go wanderin’ around."

Some of the men inside the pool hall knew Bullet from
his football days. They nodded casually to him as he walked by. Then
they saw me and their faces filled with hate. There were ten or
twelve of them leaning against the walls of the main room, and a half
dozen more loitering in the lobby. Robinson might have been there. I
couldn’t tell. It was so dark and smokey I couldn’t see all of
their faces and those I did see I didn’t look at long. Bullet said,

"Wait out in the lobby, Harry." And I
walked toward the rear of the main room. I walked back out to the
alcove, where the boys were leaning against the walls. One of them
straightened up when he saw me. I turned away and pretended to study
an old photo of Elijah Muhammed, and not to see the black kid as he
came up behind me.

"Wha’chu doin’ here, man?" he said in
quick, sharp, sing-song voice. "Wha’chu want ’round here?"

"He lost his way," one of the kids on the
couch said.

"He look like he lost his way," another one
said.

"Is that right?" the one behind me said. He
prodded me in the ribs, hard. "Hey! I’m talkin’ to you."

I turned around and looked at him.

He was nineteen, maybe twenty. His hair was braided
in corn rows and he was wearing a black dashiki over a pair of jeans.
His face was as black as the dashiki, except for the whites of his
eyes which were the yellow of raw egg yolk.

"You got a tongue?" he said.

"What do you want me to say?" I asked him.

"Say your prayers," one of them said and
they all laughed.

"That’s it. Say goodbye, man," the one
standing in front of me said. "How much money you got?"

"I’m not giving you any money."

"Oh, you ain’t? Well, maybe, you change your
mind in a minute."

I stared at him. He’s just another smart-ass kid,
Harry, I told myself. All bluff. Only that’s not the way it felt—in
that dark, rank room. I put my hand in my coat pocket and he jumped
back.

"Wha’chu got in there? You carryin’ iron in
there? You best not pull no iron around here, man. You dig?"

We stared at each other for another minute, until
Bullet came walking back through the door. He had Robinson with him.

"Back off," Bullet said to the black kid.

"Wha’chu mean ‘back off,’ Tom? I be
talking to the dude here."

"Cool it, Lucius," Robinson said.

Lucius looked angrily at Robinson. One of the other
boys walked up and took him by the arm.

"Let’s go, man," he said.

"I be talking to the dude," Lucius said to
him.

 
Robinson walked over to me and said, "Just
get the hell out of here."

I walked out into the street, where the air was full
of the smell of snow and the spicy incongruous smells of rib joints
and chicken shacks. For a second my legs felt rubbery and I was torn
with the impulse to run—as fast and as far as I could—away from
that dark, dangerous place.