They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

Thread Hunting

We showered together. Kira was more playful in the light. I wanted to take her to breakfast, but she turned me down. She had acted out a dream. Dreams end in the morning, she said, don’t push them. To push them is to destroy them. We had real lives to get back to. She had to go to her room and find her paper on twentieth-century existential novels. I had to find Zak.

We talked while she dressed. I asked about her loneliness. She didn’t run away from the subject. She had been born in Tokyo, but her father, a V.P. for Japan Airlines, was transferred to Chicago when she was only four, to San Francisco when she was nine, to L.A. when she was eleven, and finally to New York when she was fourteen.

“I was kind of an army brat,” she said sadly, “but without the support of others with the same fate. At least army brats have the base. Then, when I was seventeen, my father was given his big promotion and called back home.”

“You stayed?”

“What choice did I have, really? I wasn’t Japanese. I wasn’t American. I was both and neither. I had no good friends here, but I had none there. My family in Japan were strangers to me. In America at least, there is room for misfits. At home-listen to me-sorry. In Japan, a misfit is treated like a protruding nail. It is hammered down. I will not be hammered down.”

“I can see that. You’re pretty brave,” I said.

“No, Dylan. Only people with choices can be brave.”

I asked again, as I had the night before, if she knew any other of Zak’s friends who might be able to help. The answer was unchanged. She and Zak guarded their friendship jealously. They did not mix in the other’s circle. She asked if she could check in with me. I said that was a silly question. I asked if we might dream again. She said we would have to see what the night would bring. We left it there.

I went down to the local pancake house and had a breakfast that would have made my Uncle Saul jealous. Uncle Saul was the only man I knew who could have lunch while still eating breakfast. He had also consumed enough scotch whiskey to float an aircraft carrier. It worked for him. Saul was eighty-four and looked like sixty. Who needed bran and mineral water?

Somewhere between the cheese omelet and the corned beef hash, I managed to read the local paper. It was pretty much what you’d expect: two pages of local news, two pages of national and international news off the wire, an editorial about zoning variances, and twenty-three pages of advertisements.

I was about to put the paper down, when I overheard two guys who seemed to be groundskeepers from the college angrily discussing somebody named Jones. Their anger had a nasty racial bent. “Crack-pushin’ nigger” topped the list of their favorite phrases. “Black bitch is just like her daddy” was a close second. I turned back to page three of the Riversborough Gazette. The headline read: “JONES JURY SELECTION TODAY.”

Valencia Jones was big news in Riversborough. A freshman last year, Ms. Jones was stopped for a broken taillight as she was leaving town at Spring break. In spite of the fact that both her license and registration were in order, the cops searched her vehicle. In Riversborough, apparently, black face plus BMW equals reasonable cause. Their search netted two vials of a drug the cops were calling Isotope. Relatively cheap and easily produced, Isotope was a far more potent chemical variant of LSD. The paper said that the cops said that one of the vials found in the spare tire compartment of Ms. Jones’ car contained enough Isotope to dose all of New York City. But since you can never believe what you read or what cops say about drugs, I figured there was enough Isotope in the vial to dose the Bronx. Anyway you cut it, that’s a lot of stoned New Yorkers.

But beyond the drugs, the validity of the search, and the inherent racial baggage, there was Valencia Jones herself. As the paper pointed out in at least three instances, Valencia Jones was the daughter of the late Raman “Iceman” Jones. Until someone introduced him to the business end of a 9mm, the Iceman had controlled the heroin traffic between Stamford and Hartford, Connecticut. So, despite her exemplary scholastic record, her oft-stated desire to distance herself from her father’s heinous life, and vows of innocence, no one seemed inclined to believe her. Her mother had even encountered difficulty finding a lawyer to take the case. No doubt my friend Larry Feld was previously committed to defending Jack the Ripper’s latest devotee. Lord knows, this wasn’t Jeffrey’s kind of case.

Remembering I had to call both of them, I put the paper down. I felt sorry for Valencia Jones. I don’t know why, exactly. I just did. But I had troubles of my own. However, as a gesture to racial harmony, I did a pratfall and dropped my tray of dirty dishes all over the two groundskeepers at the next table.

“Sorry,” I said, “but this Jones trial’s got me all riled up.”

Zak’s teachers were all pleasant. Uninformative, but pleasant. I got the usual stuff about how Zak and I looked alike and sounded alike. Zak was a good student, wrote a vicious term paper, didn’t respond well to authority. None of them knew where he could have gotten to and they all missed his presence in class. His current English instructor, Professor Pewter, was all fired up about having read my novels. Overwritten, he thought, though he did rather enjoy the naughty bits. It was nice to know that my pornographic appeal crossed gender lines. It was nearly 1:00 P.M. when I headed back to my room to make some calls.

“So,” MacClough began, “anything?”

“Depends.”

“Depends on what?” He sounded down.

“Nothing on Zak unless we’re interested in glowing testimonials,” I said.

“What else?”

“What else can wait until this thing with Zak is resolved,” I said.

“That Japanese chick, huh?” He perked up a bit.

“Something like that. What’s wrong with you?”

“The safe-deposit box was a dead end as far as we’re concerned.”

“Empty,” I asked, “or full of savings bonds?”

“Neither. Just some newspaper clippings about a drug bust upstate.”

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I was too stunned to speak.

“Klein!” MacClough shouted. “Klein, you still there?”

“This drug case recent?” I asked.

“I think so, but Fazio didn’t exactly invite me along as a witness, you know? I got my info through Hurley.”

“Did she give anything specific about the case, a name, maybe?”

“Yeah. Wait, I got it written down here somewhere.” I heard him shuffling papers. “Here we are. Valen-”

“-cia Jones.”

“Holy shit!”

“You know what I think, John?

“What?”

“I think we just found ourselves a place to start.”

I filled him in on the little I knew of the case. He already knew of Raman “Iceman” Jones. MacClough had worked a tri-state narcotics task force and Raman Jones was one of the key targets of the investigation. Maybe we were just hungry for leads, but we both agreed that the timing of Zak’s disappearance, Caliparri’s murder, and the start of the trial were too close together to be coincidental. Now we had to go find a thread that tied them all together. MacClough said he’d come up my way as soon as he could, but in the meantime he’d go thread hunting in Castle-on-Hudson. When I asked him if he wanted me to tell Jeff about our theory, Johnny said no one was going to tell Jeff anything just yet.

“Your big brother strikes me as the kinda guy that likes to stick his nose into things whether his nose belongs there or not,” MacClough explained. “Let’s find something first.”

“Agreed.”

I hung up and punched in Larry Feld’s office number. I didn’t want to give myself any time to work out the permutations of an equation that involved my nephew, a drug kingpin’s daughter, and a murdered cop. As I waited on the line, I distracted myself with fresh memories of Kira Wantanabe. Now there. I thought, there was someone with whom I’d be willing to work out any number of permutations.

Larry Feld was in court, but his secretary said that he had left some material behind for me to read. I gave her the hotel’s fax number and asked her to thank Larry for me. She said she would, but that when I got the fax I’d want to speak to Larry myself. There were things he needed to explain. That was Larry Feld’s philosophy: everything needs explaining. Nothing is ever what it seems. He would even say: “My clients don’t pay for me. They pay for my explanations.” I couldn’t wait.