And what made all that happen? What had been the first cause? Why, a man listening. That was all. Listening to a lady bartender who was used to having her br**sts stared at while her words most commonly went in one ear of the man doing the staring and out the other. And who had Hollywood Jack listened to before he had listened to Janna Massengale? Some Sunset Strip hooker, it seemed . . . or more likely a whole bunch of them. (What would you call that, anyway? Dale wonders absently as he goes out to the garage to get his trusty hose. A shimmy of streetwalkers? A strut of hookers?) None of them could have picked Thornberg Kinderling out of a lineup, because the Thornberg who visited L.A. surely hadn't looked much like the Thornberg who traveled around to the farm-supply companies in the Coulee and over in Minnesota. L.A. Thorny had worn a wig, contacts instead of specs, and a little false mustache.
"The most brilliant thing was the skin darkener," Jack had said. "Just a little, just enough to make him look like a native."
"Dramatics all four years at French Landing High School," Dale had replied grimly. "I looked it up. The little bastard played Don Juan his junior year, do you believe it?"
A lot of sly little changes (too many for a jury to swallow an insanity plea, it seemed), but Thorny had forgotten that one revelatory little signature, that trick of pinching his nostrils together with the palm of his hand turned outward. Some prostitute had remembered it, though, and when she mentioned it — only in passing, Dale has no doubt, just as Janna Massengale did — Jack heard it.
Because he listened.
Called to thank me for tracing the knife, and again to tell me how the jury came back, Dale thinks, but that second time he wanted something, too. And I knew what it was. Even before he opened his mouth I knew.
Because, while he is no genius detective like his friend from the Golden State, Dale had not missed the younger man's unexpected, immediate response to the landscape of western Wisconsin. Jack had fallen in love with the Coulee Country, and Dale would have wagered a good sum that it had been love at first look. It had been impossible to mistake the expression on his face as they drove from French Landing to Cen-tralia, from Centralia to Arden, from Arden to Miller: wonder, pleasure, almost a kind of rapture. To Dale, Jack had looked like a man who has come to a place he has never been before only to discover he is back home.
"Man, I can't get over this," he'd said once to Dale. The two of them had been riding in Dale's old Caprice cruiser, the one that just wouldn't stay aligned (and sometimes the horn stuck, which could be embarrassing). "Do you realize how lucky you are to live here, Dale? It must be one of the most beautiful places in the world."
Dale, who had lived in the Coulee his entire life, had not disagreed.
Toward the end of their final conversation concerning Thornberg Kinderling, Jack had reminded Dale of how he'd once asked (not quite kidding, not quite serious, either) for Dale to let him know if a nice little place ever came on the market in Dale's part of the world, something out of town. And Dale had known at once from Jack's tone — the almost anxious drop in his voice — that the kidding was over.
"So you owe me," Dale murmurs, shouldering the hose. "You owe me, you bastard." Of course he has asked Jack to lend an unofficial hand with the Fisherman investigation, but Jack has refused . . . almost with a kind of fear.
I'm retired, he'd said brusquely. If you don't know what that word means, Dale, we can look it up in the dictionary together.
But it's ridiculous, isn't it? Of course it is. How can a man not yet thirty-five be retired? Especially one who is so infernally good at the job?
"You owe me, baby," he says again, now walking along the side of the house toward the bib faucet. The sky above is cloudless; the well-watered lawn is green; there is nary a sign of slippage, not out here on Herman Street. Yet perhaps there is, and perhaps we feel it. A kind of discordant hum, like the sound of all those lethal volts coursing through the steel struts of the KDCU tower.
But we have stayed here too long. We must take wing again and proceed to our final destination of this early morning. We don't know everything yet, but we know three important things: first, that French Landing is a town in terrible distress; second, that a few people ( Judy Marshall, for one; Charles Burnside, for another) understand on some deep level that the town's ills go far beyond the depredations of a single sick pedophile-murderer; third, that we have met no one capable of consciously recognizing the force — the slippage — that has now come to bear on this quiet town hard by Tom and Huck's river. Each person we've met is, in his own way, as blind as Henry Leyden. This is as true of the folks we haven't so far encountered — Beezer St. Pierre, Wendell Green, the Color Posse — as it is of those we have.