Heat Lightning

18

MAI WAS HAPPY to hear from him: “I’m standing outside an ice cream parlor on Grand Avenue, thinking about eating a giant ball of fat and sugar, so my ass will blow up to the size of a dirigible.”

“Want to go fishing?”

“Sure. Where?”

“My boss has a cabin up north-two hours from here,” Virgil said. “It’s pretty far, but we could be there by early afternoon, go fishing, go for a walk, whatever, and be back here by bedtime.”

“There’s this restaurant at Grand and Victoria that makes good sandwiches and desserts,” she said. “I’ll go get some. You can pick me up outside-if that’s not too quick for you.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Virgil said, and he was running.

DAVENPORT ’S CABIN was twenty miles east of Hayward, a bit more than two and a half hours from the Cities, but they ate lunch in Virgil’s truck and never slowed down and made good progress. Mai had never been in a police vehicle before, other than Virgil’s, and wanted to know what all the pieces were, and for a while, when nobody was around on Highway 70, Virgil ran with lights and sirens to give her the feel. Mai was wearing blue jeans and a black cotton blouse, and her physical presence was all over the truck, her high-pitched girly voice, a tendency to giggle at vulgar jokes, a flowery scent.

“Peach blossom,” she told him.

“I thought perfumes were called ‘Sin’ or ‘Obsession,’” Virgil said.

“Eh, that’s so inane. Do you wear a scent?”

He smiled at the word. “Aftershave sometimes, ‘Big Iron Panzer Diesel. ’ It makes me feel more masculine.”

They talked growing up in the Midwest, about going to Big Ten rival schools in Madison and Minneapolis. She confessed to never having gone to a Wisconsin football or basketball game, though she’d once gone on a date to a wrestling match, Wisconsin against the University of Iowa. “We got crushed,” she said. “I mean, they got crushed. I personally didn’t wrestle.”

“I bet that disappointed everybody.”

“Especially my date,” she said, and patted him on the thigh.

Virgil said, “Have I told you about my illustrious baseball career?”

“You haven’t mentioned it.”

“The salient fact is, I couldn’t hit a college fastball. I could hit the covers off a high school fastball, but not a college fastball. Anyway, I played for a couple of years and we went down to Madison three or four times a season. I’d hang out on the Terrace, eat ice cream, try to pick up women at the Rat…”

“Successfully?”

“Well-college successfully,” Virgil said. “Never got laid, but we got some to talk to us.”

She asked him how he felt about shooting people. He’d shot two people in his life, and had shot around a couple more. Of the people he’d shot, one man and one woman, he’d killed the man and had shot the woman in the foot. The same woman, as she lay wounded on the sidewalk, had been shot and killed seconds later by a second woman.

“Does it make you feel bad? Shooting people?” She was genuinely curious; the question wasn’t a hidden accusation.

“Yes. Of course. People, you know… Neither of those people I shot had children, and here they are, at the end of millions of years of evolution, ancestors lived through the ice ages, hunted bison and mammoths, and here it all ends in a puddle of blood on some street, or out in a weed field. Their whole line, whatever potential they may have had in the centuries ahead of us…”

“That sounds pretty dry and intellectual.”

“Because I’ve thought about it a lot. Intellectualized it. At the time, I felt pretty bad. I find you feel less bad the further you get away from it-but I dunno, it could come back on you later.”

She said, “It’d be a pretty big load, killing people,” she said.

“Yeah, well, you are what you do,” Virgil said. “That’s my take on it. I’m officially a killer. I think about it.”

He asked why her father, big shot that he was, a leading antiwar critic, environmental activist, full professor at the University of Wisconsin, deigned to take a year to teach at Metro State.

“Burnout. Pressure to perform all the time,” she said. “Always had to be out front on every issue. Maybe just getting old-things didn’t work out the way he thought they would. Also, maybe, he didn’t impress anybody at Wisconsin anymore. His big days are gone. He still impresses people at Metro State.”

“Why didn’t he get one of those fellowships or foundation grants and go live in New York or Paris or something? Go for long walks.”

She shrugged. “Some people are teachers and take it seriously. He does. That’s what he is-a teacher. So he looked for a job where he could stay in touch with things at Wisconsin.”

“And you came with him,” Virgil said.

“I’m trying to break the Madison spell-I’ve gotta get out of there. If I’m going to do anything with my life, I’ve got to start figuring out what it is. I can’t take dance lessons forever. I’ve pretty much figured out that my answer isn’t to dance with small repertory companies-and I’m not dedicated enough to make it with a big New York company. So I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

“And what have you figured out?” Virgil asked.

“I’m thinking… Don’t laugh…”

“I won’t.”

“Medicine,” Mai said.

“Oooh. That could be tough. But my boss’s wife is a surgeon, and she is really fascinated by it, really into it.”

“I could handle the academics,” she said confidently. “It’s just sometimes… you think, I’ll do all that work, years in school, and then… that’s it? That’s my life?”

Shrake called: “These guys around Warren -we’ve been watching them all day. These guys are heavy hitters. They’re all wired up, they’re talking to each other-there’s a whole net around him. And he was down talking to John Crumb, who’s like some big deal with the Republicans, and Crumb’s got his own net, and they all knew each other. Man, this is tough stuff. Who are all these guys? I’ve never seen them before.”

“He’s piping them in from someplace,” Virgil said. “Borrowing people, I guess-maybe all these security guys know each other or something.”

“We can’t stay too close to him,” Shrake said. “I don’t know what good we’re gonna be able to do, Virgil. He’s just got too many guys.”

“WHO WAS THAT?” Mai asked.

“We’re watching a guy-a suspect. I really… can’t talk to you about it. I mean, I really can’t.”

“All right,” she said. “Gives me a little tingle, mysterious cop stuff.”

DAVENPORT DID MOST things well, Virgil thought, and among the things he’d done well was his lake cabin. The place was built of planks and cedar shingles and native stone, with a big fireplace and a comfortable living room and efficient kitchen, and two small comfortable bedrooms, all on one level.

The place was surrounded by a patch of overgrown fescue; off to one side, a giant white pine loomed over the water’s edge; and Davenport had paid a deer-stand builder to build him a treehouse up in the pine, a deck with a few chairs and a roof, all up above the mosquitoes. A stone walk led to a forty-foot floating dock. A Tuffy fishing boat with a ninety-horse Yamaha outboard sat on a boatlift next to the dock.

Virgil recovered the guest key from a fake rock next to a stone wall along the driveway, and they went inside, into the dimly lit living room, and Virgil pulled the drapes and let the sunlight flood in.

“I don’t know much about fishing,” Mai said. “I’ve been fishing, but only with a bamboo pole.”

“You’re a jock. You’ve got reflexes. It’ll take you two minutes to get a good start,” Virgil said. “Lucas keeps his stuff in the storeroom.”

He took out two seven-foot light-action musky rods and a box of baits, humming to himself, and sat her down and showed her how to rig them, did it himself, then took it apart and made her do it. They were still doing it when his phone rang again. He dug it out, looked at it, said, “Huh,” and answered.

The voice actually sounded far away and satellite-fed: “This is Harold Chen with the Hong Kong Police Force. Is this Virgil Flowers?”

“Yes, it is… Hang on just one second.”

Virgil said to Mai, “I gotta take this, it’s from China… I’m gonna run outside, sometimes you can drop the calls inside here.”

He went back to the phone as he walked toward the door. “Yes, Mr. Chen, thank you for calling me back. I’m looking for information about Chester Utecht, a man who died there a year or so ago. I’ve got the details in my notebook-”

“I’m quite familiar with Mr. Utecht’s case.” Chen sounded like he’d just left Oxford. “Could I ask why you’re inquiring after him?”

“We’ve had a series of murders here…” Virgil told Chen about the murders in detail, and about the possible tie to Vietnam.

When he was done, Chen said, “Well. Vietnam. I should tell you that Mr. Utecht was something of a character. One of the last of the old-time soldiers of fortune, so his death was… noticed. He had been suffering from a series of debilitating diseases in his final days. Both his liver and kidneys were failing. However, his death hadn’t appeared imminent when he saw his internist a few days before he died. The pathology suggests that he may have taken his own life, or perhaps accidentally overdosed, on pain pills and alcohol.”

“Ah. A suicide,” Virgil said. “Nobody told me that on this end.”

“There was no official finding of suicide,” Chen said. “The cause was recorded as ‘unknown.’ However, the pathologist, who is quite competent, told me privately that Mr. Utecht had some bruises on his arms above his elbows, and around his ankles, that would be consistent with restraint.”

“Restraint.”

“Yes. But restraint by who, or what-or even if there was any restraint-is unknown. We looked for something, but couldn’t find anything at all. The fact is, he was elderly, alone, sick, probably dying, and running out of money. The easiest answer is suicide or accident; however, I wasn’t entirely satisfied by that. I looked for anyone who might have had any animus toward him. Anyone who could have carried out such a sophisticated murder, or would have any reason to. I found nothing; and frankly, Utecht was not important enough to be the object of such a murder. Now you say there was a murder in Vietnam, that he was involved, and that others who were involved are also being killed.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Virgil said.

“That may give me a few more questions to ask. But I can also tell you this: we are quite certain that Mr. Utecht had connections with your CIA in his past. He didn’t work for them, he wasn’t paid, but he had… connections, if you see what I’m saying. He helped them when he could, and they helped him when they wished.”

“You don’t think the CIA is killing these people?”

“I think nothing in particular,” Chen said. “But who really knows what happened in the last minutes before the victory? The whole business of the ship, this sounds like too complicated an operation for one man. If it were a CIA operation that had gone bad, if, as you say, you have photographs of a man raping a dead woman, if babies were killed… Well, this is an ugly thing. With the controversy about the CIA, perhaps they wouldn’t like to have this float up from the past. Especially if the men were willing to talk about it.”

They let the satellite idle for a moment, then Virgil said, “Mr. Chen, if you’re curious, I will call you and tell you how this works out. I would deeply appreciate it if you would ask your questions and let me know the answers. I don’t like the sound of this CIA connection. I don’t like that.”

“Yes, because what could you do? Your hands would be tied.”

They talked for a few more minutes, details and phone numbers, then Virgil rang off, and as he walked back to the cabin, he could hear Mai talking. He stepped inside, and she smiled and said, “Daddy… I will be home when I will be home. We’re just going out fishing. I will see you when I see you. Good-bye.”

THEY DROPPED the boat in the water and headed out, a good blue day without wind, the water like green-black Jell-O, not quite still, but jiggling from the distant passings of small motorboats. Virgil found a weed bed, and explained about musky fishing. “There’s a cliché about musky-that they’re the fish of ten thousand casts. Hard to catch. Which means, when you go musky fishing, you probably won’t actually have to deal with catching one.”

He tied a black-and-orange-rubber Bull Dawg lure onto one of the rods, flipped it out, retrieved it, showed her how the tail rippled at a certain speed, showed her how to cast with her arms and her back instead of her wrists, steadied her in the boat with a hand on her waist and back and occasionally her butt. Twenty or so casts out, the lure was hit by a small northern pike, two feet long, which hooked itself and then flipped once out of the water and gave up, and she reeled it in. Virgil wet a hand in the lake, grabbed the fish at the back of its head, unhooked it, and dropped it back in, looked up to see her watching in fascination.

“You threw it back! That’s the biggest fish I ever caught!” she said.

“Shoot… hmm, I didn’t think you’d want it. Besides, if you want one, we’ll catch more.”

“Well, I guess I don’t really want one. I like fish… but…”

So they went on around, and she caught two more northerns, which were easy, and lost a fish that Virgil thought might have been a small musky.

“You fish for a while; I’m going to drink a Coke,” she said.

So he fished as she sat in the boat, and then she said, “Is that a thunderstorm?”

He looked off to the southwest, over his shoulder, and saw the anvil of cloud coming in. “Yeah… gotta be thirty miles away. We got time.”

“Until you reminded me… I hadn’t thought about the Terrace for years-I was never that much for it. Too busy. Now that I look back, I wonder what I was busy at. I should have had some lazy friends, you know, just sit out there with root-beer floats and watch the sailboats. But what the heck did I do?” She stared at the water, and Virgil flipped the lure into a niche in the weed line, twitched it a few times, and she said, “You know what I did? I worked. But I worked at all this art stuff. Dancing. Photography. Writing. All the time. Obsessively. I hardly ever went and sat and laughed with friends.”

“ Madison is the best place in the world if you want to hang out,” Virgil said. “You see these old gray-bearded guys on their rusty bikes, they’ve been hanging out since the sixties. Never quit.”

“Yeah, but… ah, I don’t know. And the Rat. What a dump; that’s what I used to say. What a dump. Just too busy… busy, busy, busy…”

So they floated and talked and she cast some more, and once almost tipped over the side, and he said, eventually, “If you cast any more, you’re gonna be sore in the morning. You’re going to feel like this muscle”-he rubbed his knuckles up and down the big vertical muscle just to the left of her spine-“is made out of wood.”

She’d caught five fish at that point. “One last cast.”

“No point. You never catch anything on the last cast.”

She cast, and didn’t catch anything. “All right. I submit to your greater knowledge, although it doesn’t make any statistical sense.”

“Sure it does-if you catch something, that’s never your last cast,” Virgil said. “You always keep going for at least ten minutes. So you never catch anything on the last cast.”

He sat next to the motor, saw a distant flash of lightning, counted the seconds, and then said, “Six miles, more or less. Better get off the lake.”

They got off, cranked the boat out of the water, pulled the plug, tied on the canvas cover, walked up to the cabin, washed their hands, got a couple of beers, sat on the lakeside porch, and watched the storm coming in.

When the first fat drops of rain hit around them, she said, “We probably ought to go jump in bed.”

“Probably,” he said.

SHE SAT on the edge of the bed and let him take her clothes off; he did it from behind her, kneeling on the mattress, with his face buried in the pit of her neck, his hands working the buttons on her blouse and jeans.

“Ah, God, this is where I can’t stand it,” he said. He popped the hooks on her brassiere.

She giggled with the stress. “What? You can’t stand it?”

“It’s always so wonderful…” He popped her brassiere loose and let his hands slip up her stomach and cup her breasts.

“It can’t always be wonderful,” she said.

“No, no, it’s always wonderful,” he said. “It’s just like opening your Christmas presents when you’re eight years old. Ah, jeez…”

Then it was underpants and she was pulling on Virgil’s jeans, which still smelled a little fishy from one of the northerns they’d caught, and then they were all over the place, and somewhere during the proceedings, though Virgil didn’t bother to check the time, she began to make a low ohhhh sound and then Virgil lost track, but not for long.

WELL, HE THOUGHT as he lay on his back, the sweat evaporating from his stomach, he’d thought it would be pretty good, and it had been. And would be again in about, hmm, seventeen minutes.

She said, “Why…” She giggled. “That was so crazy-all of a sudden, I realized, this afternoon, before we went out, you said you got a phone call from China. From China? You get calls from China?”

“No, it’s this case. Trying to go back in time. There was a guy killed in Hong Kong a year or so ago, and there’s a question of how exactly he died. He’s connected with the guys here. The Chinese are going to look into it, see what they can find out.”

“All the Chinese? That’s a lot of Chinamen.”

“The Hong Kong police force.”

“Really. Indians, Chinese, Hong Kong, the North Woods.”

“Yeah… I gotta tell you, when I brought you up here, I was mostly thinking about this…” He slipped his hand up her thigh. “But I worry about your father and you. You don’t know anything about this case, do you?”

She propped herself up on one elbow. “Why would I know anything about it? Why would you ask?”

“Because your father, you know, he was talking to Ray and Sanderson, and when I asked what they were talking about, he didn’t have much to say. The thing is, if this killer even thinks your father was involved, he might go after him. And if you’re in the way… Look, I really, really don’t want you to get hurt, and if your father’s involved, you could be in the line of fire.”

“Oh… Virgil. You don’t really think so? I mean, my father…” She trailed away.

“Was he in Vietnam in 1975?”

“He’s been there a lot. When I was a child, it seemed like he was gone all the time, but that was in the eighties. As I understand it, the Vietnamese really thought they had allies with the American people, and that he was one of them. So he was there during the war, and right after it, and later, he was there more… He was there a lot. But 1975, I don’t know.”

“I’m amazed he was never busted,” Virgil said.

“Busted…”

“Arrested. By the feds… you know, ‘giving aid and comfort.’”

“Well, when he went, he went as a journalist,” Mai said. “So that gave him some status.”

“Still. You gotta ask him about it,” Virgil said. “If there’s anything, he’s got to talk to me.”

“How many more killings do you think-”

“I don’t know… I’ll tell you something, but you gotta promise not to tell.”

“All right, sure,” she said.

“The last one, the killer was probably seen, and he was an Indian guy. Ray was an Indian guy. Some of these guys were living on the edge, and there’s a question of whether there was a dope deal going down somewhere. So… it’s all really confusing.”

“Do you know who the other targets might be?”

“Yeah, I talked to one the other day. I can’t really tell you his name-it’s, like, a legal thing. But he’s out there traveling around. He told me he’s safe. He’s got a security guy who travels with him, he says the president couldn’t find him. But hell, it’s possible he’s involved somehow.”

“You’ll figure it out. Dad says you’re a pretty smart guy,” Mai said.

“I don’t feel so smart; I feel like my head is stuffed full of cotton. Something is going on, and I don’t know what it is.”

She squeezed him. “Feels like something is going on down here.”

“I know what that is,” he said. “I have that completely under control.”

“Right. Mr. Control.” She gave him a yank. “How many women have you slept with, Mr. Control?”

“I have a list on my laptop,” Virgil said. “I’d hate to say without consulting my list.”

“Just names, or… talent, as well?”

“Everything. Names, photographs, résumés, criminal records. I give them all grades, too. For example, a couple of women might call me up, and I don’t remember them that well in the fog of all the women, but I’ve got to make a decision. So I look at my computer records, and one of them I’ve given a B-minus, and the other a C-minus. So the decision is clear.”

“What’d I get?”

“You got a B-plus,” Virgil said. “You could easily move up to an A, if you play your cards right.”

“Lying in bed,” she said. “Joking.”

“Ah, well…” He sat up, looked down at her. “It’s what happens when you become a cop. Something curdles your sense of humor. My problem is not really that I sleep with so many women. My problem is that I fall in love with them.”

She was lying facedown on top of the sheet with her face turned toward him, and he ran his hand down her back and over the rise of her butt. “Women don’t understand how beautiful they are. They don’t understand it. They get beauty all confused with personality, or charisma, or a nice smile… but they really don’t see the simple beauty of this…” and his hand glided again over her bottom. “It’s a goddamn tragedy that you can’t see it. But you can’t; I know you can’t. And it’s just so beautiful.”