Utterly Charming (4 page)

“Are those necessary?” Nora asked in the same tone she had used with Blackstone.

The cop visibly flinched but nodded. He snapped them on Blackstone’s wrists.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked.

“Downtown,” the first cop said.

“Not the Beaverton station?”

“We’re better equipped for this kind of criminal downtown, ma’am,” the cop said.

This kind of criminal. She shook her head. “My client is not a criminal.”

“All right,” the cop said. “We’re better equipped to handle this kind of
alleged
criminal downtown.”

Now she remembered why she had avoided criminal work. It was so that she wouldn’t have to deal with cops. “I’m coming with you.”

“No!” Blackstone said.

“I told you to be quiet,” she said.

“And I need you to find Sancho. We need—”

“One more word,” she said, “and I’ll gag you myself. You will not speak unless told to by an attorney.”

“I promise,” he said, “I won’t say another word, if you promise you’ll find Sancho.”

“I’m going with you to the station,” she said.

He shook his head. “You’re my attorney, aren’t you?” he asked. “You have to do what I ask.”

Technically that was correct, but it was also her job to save her clients from themselves. The cops were watching the entire interaction with great interest.

“I promise to say nothing at all until you tell me when I can speak again, if you find Sancho and secure the case.”

She didn’t know what he meant by “secure the case” but she was sure she would find out. “All right,” she said, wishing she had another choice. She probably did, but damned if she knew what it was. If he chose to speak without an attorney present, that wouldn’t be her problem. She didn’t do defense work. “But I won’t meet you at the station. I’ll be sending one of my colleagues.”

No sense in using Max’s name since she hadn’t yet spoken to him. Blackstone smiled, full wattage. It hit her like a beam of light in the darkness. That smile was as powerful as she had fantasized it would be. She almost had to take a step backward.

“Thank you,” he said, then he let the cops lead him away.

She watched. He was taller than the cops, but not by much. He only seemed taller because he stood so straight, even handcuffed when most people would have been humiliated.

Amazing how she could find him attractive, even now.

She brushed a strand of hair out of her face. The smoke was making her woozy. She adjusted her purse strap, and walked across the green lawn. Amazingly, none of the ash and burning debris had fallen here. The cops were still bent over the corpse, and as Nora passed, she paused to look.

The corpse was of a slender older woman with jet-black hair and a streak of white off the right temple. Her face, which might have been beautiful in life, was frozen in an expression of such malevolence that it took Nora’s breath away. The woman’s hands were splayed at her side, her legs bent, and her expensive dress torn. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who normally frequented the suburbs.

She also didn’t look dead. She looked more like she had—stopped—freeze frame, the way someone would pause a movie.

One of the cops moved in front of Nora, blocking her view. And she let him, feeling a bit odd lingering here. The fires were not spreading anymore, but it would take a long time for them to burn out—at least that was what one of the firefighters said as he passed behind her.

She walked across the sidewalk and down the curb. As she passed the microbus, the passenger window rolled down a crack. A tiny face pressed against it. Sancho.

“I’m going to your office,” he whispered.

She suppressed a sigh and didn’t even nod as she passed him. The last thing she wanted was for the cops to investigate the microbus. Who knew what they would find inside? She couldn’t believe they hadn’t cordoned it off as part of the crime scene. It was as if no one seemed to notice it. No one but her.

She climbed over hoses and returned to her own car. It was covered in a film of ash. As she settled into the driver’s side, she turned on the wipers. The ash smeared all over the glass.

The cops said Blackstone had destroyed a neighborhood and maybe killed a woman. She didn’t believe it. Was that because she had spent the last two weeks fantasizing about him? Or was it because she had some innate belief in the goodness of people? Or was it because this feeling that she had—that she had had from the beginning—that this was a decent man was growing stronger instead of weaker?

She started the car and executed a series of small Y-turns in the tiny space, careful not to run over any hoses. Why didn’t she see this destruction as something awful? It looked as make-believe as the dead woman, the one who looked as if she had been a video stopped midframe.

Whew. Nora had never thought she was one who practiced denial. At least, she hadn’t thought it—until now.

***

Before Nora drove to the office, she stopped at a pay phone just off 217 and called Ruthie. Ruthie asked if Nora had heard about the disaster in the west side suburbs, and Nora said, yep, she’d heard. No sense telling Ruthie that she’d been in the middle of it. Ruthie would panic, and Nora would spend the next few minutes calming her instead of getting business done.

And she suddenly had a lot of business, although she doubted she’d be paid for it.

Not that it mattered. Some part of her really thought Blackstone was being framed. By whom and for what, she didn’t know, but she was convinced of it.

She had Ruthie set up a conference call with Max, and while she waited on hold, she brushed ash off her blazer. There was a lot of ash, and as she brushed, she changed the color from a faded blue to a dusty gray.

When Max came on, she told him about Blackstone (“You’re kidding about the name, right?”) and asked him to go to the police station. Max sniffed money immediately and all the fame and publicity a good local defense attorney wanted. He agreed to go the police station before Nora had told him about the dead woman. She was left holding the receiver, Ruthie on the other end, asking her if she was all right.

Nora lied and said she was.

She was shaking as she drove back to her office, shaking and slightly woozy from the smoke. Her nylons were ripped, and she didn’t know how she had done that. She smelled like charred wood, and she doubted the smell would ever come off.

The traffic was horrible—backed up for miles as people gawked at the smoke and pulled aside for the emergency vehicles. Nora ran a hand through her hair, and her fingers came away covered with dirt. She was filthy, but she couldn’t go home. This might be her only chance to meet Sancho.

She was a bit amazed she hadn’t told Max about him. The police would be looking for Sancho, particularly after Blackstone’s three requests that she find him. The little man would prove important to all of this, she knew that somehow. But she didn’t know exactly how. And she didn’t relish meeting with the man without Blackstone around.

Still, she couldn’t stay away either. She was too involved. If Sancho told her something pertinent, she would send him to Max. It was the least she could do.

So after this meeting, the problems would no longer be hers. She would bill for these few hours—any attorney would, right?—and then she would get on with her life and not think about the case at all, except maybe a few phone calls to Max, and those would be an excuse to talk to him, not necessarily to find out about Blackstone. She would act as if nothing unusual happened. Not that she would succeed, of course. She knew, deep down, that this afternoon had changed her life.

But in the spirit of pretense, she flicked on the radio to focus her mind on something else.

Instantly a shrill female voice, filtered through a phone line, grated on her nerves. She was about to flip away when a professional radio voice broke in and clearly hung up on the caller.

“Crackpots,” the announcer said. “We have a situation, and all we get are crank calls.”

“Several dozen of them, though, Dave,” said a professional female voice. “Don’t you think we should pay attention to them?”

“No,” Dave said. “To recap, there’s been an incident…”

He started to describe the neighborhood she had just left, adding nothing to what she already knew. Fortunately he didn’t have Blackstone’s name and he didn’t seem to know about the dead woman. At that moment, the radio was reporting that no one had died. In fact, it said that no one had even been injured and that all of the residents had seen the trouble brewing and had been able to leave as the fires started.

“…another caller from the neighborhood,” the female announcer was saying. “And this one we both happen to know. It’s Rick Ayers, our morning news announcer. Rick?”

Traffic had slowed to a crawl. Nora had turned on Highway 99, but it seemed as if all of Tigard was at a standstill. In the westbound lanes, traffic had completely stopped as the police tried to prevent anyone from heading to Beaverton. She didn’t know what was causing the tie-ups in her eastbound lanes. She just wished it would end. She wanted to get out of here.

“Stephanie.” Rick-the-Morning-News-Announcer’s voice crackled over the phone lines and through Nora’s radio. “Even though Dave thinks the other callers are cranks, they aren’t.”

Nora felt a shiver run down her back. It was a warning shiver. She turned up the volume.

“Come on, Rick,” Dave said. “Two people fighting with fire that gets out of control? A big wild fireball battle like something out of Tolkien? We’re supposed to believe that?”

Now they really had her attention. Nora glanced at the radio as if she could gauge its truthfulness just by looking at it.

“’Fraid so,” Rick said. “I was across the street. I got the kids out and down the block as fast as possible. There were two people involved—a man and a woman. The man had been coming out of the woman’s garage. He had a glass case shaped like a coffin in front of him, and there was something inside it. That’s what caught my attention. He wasn’t carrying the case. It was floating in front of him.”

Glass case.
Nora gripped the wheel tightly. Blackstone wanted her to talk to Sancho about the case. Not his court case. A glass case.

“And what were you drinking this afternoon?” Dave asked. It didn’t sound like banter.

“I wasn’t drinking anything,” Rick said.

Behind Nora, a horn honked. She glanced in her rearview mirror and saw a red pickup and its driver waving his fist. Then she looked forward and realized the traffic had started to move again. She drove, the muscles in her shoulders so tight that it actually hurt to move the wheel.

“The guy put this case in an orange and brown Volkswagen bus,” Rick was saying. Nora resisted the urge to close her eyes. “And then this woman comes out of her house and lobs a ball of fire at him.”

“A ball of fire, Rick?” Dave asked.

“The size of a basketball,” Rick said, unperturbed. “The guy deflects it, and it lands on a neighbor’s house. That’s when I got the kids and sent them down the block, knocking on doors.”

“You sent your kids into that mess?” the woman, Stephanie, asked.

“It was smarter than staying inside,” Rick said. “Believe me. The entire neighborhood fanned out. I think we got the place evacuated by the time the firefight started in earnest.”

“According to the police, you did,” Stephanie said.

“What does ‘started in earnest’ mean?” Dave asked. The man was a bulldog. Nothing could sidetrack him. Maybe he saw the morning news anchor slot opening up. He had to be thinking:
If I can discredit old Rick here, I’ll be getting drive time
.

Nora was finally at full speed, heading toward downtown. She drove like a madwoman, not sure if she wanted to see Sancho now or not.

“They were throwing fire at each other like kids throw water balloons,” Rick said, “and the fire was landing everywhere but on them. It was ugly and scary and—”

“I hope you were hiding somewhere,” Stephanie said.

“There was nowhere to hide,” Rick said. “Most of us had moved to the far side of the block, but the way that fire was flying, we were no safer than we had been up close.”

Nora took her usual exit. It was dark, even here. The smoke had settled over the valley.

“So, what?” Dave said. “Someone was passing hallucinogens through your neighborhood this afternoon, and everyone had the same bad trip?”

“No—”

“It sounds more like David Copperfield came to visit,” Stephanie said and laughed.

“Really,” Rick said. “It happened. I’m not lying to you. My neighbor Alex, he took out one of those camcorders and…”

Nora pulled into the underground parking garage near her building and lost the radio signal, just like usual. Another thing she didn’t like about the garage.

The fluorescents glowed as brightly as they did at night. It felt like night here, with the overcast caused by the smoke. She drove past the usual decrepit cars to her parking space. There she shut off the car and leaned her head against the steering wheel.

The thing was, she believed this Rick, this voice on the radio who claimed he had seen two people hurling fireballs at each other. She believed him, and she knew, without a doubt, that one of those people had been Blackstone, and that somehow, Blackstone had killed his opponent after he had stolen a glass case from her, a glass case that he wanted Nora, somehow, to help Sancho with.

What she didn’t know was whether believing all of that made her as crazy as she was afraid it did.

She sighed and sat back up. Her eyes were swollen, her throat scratchy, and the entire car smelled of smoke. Those were the facts. That was all she could know. From there on, she would have to see what happened. No supposing, no guessing, no relying on disembodied radio voices for her information.

Her father used to call her ability to set aside her beliefs as great a magic trick as the ones he used to perform. She still missed him, more than she wanted to admit. The Great Maestro, Portland’s best birthday entertainer, who had always wanted to be something more, who had always wanted, in his heart of hearts, for the magic to be real. That was why her mother left him; not for the lack of money or the hand-to-mouth existence, but her father’s stubborn belief that, beneath the tricks and the sleight of hand, real magic did exist.