Third
Person
Singular
KJ Erickson
St. Martin’s Minotaur
New York
Copyright 2001 by KJ Erickson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
ISBN 0-312-26666-9
First Edition: January 2001
Part I
Minneapolis
Thursday, April 3
Chapter 1
The Father Hennepin Bluffs rise on the east side of the Mississippi River, facing the Minneapolis skyline. Below the bluffs is St. Anthony Falls—the only falls on the more than two thousand miles of the Mississippi. It is at the falls that the Mississippi gives up its casual, low-banked meandering and begins to take itself and its journey to the Gulf of Mexico seriously.
Evelyn Rau pulled up and parked on the railroad tracks that ran in front of the historic Pillsbury A Mill on Southeast Main Street. The mill’s windows—opaque with milled flour dust—stared out blindly over the cobbled street toward the river. Directly across from the mill was the west trailhead for the paths that crisscrossed the bluffs below.
Evelyn would have liked to keep the car running. She’d been cold since waking. But sitting alone in a car with the engine running on a nearly deserted street might draw attention. So she stayed cold and got in position, adjusting the seat back so she could lie low enough to avoid being seen by someone looking in, but still able to catch any action from behind in the rearview mirror.
Two months from now, and a block or so farther up on Main, the street would be swarming with people wandering between the bars and restaurants that filled the warehouses facing the Mississippi. But before noon on a cold, damp April weekday, the street was empty. Which was good. What was better was that Main was neither residential nor were there small businesses. Homeowners and small-business owners were the worst when it came to people with their noses up for deals going down.
But her real risk was always the buyer. That he’d been hustling stuff to get money and the cops had turned him. So she always gave the buyer a short rope for getting the deal done. She’d called this morning’s buyer from a Super America where she’d stopped for coffee. He had less than a half hour if he wanted to make a buy.
Remembering the coffee, she leaned forward for the cup she’d wedged between the gear box and the seat. The heat of the cup in her hands felt good. On reflex, she glanced at the side-view mirror—and froze. A dark green BMW had made it within a half block of where she was parked. The car moved slowly. It wasn’t the buyer. She knew his car and his license plate. And there were two people. She wouldn’t sell to two people. Her buyers knew that.
The Beemer slowed to a stop maybe thirty feet behind her, then pulled in and parked. The front parking lights flashed and died, and from the driver’s side, a tall, good-looking guy eased out. His eyes took in everything as he moved to the backseat door, opened it, leaned in and took out a narrow brown bag. A young girl—younger than the guy—came from the other side of the car. He wasn’t paying much attention to her. He was paying attention to the street, his eyes landing for a moment on Evelyn’s car, then darting up at the mill, across the road toward the river.
Another dealer? The guy wasn’t a cop, she’d put money on that. But he was thinking hard about something. The couple crossed Main to the trailhead. In moments they’d disappeared down the trail. A shudder hit Evelyn before she knew it was coming. Without knowing why, she was spooked.
Something wasn’t right. Reaching down to the side of the seat, she flipped the seat back into position, let it push her upright, and cranked the ignition. She stopped just long enough to take a deep gulp of the coffee. Then, rolling down her window, she dumped what was left, throwing the empty cup on the floor.
Without turning her head, she pulled out, hung a right on Third, and drove up the hill behind Main, then circled back to Main to come up behind the BMW. With the car idling, she focused for a moment on the plates: VSW 341. An association from her past life entered her consciousness like a ghost. Virginia Stephen Woolf. A twinge of emotional pain twisted in her gut, and she pulled back out onto Main, away from ghosts, buyers, and mystery couples.
Back at the apartment, Evelyn sat in the underground garage for almost ten minutes. With any luck, Gary would either be sleeping or would have gone out after she left. Scooping up crap from the car floor, she dumped it in the barrel by the elevators on her way in. Keeping the car neat was one of the things she did to create the illusion that her life was under control.
She held her breath as she turned the key in the apartment door. No luck. The door wasn’t half open before the sound of the TV from the living room told her Gary was in and up.
He was standing directly in front of the TV. Shirtless, watching cartoons and drinking a can of beer. His hair, long and shapeless, hung forward over his unshaven face. He had on a pair of unzipped jeans; the skin of his belly looked soft and white.
He didn’t look up from the TV or say anything as she walked through the living room into the kitchen. She was bent over in front of the open refrigerator when he called to her.
"Where you been?"
She straightened up and shut the refrigerator door without taking anything out. She didn’t move from where she was standing. "I was supposed to do a deal down by the river. The buyer didn’t show."
Gary walked into the kitchen, crunched the empty beer can with one hand and dropped it on the counter. It rattled briefly, the only sound between them. He leaned over against the wall and fixed his eyes on her.
"How much cash we got?"
She shrugged and turned away. "I don’t know exactly. Seven, eight hundred, maybe."
She heard him blow air through his lips in contempt.
"Eight hundred does diddly if I’m gonna get more stuff from Howard, which I need to do pretty quick, or he’s gonna start treating me like a stranger. Meanwhile, we’re sittin’ on practically everything we bought last month, which I don’t much like having around. What’s the problem, Evie?"
She hiked herself up on the edge of the counter and concentrated on a rough cuticle. "I told you. The buyer didn’t show."
Gary left the room, leaving her sitting on the counter edge. He came back in with a pack of cigarettes. Holding his hair back from his forehead, he flicked on one of the gas burners on the stove, bent forward and lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply and blew smoke directly at her. Picking tobacco off his tongue, he said, "Far as I can tell, you haven’t sold hardly any stuff in the past two, three weeks. The deal we had was, I handle wholesale, you do retail. Now anytime you want to trade places, say the word."
She knew they were both thinking about the one time she’d gone with him to buy from Howard. In a downstairs room of a ramshackle duplex, Evelyn and Gary did business with four black men and one woman. The woman was grossly overweight and had no upper teeth on the right side of her mouth. Two thin, ill-tempered German shepherds could be seen down the hallway, tied to doorknobs with ropes.
Howard and Gary sat on a couch that was missing a front leg and two seat cushions. In front of the couch, a board had been propped up on cardboard boxes. On the board were maybe a dozen brown paper bags, the kind kids used for school lunches. Gary and Howard were counting capsules into piles, after which they’d dump them into one of the bags. When they’d finished with the capsules, the woman brought in a cardboard box filled with plastic bags of coke. With surprising delicacy, Howard would open a bag, and offer it to Gary, who’d touch his finger to his tongue, dip the finger into a bag, and touch it again to his tongue. He made a small sound of acceptance after each of these gestures.
Gary put the bags of capsules and powder into a canvas bag. "Give me the money," he said, without looking at Evelyn. Evelyn, who’d left her jacket on, reached inside the jacket to pull out the thick rectangle of cash Gary’d given her to carry. Gary passed the cash to Howard.
Howard’s eyes went from the cash to Evelyn.
"You wanna throw in a piece a tha for a one-day-only discount, Mistah Gare-uh Say-hen?"
Gary joined the others in snickering at Howard’s suggestion. He glanced over at Evelyn, not to let her in on the joke, but to suggest to the others that she was his to do with as he pleased.
He was slow in answering. Then, as if it didn’t much matter, he said, "We got our deal, Howard. Leave it like it is."
"You member tha woman wit you first time you an me did business?"
Gary sucked on his cigarette, blew out, and looked up at Evelyn. He looked at her without meeting her eyes. He tapped the ash off his cigarette and with great concentration, eyes downward, ground the ash into the bare wood floor with the heel of his boot.
"Yeah. Ramona," he answered.
"Thas it. Rah-moe-nah. Big titties on tha Rah-moe-nah girl. Member I tol you five hunnert off for a squeeze on Rah-moe-nah’s big titties and what she done when I says tha?"
Gary gave no sign of answering. Howard looked around at the others with a wide grin. "This Rah-moh-nah girl, when I says I wanna squeeze on her big titties, she come over, pull her shirt off, sits right down on my lap, pulls my face down on them big titties and says, ‘You give me ten dimes worth a coke an I fuck you right here, right now,’ and she did. She did Eli for nuthin, too. But then she’d blown through so much stuff, I doan think she knew no more wha she’s doin. Wha ever happened to tha Rah-moe-nah girl, Mistah Say-hen?"
"I had to cut her loose," Gary said, standing. "She was doing more stuff than she was selling. Come on, Evie. We got places to go and people to see."
"You come see me again," Mistah Gare-uh Say-hen, and bring some other big-tittie girl. I like this Evie all right, but she ain’t got them big titties like I like. You see that Rah-moe-nah girl, you tell her come see Howard."
Evelyn couldn’t remember how she got out of the house and back to the car. Sitting next to Gary in the front seat, she hissed, "You shit. You let them think I was some piece of crap that’d do whatever you said. You jerk-off !"
Gary hadn’t answered her. He’d reached into his jacket to a paper bag he’d stashed separate from the canvas tote and pulled out a handful of colored capsules and bags of coke. He’d dumped them in her lap and kept driving.
More or less like he’d done the first time they’d met.
A friend asked her, "For God’s sake, Evelyn, what do you see in him?" The question had come soon after she’d started seeing Gary Sehen, when she thought the answer was simple.
The first reason: he wasn’t an academic, a qualification of some significance to Evelyn after four years as a floundering Ph.D. candidate.
The second reason: he’d been kind to her, and she wasn’t used to people being kind to her. "Are you okay?" he’d asked, looking at her through the rearview mirror where she’d huddled in the back seat of his cab. His voice had been quiet, respectful.
Surprising herself, she’d answered honestly. "Not okay. But I’ll survive. Thanks for asking."
"You’ve got a west bank address—teach at the U?" He kept is eyes on her in the mirror.
"Sort of. I’m a graduate student."
"Really? Maybe that’s why you look familiar. What’s your degree in?"
"English literature." She paused, then tested him a bit, the way academics always did in social situations. She disliked herself even as she did it. "Early-twentieth-century English novelists. The Bloomsbury Group is my specialty."
He smiled at her, shaking his head. "Definitely not why you looked familiar. One of the reasons I haven’t finished my econ degree after six years is I’ve still got the English comp requirement hanging over my head. That, and driving a cab full-time."
Pass. He hadn’t pulled any phony bullshit to try to impress her.
She tried to think of something to say in return, but she was too tired to be clever, and nothing came. "Sorry," she said, "I’m not much for chat tonight. I’ve had a long trip and I’ve got a stack of midterm papers to correct before lights out…."
He held up a hand in response. "No problem. Take it easy." And he’d been quiet for the rest of the ride, talking in a muffled voice into a handheld mike now and again and scribbling on a clipboard lying on the seat next to him.
At the apartment entrance, he’d hopped out of the cab and carried her luggage into the lobby before she had a chance to get out of the back seat. When she handed him cash for the fare, he’d held up a hand in resistance and instead put an envelope in her hand, pressing her fingers closed around it.
"You look to me like somebody who could use a good deed. Let me recommend my little friends. I couldn’t get through finals without them."
In her apartment, with the door closed behind her, she’d opened the envelope to find a couple dozen red-and-orange capsules. Speed. Evelyn’s undergraduate roommate sophomore year had relied on these guys to stay thin and get through finals. There was a message scrawled on the envelope: "Take two as needed. Call me if I can help again. Gary Sehen, 331-8979."
Evelyn looked at the capsules in her hand and then at her watch. She contemplated her briefcase, stuffed with the ungraded midterms which were due to be returned in less than ten hours.
What the hell.
Within a half hour, a smooth, internal warmth was moving through her veins, into tight muscles, through frazzled nerves. She’d expected—what? Maybe frenetic energy. What she felt was a calm intensity. She worked through the night with a concentration she’d not been able to muster since her first year of graduate school. Her comments on the midterms were detailed and on point. She felt confident about the grades she assigned.
She completed the last paper just after dawn, stacked it neatly with the others, and decided to shower and change. She could have gone to bed for a catnap, but the prospect of an early start had an inexplicable appeal.
Coming out of the shower, she realized the effect of the capsules was wearing thin. She felt jangly, warm, and slightly dizzy. She walked back to the desk where she’d left the envelope. She took one capsule out, went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, and washed the single capsule down with hot coffee. By the time she left the apartment for campus, she was back on track.
The English Department office looked and felt like a high school principal’s office. The de facto principal of the department was its senior secretary, Rita Hoehne. Rita was a squat, tightly permed divorcee who’d worked in the department for more than twenty years. Her dominance of the department was founded on a genius for organization, abundant energy, a self-defined sense of moral purpose, and a deeply rooted anti-intellectualism. In combination these qualities had the effect of making the faculty and students she served feel incompetent with respect to the basic functions of daily living. Their resulting insecurity kept them slightly off-balance and squarely under Rita’s thumb. Which was just where she wanted them.
Among the current crop of graduate students, all of whom depended on Rita in important ways, only Evelyn escaped Rita’s contempt. Evelyn chalked this up to Rita’s recognition that, like Rita, Evelyn was an outsider in academe. And Evelyn knew that being a graduate student wasn’t really important. Evelyn’s self-knowledge relieved Rita of her duty to remind Evelyn of these truths on a daily basis.
"So. You’re back." Rita greeted Evelyn without looking at her.
"Yup," Evelyn said, and walked over to her mailbox. "Back last night after midnight." She grabbed the mail from her box, dumped it on a table, and helped herself to coffee from the department pot. Then she opened her briefcase and removed the midterms, plopping them on the counter next to Rita.
"For John. He in yet?"
Rita pulled a face and looked over the top of her glasses at Evelyn. "At eight-thirty in the morning? You have been out of touch." She scooped up the term papers. "When did you find the time to get these done?"
"I didn’t go to bed last night. I expect John’s nose is sufficiently out of joint, my being gone for almost three weeks in the middle of term, much less my coming back without the midterms graded."
"You got that right. Dead dads don’t count for much with our John Oswald. He came close to doing an honest day’s work once or twice while you were gone. Made a lot of noise while he was at it. Drove us all crazy. When was the funeral?"
"Thurday. I finished going through my dad’s things on Saturday and got a cheap flight back last night. So I take it I still have a job? I called John from Texas just after Dad died to say I’d be a week longer. He all but told me I needn’t bother to come back."
Rita snorted. "Ha. Fat chance. You don’t come back and he’s got to finish the research on his MLA paper, write the final for the senior seminar, and grade the honors papers. I won’t live long enough to see him do as much as that for the rest of his life, much less between now and the end of the quarter."
Rita’s recital of what Evelyn had left to do for John Oswald—not including Evelyn’s own work—deflated the thin layer of control the pills had laid on her psyche. As she loaded up her mail and walked back to her desk, a familiar sense of dread began to gather. Standing over the disorder of her desk, she doubted she had the energy to get through the day, much less the term. Most pressing was the as-yet-undone research for John Oswald’s MLA paper. The Decline of Literature: Galsworthy and the Masses. The paper’s theme grated on Evelyn’s intellectual soul. It had been her enthusiasm for Galsworthy in a graduate seminar that had confirmed her as a heathen in the groves of academe. During a discussion of character development, she had used a Galsworthy character as an example of complex, multilayered personality development. The professor leading the seminar had looked slowly around the circle of aspiring intellectuals. An uneasy silence gathered heavily in the room. Then, with a glance at his wristwatch, the professor said, "Well, Miss Rau. It’s almost two-thirty. We must be keeping you from your soap operas." Her fellow graduate students had laughed loudly, nervously. The experience was the starting point of a cynicism that took on ever larger proportions in Evelyn’s life as a graduate student.
Damn. Why had she left the pills at the apartment? Why, for that matter, had she taken just one before leaving?
The third reason Evelyn had gotten involved with Gary Sehen, and the one she was least willing to admit to herself, was that she wanted more orange-and-red capsules. What she told herself was that if she hadn’t gotten sick two weeks after getting back from her father’s funeral, she wouldn’t have noticed that she didn’t have any pills left.
It had been almost two days since she’d taken the last pair of pills when she woke with a stiff neck. Her throat was sore by the time she got to campus. At the end of the day her eyes were bright with fever and a cold had turned the inside of her head into wet cement. The thought of being sick threw her into a dead panic.
The empty envelope with Gary Sehen’s note and number was still in her desk drawer. She sat at the desk with the envelope pressed against her warm forehead for a long time. Then, reaching for the phone, she punched the seven digits.
An answering machine picked up. "Hi, it’s Gary. Leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you."
So she did. And so he did.
Part II
Minneapolis
Saturday, April 5 to Saturday, July 12
Chapter 2
"Nice signal, fuckhead!"
Mars Bahr glanced down at the small, curly-haired boy next to him in the car’s front passenger seat. Chris’s eight-year-old face was screwed into an expression of self-righteous indignation, his attention riveted on the Ford Tempo directly in front of them.
The Tempo’s driver had committed a cardinal error in the Bahr family book of driving etiquette. The driver had failed to turn on his left-turn signal until after the light had turned green, leaving Mars and Chris locked behind the Tempo while traffic to their right flowed smoothly through the intersection.
Mars frowned. Chris had a litany of passenger-side impatience he’d begun chanting at age four. His phrasing and inflection were precise copies of what Mars said and how Mars said it since Mars had gotten his driver’s license twenty years earlier. The "fuckhead" stuff was something else. Chris’s language was getting as bad as the Minneapolis Police Department squad room. Mars made a mental note to add a discussion of language to their breakfast agenda.
Saturday morning breakfasts—and garage sales May through September—were routine for the two of them. They’d started by going to restaurants. Al’s in Dinkytown, the Modern in Northeast Minneapolis, or the Perkins on Riverside. When Chris had turned five, he’d started Cub Scouts, where he’d learned to make baking powder biscuits. Mars ate maybe two hundred biscuits after the first batch came out of the oven. When Chris learned how to make scrambled eggs, they usually skipped restaurants and Chris made breakfast at Mars’s apartment.
Mars would pick Chris up around nine at Denise’s. Chris would come out to the car carrying a big paper bag full of his own cooking gear, most of which had been bought at garage sales. If they needed groceries, they’d stop on the way to the apartment. Mars had offered early on to get groceries in advance, but Chris got as interested in grocery shopping as he was in cooking.
"So. What’s for breakfast?"
"Cheese omelettes. You want sautéed onions in yours?"
"Saw-taid onions would be good." Mars said saw-taid carelessly, as if that’s how he’d heard Chris say it. "Where do we stand on groceries?"
Chris narrowed his eyes in deep concentration. As he thought, he bounced his head back and forth off the seat. "We need cheese, of course. And onion—you got any onions?"
"I’ve got nothing except Coca-Cola and ice cubes. Maybe half a dozen eggs left over from last week. I’ve got a quart of milk left from…well, we probably need milk, too."
"Okay," Chris said. "Then we need milk, cheese, and onions. Half a dozen eggs should be enough, but I’d like some good bread, too. You know how when you make an omelette and the butter and the juice from the omelette is still on the plate? I’d like some French bread to mop that up with." Chris’s head flopped sideways to look up at Mars. "Could we go to Surdyk’s to get cheese and bread? And go to Cub for the other stuff? If we go to Cub we could get extra eggs for next time. And oranges. I know I used all the oranges last week, so we’ll need oranges. And Cub’s the best place to get oranges."
Mars swung the big, standard-issue Pontiac into the Cub parking lot and got the best spot in the lot, a piece of luck that brought a big grin to Chris’s face. It was the kind of thing Chris cared about.
"Dad? ‘Cause you’re a cop, could you park in a handicap spot and not get a ticket?"
Mars gave a push down on Chris’s head. "Yes, I could, but no, I wouldn’t. Come on, let’s shop."
Chris was a serious shopper. His mother’s genes. He smelled and squeezed produce. Counted pieces of fruit when it was sold by the bag. Took out the cheap pocket calculator Mars had given him and figured unit costs. Checked expiration dates. He saved all their grocery receipts and compared prices of what they’d spent with the Sunday paper ads, a task that involved a mix of moans and cries of triumph.
This Saturday he spent a long time with the oranges. "Four bucks!" he said, holding up a bag in disgust. He looked at Mars for approval.
Mars shrugged. "Wouldn’t be breakfast without fresh orange juice. Maybe cut down from four oranges a piece to three."
In the dairy section, Chris found a milk carton in the back with an expiration date that was almost a week later than the ones in the front. This was the equivalent of getting the best parking space in the lot. On their way out and back to the best parking space in the lot, Chris said with satisfaction, "Next stop, Surdyk’s."
The counter staff at Surdyk’s looked like art students, and they took cheese seriously. Mars wouldn’t have known where to start with them. But Chris, after pulling a wheat-and-herb baguette from a basket and sliding it into a narrow white bag, grabbed a number and began an undaunted consideration of the yards of cheese.
"Number thirty-six?" A pale young woman with blue-black hair and a stud in her nose walked toward the number Chris held up. Chris didn’t look at her, keeping his eyes on the cheese. "I need some cheese for omelettes. Cheddar, I think."
"I’ve got a Wisconsin white cheddar on special that would be nice."
Chris followed her to the far end of the refrigerated cheese case. With a gesture graceful enough to be part of a dance, she swiped a stainless tool across a block of white cheese and dropped it on a piece of cracker. Chris chewed it slowly, nodding only slightly.
"It’s okay. On the cracker. You got a yellow cheddar?"
She smiled at him. A smile of respect, not condescension. "Let’s try an aged Vermont cheddar. A bit pricey, but I think it’s going to be what you want." Another artful swipe, dropped on a cracker and barely in Chris’s mouth before his nod was decisively affirmative.
"How much is it?"
She turned the card, which was stuck in the cheese. "Five ninety-eight a pound. I think you’ll like the texture of this cheese in the omelette. It holds up well under heat." Mars made a slight face, but nodded his agreement.
"We’ll take half a pound," Chris said, clearly pleased.
To call where Mars lived home was to suggest a degree of domesticity that exceeded reality. Mars had a single standard for a place to live after the divorce: cheap. He found what he was looking for in a three-story red-brick walk-up on the outskirts of downtown. The apartment was a studio plus-bath. The kitchen was laid out against one wall, single bed under the windows, futon rolled on the floor for Chris. A row of steel frame shelves lined the wall opposite the kitchen. Mars’s clothes were folded on the shelves. The only other furniture was a table with four chairs. The only decoration was a movie poster for The Usual Suspects. Chris had bought the poster at a garage sale because he thought Mars looked like Kevin Spacey.
In the four years he’d lived there, Mars never had a rent raise. He understood why. First, he paid his rent on time, which wasn’t the neighborhood standard. Second, it was clear the caretaker liked having a cop living in the building. For Mars, keeping his rent low meant he’d been able to maintain Chris and Denise’s lifestyle at the same standard as when Mars and Denise had been married.
Chris began preparations for breakfast with precision. Their mutual roles were firmly established. Mars set the table with the odd bits of tableware he kept at the apartment and took directions from Chris.
Chris pulled a yellow onion out of the bag. "You can slice the onion. Real thin is best." Chris dug around in the bag and pulled out a knife and a cutting board. He’d asked to get pieces of Trident cutlery for Christmas last year, after the previous summer’s garage sale expeditions had failed to produce anything up to his standard. The cutting board he’d made in Scouts.
Mars was aware as he started on the onion that Chris was glancing over now and again to be sure the onion was getting sliced thin. Without turning around, Chris said, "You know what those Salad Shooter things are really good for?"
"Making salad?"
"Making shredded cheese." Chris stopped whisking to extract a complicated-looking hunk of white plastic from his bag. He assembled some funnel pieces, and placing the Salad Shooter over an empty plate, pressed their pricey cheese through one end. It took less than seconds, after which Chris held up a plate of perfectly shredded aged Vermont cheddar. Mars had enough experience with Chris’s new-found enthusiasms to be fairly sure their menus for the foreseeable future would be dominated by entrees that used shredded cheese.
"Carl gave it to Mom for Valentine’s, and I used it to shred cheese for some tacos I made for dinner Thursday night."
Chris had looked over his shoulder at Mars as he said Carl. Mars made it a point not to react. What he thought was that Carl was lucky to have found maybe the one woman alive who’d be pleased to get a Salad Shooter for Valentine’s Day.
As the omelette sizzled in the cast-iron pan Chris had bought at a garage sale and seasoned himself, Chris squeezed orange juice. "You know how you always say, ‘The sweeter the juice, the less juice you get?"
"How’re we doing this morning with those overpriced suckers?"
Chris handed Mars his glass of juice. Mars tossed back half a glass in a single gulp.
"I got almost twelve ounces out of three oranges. Just about a record. And it’s sweet, right?"
Mars nodded with genuine appreciation. "Sweetest so far this year."
Chris brought the omelettes to the table. They were perfect. Crisply browned skin, light and fluffy inside, a first-class cheddar cheese, and delicious wisps of saw-taid onions
Chris’s attention was evenly divided between his pleasure in eating and watching Mars for his reactions. "How’s your omelette?"
"Outstanding. Just the way I like it. Crisp on the outside. Great cheese."
"What do you think about the onions? Maybe we shoulda had them across the top, instead of inside?"
Mars shook his head. "No, they’re fine inside. Of course, nothing to say next time we can’t have the onions in the cheese and across the top. How’d I do on the onions? Thin enough?"
"Perfect."
Mars tore off a hunk of French bread and dabbed at his empty plate. "We should get some business done. You need to be to Scouts when?"
"Eleven-thirty. We’re leaving from Grace Lutheran Church."
"We’d better get going on our agenda, then. Whatcha got?"
Chris pulled out a spiral-bound notebook and folded it open. Across the table, Mars could see the carefully block-printed list.
"Mom says we gotta talk about summer vacation. Soccer camp’s in July. It costs a lot. And if I go to soccer camp, and go to the Black Hills with Mom, plus going camping with you, it doesn’t leave much time to do stuff with James."
A sharp, thin pain shot through Mars. A kid shouldn’t have to feel guilty about arranging a summer schedule to accommodate divorced parents. "Look. In my book, hanging out is what summer vacation is all about. Why don’t we plan on taking a couple of short trips during the school year—like out to Blue Mounds State Park or do some hiking on the Lake Superior Trail. How would that be?"
Chris smiled with pleasure. And relief. "That’d be good. How about the money for soccer camp? Mom says she’ll try and come up with half. She’s making some stuff for Aunt Gwen, but she’s not going to get paid until later, so you’d have to pay the whole thing, then she’d pay you…."
Mars shook his head. "Tell your mom to let me know how much, and I’ll pay. I appreciate knowing in advance so I can plan to get it together."
Chris smiled again, and looking a little shy, said, "Mom says you don’t leave enough money for yourself. Brent Rice’s dad, who’s a big shithead anyway, yells at Brent all the time about the support money he’s gotta give Brent’s mom, and Brent’s dad doesn’t give Brent’s mom even half as much money as you give Mom. Brent says so."
"Your mom and I have a deal. She gives you time, I give money. We talked about it when we got divorced. Your mom wanted to be able to stay home, and I wanted her to be able to keep the house. With my job, I can’t count on being around when you need me. It’s what we agreed on a long time ago, and I think it works pretty good. What else on your list?"
"Know what my health science teacher said about smoking and taking drugs?"
Mars shook his head and waited.
"He said that if you haven’t started smoking or taking drugs by the time you graduate from high school, chances are something like ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine you never will."
"I think that’s probably right."
"I was really glad to hear that. I thought, like, I was going to have to worry my whole life that I might be a junkie or something."
"I’d say that’s a teacher who knows what he’s talking about."
"Dad?" Chris was looking at the tattered box of Camels next to Mars’s plate. "Tell me again about when you quit smoking."
"I quit the day your mom told me she was pregnant with you."
"Because…."
"Because I knew that if I smoked, you’d be at a higher risk for smoking."
"And…."
"And because I didn’t want Mom breathing smoke when she was pregnant with you."
"Tell the part about why you still buy cigarettes."
"Well, when I stopped smoking, I felt sort of lonely. Like I’d lost a good friend. I’d go in to pay for gas, or whatever, and I’d see all those cigarettes, and I just missed having that pack. So then I thought, what’s to say I can’t buy a pack of cigarettes and carry it around with me? Put it on the table in the morning when I’m having my first can of Coke, which is when I really missed smoking. So I’ve been buying a pack and carrying it around ever since. It helped."
"How long you had that pack?"
Mars picked up the pack and rotated it in his left hand. "Well, let’s see. I bought this pack in…February. I bought it the day Latisha Williams’s body was found in the trunk of Duwayne Turner’s car. So that was February eight, and this is April 3—just about two months." Mars changed the subject. "That it for you?"
"Yup." Chris slapped his notebook shut and straightened up. "What’s on your ‘genda?"
Mars looked at him directly. "Language. Fuckhead. Shithead. I think we need to think about some guidelines for using swear words."
"Mom says it’s against the Ten Commandments to say goddamn."
Thin ice, here. "Okay, for some people that would be one reason not to swear. For me, it’s not that simple." Mars sat back and thought about it. "I know one thing I don’t like about swearing is that a lot of people use swear words because they’re too lazy to think of a better word to use. Being lazy when you talk makes you sound stupid. So that’s rule number one: think before you talk."
Chris said, "Y’know what Dennis Engstrom does? He makes lists of all the swear words he knows. He’s got two hundred and seventy-three words so far. Then he sees how many he can say without taking a breath. On the bus Tuesday he got to forty-seven."
Mars held up two fingers. "Rule number two: Don’t use swear words to try and gross other guys out. People who are impressed because you’ve got a foul mouth aren’t the people you want to impress, anyway."
"What else?"
"Well, in my book, using any word too much, swear word or not, is bad. So that would be rule number three. A guy I work with begins every other sentence with, ‘The way I see it…’ Second or third time in the space of five minutes you hear ‘the way I see it,’ you’re ready to grab the guy by the throat."
"You say ‘in my book’ a lot."
The kid was quick. "Point taken."
"So it’s okay to swear sometimes?"
"For me, there’re times when a good, hard, flat damn hits the spot."
"Dad? Know what we could do? If I swear, you say, like, ‘Number one’ if you think I’m being lazy. Or, ‘Number three’ if you think I’m using a word too much. Okay? Then if you don’t say anything, I’ll know you think it was okay that time. You wanna do that?"
Mars smiled at Chris. "Sure. Let’s try it. Keep us both on our toes."
They were doing dishes when Mars’s beeper went off. Chris’s face glowed. More than good parking spots, Chris liked police action.
Mars handed Chris the towel. "You finish up, and I’ll catch my beeper." He walked over to the wall phone and punched the Homicide Division number.
The assistant division chief answered. "Mars? A girl’s body’s been found down on the Father Hennepin Bluffs, just below the A Mill. Chief says he’d like you to take a look."
Mars glanced at his watch. "I was just about to take Chris to Scouts. I could get down there in a half hour. Maybe less. Who’s down there now?
"Some guys from the Second Precinct who took the call when the body was found. I think they’ve called the ME, but I don’t know if he’s there yet."
"Tell them I’m on my way."
Chris’s eyes were fixed on Mars’s face. "Somebody dead?" The question contained no remorse.
"Yup."
"Can I come?"
"Nope. You get to go to Scouts."
"Shit."
They looked at each other. Mars said nothing. He dumped Chris’s jacket hood over his head, gave the kid a quick, affectionate butt slap, and said, "I’ll call you later and let you know what’s up. Now let’s get our shows on the road."