Endangered Species (24 page)

its braids, falling over her breasts like spiderwebs.

Frozen in his tracks, Dijon continued to hold on to the paper.

"You barge into my home"-Schlessinger stepped over the mess of the

coffee table with the speed and grace of a young athlete"you badger me

with bullshit"-she stalked across the narrow room toward the paralyzed

firefighter-"and you snoop through my mail."

With that, she snatched the letter from Dijon's fingers ." Out.  Get

out.  Out of my house."

Anna turned and fled, the unsubtle pounding of Dijon's boots half a step

behind her.

"Holy shit, what was that;?" Dijon asked when they'd completed their

ignominious retreat and sat again in the sanctuary of the pumper truck

." She's crazy as a loon.  Mrs.  Ted Bundy.  Like I'd want to read her

frigging mail.  It was laying there.  Christ, a blind man would have

been able to read it.  What is her problem?" Dijon was babbling, creepy

laughter mixed with his words.

"She was higher than a kite," Anna said.

"On Nestea?  That's all it was.  I've got a nose like a bloodhound."

"Not alcohol.  Cocaine, maybe.  Crack.  Could be meth or just

old-fashioned speed.  Something.  Her pupils were almost invisible and

she was wired so tight she hummed."

"Damn," Dijon said ." I didn't think old people did drugs."

"Old people invented drugs."

"Witches and shit." Dijon shuddered.

Anna crossed herself ." Just in case you're right," she said when he

looked surprised.  She fired up the truck and backed out the fifty yards

of driveway.  There was room to turn around but she wasn't comfortable

with her back to Marty Schlessinger.

Only once before had she had such a sense of malignancy.  It was when

she worked in Texas at Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  She'd pulled

over a blue sedan for speeding.  The sun was high, the road public, and

Anna well armed.  The sedan had two occupants.  The driver was a woman

in her late thirties, weighing close to three hundred pounds, with

small, very dark eyes.  The passenger was a wisp of a woman somewhere

between seventy-five and a thousand years old.  Her eyes were the same

beetle-back black.

As Anna approached the driver's-side door, she'd gotten a real bad

feeling, as if some odor of pure evil poured out the open window.  She

didn't even ask the woman for her driver's license.  All she said was:

"Slow it down please," and, "Have a nice day." God knew what was in

their trunk and Anna didn't want to.

Whether it was ESP or PMS, she never found out, but she'd never been

sorry she turned tail and ran.  Today she'd gotten a whiff of that same

scent in Schlessinger's shack.

GNOI%ING the blaring headline, "POLICE CAPTURE SUSPECT IIN BABY KILLING"

shouting up from the paper on the table in front of him and nearly every

other rag in the room, Frederick sat in the pub on Ninth Avenue waiting

for Molly.  In the three days he'd been in New York it had become

"their" place.  At least in his mind .

Along with titillating excitement was a rising tide of self-contempt.

He'd found a reason to lunch with Dr.  Pigeon Saturday, meet her for

dinner Saturday night and brunch Sunday.  Today he'd called the Chicago

office pleading the flu and, to the tune of $220 a pop, reserved another

couple of nights at the Parker Meridien.  He'd worked harder than a

roomful of hot new recruits tracking down the leads he had on the

threatening letters.

In seventy-two hours he'd lost control.  It started over drinks the

first night.  Sometime between salad and coffee at Saturday's lunch he'd

slid over the edge.  Love at first sight?  He scoffed, making a small

noise he passed off as a cough, not wanting to call attention to

himself.  As if talking to oneself were cause for comment in Manhattan.

There was an apt definition of love at first sight floating around the

Enmail circuit: when two horny but not particularly choosy people meet

for the first time.

Chemistry?  Biology?  Maybe simple neurosis.  Anna was getting too

close-and at his ardent behest.  Promises had been, if not made,

certainly implied: letters written, laughter shared, a future together

strongly hinted at.  Was this just panic, this sudden infatuation that

gripped him as if he were a boy of fifteen?  And not merely over a jean

or a Janet or a Judy, but with Anna's sole and beloved sister.

Not aware he did it, Frederick buried his face in his hands, a parody of

the tortured soul.  Though he was aware logic-not to mention everyone he

knew-would see this dramatic shift of affections as a psychological blip

on his aging radar, in his heart there was a romantic arrogance

demanding it be True Love.

He was ashamed.  On some level he was aware of that.  The telitale sign

was secrecy.  Like a lovesick coed, he wanted to talk al)out Molly but

kept her name a mystery, even when he talked with his daughter, Candice.

Frederick lifted his head and took a long pull on his Scotch, then

checked his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace to see if his

histrionics had made his hair clownish.  He downed the rest of his drink

and signaled the waiter to bring him another.

Soon, he knew, the process of his exoneration would begin.  Bit by bit

he would change what needed changing.  Each time he told himself the

story he would come out looking a little cleaner.  Frederick's judgments

were cruel, damning.  Years before, he'd learned how to keep them from

turning and cutting him.  After the process was complete and he was once

again whole, there would be only a scar.

Anna would hate him.

She was proud.  She'd never let on.  Like Mary Tyrone in A Long

's Journey into Night, she would forgive but she would never t.  Respect

would die.  Touched by betrayal, memories would be smuted from gold to

lead.

With something akin to desperation, he pawed beneath the paper he'd been

pretending to read to find the folder.  When selfanalysis came close to

an unpleasant truth, Frederick turned his mind to his work.  It was what

he was good at.

None of the leads Molly provided him with went anywhere .

James Lubbock, the man angling for disability, had sued and won, this

time claiming a back injury.  His hostile wife, Portia, had been happy

to tell Frederick more than he'd ever wanted to know about the Lubbock

union.  The money, not surprisingly, was still not enough, but the

Lubbocks were on to other scams and had forgotten Molly Pigeon's

unprofitable sense of ethics.

Sheila Thomas, the not so gay divorcde, was head over heels in love with

the lawyer who had gotten her such a lousy settlement, and quoted Dr.

Pigeon the way the newly converted quote Jesus.

Thomas bored him.  The page tired his eyes.  His concentration

splintered.  Though his head didn't ache, Frederick rubbed his temples.

His train of thopght was derailing, Molly Pigeon, or his sudden

attraction to her, filling his mind.

When emotional lightning strikes once, it's easily passed off as the

real thing.  By the third or fourth hit, the possibility it's a neurotic

pattern and not love had to be considered.

There'd been a woman in California, a married woman, he'd made a fool of

himself over.  Much, he suspected later, to her great if adamantly

denied delight.  A lawyer in Oregon he'd thrown himself at, only to run

like a scalded cat when she began to talk commitment.  Then Anna: Anna

had been slow and sure.  Time had passed, they knew one another.  It had

been, he'd told himself, Real.

And it had been blown away over lunch by this new wind that Molly

breathed through his soul.  Frederick laughed aloud, no longer concerned

that others might stare.  Maybe the Scotch was kicking in. "Soul" might

be a little less specific a part of the anatomy than that which was

acting as lightning rod.  Intellectually, he knew Molly might be another

symptom of whatever: a choice between the tedium of having and the

endless potential in wanting.  What saddened him was that he didn't give

a damn.

Anna was fading.  just like that, dissipating into a vague fog the way a

dream will on waking.  A memory that ached only occasionally, like a bad

tooth when he bit down on it.

The light Frederick saw himself in was rapidly becoming less than

flattering.  Forcing himself to sit up straight, he fixed his mind on

the work before him.

Nancy Bradshaw, the smasher of lamps, had proven a bit more of a

challenge, but the end result was no more promising.  She'd moved to

Vermont.  Assuming correctly that someone as volatile as Molly had said

Bradshaw was would have little patience with posted speed limits,

Frederick had traced her through outstanding traffic tickets.

Miss Bradshaw's new employer told him she had been vacationing in

Ireland for three weeks and wasn't due back till Thursday .

That effectively let her out of the picture unless the plot was

ridiculously convoluted, which was seldom the case.

Nancy Bradshaw's defection left Frederick fresh out of ideas.  In his

mind's eye he'd seen himself hauling the perpetrator off in chains after

a suitably Schwarzeneggeresque rescue of the imperiled heroine.  Failing

that, he'd hoped to have a fait accompli to lay at Molly's feet.

The pub door opened and Dr.  Pigeon walked in.  Frederick saw her

through a haze of Scotch and rose-colored glasses.  Her suit \?"as

perfect, cool white linen with a salmon blouse of what was undoul)t edly

silk, soft to the touch.  Despite the heat and the time of day, she

looked fresh.  In the moment that she paused, scanning the tables for

his face, he noticed how pale she was, the slight crumpling of her

features.  Molly Pigeon looked afraid.

Frederick's first rush of feeling wasn't compassion, it was

satisfaction: she needed him.

wA WAS 17EELIN(; bereft.  The guys, including the usually raational AI,

had gone jogging.  Anna had escaped, though not unscathed.  Gender and

age had been touched upon with good-natured ridicule.  Rick had been

closest to the mark; Anna wasn't so much lazy as genetically skinny and

congenitally opposed to profitless exertion.  Dijon had offered to chase

her with a girl-hating reptile of some sort to give the exercise a

point.  Anna had declined his generous offer and slipped away to the

ranger station for an uninterrupted evening with AT&T.

Neither Molly nor Frederick was home.

She'd called both three times over the past hour and three times had

hung up without leaving a message.  A message was a commitment.  If she

called again afterward it would prove she was (lesperate, or worse,

pathetic.  The etiquette of phone tag had grown more complex with the

advent of the answering machine.

Anna broke off another chunk of a Nest]& Crunch and chewed it slowly.

Lights off, she sat in the chief ranger's office, her feet on his

agonizingly tidy desk.  It wasn't merely cleared of debris; everything

was lined up in precise rows, like men on a chessboard: tape dispenser,

stapler, electric pencil sharpener, each a careful two inches apart and