Simon Said (16 page)

 

"You're probably right. Personal involvement is never a good idea. Speaking of which, aren't the two of you going to a ball game tonight?"

 

"Yes, but we're just friends, too," Julia said. "And speaking of ball games, I've got to go home and change. See you tomorrow."

After Julia left, Otis Gates got up and closed the miniblinds between his small glass cubicle and the rest of the department. Everyone knew that meant he wanted a few minutes peace to think. Gates sat down at his desk and lit one of the three Marlboros he allowed himself a day. He dragged on it happily. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out two battered drumsticks, with "Otis" woodburned on the shafts. With the cigarette dangling from his lips, he played the rhythm section from that classic gospel song he had heard Aretha Franklin sing twenty-five years ago at Fillmore West. He supplied the words and melody from memory. "When you're down and out, when you're feeling blue . . ." He closed his eyes and visualized her in a white satin dress with big yellow roses at her magnificent bust, singing her heart out. "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down." What a belt the woman had.

Gates began to taste filter, so he regretfully opened his eyes, put his sticks away, and crushed the cigarette stub in an ashtray. He carefully wiped the ashtray clean with a paper towel over the wastebasket. Then he put Simon's accident file into the stack of files labeled OPEN. The last thing he did was open the miniblinds before giving himself to his job again.

Chapter Sixteen

AFTER HE FINISHED WORK THAT DAY, SIMON GOT HOME WITH barely enough time to shower, shave, and feed Maybelline before Julia McGloughlan pulled up in front of his house and honked.

She was driving an old black two-door BMW with creased leather upholstery. He slid into the passenger seat next to her.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked. "Aren't you exhausted? If I'd been through what you have, I'd be in bed curled up in a fetal position under the influence of Ernest and Julio's best."

"Actually, I'm not tired at all. Must be adrenaline," Simon said. "Or maybe caffeine and sugar."

Julia pulled away from the curb, backed into a neighbor's driveway, turned around, and headed for the highway and the thirty-minute drive to Durham Athletic Park. She was relieved that Simon hadn't asked to drive. She could avoid her long spiel about how this was her car and why shouldn't women drive men, et cetera— which always sounded defensive and neurotic. It shouldn't matter who drove. It was just that a man wouldn't give up the wheel of his own car, so why should a woman?

Simon, oblivious to all this feminist soul-searching, was comfortably stretched out in the seat next to her, pretending to listen to the Schubert emanating from the classical radio station she was tuned to.

Actually, he was looking at her. She was wearing a sleeveless gold shirt tucked into black jeans, along with well-worn running shoes without socks. Large gold hoop earrings hung to her chin, and sunglasses dangled from a strap around her neck. Simon had resolved earlier not to make too much of this date. The woman had learned the most embarrassing details of his private life from a police file, and he didn't want to know what she must think of him. Now that they were together, though, he couldn't ignore the attraction he felt for her. He wished he'd thought of something else to do. She probably would have preferred a nice dinner somewhere.

When they pulled into the outskirts of Durham, she asked for directions to Durham Athletic Park. Simon guided her downtown, past the high school, and into the maze of factories and warehouses that comprised the tobacco industry of Durham. They negotiated parking along the shoulder of a narrow, weedy side street where the odor of menthol permeated the air. Then they walked two blocks to the baseball park, which was wedged into a triangle between buildings painted royal blue out of respect for the team that had played there since 1939.

Simon and Julia waited in line for tickets with dozens of other couples, some young, some old, and some in between, all dressed in jeans or shorts and Bulls T-shirts. It seemed as if all the couples were holding hands or snuggling, and Simon was self-conscious. What did thirty-something people do on a first date, physically speaking?

His lack of adult dating experience just added a new dimension to his selfconsciousness. Reserved seats cost six bucks each. With food and beer, he would be lucky if he spent thirty dollars tonight. What a cheap date. And he had forgotten his stadium seats. Even in the reserved section, the old concrete bleachers would numb their butts in five minutes flat. He wondered if Julia would give him another chance after this fiasco.

In a reserved lady-lawyer way, Julia bopped to the rock 'n' roll that was blaring from the park's loudspeakers as they walked down the narrow concrete steps to their seats, which were just on the third-base side of the netting that stretched over the bleachers behind home plate.

"What a fantastic place," she said, sitting down and looking around. "I had forgotten what a happening a baseball game is. This is a great spot for foul balls. I should have brought my glove. And I need a Bulls baseball cap. Have they got them for sale anywhere?"

Simon's spirits revived.
"Wait right here. I'll be back."

Simon went up the steps into the concessionaires' domain and bought a Durham Bulls baseball cap, a T-shirt, two cheap foam seat cushions, two souvenir programs, and two beers in plastic cups. He returned to their seats with his booty.

"Let me repay you for this stuff," she said as she put on the T- shirt and cap. "No way," Simon said. "This fabulously expensive evening is my treat."

They drank their beers and settled back to watch the show. Simon thought there was nothing so satisfying as the view from behind home plate looking out over the baseball diamond when the ballplayers fanned out onto the field. That combination of visual spectacle, the sounds of the crowd and the calliope, and the perfection of a warm, clear Carolina evening produced an indescribable sense of well-being in him. Simon doubted that even fifth-century Greeks watching the chariots wheel into the hippodrome at Olympia with the Temple of Zeus as background had experienced such harmony. It was probably ridiculous to compare the oratory of the ballpark announcer to Pindar reading his poetry between the discus and the marathon, but Simon made the comparison anyway—just to himself.

Most sports fans love the game they once played, and for Simon the thwack of the ball on the bat and the thunk of it in a glove brought back dreams of glory. Simon had played high school varsity baseball, but his college career ended ignominiously. He could catch, throw, and run, but he only weighed 130 pounds, and that was after Thanksgiving dinner. The coach thought he'd get killed on the field, so Simon warmed the bench until he got tired of wasting his time. From then on, he was just a fan.

"How's the food here?" Julia asked.
"Is that a hint?" Simon asked.
"I'm famished," she said.

"The food's incredible—flying burritos, pizza, hot dogs, ribs, fries. Real fries—the kind with the skins still on."

 

"Oh God," she said. "I'd be happy with just the fries."

"We have to have ribs, too, to keep up appearances," Simon said. He negotiated the narrow steps and aisles and walked to the Dillard's Bar-B-Q stand at the far end of the left-field bleachers. He waited in line with about two dozen other hungry fans. The smell of roast pig, barbecue sauce, and homemade french fries overwhelmed his other senses and his reason. By the time he reached the head of the line, he had lost all dietary restraint. He carried back cardboard platters heaped full of ribs, fries, cole slaw, and magnums of sweetened ice tea. Simon sometimes felt guilty eating pork, but his conscience vanished when he took his first succulent bite, dripping with the eastern-style barbecue sauce that was mostly vinegar and hot sauce.

They both happily cleaned their plates. Julia insisted on making the trip to the trash can, and she came back with two more beers.

 

During a lull after a Bulls home run, Julia brought up the subject that was on both their minds.

"I'm sorry that last night when I called you at the hospital I couldn't tell you anything about your accident," she said. "I just couldn't, no matter how much I would have liked to. Sergeant Gates hadn't finished his investigation yet. He hadn't talked to you. It was a confidential matter."

"It's okay, really," Simon said. "I understand that professional ethics were involved." "But you're irritated anyway."

"Not with you, or anyone else, really. It just gives me a queasy feeling that all these people I know were talking about me to a policeman and I didn't have a clue. It makes me feel uncomfortable."

"You couldn't be told anything until after Gates talked to you."

"Why? Because I was suspected of attempted suicide and you didn't want to tip me off ? Gates wanted to surprise me with what he knew, in hopes I would slip up and admit it?"

"Well, yes, exactly."

"He surprised me all right. Shocked the hell out of me is more like it." Simon remembered the rush of adrenaline that had almost knocked him down when he saw the apparatus under his car, and the way the room had tilted when Gates told him his psychological stability had been questioned.

"Do you agree with his conclusions?"

 

"Vandalism is the only thing that makes sense to me. Alex Andrus has a serious grudge against me, but he would be too scared of the consequences if he got caught."

"The way it was done convinces me," Julia said. "What a stupid method. First of all, it wasn't likely to work. And the hose under the car was so obvious. So I don't see how it could be a serious attempt on your life, by you or anyone else."

"I can't think why anyone would want to hurt or threaten me."

"You'd be surprised what some people would murder for," Julia said. "There are probably a dozen people within five miles of here who would kill you for five bucks if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Still..."

"Say you ran into a panhandler near your house. He asks you for money, and you turn him down. Maybe he's mentally ill anyway. He hangs around the neighborhood so he knows where you live. He's furious with you and the world, so he plays a terrible trick on you."

"He's a sociopath."

"That's right. Or let's say you're a very unpopular guy. Everyone who knows you thinks you deserve to die. Or you're a good person, but you are innocently thwarting someone. Like that assistant professor who tried to convince Sergeant Gates that you were mentally ill—he wants something you have."

"But he has an alibi."

"That's right. Which gets to my main point—you can't start with consideration of motive when you're investigating a crime. You have to figure out how the crime was done, who had the opportunity to do it, and voila, the motive will become apparent."

"This is interesting. My colleagues accuse me of being too emotionally involved in my research all the time. So I have been trying to figure out why anyone would want to kill a nineteen-year-old woman in 1926, when I should have been coldly and unemotionally gathering facts."

"Absolutely. Of course why is more fun than how and when. On TV, the detective always walks into the crime scene and hollers out, 'Who had a motive?' In real life, the police are wary of motive as a starting point. What they want to do is to eliminate everything that couldn't have happened, then analyze the rest."

"Did you pick all this up in law school?"
"No. From a famous London consulting detective."
"Who?"

"Sherlock Holmes, idiot. It's from The Sign of Four. 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' He also said that it is a 'mistake to theorize before one has data.' And we have damn little data to theorize from."

"That may change," Simon said. He told her about the classified ad he'd placed in the newspaper, his conversation with the unfriendly florist, and his plan to find some lucid contemporaries of Anne Bloodworth.

"If the florist doesn't cooperate," Julia said, "maybe I can do something official to shake their phone numbers loose."

"Like what?"
"I have no idea, but I'll think of something."

The Bulls won the game in a most satisfying manner. They scored six runs against the Kinston Indians, which meant the famous mechanical bull in the outfield got to spew smoke and fire, to the delight of the fans. There was also a fifth-inning triple play and a seventh-inning grand-slam. The ballpark lights came on precisely at dusk, and the cool night fell just as the ninth inning began. Simon could not have ordered a more perfect minor-league evening.

Once they had picked their way carefully through the ballpark traffic and navigated the maze of one-way streets in downtown Durham, Simon and Julia drove home uneventfully. The modern freeway lined with streetlights and exits could have been anywhere in the United States, but Simon knew that rural North Carolina lay just past the glass buildings and fancy hotels of Research Triangle Park.

Out in the county, almost every house had a tobacco allotment or a livestock barn next to it, and the whole town went to church on Sunday mornings. Double-wides sat on lots next to huge brick houses built by guys who made a fortune feeding chickens for Perdue or Holly Farms. No one cared, because if God had wanted the county zoned, he'd have done it himself during that first week.

Out in the country, men came home from their day jobs and picked tobacco or fed the pigs. The women drove school buses in between doing their regular chores and going to the church to set up and cook for the Wednesday-evening service and supper. They spent their vacations selling barbecue and fried dough at the state fair every year in a booth marked with the name of their town and the words FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH so they could raise the money for a new church roof or an organ. This was where you couldn't get elected dogcatcher unless you were a Democrat, your daddy was a Democrat, his daddy was a Democrat, and everyone bragged that they voted a straight Democratic ticket. Mysteriously, though, the Republicans had carried the state during national elections since 1960. No one seemed to be able to figure that out.