Dead Man

1

Sherman Rare Books was a narrow elegant storefront across Post Street from the side entrance to the St. Francis Hotel. The steel gates padlocked shut in the recessed entryway at night were now, in midmorning, folded open for trade. The books were in locked breakfront hardwood cabinets; in recessed alcoves between them were original oil paintings. An unhurried place, sybaritic in its appointments, rugs, and furnishings, where the book was at least as important as its selling.

Eddie Dain sat on an antique Chippendale chair in a perfect lotus without even being aware of it. He was twenty-eight years old, with a strong, almost Sioux face and pale blue deep-set eyes, six-one, lean and springy, 140 pounds. A supple beanpole with a mind that had led Richard Feynman to write all over his papers while he was at Cal-Tech, arguing points with him. He wore a white cotton shirt, wash pants, running shoes, a windbreaker.

The phone spoke Marie’s voice into his ear. “R — Rlch.”

“K — Ktl,” Eddie said to the receiver.

Marie’s voice answered, “R — R2.”

To Eddie, she had always been this wondrous being who had entered his life at Cal-Tech, became his best friend, stupendous lover, then wife. Even now, after five years, he still went weak in the knees whenever he looked at her, still was always peeking up her skirt or down her blouse like a horny teenager.

“Well?” she demanded.

“I’m thinking,” he said, the old Jack Benny radio line.

As he thought, he happily drummed his fingers on Doug Sherman’s antique oak desk, ignoring the endgame Sherman had laid out with yellowed-ivory chess pieces. He was still young enough and naive enough to treat everything in life as a game.

“R X P,” he told her finally.

Doug Sherman was at the little table behind the desk, his back to Eddie, removing the steaming paper cone from his Melitta coffee dripper. Sherman was tall, lean, fortyish, barbered to perfection, as elegant as the embossed endpapers of his antique books. Below a balding crown his narrow face was sad in repose, with beautiful eyes and sensitive lips. His suit was superb.

“How’s this one?” said Marie on the phone. “KP X R.”

“You’re kidding.” But then Eddie started to think about it. “You’re not kidding. Okay, R — Q1.”

Sherman turned to Eddie, said, “Coffee?”

Eddie shook his head without turning as Marie giggled in his ear, “R — Q1? Bad move, baby. P — K6.”

Sherman sat down in his swivel chair, leaned forward over the steaming cup, eyes half-shut as he savored the aroma. He sipped. He leaned back and sighed in perfect aesthetic comfort.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he told Eddie. “French Roast and Guatemalan blend. Superb in every respect.”

“So is Marie,” said Eddie, then into the phone, “R — B1.”

“What was that you said?” demanded Marie.

“R — B1.”

“No — something with me and superb in the same sentence.”

“Oh, that — I told Doug you were a superb cook but a lousy chess player.”

“Just for that, P X R — Qch.” There was laughter in her voice.

“Damn!” He made his final move a question. “Um... K X Q?”

“Gotcha, kiddo! R — RS. And you know what that means.”

Eddie laughed delightedly. “I fall upon my sword.”

“Since I’m a superb cook, I know I’ll see you for dinner.”

Eddie hung up, kissed a forefinger, touched it to the phone. Feeling Sherman’s eyes upon him, he grinned sheepishly.

“Now how about some coffee?” said Sherman.

“You know what I want. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Very beautiful, very old, very leather-bound. The Oxford Press First Edition that Alexandra Neel had bound in calf’s hide. I know it’s out there somewhere and I know you can find it. In a couple of weeks I’m renting a house on the beach out at Point Reyes for Marie’s birthday. Candles, flowers, soft lights—”

“And The Tibetan Book of the Dead. For her birthday.” Sherman shook his head, then chuckled. “His wife can read the juicy bits aloud to private eye Eddie Dain between stakeouts—”

“A lot of good my stakeout on Grimes did,” Eddie said ruefully. “He goes on board his boat at the St. Francis Yacht Club with me watching, and...” He threw his arms up and wide, exclaimed, “Fwoom! No more Grimes.”

“Or too much Grimes,” said Sherman ghoulishly. “All over everything. Everyone else believes gases accumulated in the engine compartment ignited when Grimes pushed the starter, but does Eddie the gumshoe? No. No accident for him. Eddie the gumshoe will pursue the evildoers to their lair—”

“Their corporate office, more likely.” Eddie grinned; it made him look eighteen instead of twenty-eight. He leaned across the desk. “I really want that book for Marie’s birthday.”

“Eddie, your Marie is very sweet, very bright, very gentle — but she’s also a certifiable New Age California nut. She’s into Tibetan Buddhism, she’s into T’ai Chi, she’s into Iyengar Yoga, she’s into—”

“—computer science and engineering, running the office now that I’m out in the field so much, raising our three-year-old son, beating me at chess, especially phone chess, and—”

“All right all right.” Sherman had his hands up, palms out, to stem the spate of words. “Rub it in. She beats you at chess, you beat me at chess, and I would give almost anything to master that boardless phone chess you two children play with such casual idiocy. She’s the most remarkable woman ever born, okay? But I’m not sure I can get that specific copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead you want in the time you’re giving me.” He paused, indicated the chessboard on the desk. “Now this...”

But Eddie had caught sight of the seven-foot grandfather clock in a shadowed corner of the shop, masticating time with its slow pendulum jaw. He unfolded like a stork as he stood up.

“I’m due at Homicide in fifteen minutes.”

Sherman said seductively, “Gaprindishvili versus Kushner, Riga, nineteen seventy-two? She did fine ‘til she abandoned the Grunfeld Defense for the Nimzo-Indian, then Kushner...”

Eddie, on his way to the door, suddenly swerved, moved one of the black pieces as he went by the board.

“Kushner did that, obviously,” he said. “R — R6. Just as obviously, Gaprindishvili then had to resign.”

Sherman was studying the board with furious concentration. “Why resign? Why obviously? Why can’t she—”

“Work it out yourself.” He went across the thick Oriental carpet toward the door with DOUGLAS SHERMAN — RARE BOOKS backward on the glass in elegant script. He added, “Think Tibet.”

“All right, goddam you, you’ll have your Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Sherman called after him. “At full markup!”

But he was speaking to an empty room. He hesitated, tipped over the black king with a push of his finger, shook his head sadly, and poured himself another cup of that superb coffee.

In San Francisco, Inspector is a plainclothes grade between Detective and Lieutenant, equivalent perhaps to warrant officer in the army. Inspector Randy Solomon suggested to Eddie, “Have some of our coffee. It kills the AIDS virus.”

Homicide’s coffee, brewed in a filthy percolator beside the water cooler, was so horrible that cops from as far away as San Jose and Danville dreamed up things they had to “consult” with SFPD Homicide about, just to get a cup. If they survived it, went the legend, they could return home and sweep the streets clean of criminals because obviously they were men of steel: bullets and switchblades would bounce harmlessly off them.

“Doug Sherman told me SFPD has come up empty,” said Eddie.

“How does that guy find out everything so fast?” Solomon rumbled in mild irritation.

He was in shirt sleeves, very large, very well conditioned, an African-American the color of caffe latte, easily as tall as Eddie’s scrawny six-one but ninety pounds heavier, with none of it around his beltline. His voice was basso profundo, his laughter could rattle window glass. He had met Eddie on a handball court at the Y the previous year, they now played three days a week.

“Doug knows everybody, he’s a born gossip, women like him,” said Eddie. “People tell him things. The ultimate go-between.”

“Why the hell doesn’t he just stick to selling books?”

“Censorship,” said Eddie. “Police brutality. Fie on you.”

They went into one of the interview cubicles, glassed from the waist up: voices, phones, and rattling printers made conversation in the squadroom as difficult as resurrection. Randy sat down in a chrome and black plastic chair, sausage-thick brown fingers interlaced on his gut. He sighed.

“Anyway, Close and Bill on the Ronald Grimes case — not that it ever was a case except in our Sherlock’s pigheaded—”

“You’re wrong, Randy, my case is very much open. Ronald Grimes lived far too high for our post-junk-bonds era.”

Randy squirmed around so the snubnose Policeman’s Special in his belt holster would quit digging into his hip.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t his partner hire you just to see if Grimes was skimming from their brokerage firm trustee accounts? Grimes wasn’t, right? So, end of story.”

“Start of story. Grimes had some unknown source of illicit income. When I started nosing around, he died in an apparent accident on his powerboat. In his sleep — okay. In an explosion on his boat — no way.”

Randy sighed and heaved his bulk out of the chair. “C’mon, Sherlock, let’s you buy me some lunch across the street while I explain the facts of life to you.”

They had the elevator to themselves except for a couple barely out of their teens, despairingly intertwined as if the descending cage were a spaceship capable of blasting them out of this space/time continuum. He wore black leather and hack boots and acne; she wore tearstains on her sallow cheeks.

“Got a continuance but he’s goin’ away,” muttered Randy. They faced the doors to give the couple what little privacy the elevator offered. “Why are you out doing this shit really? Beautiful wife at home who loves you, cute little kid, a good business as a computer research source. Man, I had that going for me, I’d be down to Silicon Valley makin’ beaucoup bucks...”

“Would you?” asked Eddie doubtfully. “Why are you a cop?”

Randy’s gesture encompassed his size, his blackness, the hardness of his wide ebony face. “What else?”

“Plenty else. You’re a cop because you’re good at it. Because you like it. Because it’s got you.”

They crossed the terrazzo floor and went out through heavy brass-framed doors into the bright windy May sunshine, jaywalked across Bryant Street to Boardman Place.

Eddie said, “Well, it’s got me, too. Detective work. I didn’t want to be just another microchip in the Silicon Valley game, so I started researching stuff by computer for other Cal-Tech students. After graduation we came up here and I kept going and all of a sudden I was making a living at it. Only my clients weren’t students any more — darn little pure research. They turned out to be mostly P.I.’s hired by attorneys to check out jurors, witnesses in court cases, even the lawyers’ own clients.”

They went down Boardman past storefront bailbondsmen to a taqueria with a big sign above it, ABIERTO 24 HORAS. Inside the narrow crowded room a jukebox played Mexican music filled with sad horns. A brown chunky Aztec-looking waitress brought Tecates instead of menus to their table; they ordered the special with the carelessness of long familiarity. The room smelled of hot oil and frying tortilla chips and red pepper and salsa spices.

“But,” persisted Solomon, “if you could do it faster and cheaper with the computer than they could in the field, why—”

“I got my own P.I. license to cut out the middleman — it was just good business. But then I found out fieldwork is fun, too. The computer is still the core of my operation, but it can’t ask just the right question at just the right moment. Of course once I get an answer, I use my laptop to interface through the car phone with the data base in my big computer at home.”

The waitress returned with huge platters of enchiladas, tacos, burritos, refritos y arroz, salad to go with their second beers. Randy jabbed a forkful of beans in Eddie’s direction.

“So, Sherlock, what’s your move now on Grimes? More ‘fun’? Ring some doorbells? Go sit in your car across the street from the yacht basin with a magnifying glass and a deerstalker hat?”

“Right now, nothing — I’ve got other cases need work. Eventually, start massaging the data bases — somebody had him killed, there have to be tracks the computer can pick up.”

“You slip in that assumption about somebody having Grimes offed just so damn neat. But it was a gas leak got him.”

Eddie shook his head. “Professional hit.”

“You think the arson investigators screwed up?” demanded Randy scornfully. “The explosion was in the engine compartment, right where you’d expect it to be. Forensics, fire department, insurance company — everybody says accident except Eddie Dain.”

“Did they run a probabilities program on that particular make, model, and year of Chris-Craft to see how hull shape and engine-compartment size would affect a gas-leak explosion?”

“Why in hell should they, when everything points to—”

“I did — I developed the software program for it myself.” Eddie waved a bulging bean burrito around under Randy’s nose. “Flash point was seven-tenths of a meter from where it should have been for gas fumes, and a couple of intensity probability screenings I ran suggested C-4 plastique. Which means—”

Randy silenced him with an impatient paw.

“Wait a minute, Sherlock. If it was a hit, why pro? Why not gifted amateur?”

“Because all you professional law enforcement guys buy into it as an accident. I figure only a pro could fool everybody except the computer. After we get back from Point Reyes, Marie and I will work the data to find those footprints, then—”

“You ever think that if you’re right it might be dangerous? If somebody is out there, and you start getting close to him—”

“I’ll call a cop,” said Eddie.

And he laughed and took a big bite of burrito, and, cool dude that he was, squirted brick-colored pinto beans and red sauce all down the front of his crisp white cotton shirt.

2

When Eddie crossed the Golden Gate to their modest two-bedroom bungalow in Marin’s Tamalpais Valley, he found the household in an uproar. Or at least found three-year-old Albie (christened Albert, in honor of Einstein) in an uproar. Marie was her usual placid self.

“A kitten,” she explained.

Marie was Eddie’s age and tall; barefoot, only four inches shorter than his six-one and as limber as he, with the supple, beautiful body produced in certain women by intense devotion to yoga. Her taffy-colored hair was worn long and straight down her back in defiance of current fashions, her very clear hazel eyes were too large and wide-set under stern brows for absolute beauty — but she also had the soft rounded cheeks and rosebud mouth of a fairy-tale princess.

“Kitten?” Eddie looked around the narrow kitchen as he stripped off his burrito-stained shirt. Albie was hanging on his pantleg telling him about it also. “I don’t see any kitten.”

“It shall return,” she said with placid resignation.

“How do you know, if—”

“Albie knows.”

He believed her. Marie was a very sensual being, in touch with her body and the bodies of those she loved. In bed they made each other come so hard and so often that he sometimes thought there must be something to her reincarnation musings: it seemed that a love this rewarding spiritually and this intense physically just had to extend back through several lifetimes.

But now, Wisking the burrito stain before putting the shirt into the hamper, he said, “If the kitten does show up again, we just can’t keep it. You know that, don’t you, darling?”

“I know.”

“If it’s a stray, it’ll be dirty and diseased—”

“I know.”

“Then we’ll just have to explain to Albie that—”

“I know.” Then she kissed him, a long kiss that made him want to get Albie to bed early. She stepped back and patted the front of his pants and made a silent whistle, and laughed, “Tell you what, big guy. You explain to Albie why he can’t have that kitten, and I’ll give you something nice later.”

“You cheat!” exclaimed Eddie with feeling.

But after supper, he and his son sat out on the redwood deck he’d built the year before, at the same time that he’d built an eight-foot-high wall between the driveway and the garage they’d converted to an office. The wall had a door that was locked, so Albie could play in the backyard while Marie worked at the computer and kept an eye on him through the office window.

The deck was low, ideal for sitting on the edge with your feet in the grass. Albie sat in rapt attention beside him, staring solemnly up into his face, swinging stubby legs as Eddie explained why they couldn’t keep the kitten.

“Even if he does come back, he probably belongs to someone who’ll want him to come home to them.”

“He’s black and white,” observed Albie.

“Or his mother was a cat gone wild. In that case he’ll be a feral cat himself and won’t want to live with us because—”

“His whiskers are white.” Albie held out demonstrative hands a foot apart. “Real long.”

“That’s long,” admitted Eddie. He shook his head in admiration. “But wild kittens have all sorts of diseases—”

“Mommy says he’s a puss-in-boots kitten. Black legs, white feet.” Then he added, in case Eddie was as dense about books as he was about kittens, “Like in the fairy tale.”

“Even a puss-in-boots sort of kitten would be...”

He trailed off because his son had jumped off the deck and was running on stubby bowed legs over to the wall. Thrust through the two-inch gap left under the fence for rainy-season runoff, a tiny delicate upside-down black arm with a white paw was making what looked like beckoning gestures.

“It’s him!” cried Albie. He squatted and patted at the paw with one hand. The tiny paw convulsed about his finger, held on without claws. The kitten started to mew. Piteously.

“Open the door, Daddy!” cried Eddie’s son. Piteously.

If he opened the door, Daddy knew, all was lost. If he didn’t open the door, Daddy knew, all was lost. So macho Daddy said forcefully, “But it has to stay in the kitchen until we can housebreak it. And it goes to the vet’s tomorrow and...”

Marie stood in the darkened kitchen, watching her husband cave in to her son about their new kitten and chuckling deep in her throat. So even though they had to make up a box with an old towel in it for the kitten to sleep on, and feed it, and of course hold it, when they did get to bed she gave Eddie something just as nice as she’d promised. More than nice and more than once, in fact, and then told him she loved him because he was a kitten freak in public while being a tiger in bed.

The kitten was little and skinny and black and white and full of fleas and scabs and rickety from lack of food, so for two weeks it was touch-and-go. It could keep down milk but then immediately had diarrhea, every time. Dysentery, distemper, a massive flea allergy, eye infections... All plans were put on hold pending its survival or the sad eventuality of its death.

Ten days later the dysentery was gone. The distemper was cured. Its eyes cleared up. It strode instead of wobbled. It meowed! instead of mewed. Suddenly it was a delicate demented huge-eyed black and white furball tumbling around the house.

The day they knew it would survive, they named it Shenzie. Shenzie was a Swahili word Eddie had got from Randy Solomon, meaning crazy — but crazy in a goofy, nutty, oddball, wonderful sort of way that fit the kitten perfectly.

His survival ensured, Shenzie would watch by the hour when they played chess, sitting on the edge of the coffee table where the board was permanently set up, his skinny black tail, white-tipped, loosely curled down around a table leg.

“Think he’s trying to learn chess?” asked Eddie.

“He’s studying the way it works,” said Marie firmly. “He wants hands instead of paws. He wants to be an engineer.”

Shenzie was Albie’s cat, of course, but on nights when Eddie was out in the field on his backlogged cases, and Albie was asleep, he would lie below the screen on the computer box while Marie worked, and go to sleep — purring. If she was reading, he would climb up on her chest and go to sleep — purring.

“He never does that with me,” said Eddie darkly. “Except for Albie, you’re the only person in the world he trusts enough to sleep on.”

“We can take him to Point Reyes!” crowed Albie.

But this time Eddie was firm. “No we can’t,” he said sadly. “It might be a little too tough on him — he’s still pretty shaky. Or he might get lost in the woods so we couldn’t find him again. You wouldn’t want that, would you, Tiger?”

“Well, no, but...”

“Or get all wet in the ocean and maybe get pneumonia?”

“No, but...”

“Uncle Randy’s going to take care of him while we’re gone,” said Marie with comfortable finality. “That way, you’ll have him to come home to.”

“Okay,” said Albie in charming capitulation. He kissed Shenzie on the nose and put him into the cat carrying case, a plastic one with holes, through one of which Shenzie’s black and white paw immediately came out to begin groping about. That patented paw-grope was one of his best tricks to date.

While his wife still had been tossing her paycheck into the pot, Randy Solomon had scraped up the down on a tall skinny Victorian on Buchanan just above Fell. Even after his wife left him (cops’ divorce statistics are horrendous), he managed to hang on to it and even get it painted and fixed up outside and in.

Eddie climbed the exterior front stairs and rang the old-fashioned doorbell. He was carrying Shenzie in the plastic cat case. Randy opened the door and stepped back so Eddie could enter by him.

“The famous Shenzie, huh?” He’d been hearing a lot about the kitten on the handball courts during the past two weeks.

“Himself,” said Eddie, as he put the carry case on the couch and started to open it.

The living room was beautifully furnished in an African motif. An elongated ebony head four feet tall, carved by the Pare in Tanzania, dominated one corner; across from it was a ‘Kamba drum made of stretched zebra hide, the cords that kept it taut made from thin rolled strips of antelope hide. Graceful cranes carved from Masai cattle horns stood on top of the TV cable box; there were Kisii stools carved from rounds of tree trunk with tiny bright beads pounded into the soft wood in intricate patterns. On a clear wall was a long Kalenjin spear and a handmade knife in a red hide scabbard.

Eddie gazed around, impressed as he always was, while getting the carry case open. Delicate puss-in-boots Shenzie leaped out with a pissed-off meow! Randy shook the windows with his laughter and, quick as a synapse, scooped the tiny furball up in his arms to cradle it upside down against his chest.

“Shenzie, my man, we gonna cook you for supper!” But Shenzie, knowing a soft touch when he felt one, merely purred. Randy laughed again and stooped to set him right side up on the floor, asking Eddie, “Got time for a beer?”

“Marie and Albie are down in the car.”

Shenzie was twining himself back and forth around Solomon’s ankles. Randy laughed again.

“Guess me an’ old Shenz’ll get along just fine.”

“Thanks for taking him, Randy — I mean it. I’ve written out the direction to the place at Point Reyes if you think you can get away for a weekend—”

Solomon snorted as he crumpled up the directions. “Listen, the way people are killin’ each other off in this city, I ain’t gonna get any time off. An’ if I did, I’d spend it chasin’ gash rather than snipe or some damn thing at the seashore...”

He started walking Eddie to the door, then stopped, suddenly serious.

“Truth be told, Sherlock, I’m worried about this case of yours. You’ve sorta halfway convinced me that maybe somebody did make old Grimes’s boat blow up. If you’re right, we’re talking murder for hire here.”

“I sincerely hope so,” grinned Eddie.

“Ain’t funny, Hoss. If—”

“If I turn up a hitman where you guys and the underwriters and the fire department thought there was just an accident, I’ll be the hottest eye in town.”

“Or the deadest. You’d best remember what a hitman does for a living.”

“He won’t even know I’m there,” grinned Eddie.

“Aw, hell, you’re impossible.” Randy laughed and stuck out a big paw for Eddie to shake. “Just don’t make any moves while you’re at Point Reyes, okay? Wait until—”

“We’re not even taking the laptop. Total downtime. But when we get back — watch out!” He started out, then turned back again. Shenzie was atop the TV, sniffing one of the horn birds with brow-furrowed suspicion. “Anyway, Randy, hitmen aren’t supermen — just guys with strange ideas about a fun time.”

Randy stood in the open doorway at the head of the stairs with a worried look on his face, watching Eddie bound back down to his car with the bike rack and two mountain bikes on the roof. He waved at Marie through the window, she waved back. He could see little Albie in his car seat in the rear.

He sighed and went back into the house. Shenzie was waiting to ambush his ankle. “Hey, crazy cat!” he exclaimed. “You’re bitin’ the foot gonna kick you you keep it up!”

Shenzie didn’t care. Eyes bugged out and wild, flopped on his thin black side, he sought to disembowel the side of Randy’s size 13 leather shoe with pumping back feet while holding onto the highly shined and therefore slippery toe with his front feet.

By definition Shenzie was, after all, nuts.

But Randy loved it. He laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor. He dug the little mulatto dude. Mulatto — black and white. Get it?

Maybe he’d get himself a cat like this Shenzie one of these days. They sure were a lot more fun than he’d expected. Since his wife had left he hadn’t been having a whole lot of fun. Just working, fucking when he could, with maybe a little moonlighting thrown in on the weekends for some extra cash.

3

Life in the rustic cabin at Point Reyes quickly fell into wondrous routine. Wake up spooned together for warmth in the old-fashioned double bed, whisper lazily until curious hands and mouths found familiar pleasure points, then the rising arc of passion until they fell back panting to the sounds of Albie stirring on his little bed in the next room.

No phones to answer. No computers to work. No friends to visit. No television to watch. Just books to read. Incredible salt marshes to tramp through. Sometimes at dusk as the fog rolled in, a driftwood fire on the beach in the lee of a washed-up log, trying to identify night noises out of the darkness.

“I think it’s a... big bird!” Albie might exclaim.

“Tree frog,” Marie, raised on a ranch in the California coastal zone, would say with great authority. She would hold finger and thumb half an inch apart. “About that long.”

“But it makes a bigger sound than that!”

Once they heard a dog bark, but Marie said it was a fox — a gray, you didn’t find reds down by the ocean. Next morning, Eddie, up before dawn, saw the animal’s tracks: dainty little pawprints hardly larger than those Shenzie might make. Fox.

Other nights, Albie asleep and the wind sighing in the trees behind the house, they would yawn over the chessboard until finally falling into bed themselves. Only to feel fatigue drop magically away for velvet moments in the dark of the night, soft cries of completion that never woke their son.

Perfect vacation days, with Marie’s birthday the most perfect of all. It dawned clear and warm and bright, without a wisp of fog, and Eddie bare-legged in front of the open fridge calling out items for the grocery list.

“I think we should have steak tonight in honor of the occasion. And baked potatoes—”

“No oven.”

“Okay, write down aluminum foil for the potatoes so we can stick ‘em in the coals. And corn on the cob if that little grocery store is up to it—”

“And whatever crucifer they have fresh there.”

Eddie turned to his son, who was waiting for the piggyback bicycle ride to the store. “Eat-your broccoli, dear,” he said.

“I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it,” said Marie like the little boy in the old New Yorker cartoon. They laughed, and Albie crowed; though he didn’t understand it, he loved that one for some reason, almost as much as he disliked crucifers.

Eddie shouldered him and his outsized crash helmet, almost as big as he was, for the four-mile wobbly ride to the little corner store. And told Albie that he had only one year left.

“Year for what?” the boy asked the top of Eddie’s head.

“Before you compose your first symphony. That’s what Mozart did when he was four.”

Albie thought about it. Not knowing what a symphony was, he finally said, “I’ll wait.”

When Eddie got back, Albie still on his shoulders and the food in saddlebags over the rear wheel, they all went exploring through the salt marsh to the beach. The narrow trail led down into a big area of pickleweed, a lanky plant whose woody segments held water the way ice plants do.

A shadow shot across them, making both Marie and Eddie duck. It struck the ground thirty feet away with a thump, extended claws first, then flapped up again with a tiny rodent wriggling in its talons. It was a foot-long handsome bird with hooked beak and heavily barred tail.

“Daddy! Look!”

“We see, Albie. It’s a...” He turned to Marie.

“Harrier hawk,” she said. “With a harvest mouse.”

“He gonna kill the mouse?” demanded Albie.

“I’m afraid that’s what he does for a living,” Marie said regretfully.

Further in, the pickleweed was replaced by bright orange splotches of parasitic dodder and stiff triangle-leaved salt-bush. Marie broke off a stem so they could bite it and taste the salt.

“Could the hawk kill me?” said Albie suddenly.

“Not a chance, Tiger, you’re too big for him,” said Eddie. “In fact, there’s nobody around big enough to kill you.”

“That’s okay, then,” said Albie.

There had been heavy surf the night before, so out on the beach they found great washed-up strands of kelp, its strange broad indented streamers looking as if they had been stamped out of green tin. The thirty-foot stalks, as big as a wrist, had heads like bulls’ testicles. All smelling of salt and the sea and not unpleasantly of the deaths of the tiny marine creatures clinging to it when the giant seaweed had been washed ashore.

Looking at the shredded, ragged leaves, Eddie was reminded of one of Marie’s favorite poems.

“’Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,’” he quoted,“ ‘For every tatter in its mortal dress...’”

“Except these tatters are on purpose,” she said. “They split under the force of the waves so the holdfasts won’t be pulled off the rocks down below. But these were anyway.”

Eddie put his arms around her. “Let’s always hold fast,” he said to her in sudden inexplicable fierceness.

She laughed up at him. “Okay, big boy — forever.”

“That’s okay, then,” he grinned, in imitation of Albie talking about the assassin hawk’s activities.

Soaked in Bullfrog-36 to counteract depleted ozone, they sunbathed on a tiny wedge of sand available only at low tide, with occasional forays into the frigid surf. Albie wanted to be carried in each time also, game to their last icy dash back out of the water shrieking with frozen laughter.

Wrapped in towels, they watched a flock of sandpipers run seaward at the foot of each retreating wave, run back up at the lip of each advancing wave, moving almost in close-order drill as they pattered about stabbing sharp slightly up-curved bills into the sand for tiny living things.

Finally, they ate sandwiches and drank hot tea from a thermos, were waked from their nap by raucous western gulls squabbling with two crows over a dead striped bass without any eyes. Sun-dried and salt-crusty, they explored a tidal pool in slanting late-afternoon sunshine, moving down to it gingerly through the so-called black zone caused by lichens and blue-green algae. The gelatinous coat that kept the algae moist between their twice-monthly spring tide soakings made for treacherous footing.

Albie was in his glory here, being a touchie-feelie sort of guy, totally unsqueamish, as usual finding the tidal pools the high point of his day along the water.

“Mommy, what’s this?”

He was squatting on the algae, holding up a tiny, spiral-shelled creature for Marie’s inspection. He had long since learned that Eddie was next to useless in identifying either living or dead things on the beach.

“That’s a periwinkle snail,” she told him. She squatted beside him. “They eat the algae by scraping it off the rocks.” She turned the shell over, pointed. “See? Rows of teeth.”

“Lots of rows of teeth,” said Albie solemnly.

“Thousands of them,” agreed Marie. “When the rocks wear the teeth down, the snail just rolls up a new set, sort of like the teeth are on a conveyer belt.”

The barnacle zone was mostly acorn barnacles, their close-packed flinty white cones making the rocks also look white.

“But when a barnacle dies his shell gets taken over by periwinkles, or little bitty shrimp, or limpets...”

Back at the cabin at dusk, Eddie put briquets on the hibachi and grilled the steaks while foil-wrapped potatoes baked in the coals and sweet corn roasted in its own husks. To Albie’s delight, no crucifers. But there was ice cream and a chocolate Sara Lee with a single candle in it, and the cards and little presents they had picked out for Marie.

Finally, plates scraped and washed and leftovers in the fridge, Eddie started the fire laid in the stone fireplace. Albie was suddenly asleep, tipped over on his side. Marie carried his small sleeping form into his bedroom as Eddie went outside to bury the garbage in the mulch heap. Tree frogs trilled, branches rustled, something of consequence moved through the brush flanking the sandy track leading in from the main road.

He looked back at the cabin under the cold pale blue light of a waning moon. Smoke swirled from the chimney with the night breeze. Light shone from the windows. He shivered, somehow felt lonely even though everyone he truly valued — except for Shenzie — was just inside.

Watchman, what of the night?

He went back into the cabin, hungry for Marie. She held out fisted hands with chess pieces hidden in them.

“Left,” said Eddie.

She opened her hand. “You get black.”

“Black’s good. I can do black.” He sat down at the table and offered her a shameless bribe. “If I win you get your real birthday present.”

She gave him a bawdy grin. “And if you lose?”

He brought out the book, beautifully wrapped by Doug Sherman, and laid it on the table beside the board.

“You get your real birthday present.”

“Ah-hah! Win-win for Marie!”

But when she sat down at the board, her face lovely in the flickering firelight, she was concentrating too hard on her usual pawn first move, and spoke too casually without looking up.

“You know, honey, maybe Randy’s right.” When he didn’t immediately react, she sought his eyes. “Maybe you’re treating the Grimes thing a little too much like just a game.”

“You know that all investigations are just a game, sweetie — move, countermove, just like chess.”

“But what if it isn’t just a game to somebody else?”

“You and Randy.” He shook his head in mock despair.

“You didn’t see Randy’s face when we left. I did. He’s worried, Eddie. Really worried.”

He reached across the chessboard for her hand. “Okay, when we get back I’ll just Close and Bill on Grimes, and forget him. Like Randy says, I was only hired in the first place to find out if he was skimming or not.”

Her eyes glowed at him. She squeezed his hand. He grinned at her and picked up the wrapped package and gave it to her.

“Now that’s out of the way...”

The somber moment had passed. Marie always opened presents in the same way, starting sedately as if to save the wrappings, then suddenly losing control and turning into Albie, ripping the paper to tatters no matter how beautiful it might be.

She went still, staring at the leather-bound Tibetan Book of the Dead. She turned it over and over, her eyes huge stars.

“Oh my God, Eddie,” she whispered, “it’s Alexandra Neel’s own copy! Oh my God! It’s the most beautiful... I don’t...”

She stood, eyes brimming, opening her arms to embrace him.

The cabin door crashed back against the wall. Two bulky men, silhouetted by moonlight, charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands, heavy boots grating on the bare planks. Silver ring glinting on a finger. One, sunglasses, sandy hair. The other, ski mask.

Eddie leaped up against the sudden sticky molasses slowness of terror as his conscious mind cried, No no no, stop, it’s just a game, I don’t need to keep on with the investi—

He heard the roar even though he didn’t feel the shot pattern shred his shoulder, and rip his chest, and pop blood out of the side of his neck, and burst his cheek so his teeth were bared all the way back to the jaw hinge.

He crashed down, upsetting the table, as the shotgun belched yellow flame to smash Marie back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motion swirl, the black hole between her breasts blossoming red, her feet coming up off the floor with the force of her death. Her face thudded down a yard from his, her utterly dead eyes staring into his with inanimate patience.

Through cotton, Albie’s voice came faintly up the hall.

“Mommy! Mommy!” With terror in it.

No, Albie had never known terror. Mustn’t know terror. Eddie began a crabwise scrabble toward the voice. He couldn’t raise his head, so he could see only Albie’s stubby legs appear in the doorway, hesitate as he surveyed the room.

A question this time. “Mommy?”

“Run, Albie, ra—”

The second shooter blasted Albie’s legs back down the hall out of sight. No blood, no pellets striking flesh. Just the legs disappearing as the door frame was splintered and pocked and ripped by the edges of the shot pattern.

A voice croaked despairingly, “I wasn’t ready... Oh Christ... I wasn’t ready...”

The first shooter fired again, almost casually. The twin charges of buckshot swept Eddie’s body back against the legs of the table like a surge of floodwater. A widening red pool spread beneath his chest. His groping hand closed around The Tibetan Book of the Dead knocked from the table, held it.

His view was narrowing and darkening. His ears were failing. The voices were through steel wool.

“They... They all... dead?” Second shooter.

First shooter. “Yeah. We’ll check if he has any notes here, a computer... then we’ll burn the place down...”

Darkness. Silence.

Silence. Darkness.

I wasn’t ready... Oh Christ... I wasn’t ready...

Not a voice. A thought. A bed. Harsh antiseptic smell. Shush-shush of rubber-soled shoes in the corridor outside.

He knew he was in a hospital. He just didn’t know why.

But then voices. Real voices.

“Goddammit, when can I see him? Every hour—”

“Every hour he lives is a miracle, the blood he’s lost, the mess they made of him. He’s alive only because a neighbor saw the flames and dragged him out before the place collapsed. Right now he won’t remember anything anyway, Inspector. Why don’t you let it go? Leave him alone.”

“How about I just see him as a friend?”

Sounds. Movement. The voices were stereophonic now because they were on either side of his bed.

“Will he ever remember any of it, Doc?”

“This much massive trauma, who knows? He should be dead, he may be paralyzed... Physical survival is fifty-fifty at best, who can tell about memory?”

“Fifty-fifty? Was me, I’d make it,” said Randy’s voice thoughtfully. “I’d have too much to live for to check out yet.”

“In his condition, what could he possibly have to—”

“Death, Doc.” A pause, then Randy’s voice added, softly, “Was me, I’d be plannin’ a whole lotta other people’s deaths.”

Hearing that, knowing it to be true, Eddie died.

Leaving only Dain to live on.

Not that Eddie Dain knew any of this. The only thing functioning was his ancient lizard brain, nestled down there at the base of the cortex. Hunger, fear, survival — those were what the lizard brain knew about. And only one of those, survival, meant anything just then. If the organism could survive, the rest of what it needed would follow.

Because now some part of Dain had something to live for.

A whole lotta other people’s deaths.