Hard Rain (11 page)

“Me?”

“You have a nice life. You know that?”

“It's not so—”

“A nice car. A nice house. Nice sounds. Nice axes. Nice little girl. Where's your nice wife?”

“I told you. We're div—”

“You told me a lot of things. What does she look like?”

“Who?”

“Your wife.”

“I told you, we're not—”

“What does she look like?”

“Well, not bad-looking, I guess.”

“Nice tits?”

No answer.

“I said, ‘Nice tits?'”

“I suppose. It's been five or six years now.”

But Bao Dai knew she had nice tits. He'd seen from the garage. “How'd you ever give up tits like that?”

Zorro laughed, man to man. “Shit, they're not that good. And anyway, there're lots of girls around, you know. Women, I mean.” Zorro turned his head, and tried a man-to-man smile.

“I don't know,” Bao Dai said.

Silence.

“Your little girl have tits yet?” Bao Dai asked. He looked at her. Fast asleep.

“I wish you wouldn't talk about her like that. She's just a little girl.”

“That's what I said. A little girl. She's the same age …”

“Same age as who?”

“As my little girl.”

“But you don't have a little girl.” Pause. “Do you?”

“As my little girl would have been, asshole. If I'd had a little girl. And a wife with nice tits. You know what I mean?”

“I'm not sure.”

“You have a nice life—that's what I mean,” Bao Dai said. “Let's go.”

“Back?”

“Don't look back,” said Bao Dai. “Not you. Not while I'm around.”

“I meant where do you want to go?”

“You know.”

“It's far.”

“Far?” That was very funny. Bao Dai almost laughed. “You don't know what far is,” he said. “Drive.”

Zorro drove. The little girl slept. Bao Dai watched night turn to day.

“You're passing all the cars,” he said after a while.

“I am?”

“Slow down.”

“Sure.”

“You're still passing them.”

“I am?”

But it was too late. Red lights flashed in the mirrors. “You shit,” Bao Dai said.

“He wants us to pull over.”

Bao Dai took out the whalebone knife. He held it in his hand, covered with the tan suit jacket. “Then do it,” he said. “But if anything happens, it happens to her first. Understand?”

“Yes.”

They pulled over. A cop approached, bent over, looked in the open window. “Clocked you goin' seventy-five.”

“Sorry, officer.”

The cop peered inside the car, saw Bao Dai and the sleeping girl. “Nice car,” he said. “We don't get many of these hereabouts.”

The cop looked a lot like a platoon sergeant Bao Dai had known long ago. Maybe that's why he said, “You should hear the sound he's got.” The words just popped out.

The cop gave Bao Dai another glance. “Yeah?”

“Show him,” Bao Dai said.

Zorro switched on the music. It filled the car.

“The Doors, huh?” said the cop, cocking an ear. “Not bad. What'd it set you back?”

“The sound system?” said Zorro. “It came with the car.”

“And how much was that?” asked Bao Dai.

“Well, fairly expensive I guess.”

“Like what?” pressed Bao Dai. “Don't go all bashful.”

The cop and Bao Dai exchanged a quick smile.

“A little over thirty,” said Zorro.

The cop whistled. Zorro was looking at the cop. Bao Dai could see his eyes were full of pleading. The cop took mercy on him, but misread the plea. He tapped the roof of the car. “Okay, buddy. I'll let you off with a warning. But take it easy next time.” He walked to the patrol car and drove away.

When he was out of sight, Bao Dai said, “I don't like this car anymore. It's too … open.”

Zorro, holding his head in his hands, wasn't listening. “What do you want from me?” he said. “We can't undo the past.”

“We can give it the old college try,” Bao Dai replied. “Drive.”

They drove. The tape ended. The radio came on. A commercial for jeans.

“That's Daddy,” said the little girl. Bao Dai looked at her. She was wide awake. “Playing on the radio,” she added. She looked at him in a funny way and said, “Didn't you know he was a professional musician?”

Bao Dao couldn't say a word. It had never occurred to him that Zorro was anything, except rich. He listened to the guitar, and his whole body stiffened as the notes went by. He could have played them, every one, and just that way. And no other way—that was how he played. Exactly. That was his style.

“It's nothing really,” came the voice from the front seat. “Just a job.”

“You're too modest, Daddy,” the little girl said.

Bao Dai said nothing. Under the suit jacket he squeezed the handle of the knife, very hard, and kept squeezing it long after the commercial was over.

11

Kate was crying. The sound came from below. Jessie ran down the stairs. The basement was flooded. Kate's cries were louder, but still came from somewhere below. Jessie stepped off the last step onto the wet floor. There was no floor. She plunged into water over her head.

Jessie dove down through the blackness. Kate's cries grew louder and louder. Jessie kept swimming, down, down. Her lungs were bursting. She fought to hold her breath, groped with her hands, reaching for the bottom, reaching for Kate. The cries were all around her now, but her hands felt nothing. Then, when she could hold her breath no longer, her fingers brushed something. She grabbed it and kicked toward the surface. The crying stopped. She broke through into air, gulped it in. In her arms she held the cracked painting of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Jessie sat up. She was soaked, but with her own sweat instead of water. Daylight filled her bedroom, not the fresh light of dawn, but light already a little used. “Shit.” She was late.

Jessie hurried into the bathroom and fixed herself up, trying not to see the hollow-eyed image in the mirror. Then she went to the closet and pulled on the blackest thing she owned.

Outside, nature wasn't imitating the moods of man, at least not hers. It was a beautiful day, bright, sunny, almost hot. The smug man on the car radio told her it was cold and rainy right across the country, everywhere except the Southland, amigos. He seeemed just as proud to report that freeway traffic was heavy, the way Chicagoans secretly enjoy corruption scandals and New Yorkers get a kick out of muggings in Central Park.

Jessie didn't need the radio man to tell her about the traffic; she was stuck in it. She changed the station. The Levi's commercial came on. Pat played his ringing line. Jessie could see him turning his hips into the guitar body as he ran up the scale. Sure. Levi's. Hips. They knew what they were doing. She switched him off.

Jessie ran out of gas just before the Seal Beach exit. For a minute or two, sitting in the breakdown lane, she didn't even know what had gone wrong. Then she saw the gauge. “Shit, shit, shit.” She pounded the steering wheel, once, twice, but didn't cry. She was all cried out.

By the time she reached the cemetery, they were sliding the coffin out of the hearse. Everyone wore sunglasses. Everyone but her. She ran up and took one of the brass handles. No one objected.

Jessie helped carry the coffin to a hole in the ground. It didn't feel very heavy. Maybe that was because Blake manned the brass handle in front of hers; his broad back blocked her forward view. To the side were three pallbearers she didn't know and one she did: Noah Appleman, Barbara's son. He was three years older than Kate and lived in San Diego with his father, Sid. The sight of his thin arm straining under a blue blazer brought home to Jessie what was in the coffin. She squeezed the brass handle with all her might to keep her hand from shaking.

A Reform rabbi in a paisley tie spoke some nonsectarian words. Jessie stood around the edge of the hole with the others, feeling the heat. Her blackest thing was wool, bought long ago for a party at the Getty; she sweated into it, feeling inappropriately physical. The rabbi quoted Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim. He was a modern man. That meant he had no comfort to give. Jessie tuned him out. She watched Noah, standing on the far side of the hole, holding his father's hand. Sid wore a yarmulke, but it didn't hide his baldness. He'd had a full head of hair the last time Jessie saw him, six or seven years before; in that time, he'd become middle-aged, faded and stooped. Or maybe the whole change had hit him at once, in the past two days.

The rabbi finished speaking. It was very quiet, except for airplane noise trailing down from the sky. The rabbi nodded to a man in a soiled coverall.

“En bajo,” said the man. A machine lowered the coffin to the bottom. The man in the coverall tossed a spadeful of earth in after it. End of ceremony. A bulldozer waited nearby to do the rest.

“Jesus,” Sid said, glancing at Jessie as he passed her on the way to the parking lot. From that angle she could see one of his eyes, naked and helpless behind the green lens of his sunglasses. Noah climbed into the back seat of a big American car. Wife number two was waiting in the front, redoing her face in the vanity mirror. She bared her teeth to get the lip gloss just right.

“Jessie Shapiro?” said someone behind her. Jessie turned and saw a black-suited man taking off his sunglasses; the circles under his eyes matched the suit. “I'm—”

“Dick Carr. Barbara's partner.”

“We've met?” He put his sunglasses back on.

“Once. At her Christmas party a few years ago.”

He smiled. “No wonder I don't remember.” He held out his hand. She shook it. It was very wet. So was hers. “Got your daughter back yet?”

“No.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Barbara was very upset about it. She talked about nothing else that afternoon, what was it, Monday?”

“Monday.”

“God.” He looked out across the cemetery. Jessie followed his gaze. The bulldozer moved back and forth, back and forth, shoving earth into the hole. Dick Carr sighed. “I'd like it if you'd drop by the office some time. About Barbara's will.”

“Barbara had a will?”

“Of course. Don't you?”

“I've never seen the—” She stopped: the legs had been chopped off that argument.

Carr turned to her. “Barbara left the bulk of her estate—meaning the proceeds of the sale of her house and car, mainly, which should come to a nice little sum—to Noah. But there are small bequests of a more personal nature to two or three other people.”

“And I'm one of them?”

“Yup.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“What what is?”

“What she left me.”

“I'd prefer you came to the office.”

“All right.”

Carr drove off. So did everyone else. The rabbi was on his cellular phone before he was out of the lot. In the cemetery, workers rolled strips of grass over the earth and maneuvered a square gray stone into place. When they had finished and gone, Jessie walked back along the crushed rock path and stood in front of the stone. “Barbara Ann Appleman.” The dates of her birth and death were carved below the name. She hadn't quite reached thirty-five. Jessie had a wild vision of overturning the stone, clawing down through the earth, ripping open the coffin, pulling Barbara out. That brought back the dream of Kate. The two visions closed on her like a vise, paralyzing her in front of the marble marker, as though she'd been turned to stone herself.

When, how much later she didn't know, Jessie finally found the strength to move, she backed away and bumped into someone standing behind her. Spinning around she saw a big, dark man with a heavy beard.

“Don't,” she said, raising her arms.

“Don't?” said the man; and then she recognized him: Lieutenant DeMarco.

Jessie lowered her arms. “I'm sorry.”

“You're a little jumpy.”

“I said I'm sorry.”

He nodded, then looked at the gravestone. “She was something,” he said.

The thought that Barbara might have slept with DeMarco popped up in Jessie's mind. It was an unpleasant thought; perhaps that sharpened her tone a little when she asked, “Have you found her murderer yet?”

“Murderer? Isn't that a bit strong? The most we ever shoot for in hit-and-runs is vehicular homicide. And that's in flagrant cases. With witnesses. Here we've got no witnesses. No leads.”

“You do have leads. I explained to the officer that someone flashed headlights at me earlier that night. Later, when Barbara went out, she was wearing the same yellow—”

DeMarco held up his hand; it was big enough to smother her whole face. “I've read your statement.”

“Then you're involved in the investigation?”

“I'm keeping an eye on it.”

“Does that mean it's being treated as murder?”

“I answered that already. I'm keeping an eye on it because Barbara and—because I knew her personally.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did you think about my statement?”

His eyes shifted. Jessie could see he'd expected something else, maybe a question about Barbara. “You mean the part about you being the intended victim and it all having something to do with your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't give it much credence.”

“Why not? My daughter disappears with my ex-husband. Then my best friend gets killed wearing my raincoat. Doesn't that make you suspicious?”

“Look, this is hardly the time or place for an argument.”

“No? You think she'd mind?” The words were out before Jessie realized she'd pitched her voice a little higher—like Barbara's—and jabbed her thumb at the gravestone, the same way Barbara jabbed hers.