Sweetheart (22 page)

“Archie’s not here,” Susan told Bliss when she got back into the room.

“It took you long enough. Where did you get the gum?”

Susan’s phone rang. It was the
Herald.
She picked it up.

“Just met with editorial,” Ian said. “They’re excited about the blog.” He paused dramatically. “I’ve got the headline—
SAFE HOUSE DISPATCHES.
You have content yet?”

“Is the paper under pressure to bury the Molly Palmer story?” Susan asked.

Ian was quiet. She listened to him get up and close his office door. Finally, he said, “Yes.”

“Are you fighting for me?” Susan asked. “Behind the scenes?”

“I know you won’t believe it,” Ian said. “But yes.”

She believed him. Not because he wasn’t an ass, but because he was a journalist first. And then an ass. “I’ll do the dispatches,” Susan said. “But I want print. No more of this Web bullshit. And I’m only doing it because I want you to run the Castle story.”

“More people look at the Web site than read the paper,” Ian said.

“Oh,” Susan said. “I’ll post something in the next half hour.”

It was dark by the time Susan posted that day’s final blog. The police had determined that Gretchen had been having an affair with B. D. Cavanaugh, the guard who’d killed himself. And Gretchen had killed the female transport guard and taken off with the male one. If he was still even alive. Since Susan was sequestered she had to do all her legwork over the phone and by e-mail. With her mother on the bed next to her watching daytime TV. Bliss didn’t have a TV in the house on principle, and whenever she was around one she was completely transfixed.

Of course there were constant TV news updates about the manhunt for Gretchen. The way the TV newsies talked about it, you’d think they wanted her to get away.

Susan closed her laptop. Gretchen Lowell on the loose. Archie Sheridan just down the hall. There she was in the thick of the biggest story of the year. Her blog had gotten over a million hits. She should have been thrilled. But she couldn’t get Molly Palmer out of her head.

Susan slid the laptop onto the bed. Her legs were still warm from it.

“You’re going to get thigh cancer from that thing,” Bliss said, her eyes still trained on the TV news.

Susan stretched. “There’s no such thing as thigh cancer,” she said.

“Not yet,” Bliss said.

Susan felt stiff and tense and a little stir-crazy. “I need a cigarette,” she announced. “Will you distract Nurse Ratched?”

Bliss flicked her attention off the screen to Susan. “Who?” she asked.

“The cop in the hall,” Susan said.

“How?” Bliss asked.

Susan pulled on her sweatshirt. “Talk to him,” she said.

Bliss’s face creased with concern. “What should I say?” she asked.

Susan shrugged. “Ask him about windows,” she said.

Charlene Wood was yammering away on the television, as the screen showed images of the Beauty Killer’s victims.

“Are you sure it’s safe for you to go out?” Bliss asked.

Susan stowed her cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket of her sweatshirt. “Keep an ear out,” Susan said, pulling up her hood. “If Gretchen Lowell tries to get me, I’ll scream.”

It wasn’t even hard. Bliss went out and talked to Bennett and Susan was able to slip right down the stairs. Bennett was too engrossed to notice. Maybe he’d heard about the peace sign.

Susan was free and she had nothing to do. She didn’t have her notes. Ian wanted her at the Arlington for the blog, and as long as he had power over the Castle story, she wanted to keep Ian happy.

Susan lit a cigarette and inhaled. That first drag was the best. Her whole body relaxed a little. It was a bit like sex that way, always a relief. She tried to tell herself that she smoked because she liked smoke breaks—those forced little interludes of solitude and contemplation—but the truth was, she liked the nicotine.

The downtown ornamental streetlights had just come on and a couple of seagulls that had wandered in from the coast were squawking in the park. Portland was an hour from the Pacific, and Susan didn’t know why the gulls came so far inland, but they were always there, padding around the river, shitting on the esplanade, wandering the parks. A kid covered in tattoos and piercings flew by on a skateboard and the gulls barely gave him a glance.

It was in the high sixties, warm for evening, and pretty. The nighttime Pacific Northwest sky was a blend of pastels. There were lights on in some of the downtown buildings, late-night workers or cleaners or clandestine office affairs.

Susan took another drag off the cigarette. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the second drag was the best.

Molly had smoked Kools. Susan wondered if her estranged family was going to have a funeral service. If they did, Susan pledged to herself that she would bring a pack of Kools and put it in the casket.

A voice said, “You can’t smoke here, ma’am,” and Susan looked up to see the ghoulish Arlington Club concierge moving toward her waving his hand like a fan.

She glanced behind her to see if he was talking to someone else. Susan was, after all, standing outside. On a public sidewalk. Not bothering anyone at all. And she’d told him not to call her “ma’am.”

The concierge kept waving his hand. “Ma’am?” he said.

Susan took another drag off the cigarette. “Why not?” she asked.

“You’ll disturb the guests,” he said, as if it were obvious.

She gestured, with her cigarette, to the dark brick façade of the building, its green awning, the park, the cars on the street. “I’m outside.”

“But they have to pass you,” he said. He opened the big glass doors to illustrate. “Coming and going.”

Susan looked down at her cigarette. It needed ashing. But she was afraid to ash on the sidewalk in front of this guy. He’d probably make her clean it up. “Where am I supposed to go?”

He pointed across the street to the park.

Susan relented and ducked across the street and found a wooden bench that faced the Arlington. That part of the park had a decorative public water fountain and a low concrete wall with a medallion bearing Simon Benson’s profile on it. The fountains, so-called Benson Bubblers, were all over downtown Portland. The story was that Simon Benson, a turn-of-the-century Portland lumber baron, had the bubblers installed to discourage his workers from drinking beer in the middle of the day. Susan didn’t know if his plan had worked, but a hundred years later there were signs all over the park warning that alcohol was prohibited.

Susan ashed her cigarette on the hexagonal cobblestones beneath her feet. She smoked American Spirits. Molly was dead. And Susan was smoking. She needed to get back to Molly Palmer. The blog could wait. Writing a book about Gretchen could wait. She needed to stay focused. She needed to find a way to get the
Herald
to publish Molly’s story. She was growing more and more certain that Molly’s death wasn’t an accidental overdose. She needed to find out who killed her. And she needed to find out who was trying to cover it all up.

She was pretty sure that one line of inquiry would lead to the other.

A shaggy-haired homeless man came and sat down next to her with a bundle
of Street Roots
newspapers. He stank of grime and body odor, but Susan was determined not to react to it. He dropped the newspapers between them on the bench, sniffed the air, made a face, and turned to Susan.

“Do you mind?” he said.

“What?” she said.

“Not smoking.”

T
he beaver was three feet long and had been stuffed standing on its back paws, its tail a plate-sized flap on the carpet, head turned, as if he had just caught sight of something dangerous out of the corner of his eye. He’d been dead about a hundred years and his fur was molting, but there was a spark of fear in his black glass eyes that made him look almost lifelike. Archie could relate.

The beaver stood beside the maître d’s station in the Arlington Club Restaurant. Archie felt bad for the maître d’, because the restaurant was for members and guests only, and Archie had never seen more than seven people in there at a time. Mostly the maître d’ spent his time leafing through the leather-bound reservation book and, when he wasn’t doing that, picking up the tiny feathers that fell from the stuffed pheasant on the mantel and drifted to the carpet below.

Debbie glanced up at the buck’s head hung above the door to the dining room. “This place gives me the creeps,” she said. There was only one other table occupied for dinner, and the clanking of their silverware carried more than their voices.

“It won’t be for long,” Henry said. “A few more days.”

Debbie looked at Archie as if she wanted some kind of confirmation, a nod, something. They hadn’t talked about the previous night. What could he say? Sorry?

Archie looked at his plate.

After his visit with Rosenberg he’d spent a few hours at the task force offices trying to help with coordinating the manhunt, and the rest of the day at the Arlington Club, trying to seem normal for his children. Claire was upstairs with them now, so Archie and Debbie could have some time together. But they couldn’t even do that without Henry.

The food was all right. Archie took another bite of salmon drizzled in cilantro pesto, still avoiding Debbie’s gaze. Salmon was pretty much all they served. Salmon cakes. Salmon salad. Salmon fillet. Salmon steak. It was Copper River season, when hundreds of fishermen flocked to the head of the three-hundred-mile rugged Copper River in Alaska to try to catch the fish going upstream to spawn. That’s when the fish were rich with fat. The farther on their journey you caught them, the more damaged and tasteless they became.

Archie’s stomach churned and cramped. He had cut back on the pills before. He knew how the withdrawal started. He put down his silver fork and his white cloth napkin, pushed his chair away from the table, and stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he said.

Henry stood, too, intending to go with him.

They were too worried about him, and not worried enough about catching Gretchen. If it had been up to Archie, he’d have called in the army. But it wasn’t up to Archie. With the exception of his therapy field trip he’d spent the day under lock and key at the Arlington, not making eye contact with Debbie.

Archie sighed. “Are you going to watch me take a shit?” he asked.

Henry looked around at the vacant restaurant, the restroom within sight at the end of the room, then shrugged and sat.

“Thank you,” Archie said.

The men’s room had stalls with doors that shut. Classy. Archie finished up and washed his hands. The liquid hand soap smelled like lilacs. Or maybe he was just imagining it. He felt bleary from lack of sleep. His eyes looked yellow in the bathroom mirror. He used a real towel to dry his hands and dropped it in a straw bin below the marble counter.

The kid was waiting for him outside the bathroom door. He wasn’t a real kid. He was twenty, probably. Archie could see the hole in his lip from where he wore a piercing when he wasn’t at work. His white busboy jacket was starched flat and as he got close to Archie, Archie caught the harsh waft of fresh cigarette smoke.

The kid talked out of the side of his mouth, like he had a secret. “Your friend’s looking for you,” he said. “She said to wait and tell you when you were alone.”

The kid had a new piercing on the top of his ear, in the cartilage. It was just a tiny silver stud, lost under his hair and so small the restaurant management probably hadn’t noticed it. Archie wouldn’t have noticed it either except for the thin tear of blood that ran down the outer fold of the kid’s left ear.

Those sorts of piercings took a long time to heal.

“Where is she?” Archie asked.

“In her car in the alley.” The kid gestured behind them, toward a swinging steel door, as if it were nothing, as if he were giving directions to the mall. “Back there. Through the kitchen.”

Archie realized then from the sly spark in the kid’s eye that the kid thought that Gretchen was his mistress.

“You’re bleeding,” Archie said.