Obviously it was my time for surprises. And for mixed feelings. Wounded at the thought of Val's departure, nonetheless I was pleased that she'd be doing what she most loved. The two emotions rode a teeter-totter, one rising, the other touching feet to earth-before they reversed.
And J. T.? As my boss? Well…
I gave some thought to how she, city-bred and a city-trained officer, would fit in here. But then I remembered the way she and Moira had sat together up in the hills and decided she'd do okay. It goes without saying how pleased I was that she'd be around.
I was considerably less pleased when Miss Emily chewed a hole in the screen above the sink and took her brood out through it.
Because I considered it a betrayal? Because it was yet another loss? Or simply because I would miss them?
I was standing in the kitchen, staring at the hole in the screen, when J. T. swung by to see if I wanted to grab some dinner. She had moved into a house on Mulberry, or, more precisely, into one room. The house had been empty a long time, and the rest would take a while. But the price was right. Her monthly rent was about what a couple in the city might spend on a good dinner out.
"They're wild animals, Dad, not pets. What, you expected her to leave a note?"
"You think she moved in just to be sure her offspring would be safe? Knowing all along she'd leave afterwards?"
"Somehow I doubt possums very often overplan things."
"I thought…" Shaking myself out of it: "I don't know what I thought."
"So. Dinner?"
"Not tonight. You mind?"
"Of course not."
Some time after she left, second bourbon slammed down and coffee brewing, the perfect response came to me: But we slept together, you know, Miss Emily and I.
Rooting through stacks of CDs and tapes on shelves in the front room, I found what I was looking for.
It had been one of those drawling, seemingly endless Sunday afternoons in May. We'd grilled chicken and burgers earlier and were dipping liberally, ad lib as Val kept insisting, into the cooler for beers, bolstering such excursions with chips, dip, carrot sticks, and potato salad scooped finger-style from the bowl. Eldon sprang open the case on his Gibson, Val went inside to get the Whyte Laydie, and they started playing. I'd recently had the cassette recorder out for something or another and set it up on the windowsill in the kitchen. Just about where Miss Emily and crew went through.
"Keep on the Sunny Side," "White House Blues," "Frankie and Albert." No matter that lyrics got scrambled, faked, or lost completely, the music kept its power.
"We should do this more often," Val said as they took a break. I'd left the recorder running.
"We should do this all the time." Eldon held up his jelly glass, half cranberry juice, half club soda, in salute. Only Val and I were dipping into the cooler.
Soon enough they were back at it.
"Banks of the Ohio," "Soldier's Joy," "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."
I left the tape going and went back out onto the porch. Just days ago I'd been thinking how full the house was. Now suddenly everyone was gone. Even Miss Emily. Val and Eldon shifted into "Home on the Range," Eldon, playing slide on standard guitar, doing the best he could to approximate Bob Kaai's Hawaiian steel.
"What the hell is that you're listening to?" a voice said. "No wonder someone wants you dead, you pitiful fuck."
Diving forward, I kicked the legs out from under the chair and he, positioned behind with the steel-wire garrote not quite in place yet, went along, splayed across the chair's back. An awkward position. Before he had the chance to correct it, I pivoted over and had an arm locked around his neck, alert to any further sound or signs of intrusion. The garrote, piano wire with tape-wound wood handles, sat at porch's edge looking like a garden implement.
"Simple asphyxiation," Doc Oldham said an hour later.
I do remember pulling the arm in hard, asking if he was alone, getting no answer and asking again. Was he contract? Who sent him? No response to those questions either. Then the awareness of his body limp beneath me.
"Man obviously didn't care to carry on a conversation with you," Doc Oldham said, grabbing hold of the windowsill to pull himself erect with difficulty, tottering all the way up and tottering still once there. '"S that coffee I smell?"
"Used to be, anyway. Near dead as this guy by now's my guess."
"Hey, it's late at night and I'm a doctor. You think I'm so old I forgot my intern days? Bad burned coffee's diesel fuel for us- what I love most. Next to a healthy slug of bourbon."
Meanwhile J. T. waited, coming to the realization that further black-and-whites would not be barreling up, that there were no fingerprint people or crime lab investigators to call in, no watch commander to pass things off to. It was all on her.
She sat at the kitchen table. Doc nodded to her and said "Asphyxiation," poured his coffee and took the glass of bourbon I handed him.
"Tough first day," I said.
"Technically I haven't even started."
"Hope you had a good dinner at least."
"Smothered chicken special."
"Guess homemaking only goes so far."
"Give me a break, I'm still trying to find the kitchen. Speaking of which, this coffee really sucks."
"Don't pay her any mind, Turner," Doc Oldham said, helping himself to a second cup. "It's delicious."
"I'm assuming there's no identification," J. T. said.
"These guys don't exactly carry passports. There's better than a thousand dollars in a money clip in his left pants pocket, another thousand under a false insole in his shoe. A driver's license that looks like it was made yesterday."
"Which it probably was. So, we have no way to track where he might have been staying because there isn't any place to stay. And with no bus terminals or airports-"
"No airports? What about Stanley Municipal? Crop duster to the stars."
"-there's no paper trail." She sipped coffee and made a face. "Nothing I know is of any help here."
"What you know is rarely important. The rest is what matters- all those hours of working the job, interviews, people you've met, the instincts nurtured by all of it. That's what you use."
"Something you learned in psychology classes?"
"From Eldon, actually. Spend hours practicing scales and learning songs, he said, then you get up there to play and none of it matters. Where you begin and where you wind up have little to do with one another. Meanwhile we," I said, passing it over, "do have this."
I gave her a moment.
"Thing you have to ask is, this is a pro, right? First to last he covers his tracks. That's what he does, how he lives. No wallet, false ID if any at all, he's a ghost, a glimmer. So why does a stub from an airline ticket show up in his inside coat pocket?"
"Carelessness?"
"Possible, sure. But how likely?"
I was, after all, patently an alarmist, possibly paranoid, a man known to have accused a possum of overplanning.
It was only the torn-off stub of a boarding pass and easily enough could have been overlooked. You glance at aisle and seat number, stick it in your pocket just in case, find it there the next time you wear that coat.
But I wasn't running scales, I was up there on stage, playing. And judging from the light in J. T.'s eyes, she was too.