"Hey, what can I say?" said Karp grinning. "I'm a lawyer."
"You didn't burn the place?"
Bishop's voice was calm over the phone, but Caballo could tell he was upset. Extremely upset.
"No, like I said, some people showed up. They tried to get in and then I heard some shots fired. Then the guy, the client, came in at a run with a gun in his hand…"
"All right, I understand. Let's not discuss it over the phone. We'll have to continue under the assumption that whatever material your client had is in the hands of our competitors."
"So, what should I do? You want me to go down the list?"
"No, not just yet. And I want you to stay out of Texas for as long as possible. Things in Washington will be coming to a head soon. I think I'd like you back here."
SEVENTEEN
Marlene walked in the door and was immediately hit by, "Mommy, Mommy, guess what? Sweetie bit a bad man!"
"Oh, Christ! Harry?"
"He bit him really hard and made his pants rip off!"
"Harry!"
Harry Bello strolled in from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel tucked into the front of his pants. "How'd it go?" he asked.
"What's this about the dog?" Marlene countered.
Harry shrugged. "The kid's right. We were walking in that park up the highway a couple miles. I got a ball for the dog, we're throwing it. Guy gets out of this pickup and watches us for a while. The dog comes by him, chasing the ball, he makes a grab for its collar. The dog goes crazy, does his rabies act, growling, snapping. The guy backs off, makes a run for his truck, the dog goes after him, grabs his behind, rips the seat of his pants off, shorts and all. We're just standing there, it went down so fast. The guy's in the truck, he starts yelling his old lady paid two hundred for the dog, he's gonna sue our ass. I gave him the eye for a while and he ran out of steam and took off."
"He said a lot of bad words, Mommy."
"I bet he did, honey. Harry, this guy: about six-one, two-hundred, crew cut, bent nose, looks like a bouncer in a redneck bar?"
"Yeah. You know him?"
"In a way. He used to live next door. His wife actually did buy the dog, but this bozo was always getting on her to get rid of it. I guess he found out he could get some cash for it and wanted it back. They were real mean to him anyway, and I guess old Sweetie has a long memory." She glanced at the dish towel.
"You're cooking?"
"Yeah, she was hungry."
"We're having SpaghettiOs," crowed Lucy, and she began to hop around on one toe singing the eponymous jingle.
Marlene lowered her brows at Bello. "Harry Bello, you brought SpaghettiOs into my house?"
Bello made an appeasing gesture. "She wanted."
"This gets out, I'll never be able to walk down Grand Street again."
"I got steaks for us, wine for you," said Bello.
"Oh," said Marlene, "in that case…"
They ate, and afterward the dog licked all the plates and crunched up the steak T-bones like potato chips.
"So, you get anything at the old lady's?" asked Harry when they were settled over coffee.
"You could say that. I read her diaries and some old letters."
Bello's left eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch, to which implied query Marlene answered with a minuscule waggle of her head: no, she didn't want me to read them, but I did anyway.
"It keeps coming back to Harley Blaine," said Marlene. "It turns out Blaine was the one who started dating Selma, back then, and then Richard Dobbs fell in love with her, and then Harley seemed to lose interest and she started going out with Richard and then she married him. Her letters to Blaine were there too; that was one of the things a gentleman did in those days, return a lady's letters when the romance was over. And his to her too; she kept them all those years, which tells you something. It was weird reading them in order; first, he's hot as a furnace, swearing eternal love, quoting poetry, and then it's like, over the course of a week, he's turned it all off; the letters start sounding like he's writing to a pen pal in Uganda. Then her letters get cold too. She writes him a note: he left a camera. He left a hat. Hope you are well. He left another camera."
"The guy had a lot of cameras."
"Yeah, well he could afford them. Then they stop writing, except for Christmas cards. She had an affair too, later on, so it wasn't the perfect American family after all. In the diaries she talks about Richard frankly as if he were another child-'the boys,' as in 'I got the boys out of the house,' meaning Richard and Hank. In forty-five or so she falls for this guy she calls 'Q' in the diary and it lasts for three, four years. Intensely romantic. No letters from Q though. The diary says she wants to leave her husband, but Q won't let her. Finally, he breaks it off. She's crushed. She stops writing diaries. Around then is when the spy stuff started, so maybe they were afraid it would come out in the investigation."
"Backward," said Bello.
"Yeah, that's what I thought too," Marlene agreed. "Usually the lover wants the married one to leave the marriage and he or she won't. The guy wasn't married, whoever he was, that's clear from the diaries. But… who knows? Maybe, like the man said, the very rich are different from you and me."
An inquiring look from Harry.
"What's the connection to the case? I don't know, but there's a pattern. Here's Richard in the center, the golden boy. He brings Blaine in as a kind of brother, and Selma in as a kind of wife, and their job is sort of to protect him, and keep the gold shiny. They… I don't know what's the right word… they invested in him, like, if Richard shone, so would they. He was the center. In fact, now that I think of it, Blaine probably sort of gave Selma to Dobbs. Blaine was in love, so he said, but when the golden boy expressed an interest, it was 'take her, she's yours.' Blaine's really the most interesting character in the trio. Slick. A slick liar. And not just slick; I get the feeling of snakes below the surface. That whole CIA thing with Gaiilov and before. I'd give anything to be able to go out there and talk to him face-to-face."
"Wizard of Oz."
She laughed. "Yeah, right! With the dog pulling at the curtain. My God, Oz! I almost forgot. Wait a sec!"
She got up from the kitchen table and dashed into the living room, returning with her bag. She rummaged in it briefly and then placed a small, worn Kodak-yellow box on the table. "After I went through the diaries and put everything back the way it was, I didn't have much time to look around. The rest of the attic was mostly the usual stuff-suitcases, a wardrobe with old clothes in it, furniture. I checked out the suitcases, nothing, the wardrobe, nothing, the bookcases… maybe a hundred or so books, all old kids' stuff in complete sets, boys' books: Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Zane Grey, and a complete set of the Oz books. You know the big size, with those great pictures and the funny curvy writing in gold on the covers? Okay, I used to love them when I was a kid, so of course, I looked through them, not really looking for anything in particular, just looking at the pictures. If you want to know, I was feeling kind of grimy, like you do when you find something out about someone, something shameful, that you weren't supposed to know, and I thought that Oz would cheer me up. But I found this"-she tapped the little box-"in a cut-out space in Tik-Tok, the Mechanical Man of Oz."
Bello handled the little box. "So what is it?"
"Well, you can't see much on eight-millimeter just by holding it up to the light, but it looks like a naughty movie."
"Porn?"
"Not exactly. Not hard-core suck-fuck anyway. It looks like one of those old-fashioned amateur jobs. A couple at the beach, they take off their clothes, they fall on the blanket and so on. I just looked at the first couple of feet or so. I wish we had a projector here." She put the film box back in her purse.