Blinded

FORTY-SIX

Sometimes momentum rules. I’d been pointing toward Indiana’s bull’s-eye, so I kept going that way. I had some lunch in a Shoney’s by a gas station, went and saw the Speedway just for the hell of it, and then backtracked downtown so I could be near the RCA Dome. I parked the car in a motel lot a few blocks away, checked in for one night, and started strolling over toward the immense sports stadium, waiting for some inspiration from the dead woman who had worked there. What was her name? Julie Franconia. Yeah.

But I got no inspiration.

Nothing. Julie wasn’t talking.

My pager vibrated once again against my hip.

I knew it was him. I walked another hundred yards or so before I bothered to look at the screen.

It was him. Another faux 911.

First I kept my promise to Lucy, called her, and told her where I was spending the night. She didn’t have anything new for me. Then I called Alan.

The second the phone started ringing, I was already regretting phoning him back. “What?” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I was still walking. It turned out that the Dome butted right up against downtown Indianapolis. I liked that. Sports should be part of things, part of a city’s life, not some suburban reverse-doughnut thing where the arena is surrounded by acres of open space that are used to park a gazillion cars twenty times a year. There was even a nice green park with a big fountain outside the front door of the RCA Dome.

Cool.

“I’m sorry,” Alan said again.

By then I’d walked around the corner, ducked under a sky bridge that linked the stadium with a garage, and stopped in front of a nice old church with twin copper steeples. I sat on the steps.

“I’m in a church,” I said to Alan, lying. “I’m hoping it will make me be nice to you.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“You said that. Next.”

“If that was being nice to me because you’re sitting in a church, I’m glad you’re not sitting in a topless bar.”

I laughed. It was a good comeback. “A titty bar would be way too much stress on my heart. Truth is, I’m actually on the stoop of the church. Not inside. God may be occupied with the folks who made it all the way inside, so be careful.”

“I shouldn’t have accused you.”

“Accused me? You shouldn’t have even considered me. I play hard, but I don’t play dirty. I might be tricky, but I don’t cheat.”

“I know. I was wrong.”

“Is that it? I got to go.”

“Where?”

It was actually another good comeback, although Alan probably didn’t realize it.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking of going up north and seeing Simon.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Seeing my kid? It’s always a good idea. Always.”

He didn’t skip a beat. He asked, “You want to tell me what’s going on with Sherry?”

“Nope.”

My pager vibrated again. I was about to turn the damn thing off. I lifted it off my hip and held it at full arm’s length from my eyes. Even that far away I could barely read it. I said, “Gibbs is paging me. Now I do have to go.”

“What does she want? Call me back.”

“Right.”

“Detective Purdy? I’m scared.”

Her voice did something to me.

It was something unfamiliar. I stood and moved two steps higher on the church stoop. That didn’t feel quite right, so I moved back down and settled my fat ass one step lower than when I had started. I wasn’t sure precisely what I wanted God’s help doing at that moment, but I was aware that it might be something He wouldn’t be eager to assist me with.

“Yeah?”

“I think he’s alive. I do.”

I assumed we were chatting about Sterling. “You think he’d come after you?”

She said, “No, not really. But maybe, I guess. God, what a thing to say.”

As she implored the deity, I craned my neck upward toward the pointy ends of the steeples.

“Where are you, Gibbs? Are you at home?”

“No, I checked into a hotel.”

I guessed she would be at the Boulderado. I saw her standing near one of the tall windows in the new wing of the downtown hotel, her body softer than soft behind the gauzy curtains. “Which one?”

“The Boulderado,” she said.

Arguably Boulder’s finest, and the first place Sterling would look for her after he determined she wasn’t at home. The very first. Gibbs’s judgment was impaired. That wasn’t news. A lot of experience had convinced me that all battered spouses have impaired judgment.

Just like all squares have corners.

“Maybe not the best choice,” I suggested.

“Do you think he’s coming?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

“Over these years he hasn’t hurt me, he’s hurt them.”

“Them?”

“The women he was… you know.”

“Screwing?” I felt my pulse jump as though my heart had a turbocharger. Seventy to one-seventy in three seconds flat.

I thought she mumbled, “Mmm-hmmm,” or something like it.

“The women he killed… he was… having affairs with them?”

“I don’t want to…”

I found a fleece-lined version of my don’t-fuck-with-me voice and used it like an exposed blade against her throat. I said, “This isn’t the time to get coy with me, Gibbs.”

“Yes,” she blurted. “Yes.”

“Do you know of others? Other women? Besides the ones who are in the news already?”

“No one else.”

She had hesitated. Damn it. The pause was subtle, but it felt like a stomp on the foot to me. She was lying.

I didn’t want her to be lying to me.

Her next words seemed to come out of her like a tabby’s purr, all soft and comforting. She said, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Do you think he’s out there? Do you?”

I inhaled slowly, as though I could somehow detect the scent of Gibbs’s perfume in Indianapolis’s air. All I got was a lungful of bus exhaust. “Until someone finds his body, you can’t be sure he isn’t. I always tell people to trust their fear. It’s usually pretty good advice.”

“The FBI called and asked me about Brian Miles.”

Gibbs’s change of direction was abrupt. I felt like I’d just tripped over something. I regained my balance and asked, “Yeah? What did you tell them?”

“What I told you already. That Brian and Sterling had whored around together. And that I didn’t like Brian.”

“You didn’t tell me that. That you didn’t like Brian.”

“He wasn’t nice to women.”

“No?”

“No.”

“How wasn’t he nice to women?”

“Maybe I should go to Denver instead of staying here. Or go up into the mountains.”

Way out in front of my eyes I spied a couple of dots that needed connecting. I asked Gibbs, “What business is he in? Brian Miles?”

“Electronics.”

“Huh? Like TVs? Stereos?”

“No, microelectronics. Stuff I don’t understand. Do you like the mountains?”

I stumbled again trying to keep up with her. Gibbs was clearly accustomed to having men follow her wherever the hell she decided to go. So what did I do? I followed her, too. I asked, “Have you considered Safe House?” but I was still pondering Brian Miles and microelectronics.

“Actually, I was thinking Vail. Or maybe going back to Corona Del Mar and staying with friends.”

Gibbs was definitely Vail. Not Aspen, Vail. Not the mountain, the village. She’d be right at home in Vail Village.

Through the phone I heard a horn honk loudly.

“You have a room on the Broadway side?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Close. I’m on the alley.”

A siren blared by.

“That ambulance was really moving,” I said. “They usually don’t go that fast on Broadway.”

Gibbs said, “I wish you were here, Detective. I’d feel safer.”

It was the tabby’s purr again, vibrating gently against my fragile heart. I stood and stepped down the church steps. My feet felt like they were disappearing into sand. Lifting them-left, right-took extraordinary effort.

I made her feel safer.I made her feel something good.

I made her feel.

“Call me Sam” was what I said. Or just call me glib. Was I tempted? Yeah. Heading back to Colorado’s high country to play bodyguard to Gibbs’s princess sounded just fine to me. The impulse to go felt wrong. It did. But the sense that it was wrong came and went fast, like the roar of a passing stock car.

A homeless guy was sitting hunched over in the recessed doorway of a building just a few yards from the church steps.That,I thought,is what hope looks like as it’s dying.

I tried, but I couldn’t pry my eyes off him.

As a way to break free from the suction of his gravity, I pulled out my wallet and fished out ten bucks. I dumped the bill into the hat that sat upside down between his antique Air Jordans. He didn’t even look up to check the identity of his benefactor, but a remarkable sleight of hand allowed him to suck the bill up into the sleeve of his ratty corduroy coat so fast that my eye lost track of the money.

I realized that quick-as-a-burp he’d replaced the ten with a single and that I’d been had. I hadn’t contributed some needed charity to a homeless man, I’d made an unwitting payment to a skilled urban busker.

Gibbs broke into my reverie. “Detective?” she said. “Sam?”

She called me Sam.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“If I decide to move somewhere else, I’ll call you from Vail or wherever I am. I hope you have something for me when we talk again.”

Me too. Me too.“Me too,” I mumbled.

“I can pay you, you know, to protect me. I can. I’d like you… here.”

“That’s not it,” I said. “I’m working on something here that might help.”

She sighed. “ ’Bye, Sam.”

“ ’Bye.”

Where was I planning on finding whatever information it was that I planned on giving to Gibbs? That I didn’t know.

I found myself again distracted by the costumed magician who had my hard-earned money up his sleeve. An elegant, elderly woman wearing a fox stole walked by, slowed, and threw a handful of coins into his hat. For a brief moment his hand hovered above the money. But her contribution apparently didn’t equal the price of admission; this guy granted no magic show for a mere handful of change.

Then I remembered: Alan wanted me to call him back. It was just as well that I’d forgotten. If I’d remembered, I would have had to make a conscious decision not to do it. Then I would have ended up feeling guilty. And that would have been bad for my heart.

I pulled a five out of my wallet, folded it the long way into a V, and slid it into the magician’s hat. Faster than my eyes could follow, the bill was gone and replaced in the hat by a solitary buck.

The surrogate bill wasn’t folded down the middle.

I took a step back and applauded quietly and politely, as I might if I attended the symphony, which I don’t.

The homeless impersonator lifted his head an inch or two and mimed a tip of the hat for me.

All in all, it hadn’t been a bad way to spend fifteen dollars.