She smiled again and put her hand on my arm. “I’ll take care of that. He parks in the back and sneaks in through the rear stairway.”
“Hiding out, huh?”
She leaned toward me, her hand brushing against my forearm even harder. “There’s a few out there he needs to dodge.”
I watched her walk back up the stairs. I tried to avoid an avalanche of lascivious fantasies without much success. I sat down and picked up the paper with one hand, the coffee cup firmly glued in the other.
Section B was local news, with Day Six of the hostage story as the lead. A little clock in the upper right-hand corner of the page ticked off the hours that the crisis had gone on. A sidebar described the Nightline installment from last night, not without some measure of civic pride. There was a brief mention in the main story of Marsha and the other people locked in the morgue, but since no one in the media knew about Marsha’s private cellular-phone number, they hadn’t been available for interviews.
On page four, buried beneath a two-column story on a zoning committee meeting, was a short piece about this afternoon’s funeral for Rebecca Gibson.
I finished the paper and my coffee, then checked my watch: 9:40. Was Mac Ford doing a Phil Anderson-like dodge on me? Had I become a pariah? I shifted restlessly on the couch, impatiently flipping through the classifieds, growing more irritated by the moment.
Ten minutes later I stood up and stretched, about ready to blow the whole morning off. Alvy Barnes suddenly rounded the corner upstairs and scooted down the flight of stairs. She stopped on the landing.
“Good, you’re still here,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Mac just got in. I said something to him, but you know how-”
“Yeah, I understand. He still got time to see me?”
“Sure, c’mon.”
I followed her up the stairs and down a long, carpeted hallway on the second floor. While the first floor was a model of decorum and cool professionalism, the upstairs could have been decorated by a graphic designer in the middle of a psychotic break. Splashes of neon paint covered the walls, with movie and rock posters outnumbering country-music posters at least two to one. A stuffed groundhog perched in one corner, with a straw hat planted fashionably on its head and a corncob pipe stuck in its mouth. We passed open office doors with T-shirted agents in jeans and thousand-dollar snakeskin boots making deal after deal. I could hear shouts, arguments, pleas, manipulations. Inside one large office, a Xerox machine painted in desert camouflage clicked away.
“You guys are busy up here,” I commented to the back of Alvy Barnes’s head.
“Oh, this is nothing,” she answered, outpacing me down the hall.
We entered an anteroom that had been converted into Alvy’s office. It was a little more staid than the rest of the floor, but still revealed chaos as the operative mode.
“Wait just a moment,” she said. She walked over to a large heavy door painted bright chromium white and opened it. A cloud of blue smoke drifted out of the crack she’d stuck her head into, along with the booming rumble of a loud reggae beat. Ford’s office, I surmised, must be heavily soundproofed.
“Mac, he’s here,” I heard her say over the bass guitar and the steel drums.
“Yeah,” Ford yelled, “get him in here!”
I swallowed hard, wondering what I was getting into. Alvy turned, waved me to the door, then held it open for me.
“Go on,” she said. “You asked for it.”
I stepped into a thick cloud of cigar smoke illuminated by the kind of black light fixtures I hadn’t seen since my days as an undergraduate. Alvy shut the door behind me. I squinted in the dim light, my ears aching from the thunderous reggae now confined to Ford’s office. Across the large office, maybe fifteen feet away, Mac Ford sat sprawled out in an office chair beneath an enormous Tiffany lamp with about a ten-watt bulb in it. I squinted to focus. He was on the phone, shouting something into it I couldn’t understand over the music. It was meat-locker cold, the air-conditioning turned up to goose-pimple levels.
Black light counterculture posters covered the wall: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Avalon Ballroom stuff in that typeface that looked like melting letters and, I’m told although I never tried it, simulated reading under the influence of psychedelics. Ford McKenna Ford, I realized, was a Neanderthal throwback to the Sixties.
And I was locked in his dream.
From behind the haze of thick smoke, he motioned me toward a seat. My nose was closing up and the back of my throat felt scratchy. What was this guy smoking, old socks?
He continued the phone conversation as I shivered in a chair across from him. The Jamaican CD roared on, with the Bob Marley sound-alike wailing away unintelligibly.
I looked around. Clutter, chaos, piles of papers, magazines, framed gold records, photographs. A huge twelve-point buck with a pair of panty hose draped across the horns was mounted on the wall behind him. There were piles of empty Grolsch and Dos XX bottles everywhere, intermixed with discarded Coke cans encrusted with brown goo. A fisherman’s net was suspended from the ceiling with dried Spanish moss hanging down like tendrils. The walls rattled with the energy and the sound. Another minute or so of this and I was going to break a window to escape.
Ford slammed the phone down and said something to me, but I not only couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t see his face through the smoke and the black light well enough to lip-read.
“Could we turn the music down?” I yelled.
He cupped a hand to his ear. Great, I thought, this interview is going just swell.
“Turn down the music!” I yelled again, this time motioning downward in a curve with my right index finger.
He said something like, “Oh, yeah,” and reached for a remote control buried in a stack of junk on his desk. He fished it out, hit a button, and the huge speakers went quiet.
The silence was even weirder.
“You know,” I said, “my landlady’s hearing-impaired. You ought to talk to her about what you’ve got to look forward to.”
“Not a music lover, huh?”
“I’ll let you know when I hear some.”
“Ooh,” he moaned, then laughed. “That’s not going to make you any friends around here.”
“I didn’t come to make friends,” I said. “I came to find out Rebecca Gibson’s secrets.”
“If you do that, they won’t be secrets anymore.”
“What’s it matter to her?”
Mac Ford lodged the thick cigar in an ashtray, then found a bare spot on his desk and drummed it frenetically. He practically leaped out of the chair and circled around me. On a junk-cluttered bookcase, he found a neon hot-pink basketball and bounced it a couple of times on his hardwood floor, then let it fly toward the opposite wall. It bounced off the wall, then rolled around the rim of a basketball hoop he’d mounted above the door to his office. The ball circled the metal hoop three times and rolled off the wrong side.
“No points,” I said. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re one of the most frenetic people I’ve ever met.”
That stopped him cold. He recovered the ball and dribbled it a few times, then palmed it and held it against his side.
“I prefer to think of it as dynamic.”
“Could you be a little less dynamic, then? I’m getting dizzy.”
“You know, I’ve already talked to the police. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“I know you don’t. I’ll just repeat what I said yesterday.
Surely you want the real killer to be caught as much as I do.”
“The real killer is caught.” He reached down and scratched his crotch through his jeans.
“Then humor me,” I said. “How much money was Rebecca Gibson going to make over the next year?”