“Yes,” Lanternglass said. “It’s when Ramadan ends.”
He nodded. “And you know today is the first day of Ramadan?” Then he snorted with amusement—although there was no real humor in it—and added, “But of course you know. That’s why you’re staking out the mosque.” He did not say it angrily, like an accusation. In some ways his mildness was worse. She wasn’t sure how to respond. She was still trying to think what to say when he added, “I walked Yasmin’s mother here. She’s inside with the other women. She doesn’t know I am not praying myself, because the men and women pray in different rooms. You know that?”
She nodded.
“Yasmin’s father couldn’t walk her to the dawn prayer. He’s in the hospital for observation. He’s fainted several times since he heard the news. We’re all scared to death for him. He had a bypass operation last year.” Tapping his chest with his thumb. “She was his only child.” He stroked his breastbone with the edge of his thumb, rubbing the place where his wife had been shot. He gazed blankly out at the temple and added finally, “Do you think it was because she was Muslim?”
“What?” Lanternglass asked.
“That she was shot. That they were both shot.”
“I don’t know. We may never know.”
“Good. I don’t want to know. I dreamed last night my son said his first word. It was ‘cake.’ He said, ‘Mm, cake!’ Probably not a very realistic first word. I haven’t dreamed about Yasmin yet. But then I’m not sleeping much,” he said. “You’re not eating your doughnut.”
“I hate these things,” Lanternglass said, pushing it away from her. “I don’t know why I got it.”
“Shame to let it go to waste. Smells lovely,” he said, and picked her doughnut off her plate without asking and, making steady eye contact, took a large bite. “Mm. Cake.”
July 10, 5:40 P.M.
AFTER THEY RECORDED THE INTERVIEW for Telling Stories, Jay Rickles said why not come to his house for supper. He wanted Kellaway to meet the family. They could open some beers and watch the show when it aired at nine. Kellaway didn’t have anything else to do.
Rickles lived on Kiwi Boulevard. It wasn’t a mansion. No fountain out front, no white stucco wall enclosing the property, not even a swimming pool. But it was pretty nice all the same, a big hacienda with a red Spanish-tile roof and an enormous courtyard of crushed white shells. The front steps were flanked by a pair of green copper koi statues the size of Welsh corgis.
Inside, the house was like a Tex-Mex restaurant, with lassos and bleached longhorn skulls mounted on the walls. It was crowded, too, with willowy young women in tooled-leather boots and denim skirts and squads of little kids who crashed from room to room. At first Kellaway thought Rickles must have decided to throw a party and had invited half the neighborhood. He was there for most of an hour before he gradually realized the girls with golden hair were all his daughters and the small children were his grandkids.
They rooted themselves on a couch the size of a Cadillac, done in tribal patterns, in front of a television as large as a Cadillac’s hood. There was already a big steel bucket full of ice and Coronas on the coffee table, next to a dish of salt and a bowl of lime wedges. Rickles helped himself to a beer with one hand. The other snaked around the hip of a tall, leggy woman in a pair of Wranglers so tight they were close to obscene. At first glance Kellaway thought Rickles was patting one of his daughters on the butt. At second he saw that the woman next to Rickles was maybe as old as sixty, thick makeup covering the finer creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes and the yellow of her hair almost certainly a dye job. She had the toned beauty of someone like Christie Brinkley, of someone who had always been beautiful and always would be, was beautiful almost by habit.
“Is it Mr. Kellaway?” she asked. “Or Deputy Kellaway?”
Rickles cracked her rear with one hand, and she jumped away, laughing and rubbing her bottom. “You hush up, woman. You ruin everything.”
“Ruining men’s plans is my life’s work,” she said, and wandered off, swinging her hips in a provocative sort of way. Or maybe that was just how she walked.
When she’d gone, Kellaway looked at Rickles and said, “Deputy?”
The police chief’s eyes glittered damply with emotion. “That’s supposed to be a surprise. We’re going to make you an honorary deputy next month. Give you a key to the city, too. Big ceremony. When we announce it, try and pretend you didn’t know.”
“Do I get my very own badge?”
“Bet your ass,” Rickles said, and laughed a husky, beery laugh. “What I wonder, how come you’re not a deputy for real?”
“I applied. You turned me down.”
“Me?” Rickles put a hand to his chest and opened his eyes wide in stunned disbelief.
“Well. The department anyway.”
“Didn’t you serve in Iraq?”
“Mm-hm.”
“And we turned you down? Why?”
“One position, fifty applicants, and I came up short in the melanin department.”
Rickles nodded sadly. “Christ, isn’t that always the story. Though, no matter how much you do to show you care about diversity, it’s never enough. Did you read that hit piece the Digest ran, about the drama student? No? So twenty years ago, there’s an APB out for a deranged African American with a knife who cut up a white couple and stole their Miata and a Hermès purse full of loot. Wife died, husband pulled through. Cops traced the Miata to a parking lot in the Black & Blue and saw a guy matching the description walking away from it, holding a knife, purse over his shoulder. They tell him to get facedown, he runs instead. He goes around the corner of a little shopping plaza—then changes his mind and turns back. When the cops come around the corner, they run smack into him. They think he’s charging, and one of them blasts his black ass. Well, turned out he wasn’t holding a knife. It was a CD. The Hermès purse over his shoulder? It was a Little Mermaid backpack he was carrying for a cousin of his. He was a seventeen-year-old slickster who did summer-stock theater and who was applying to the London School of Drama. He ran because he’d been wandering around opening cars, grabbing stuff, petty thievery. Basically, he died of a guilty conscience.”
In his mind Kellaway shot the Muslim woman all over again. It made him angry, thinking about her, trying to figure out why the bitch had stood up, why she didn’t stay still. He resented her for making him shoot her.