Portland Noir (20 page)
Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes (thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor … me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment—“
One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal … One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath … One star: you’re not even good at sex.”
I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was
Jerk
and changed the clue to
Mark Aikins, e.g.
Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.
Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.
Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pat-tio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked, having symptoms consistent with salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.
He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma—an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.
My father was a Virgo.
In their glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.
In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read the heartfelt plea, “
Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry.
”
Dad pulled out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.
And Tanya? Even after the story in the
Oregonian
—from which I hoped she’d at least glean the depth of my feelings for her—I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.
This time, however, it was different. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d begun to worry that my little prank had somehow caused her to become sick. And I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t want that for her. I really didn’t. I sat in my car down the street and gazed up to our third-floor corner window, just hoping to get a glimpse of her. It’s winter now and the early night sky was bruised and dusky. Our old condo was dark. It crossed my mind that maybe she had moved, and I have to say, I was okay with that. I had just reached down to start my car when I saw them walking up the sidewalk, a block from the condo. Tanya looked not only healthy, but beautiful. Happy. The big, dumb, sensitive, cheating chef was holding her hand. And I was happy for her. I really was. She laughed, and above them a streetlight winked at me and slowly came on.
There was a line in the newspaper’s apology that stunned me, describing what I’d done as “
a kind of public stalking
.” I shook when I read that. I suppose it’s what Tanya thinks of me too. Maybe everyone. That I’m crazy. And maybe I am.
But if you really want my side of the story, here it is:
Who isn’t crazy sometimes? Who hasn’t driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn’t haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn’t toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence e-mail, watched the phone praying that it will ring; who doesn’t lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else?
I mean, Christ, seriously, what love
isn’t
crazy?
And maybe it was further delusion, but as I sat in the car down the block from our old building, I was no longer wishing she’d take me back. Honestly, all I hoped was that Tanya at least thought of me when she read our page.
I really do think I’m better.
And so when I started the car to go home, and they crossed the street toward Tanya’s condo, I was as surprised as anyone to feel the ache come back, an ache as deep and raw as the one I felt that night in late October when I first saw the lamp go out.
I told the other officer, the one at the scene, that I didn’t remember what happened next, though that’s not entirely true.
I remember the throaty sound of the racing engine. I remember the feel of cutting across traffic, of grazing something, a car, they told me later, and I remember popping up on the sidewalk and scraping the light pole and I remember bearing down on the jutting corner of the building and I remember a slight hesitation as they started to turn. But what I remember most is a spreading sense of relief that it would all be over soon, that I would never again have to see the light come on in that cold apartment.
BY
C
HRIS
A. B
OLTON
Powell’s City of Books
J
acob Black catches the kid’s reflection in the window of the bookstore coffee shop and can tell right away he’s the one. He knows nothing about his potential client—the brief, terse e-mail exchange only led to Powell’s City of Books as the meeting place. Jacob IDing himself by the pile of books next to him:
The Big Sleep
,
The Maltese Falcon
, and
The Postman Always Rings Twice
.
The client picked the titles. Not exactly subtle.
The kid appears in the large doorway separating the Gold Room from the Coffee Room, wearing an oversized army coat with anarchy symbols and a giant messenger bag spattered with dried mud, carrying a dirt-crusted bike helmet, and whipping his head around like someone’s hollering his name. Sitting at the window despite a roomful of empty tables, Jacob follows the kid’s reflection in the glass and for a moment considers leaving the books and walking right the fuck out of there.
Jacob Black is used to trouble. A guy who finds clients by answering craigslist ads for obscure jobs like “cat walker” and “breast feeding for adults” deals exclusively with trouble and the sorts of people who deeply embroil themselves in it. To seek out the kind of person who knows about Jacob Black, and where to place the ad and what to put in it, requires a level of desperation that may cause cancer by close proximity. But this one—this kid in his early twenties, soft and clueless, a Reed College trust-fund brat who likes to dress up and pretend he’s living in the gutter—this blend of trouble smells too strong.
The kid finds Jacob before he makes up his mind. “Are,” he begins—but has to swallow, nearly chokes on it, and starts again. “Are you him?”
“I’m he,” Jacob says. “Sit down, you’re making the coffee nervous.”
The kid perches on the next stool and tries to size Jacob up. Jacob himself would admit he isn’t much to look at: a face that hasn’t seen a razor since Portland last saw the sun, T-shirt and khakis that look and smell like he yanked them from the bottom of his dirty laundry pile (which is, in fact, his only laundry pile), and a disheveled head of unruly hair that used to be dark blond but has turned muddy with gray.
“So, uh, what’re you exactly, like, a private detective?”
“I’m a guy who does jobs. You got one?”
The kid glances around, as though he could spot anything suspicious if it were there. “What’s your rate?”
“It varies.” The kid gives the coffee shop another scan and Jacob says, “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to tell me what the job
is
.”
The kid chews his lip, sucks it under his front teeth, chews some more. Finally he lets out the breath he’s been holding. “I got something that someone wants.”
“Don’t be specific or anything. Just give me lots of pronouns.”
He reaches into his army coat, produces a heavily wrinkled manila envelope with a small, square bulge only a few inches long. “It’s a videotape. Wanna know what’s on it?”
“Nope.” Jacob stands, launching the kid’s eyes, hands, his whole being into a frenzy of frantic motion. “You blackmailed some asshole, now you want me to be your bag man? Fuck off.”
“Five hundred,” he whispers in desperation. “Half now, half later.”
Jacob turns away, all set to walk and never look back. The kid reaches into the other side of his coat and flashes the cash. “I’m good for it.”
Jacob plops back onto his stool.
The kid spits out the rest in one breath: “There’s a reading upstairs, ten minutes. The guy’ll be in the audience. His coat’s folded up on the chair next to him, with the money under it. You sit in the next seat—take his coat, then leave yours in its place with the tape underneath.” The kid reaches into his messenger bag and hands Jacob a brown Members Only jacket. “That’s it. Come get your two-fifty.”
Jacob thinks it over. Plays it out in his head, looks for all the flaws, every conceivable way this goes sour. He finds a dozen in under ten seconds.
The kid presses: “No risk, either—it’s totally in public.”
“It’s a
book reading
. I’ll be lucky if we aren’t the only two people there.”
The kid counts out 250 dollars, slaps the cash into Jacob’s hands. “I’ll wait for you in the Mystery section. Who’s your favorite writer?”
“Michael Connelly.”
“That’s where I’ll be. You come find me, okay?” The kid is half-sitting, half-standing, one foot solid on the floor, both eyes scrutinizing Jacob. “Okay?”
He holds the envelope out. Jacob pockets the money, thinking about his empty cupboards back home, and grabs the envelope from the kid’s clammy fingers. Thinking,
This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done
.
Knowing full well it isn’t.
Jacob arrives a few minutes early for the event. He walks up three flights of stairs, marveling—as most do—at a four-story bookstore that encompasses an entire city block. Each room is color-coded, which either makes things easier or more confusing, depending on how readily you associate gold with genres like Sci-Fi and Romance, purple with Military History and Philosophy, and orange with Cooking and Business.
He remembers dating a woman who worked here back in the late ’90s, wonders if she’s still around. Her name lost to him. Probably wouldn’t recognize her anymore. Pierced, tattooed, dyed Goth hair, and a fondness for industrial wear back then; now she’s probably got a house, family, hybrid car, and those Mom jeans that turn a woman’s ass into a denim landing strip.
Jacob enters the Pearl Room wondering what’s “pearl” about it, why “pearl” and not “silver,” not that there’s any silver to speak of, either. A few rows of folding chairs fill the Basil Hallward Gallery next to the art books. A dais is set up beside a cart loaded with books to be signed—though, judging by the half-dozen people scattered about the seats, they won’t sell many copies tonight. Jacob glances at the author’s name—no one he recognizes—then pretends to be extremely interested in a 200-dollar book containing photographs of fat men in diapers.
He finds his mark instantly—a tall, muscular black man with curly hair cut close to the scalp and shoulders so broad and thick they need their own chairs. The guy sits in the back row, a high school letterman’s jacket neatly folded on the seat beside him. Tight short-sleeve button-up shirt tucked into faded blue jeans. Beige hiking boots. Cell phone in a holster clipped to a leather belt.
What interests Jacob even more is the man hovering by the shelves of remaindered books. Black leather jacket, T-shirt tucked into dark blue Levi’s, sunglasses resting on the back of his head. Military-style buzz cut and a thin mustache. And he’s “reading” an oversized book about Gustav Dore while discreetly scanning the room.