12
The Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, aka the MAC, is called “the Louvre of the Midwest” by the newspaper and the local Chamber of Commerce (the residents of this midwestern city call it “the Loovah”). The facility covers six acres of prime downtown real estate and is dominated by a circular building that looks to Brady like the giant UFO that shows up at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is Mingo Auditorium.
He wanders around back to the loading area, which is as busy as an anthill on a summer day. Trucks bustle to and fro, and workers are unloading all sorts of stuff, including—weird but true—what looks like sections of a Ferris wheel. There are also flats (he thinks that’s what they’re called) showing a starry night sky and a white sand beach with couples walking hand-in-hand at the edge of the water. The workers, he notes, are all wearing ID badges around their necks or clipped to their shirts. Not good.
There’s a security booth guarding the entrance to the loading area, and that’s not good, either, but Brady wanders over anyway, thinking No risk, no reward. There are two guards. One is inside, noshing a bagel as he monitors half a dozen video screens. The other steps out to intercept Brady. He’s wearing sunglasses. Brady can see himself reflected in the lenses, with a big old gosh-this-is-interesting smile on his face.
“Help you, sir?”
“I was just wondering what’s going on,” Brady says. He points. “That looks like a Ferris wheel!”
“Big concert here Thursday night,” the guard says. “The band’s flogging their new album. Kisses on the Midway, I think it’s called.”
“Boy, they really go all out, don’t they?” Brady marvels.
The guard snorts. “The less they can sing, the bigger the set. You know what? When we had Tony Bennett here last September, it was just him. Didn’t even have a band. The City Symphony backed him up. That was a show. No screaming kids. Actual music. What a concept, huh?”
“I don’t suppose I could go over for a peek. Maybe snap a picture with my cell phone?”
“Nope.” The guard is looking him over too closely. Brady doesn’t like that. “In fact, you’re not supposed to be here at all. So . . .”
“Gotcha, gotcha,” Brady says, widening his smile. Time to go. There’s nothing here for him, anyway; if they have two guys on duty now, there’s apt to be half a dozen on Thursday night. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.”
“No problem.”
Brady gives him a thumbs-up. The security goon returns it, but stands in the doorway of the security booth, watching him walk away.
He strolls along the edge of a vast and nearly empty parking lot that will be filled to capacity on the night of the ’Round Here show. His smile is gone. He’s musing on the numbf*ck ragheads who ran a pair of jetliners into the World Trade Center nine years before. He thinks (without the slightest trace of irony), They spoiled it for the rest of us.
A five-minute trudge takes him to the bank of doors where concertgoers will enter on Thursday night. He has to pay a five-dollar “suggested donation fee” to get in. The lobby is an echoing vault currently filled with art-lovers and student groups. Straight ahead is the gift shop. To the left is the corridor leading to the Mingo Auditorium. It’s as wide as a two-lane highway. In the middle of it is a chrome stand with a sign reading NO BAGS NO BOXES NO BACKPACKS.
Also no metal detectors. It’s possible they haven’t been set up yet, but Brady’s pretty sure they won’t be used at all. There are going to be over four thousand concertgoers pushing to get in, and metal detectors booping and beeping all over the place would create a nightmarish traffic jam. There will be mucho security guards, though, all of them just as suspicious and officious as the sunglasses-wearing ass-munch out back. A man in a quilted vest on a warm June evening would attract their attention at once. In fact, any man without a pigtailed teenybop daughter in tow would be apt to attract attention.
Would you step over here for a minute, sir?
Of course he could blow the vest right then and there and scrag a hundred or more, but that isn’t what he wants. What he wants is to go home, search the Web, find out the name of ’Round Here’s biggest song, and flick the switch halfway through it, when the little chickie-boos are screaming their very loudest and going out of their little chickie-boo minds.
But the obstacles are formidable.
Standing there in the lobby amid the guidebook-toting retirees and junior high school mouth-breathers, Brady thinks, I wish Frankie was alive. If he was, I’d take him to the show. He’d be just stupid enough to like it. I’d even let him bring Sammy the Fire Truck. The thought fills him with the deep and completely authentic sadness that often comes to him when he thinks about Frankie.
Maybe I ought to just kill the fat ex-cop, and myself, and then call it a career.
Rubbing at his temples, where one of his headaches has begun to gather (and now there’s no Mom to ease it), Brady wanders across the lobby and into the Harlow Floyd Art Gallery, where a large hanging banner announces that JUNE IS MANET MONTH!
He doesn’t know exactly who Manet was, probably another old frog painter like van Gogh, but some of the pictures are great. He doesn’t care much for the still-lifes (why in God’s name would you want to spend time painting a melon?), but some of the other ones are possessed of an almost feral violence. One shows a dead matador. Brady looks at it for nearly five minutes with his hands clasped behind him, ignoring the people who jostle by or peer over his shoulder for a look. The matador isn’t mangled or anything, but the blood oozing from beneath his left shoulder looks more real than the blood in all the violent movies Brady has ever seen, and he’s seen plenty. It calms him and clears him and when he finally walks on, he thinks: There has to be a way to do this.
On the spur of the moment he hooks into the gift shop and buys a bunch of ’Round Here shit. When he comes out ten minutes later, carrying a bag with I HAD A MAC ATTACK printed on the side, he again glances down the hallway leading to the Mingo. Just two nights from now, that hallway will become a cattle-chute filled with laughing, pushing, crazily excited girls, most accompanied by longsuffering parents. From this angle he can see that the far righthand side of the corridor has been sectioned off from the rest by velvet ropes. At the head of this sequestered mini-corridor is another sign on another chrome stand.
Brady reads it and thinks, Oh my God.
Oh . . . my . . . God!
13
In the apartment that used to belong to Elizabeth Wharton, Janey kicks off her heels and plunks down on the couch. “Thank God that’s over. Did it last a thousand years, or two?”
“Two,” Hodges says. “You look like a woman who could use a nap.”
“I slept until eight,” she protests, but to Hodges it sounds feeble.
“Still might be a good idea.”
“Considering the fact that I’m having dinner with my relatives tonight in Sugar Heights, you could have something there, shamus. You’re off the hook on dinner, by the way. I think they want to talk about everyone’s favorite musical comedy, Janey’s Millions.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“I’m going to split Ollie’s loot with them. Straight down the middle.”
Hodges starts to laugh. He stops when he realizes she’s serious.
Janey hoists her eyebrows. “Got a problem with that? Maybe think a paltry three and a half mil won’t be enough to see me through to my old age?”
“I guess it would, but . . . it’s yours. Olivia willed it to you.”
“Yes, and the will’s unbreakable, Lawyer Schron assures me of that, but that still doesn’t mean Ollie was in her right mind when she made it. You know that. You saw her, talked to her.” She’s massaging her feet through her stockings. “Besides, if I give them half, I get to watch how they divvy it up. Think of the amusement value.”
“Sure you don’t want me to come with you tonight?”
“Not tonight but definitely tomorrow. That I can’t do alone.”
“I’ll pick you up at quarter past nine. Unless you want to spend another night at my place, that is.”
“Tempting, but no. Tonight is strictly earmarked for family fun. There’s one other thing before you take off. Very important.” She rummages in her purse for a notepad and a pen. She writes, then tears off a page and holds it out to him. Hodges sees two groups of numbers.
Janey says, “The first one opens the gates to the house in Sugar Hill. The second kills the burglar alarm. When you and your friend Jerome are working on Ollie’s computer Thursday morning, I’ll be taking Aunt Charlotte, Holly, and Uncle Henry to the airport. If the guy rigged her computer the way you think he did . . . and the program’s still there . . . I don’t think I could stand it.” She’s looking at him pleadingly. “Do you get that? Say you do.”
“I get it,” Hodges says. He kneels beside her like a man getting ready to propose in one of the romantic novels his ex-wife used to like. Part of him feels absurd. Mostly he doesn’t.
“Janey,” he says.
She looks at him, trying to smile, not quite making it.
“I’m sorry. For everything. So, so sorry.” It isn’t just her he’s thinking of, or her late sister, who was so troubled and troublesome. He’s thinking of the ones who were lost at City Center, especially the woman and her baby.
When he was promoted to detective, his mentor was a guy named Frank Sledge. Hodges thought of him as an old guy, but back then Sledge was fifteen years younger than Hodges is now. Don’t you ever let me hear you call them the vics, Sledge told him. That shit’s strictly for a*sholes and burnouts. Remember their names. Call them by their names.
The Crays, he thinks. They were the Crays. Janice and Patricia.
Janey hugs him. Her breath tickles his ear when she speaks, giving him goosebumps and half a hardon. “I’m going back to California when this is finished. I can’t stay here. I think the world of you, Bill, and if I stayed here I could probably fall in love with you, but I’m not going to do that. I need to make a fresh start.”
“I know.” Hodges pulls away and holds her by the shoulders so he can look her in the face again. It’s a beautiful face, but today she’s looking her age. “It’s all right.”
She dives into her purse again, this time for Kleenex. After she’s dried her eyes, she says, “You made a conquest today.”
“A . . . ?” Then he gets it. “Holly.”
“She thinks you’re wonderful. She told me so.”
“She reminds me of Olivia. Talking to her feels like a second chance.”
“To do the right thing?”
“Yeah.”
Janey wrinkles her nose at him and grins. “Yeah.”
14
Brady goes shopping that afternoon. He takes the late Deborah Ann Hartsfield’s Honda, because it’s a hatchback. Still, one of the items barely fits in the rear. He thinks of stopping at Speedy Postal on his way home and checking for the Gopher-Go he ordered under his Ralph Jones alias, but all that seems like a thousand years ago now, and really, what would be the point? That part of his life is over. Soon the rest will be, too, and what a relief.
He leans the largest of his purchases against the garage wall. Then he goes into the house, and after a brief pause in the kitchen to sniff at the air (no whiff of decay, at least not yet), he goes down to his control room. He speaks the magic word that powers up his row of computers, but only out of habit. He has no urge to slip beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, because he has nothing more to say to the fat ex-cop. That part of his life is also over. He looks at his watch, sees that it’s three-thirty in the afternoon, and calculates that the fat ex-cop now has roughly twenty hours to live.
If you really are f*cking her, Detective Hodges, Brady thinks, you better get your end wet while you’ve still got an end.
He unlocks the padlock on the closet door and steps into the dry and faintly oily odor of homemade plastique. He regards the shoeboxes full of explosive and chooses the one that held the Mephisto walking shoes he’s now wearing—a Christmas present from his mother just last year. From the next shelf up he grabs the shoebox filled with cell phones. He takes one of them and the box of boom-clay over to the table in the middle of the room and goes to work, putting the phone in the box and rigging it to a simple detonator powered by double-A batteries. He turns the phone on to make sure it works, then turns it off again. The chance of someone dialing this disposable’s number by mistake and blowing his control room sky-high is small, but why risk it? The chances of his mother finding that poisoned meat and cooking it for her lunch were also small, and look how that turned out.
No, this baby is going to stay off until ten-twenty tomorrow morning. That’s when Brady will stroll into the parking lot behind the Soames Funeral Home. If there’s anyone back there, Brady will say he thought he could cut through the lot to the next street over, where there’s a bus stop (which happens to be true; he checked it on MapQuest). But he doesn’t expect anyone. They’ll all be inside at the memorial service, bawling up a storm.
He’ll use Thing Two to unlock the fat ex-cop’s car and put the shoebox on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He’ll lock the Toyota again and return to his own car. To wait. To watch him go past. To let him reach the next intersection, where Brady can be sure that he, Brady, will be relatively safe from flying debris. Then . . .
“Ka-pow,” Brady says. “They’ll need another shoebox to bury him in.”
That’s pretty funny, and he’s laughing as he goes back to the closet to get his suicide vest. He’ll spend the rest of the afternoon disassembling it. Brady doesn’t need the vest anymore.
He has a better idea.
15
Wednesday, June 2, 2010, is warm and cloudless. It may still be spring according to the calendar, and the local schools may still be in session, but those things don’t change the fact that this is a perfect summer day in the heartland of America.
Bill Hodges, suited up but as yet blessedly tieless, is in his study, going over a list of car burglaries Marlo Everett sent him by fax. He has printed out a map of the city, and puts a red dot at each burglary location. He sees shoeleather in his future, maybe a lot of it if Olivia’s computer doesn’t pan out, but it’s just possible that some of the burglary victims will mention seeing a similar vehicle. Because Mr. Mercedes had to watch the owners of his target vehicles. Hodges is sure of it. He had to make sure they were gone before he used his gadget to unlock their cars.
He watched them the way he was watching me, Hodges thinks.
This kicks something over in his mind—a brief spark of association that’s bright but gone before he can see what it’s illuminating. That’s okay; if there’s really something there, it will come back. In the meantime, he keeps on checking addresses and making red dots. He has twenty minutes before he has to noose on his tie and go after Janey.
Brady Hartsfield is in his control room. No headache today, and his thoughts, so often muddled, are as clear as the various Wild Bunch screensavers on his computers. He has removed the blocks of plastic explosive from his suicide vest, disconnecting them carefully from the detonator wires. Some of the blocks have gone into a bright red seat cushion printed with the saucy slogan ASS PARKING. He has slipped two more, re-molded into cylinders with detonator wires attached, down the throat of a bright blue Urinesta peebag. With that accomplished, he carefully attaches a stick-on decal to the peebag. He bought it, along with a souvenir tee-shirt, in the MAC gift shop yesterday. The sticker says ’ROUND HERE FANBOY #1. He checks his watch. Almost nine. The fat ex-cop now has an hour and a half to live. Maybe a little less.
Hodges’s old partner Pete Huntley is in one of the interrogation rooms, not because he has anyone to question but because it’s away from the morning hustle and flow of the squadroom. He has notes to go over. He’s holding a press conference at ten, to talk about the latest dark revelations Donald Davis has made, and he doesn’t want to screw anything up. The City Center killer—Mr. Mercedes—is the furthest thing from his mind.
In Lowtown, behind a certain pawnshop, guns are being bought and sold by people who believe they are not being watched.
Jerome Robinson is at his computer, listening to audio clips available at a website called Sounds Good to Me. He listens to a woman laughing hysterically. He listens to a man whistling “Danny Boy.” He listens to a man gargling and a woman apparently in the throes of an orgasm. Eventually he finds the clip he wants. The title is simple: CRYING BABY.
On the floor below, Jerome’s sister Barbara comes bursting into the kitchen, closely followed by Odell. Barbara is wearing a spangly skirt, clunky blue clogs, and a tee-shirt that shows a foxy teenage boy. Below his brilliant smile and careful coif is the legend I LUV CAM 4EVER! She asks her mother if this outfit looks too babyish to wear to the concert. Her mother (perhaps remembering what she wore to her own first concert) smiles and says it’s perfect. Barbara asks if she can wear her mother’s dangly peace-sign earrings. Yes, of course. Lipstick? Well . . . okay. Eye shadow? No, sorry. Barbara gives a no-harm-in-trying laugh and hugs her mother extravagantly. “I can’t wait until tomorrow night,” she says.
Holly Gibney is in the bathroom of the house in Sugar Heights, wishing she could skip the memorial service, knowing her mother will never let her. If she protests that she doesn’t feel well, her mother’s return serve will be one that goes all the way back to Holly’s childhood: What will people think. And if Holly should protest that it doesn’t matter what people think, they are never going to see any of these people (with the exception of Janey) again in their lives? Her mother would look at her as if Holly were speaking a foreign language. She takes her Lexapro, but her insides knot while she’s brushing her teeth and she vomits it back up. Charlotte calls to ask if she’s almost ready. Holly calls back that she almost is. She flushes the toilet and thinks, At least Janey’s boyfriend will be there. Bill. He’s nice.
Janey Patterson is dressing carefully in her late mother’s condominium apartment: dark hose, black skirt, black jacket over a blouse of deepest midnight blue. She’s thinking of how she told Bill she’d probably fall in love with him if she stayed here. That was a bodacious shading of the truth, because she’s already in love with him. She’s sure a shrink would smile and say it was a daddy thing. If so, Janey would smile right back and tell him that was a load of Freudian bullshit. Her father was a bald accountant who was barely there even when he was there. And one thing you can say about Bill Hodges is that he’s there. It’s what she likes about him. She also likes the hat she bought him. That Philip Marlowe fedora. She checks her watch and sees it’s quarter past nine. He’d better be here soon.
If he’s late, she’ll kill him.
16
He’s not late, and he’s wearing the hat. Janey tells him he looks nice. He tells her she looks better than that. She smiles and kisses him.
“Let’s get this done,” he says.
Janey wrinkles her nose and says, “Yeah.”
They drive to the funeral parlor, where they are once more the first to arrive. Hodges escorts her into the Eternal Rest parlor. She looks around and nods her approval. Programs for the service have been laid out on the seats of the folding chairs. The coffin is gone, replaced by a vaguely altarish table with sprays of spring flowers on it. Brahms, turned down almost too low to hear, is playing through the parlor’s sound system.
“Okay?” Hodges asks.
“It’ll do.” She takes a deep breath and repeats what he said twenty minutes before: “Let’s get this done.”
It’s basically the same bunch as yesterday. Janey meets them at the door. While she shakes hands and gives hugs and says all the right things, Hodges stands nearby, scanning the passing traffic. He sees nothing that raises a red flag, including a certain mud-colored Subaru that trundles by without slowing.
A rental Chevy with a Hertz sticker on the side of the windshield swings around back to the parking lot. Soon Uncle Henry appears, preceded by his gently swinging executive belly. Aunt Charlotte and Holly follow him, Charlotte with one white-gloved hand clamped just above her daughter’s elbow. To Hodges, Auntie C looks like a matron escorting a prisoner—probably a drug addict—into county lockup. Holly is even paler than she was yesterday, if that is possible. She’s wearing the same shapeless brown gunnysack, and has already bitten off most of her lipstick.
She gives Hodges a tremulous smile. Hodges offers his hand, and she seizes it with panicky tightness until Charlotte pulls her into the Hall of the Dead.
A young clergyman, from the church Mrs. Wharton attended until she was too unwell to go out on Sundays, serves as master of ceremonies. He reads the predictable passage from Proverbs, the one about the virtuous woman. Hodges is willing to stipulate that the deceased may have been worth more than rubies, but has his doubts about whether she spent any time working with wool and flax. Still, it’s poetical, and tears are flowing by the time the clergyman is finished. The guy may be young, but he’s smart enough not to try eulogizing someone he hardly knew. Instead of that, he invites those with “precious memories” of the late Elizabeth to come forward. Several do, beginning with Althea Greene, the nurse, and ending with the surviving daughter. Janey is calm and brief and simple.
“I wish we’d had more time,” she finishes.