Rage Against the Dying

Twenty-one





Even with my stop at the hotel, I still arrived at Emery’s Cantina before Coleman and took a seat at the bar this time. I ordered a light beer while listening to the conversation around me. They were talking about teeth.

A guy from the metro police who the others called Frank said he needed a root canal and did anybody know a good endodontist in the Northwest? Cliff, who I already knew, said he’d heard about root canals but didn’t know what they were. Emery said no, he had a jaw like a rock, couldn’t remember ever having been to a dentist. Looking superior, he added that he flossed twice a day. Cheri said she went to Gentle Dental because she liked the drugs.

Then they all looked at me like someone my age would certainly know dental work. “I get all my dentures made in Costa Rica,” I said, a little resentfully. “They sound like castanets.” They laughed, but it sounded kind of polite, like they weren’t sure what part—castanets, Costa Rica, or dentures—was meant to be the joke.

Cheri, who was standing near me at the bar, said, “I hear you’re famous.” Frank and Cliff looked at their food.

My cell phone rang. The nerve sparked in my neck and I prepared my what-a-surprise voice for Max saying he’d found the body, which goes to show how it hung in the back of my mind like a nightmare. You know that nightmare where you kill someone and the worst part of it is knowing you can’t turn back the clock and make it not happen? No? Well never mind. I took a deep breath and opened the phone, gave a cautious hello.

“Brigid, it’s Emily. Are you finished at the hotel?”

“Yeah, I’m at the bar.”

“How’s Mr. Robertson?”

“Wasn’t there. Where are you?”

“I just stopped in at the office for messages. I’m on my way.”

While I waited for Coleman I did some quality brooding about how I wished I hadn’t done what I’d done. How I should have called Max right after it happened, and not covered it up. There was no going back on that. But how if I hadn’t done what I’d done I wouldn’t have found the DVD that suggested my assailant was targeting me, and that it might be connected somehow to Floyd Lynch. I might be dead. Hell, Carlo might be dead. I wished I could stop looping; it was getting me nowhere.

Lynch. I went over the interview with Wilbur and Portobello Mike, pausing, backing up, but could not find a motive for their being involved. Rather, they seemed to distance themselves from their son and brother.

Seemed.

Round and round we go.

Before I was totally brooded out, a slash of afternoon sun invaded the dark interior and I saw in the mirror that Coleman had arrived. I gestured for her to come join me at the bar. The conversation in the room dropped a notch while the men pretended not to watch her El Greco body glide across the room. Coleman looked uncomfortable and ran her fingers through her tight curls to disguise that she was passing her hand over that birthmark on her temple the way she did when we first met.

“Is this okay, or would you prefer a table?” I asked.

She shifted a little shift as if she was trying to get more comfortable with either her underwire or her side arm and sat down on the vinyl-padded stool next to mine. “No, this is fine,” she said. “It’s just my parents are Mormons and I’ve never gotten totally used to sitting at a bar.”

She ordered an iced tea from Emery, who was hovering less like a good bartender and more like a man wondering what was underneath the linen blouse. He rested his palms on the surface of the bar and leaned, not quite leering, in her direction. Even Cheri passed by and skewered him on a wide-eyed look, the kind of watch-yourself-buddy warning that confirmed my guess that they were lovers.

Emery put a basket of chips and a bowl of salsa on the bar in front of us. “On the house,” he said with his accent and a courtly flourish of his hand, both comically self-deprecating and elegantly European, before drifting away to serve someone else.

“He must like you,” Coleman said, indicating the chips and sounding a little wistful at the thought of having a bartender of one’s very own.

“He doesn’t know me. He’s flirting with you.”

Emery brought her the iced tea, rested a spoon on top of a cloth napkin, and moved the container of sugar packets closer to her.

Apparently feeling that the tea needed an excuse, “I’m still working,” Coleman said as she squeezed the lemon. She must have had Barky on her mind. “You have a dog?”

“We have Pugs.”

“Are Pugs good?”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, never having had dogs before, but answered, “Sure, they work fine. How about you?”

“We had a miniature schnauzer when I was little. Duncan. He used to sleep with me.” Then the small talk was done. She was too intense to have a knack for it. “That interview was a dead end. None of it is making much sense.”

“Neither does lust killing. These people don’t think the way we do.”

“Like you say, we need more.”

“With interviews sometimes you can’t tell what’s important until later. You just keep as much of it inside your head as you can, and sometimes connections appear. It’s like we’re all garbage scows of information and sometimes your life can depend on the connections.”

When Coleman rested her elbow on the bar and her chin on her hand, was it to cover a smile? She stared at me as if she was soaking up all the instruction I had to offer, but her eyes showed only a kind of bland patience. She may have admired me well enough, but she was no suck-up. So I pulled back on the patronizing. Lord knows Coleman had never played the over-the-hill card with me and she deserved the same respect. “Sorry, you already know all that. Your analysis really impressed Weiss, by the way.”

“I still can’t believe I met David Weiss. He was huge like you, you know, like—”

“Dinosaurs? Just kidding,” I said before she could attempt to shovel the words back into her mouth. But then I noticed she didn’t seem uncomfortable at all, so maybe I spoke too soon about the over-the-hill thing. I ignored it. “We joined the Bureau at the same time. He had already had his PhD in psych and was tapped for the new behavioral science unit. We called him Sigmund because—”

“Freud. That’s so funny.”

I hate when I repeat myself. They say it’s due to stress. I finished my beer, said no to a second when Emery swung by. “What do they call you?” I asked, to change the subject.

“Snow. Only not to my face.”

“As in…”

“Pure as the driven.” She rolled her eyes while I kept my face carefully bland, remembering the suspicion Sigmund had about her and the public defender. “I heard Dr. Weiss call you Stinger. How come?”

“Will they still call you Snow when Morrison finds out you’ve been working off the rez?”

Rather than address the Morrison issue directly, she slipped on an aphorism. “Sometimes you have to choose between following rules and doing the right thing.”

Time to get her back for reminding me I’d repeated myself. “You sound like a refrigerator magnet. Nothing can f*ck you up more than feeling noble.”

She let that one pass, changed the subject again. “One thing I always wondered, Weiss spent so much time in his book on the Route 66 case but never mentioned Jessica Robertson.”

“When he wrote the book she’d only been gone eight months. He’s a pretty cerebral guy, but I think even Sig was too close to her. A lot of people were.”

“Why is that?”

“She was childlike, could pass for thirteen at a distance. Never got on anybody’s bad side, which I’m sure you know is a quality unknown in an ego mill like the Bureau. One of those rare women who could be relentlessly perky and you didn’t want to bitch slap her. You wanted to take care of her.”

And that’s enough about Jessica, I thought. Is that what the little bit of sharing about her dog and nickname had been about? Not small talk at all, but trying to get me to open up? Nice try, Coleman. I didn’t add that I called Jessica Rookie and she called me Coach.

Coleman seemed to sense that I’d said all I was going to say and didn’t press further. “I brought a copy of the section of the murder book that covers Lynch. It’s in the car.”

What she had given me the first time was her analysis of the case. The murder book itself was the sacred document and you weren’t allowed to remove it from the office without authorization. I lowered my voice and gestured to her to do the same. “You brought it outside the office?”

She blushed. “Not the whole thing,” she said. “Just the part specifically about him, his confession, his truck, that kind of stuff. But it provides a little more than what I gave you before.”

Coleman was becoming an enigma. Rigid in some ways, yet … “Why Snow, you really don’t operate by the book, do you?”

She was also getting better and better at ignoring me. “I figured maybe we could go over it tonight at my place, and then we can interview Floyd again, say, tomorrow? Maybe we don’t need any more evidence. Maybe he’s been thinking about what he did. Maybe it will take less pressure than we think to make him tell us the truth. I’ve even been imagining, what if that body on his truck, what if the real killer gave it to him?”

“Whoa, girl. Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves with this intuition business. Give me what you’ve got so I can take it home. I think better alone. I’ll see if there’s anything we can take to Floyd Lynch tomorrow that will make him change his story.”