From Herring to Eternity (10 page)

Barron self-consciously neatened the pile, pushing the Fiji map back. He looked from me to Yutu. “I’ll talk to you about this later,” he said, and then his eyes snapped back to me. “I’m just under a lot of pressure right now. You probably should’ve called.”

“Apparently,” I agreed. “Sorry.” I turned to Yutu. “Lovely meeting you.”

“And you,” he said with a polite bow.

I smiled thinly at Barron. “Next time you come in, breakfast’s on me. That is, unless that’s too ‘pushy.’”

“No, it’s very kind—you needn’t have. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

That was a fumble-mouth bunch of words befitting a ham-fisted grave robber and likely anti-Semite. I left, trying to ignore the low burn in my stomach. The fresh lake air helped a little. Thinking about that map helped a little more. Fiji isn’t exactly around the corner from Hawaii, but it’s in the same South Pacific part of the world. There were probably a lot of ways over many years that map of that region could have made its way to Oahu. From Oahu to Nashville, Tennessee? Not so many.

Most importantly, why was the big lug so anxious about it?

I thought about those tunas Barron was telling me about at the deli. How many would he have to catch and drain to get enough mercury to kill someone? Could you even do that to a tuna? Was it like draining the oil from a can of sardines? Or did you run it through a press, like one of those old-time laundry ringers. Was there something in the nautical world that required mercury, something that would justify Barron possessing it? That would be easy enough to find out.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do that research now. I had a text message from Luke:

THOM WAS JUST ARRESTED

Chapter 10

I Bluetoothed as I drove.

Luke answered the phone. “Murray’s Deli.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“That lawyer came in and Thom hit him,” he said.

“You mean a slap? With her hand?”

“Side of the head with a bottle of Windex,” he said. “The big full one for the front door.”

“Aw, jeez. How are you guys holding up?”

“The girls are bussing their own tables—I’m on checkout,” he said. “We called Dani to come in. I run back to do dishes when I can.”

“Can you handle it?”

“If you don’t care whether the bill drawer is a little screwed up—”

“I’ll stop there first, help until Dani gets there, then bail Thom out,” I said.

“They cuffed her,” Luke said. “She was pretty badass, though. She was still yelling over her shoulder as they hauled her out.”

“Where’s the lawyer?”

“Gone,” Luke said. “I think he was afraid A.J. would come after him next.”

I hung up, hit the gas, and got there before the rush descended. The place smelled of Windex. Whether she’d whacked him hard enough to pop the top or to split the plastic bottle, that would have been a nasty smack. I made a mental note to check my insurance. I think I was covered for violent outbursts by employees. My uncle had had some wild people in his employ before Nashville got civilized, infamous waitstaff like Belle deJeune, April “Red” Dragon, who was a Marxist, and—I kid you not—a busboy named R. Tillery. I was glad they’d moved on to greater callings, like a professional lawn mower, an expatriate living in Paris, and—I kid you not—a librarian.

It was busier than usual, word of Thom’s exploits apparently having spread. The added crowd was mostly regulars who came to inquire as to her well-being and mental state. Most found it incredible that the serene, churchgoing Thomasina had snapped.

But not everyone: One was me; I saw how she had acted with Dickson during their first encounter. The other was Karen Kerr, who just happened to be getting out of jail while Thom was being ushered in.

Her six-foot, four-inch frame was hunched at the shoulders and her long blond hair hung carelessly around her lean-jawed face. She looked like Thor just back from a war with the Frost Giants.

We didn’t know each other well enough to do more than exchange looks and tentative how-are-you? smiles. She glanced at a menu and just sat there, staring.

I took over the counter from Raylene, who just looked at me like a lamb who’d lost Bo Peep. Which she had. Thom was a shepherdess to us all.

“What can I get for you?” I asked K-Two.

“A job,” she said.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“A Reuben with horseradish,” she said in a deep voice, coated with a trace of what sounded like New England—Maine, maybe. “And a chocolate milk shake.”

I wrote out the order, passed it to Newt. “Did you say you needed a job?” I asked.

She nodded glumly. “I need busywork. I don’t want to think.”

“Rough patch?” I asked, deciding to play dumb.

“Couple days in jail,” she said. “They thought I killed that guy up the street. Then discovered I didn’t. Then couldn’t decide whether I contributed to it. Then decided I didn’t. He blew his horn in my ear, startled me—like an air horn at a match, y’know?”

“I can imagine,” I said, though I really
couldn’t
conceive of what it would be like to be in a cage with a roaring crowd, air horns, and someone trying to put you in a leg lock or worse.

“I came here because I heard at the pen that Thomasina took a swing at someone,” she said. “She’s so sweet. Guy must’ve really been a jerk.”

“He
is
a jerk,” I said.

The woman’s blue eyes came up for the first time. “You know the dude?”

“I know him.”

The woman’s mouth twisted as she considered the information. Then her eyes went back down. “I’d go over to have a talk with him about not pressing charges, but—probably not a good idea right now.”

“No,” I agreed. “Not with the manslaughter thing you just got behind you.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “There’s a commission that’s part of the Mixed Martial Arts Federation. You get arrested, there’s a waiting period—like buying a gun—when you’re benched. I’ve got to wait for a formal hearing so I can present my case.”

“Even though the charges were dropped?”

She nodded. “The murder charges, not the assault charges.”

“But—the victim is deceased.”

“Right, but a committee still has to review the police reports, my own statement, all of that stuff.”

I slid over to take an order, then came back. “That’s a bum deal,” I said, trying to pick up the lingo.

“Seriously. I was never even
in
a prison before,” she said distractedly. “I mean, it’s bad for the career, but it would have been a good place to stay in shape. Nothing to do except push-ups, crunches, jumping jacks, and sleep.”

I moved to take another order, then returned.

“Speaking of what happened with Lippy, I am curious, though,” I said. “You didn’t happen to see anyone around you when he fell?”

She raised and lowered a shoulder. “Cops asked me that, too. Honestly? I was too surprised to pay attention. There was just this horn in my ear, a loud
blat
that made my elbow go sideways into his jaw, and he fell. Boom! I tried to grab him, but, I swear, it was like he was already on the way down when I turned. Which maybe he was, according to what I heard—that he was poisoned.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“From my lawyer,” she said. “When I thought about it later, it made sense. It was like he was having a heart attack or something and just screamed into his horn.” She shook her head as I handed her her meal. “Who would want to kill a musician? And his sister, too.”

“I think Tippi was an afterthought,” I told her. “I think someone killed Lippy to get his instrument case.”

She looked up again with her mouth full of corned beef, sauerkraut dangling from both sides. “What kind of sense does that make?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not a criminal.”

I took an order for old Michael Dickles’s matzo ball soup and dry rye toast on the other side of the counter.

“You really think that’s
why
this happened?” she asked, washing her big bite down with milk shake. “The case? You don’t think, maybe, someone pinched it for the money?”

“Why not just grab the cash, then?” I asked.

She thought for a second. “Because now that I think of it, there wasn’t any,” she said. “He was just starting the day.”

“But don’t these guys usually put a few bills in the bucket to encourage passersby to—,” I said, but my voice trailed off. “Except that Lippy was broke,” I said mostly to myself. “He didn’t even have coins to drop in there.” I wandered off to give Dickles his soup and toast, then drifted back.

“That means someone specifically wanted the case,” K-Two said.

That spun my attention back to “Robber” Barron, but only for a moment. The crowd was growing and I was busy for the next half-hour until Dani arrived. Young, wide blue-eyed, eager-to-please Dani Petunia Spicer. Thom was a surrogate mother to the kid. She blew in through the door so firm of purpose that if it weren’t for the nose piercing and spiky blond hair, I might not have recognized her.

She stripped off her coat like Diana Prince becoming Wonder Woman, locked eyes on me for a moment as she took my place, and said one word: “Go.”

I went.

I called Grant as I hurried to my car. He hadn’t heard about Thom’s arrest and—snapping into unemotional just-the-facts-ma’am policeman mode—he found out where they were keeping her, since I hadn’t asked K-Two where she had been held.

Like a car that has been towed
, I thought.
Just look it up, pass the info along, collect the bail.

“She’s at the Criminal Justice Center, 448 Second Avenue North,” he said. “Bail hasn’t been set—that’ll come down in about an hour, after a judge has reviewed the charges against Ms. Jackson.”

He was being cop-formal now, too. The woman who had always been “Thom” to him was now “Ms. Jackson.” What a tin-eared dope. He always was “the job” before “the lover.” I had just been too distracted by sex and companionship to see that.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, though,” he went on. “She’s not a danger to the community, no likelihood of flight, not charged with a serious crime, nothing drug related. And the officers confiscated the evidence—a Windex bottle?”

“Yeah. I don’t believe in generic.”

He didn’t get the joke. He never had.

“Anyway, I’m guessing it’ll be five hundred bucks.”

“Thanks,” I said, hanging up as I punched the address into my GPS. I didn’t feel like talking to him just then. Or maybe ever. Functional was the new boring.

I followed the calm, reassuring directions of the GPS voice, and pulled up to the six-story brick building that seemed darker and more dungeony than it probably was. I went to an imposing receptionist who sat behind bulletproof glass. She buzzed me into an area where an equally broad-shouldered lady clerk gave me a stack of papers to fill out. The pile of forms actually had weight that probably went to pounds rather than ounces. I was happy to see, announced right on the top of the first document, that I could charge Thom’s bail.

After nearly fifty minutes of hand-cramping detail—how did people have all this information, like bank accounts and phone numbers for the last five years, at the ready in the criminal era before cell phones?—my credit card was taken and run through, after which I was instructed to wait. Everything said here was a short, monotone order. What were those Star Trek aliens? The one with the hive minds? That’s who I felt I was with. I was informed that Thom was in a holding cell and would be brought to me. I stood—for a half-hour, it turned out—trying to think of what I would say to my poor, probably humiliated manager.

To my utter surprise, Thom not only came out proud, she was still angry. I could tell from the forehead-up tilt of her head and the tight line of her lips.

She was not handcuffed, but she was led by a big woman’s firm grip on her forearm. I thought, distractedly, that I should ask for a job application and pass it along to K-Two. She’d fit in with the Amazons I’d seen here so far.

“I hear they have good locks here,” I said.

It took a moment, but Thom got it and smiled. “Thanks for coming.”

The hefty guard didn’t leave until we were buzzed out and the door had clicked shut. “Thanks for coming to get me,” Thom said as we stepped into the sunlight. She winced. I offered my sunglasses but she declined.

“What happened?” I asked.

“That attorney baited me,” she said. “And I bit. He said he wanted to see you but I think he wanted to see me. I told him you weren’t there and he started talking about my brother, about how they’d take your house the same way, by eminent domain, because the witch women hadn’t registered their intent to open a temple—”

“That’s not how eminent domain works,” I said. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew
that
much.

“I know, but I just snapped, Nash. I think he rehearsed the whole thing. Didn’t take a minute, about as long as he would’ve had to wait to see you if you were there.”

We got in the car and drove back, me in thoughtful silence and Thom still venting. Over the course of the drive, she grew angrier at herself than at Dickson, alternately asking for the forgiveness of me and of Jesus, and—as she rambled—I think she actually became more and more enamored of the idea of being a martyr.

“That man is
bad,
” was the mantra to which she kept returning, as if she were playing priest and parishioner both, and that was the congregation’s response.

I knew that she would never get to be that martyr, of course, because the whole thing was a setup aimed at me. Sure enough, when we got back to the deli and Thom had taken up her post at the cash register—with happy smiles from the staff, which seemed to soften her mood considerably—I got around to checking my e-mails, and there was a message from His Academic Eminence to call him “at my earliest convenience, of course”—he was so proper and considerate now, I wanted to barf—to discuss “this morning’s unfortunate but not irreversible situation.”

The subtext, unwritten but unhidden, was: we’ll drop the charges against Thom if you let us into your house. Thom would never have heard of it, naturally, but they had to know I would never let her arrest stand.