“And you put the Hurray! in shut-the-fuck-up,” I said, not at all comfortable with being Albert’s “guy.” “Have you been telling people about our little arrangement?”
Another guffaw, as if I had been joking. “Seriously, though. Dude. I meant to call earlier, but I fucking forgot… so I thought, heeey! I’ll just leave him a message! You’re my favourite round-eye bad-ass, you know that?”
“And you’re my favourite gook-geek. What did you find out, Albert?”
“Yah-yah-yah, sorry. I called this oldbuddy ofmine who did a philosophy post-doc at Berkeley. Baars was already gone by then, but apparently he was still big news…”
Like most drunks, Albert overestimated the drama of his stories, and so kept decent people hanging with trivia.
“And?” I said.
“Brilliant. Eccentric. Divorced…”
His tone told me he was saving the juicy bits. “And?”
“Rumour was he knocked up one ofhis sophomores…”
That was interesting, at least. But I knew there was more. “C’mon, Albert. Cut me a fucking break over here. What else?”
“Well, it seems he taught a course on cults… Cults, Disciple!”
He fairly shouted this, so I knew he thought it was significant, at least.
“So?”
“Soooo, think about it, dude! The guy knows…”
“Knows what?”
“All of it. The psychology. The sociology. The history. Which means he knows how to act, how to organize, what kind ofclaims to make… “Music and droning voices swelled to fill the silence. “There’s just no way, Disciple. ”
“No way what? For him to believe his own guff?”
“Sure, there’s that. But there’s also no way for him to not be manipulating these people. It’s at least as bad as L. Ron Hubbard. Worse! “
I drove in a state of blank absorption. It made a kind of dreadful sense, to be sure.
“Hey… about the weed,,”he said, signalling super-cool, drunk Albert’s return. “You wouldn’t happen to have a… you know, a number I could call or anything? ”
“Try Kimmy,” I said, knowing I needed to shrink-wrap this latest twist, save it for some future lull. “She should be getting off about now… I’ll text you her number.” I found Molly looking smart and forlorn on the corner of an intersection that seemed surprisingly urban. Three Ruddick cruisers blocked the street at angles, bathing the bricked-in spaces with rolling lights. A thin crowd of onlookers had gathered in clutches here and there on the sidewalks. But otherwise things seemed surprisingly sedate. Only one uniform was visible.
The first words out of her lips were, “Jack shack, huh?” “I’s got needs,” I said.
“Why do you do that? Why do you always lie when people ask you where you are?”
“Keeps me sharp,” I replied, surprised that she would have anything other than this latest twist on her mind. “Reminds me I’m a captive of the facts as the world presents them.”
“Weird, you know that?” she said, shaking her head. “You gotta be the strangest man I’ve ever known.”
“We should all be so lucky,” I said. Then, intentionally shifting gears, I added, “So which fingers are we talking about?”
“The index and bird fingers,” she said.
“Bird finger?”
“Yeah. You know.” She flipped me the bird.
I sometimes have this fear that the women I’m interested in are actually psychic, that they can see the truth of me all the way down to the grimy bottom but just play along because they like the attention. The superstition struck me like a bolt right then.
Molly filled me in on the rest of the details. The first finger had been found just a couple of blocks over, in the backyard of an old amputee-a Vietnam vet or something. Apparently by sheer dint of coincidence, the second had been called in less than an hour after, found by a bunch of high school kids who had “wandered into” the abandoned warehouse looming before us, “looking for a lost dog.”
One of Nolen’s men-a guy so tired he had to have been dragged off the day shift-barred the way, and refused to even discuss the matter with us, let alone let us past. So we just stood there, every bit as tired, cooling our heels. I studied the small crowd of onlookers, knowing the chances were good that our perp would be keen to survey the social consequences of his handiwork first-hand. I described the males to Molly in a low murmur, just to be sure they would stick…
“Skinhead dude with forehead wrinkled like scrotum…
“Soccer coach dreaming of teenage ass…
“Punk who should sell me whatever it is he’s smoking…
“Guy who looks like BO… Yeesh, that fucker is ugly.”
It didn’t take much to get Molly laughing. Always makes me feel smug, killing two birds with one stone.
When Nolen finally came out, he looked ragged and more than a little shell-shocked. Dust feathered his left shoulder, and he seemed to have lost his cap. “The fingers are bagged,” he said, holding a hand out to pre-empt our questions. “We’re sending them to Pitt to get them DNA typed-just to be sure they belong to Jennifer. We also need to know whether they were cut from her while she was, ah, you know, alive… But the doctor…” Something caught in his throat, something that demanded to be swallowed. “Um, he seems to think the cuts were, ah… well, post-mortem.”
This occasioned a moment of silence. Laughter warbled from a group of kids assembled on a nearby corner.
“What about the scenes?” Molly pressed. “Could you let us check out the scenes?”
“Scenes? You mean where we found the fingers?”
“Ofcourse,” she said, with enough exasperation to earn a gentle elbow in the ribs from me. You have to be careful with people like Nolen, I had learned, not because they could be prickly, but because they were unlikely to take offence. Some people are so dispositionally agreeable that the urge to take liberties is well-nigh irresistible. The sad fact is that people primarily harass others not because the others deserve to be harassed but because they can. The easier a guy is to bully, the more likely we are to invent reasons why he needs to be bullied. Often our fuse is long or short depending on what we unconsciously think we can get away with.
“Not much anything to see,” he said, scratching the back of his head.
“So no notes?” Molly asked.
“Notes?”
“Yeah.” Again the telltale impatience. “You know, like ransom demands or anything.”
“‘Fraid not. Just fingers in these queer little cages.”
“Cages?” Molly asked in a ragged voice. Things were just beginning to sink in for her, I could tell.
Nolen shrugged. “Yeah. You know, like to keep them from getting snatched by wildlife or something.”
“To make sure they would be found,” I said.
Fawk. Guitars crunched from my pants pocket. Another call. Kimberley this time, probably calling to bitch me out for telling Albert she could hook him up. I didn’t answer. As it was, Molly was all over me about leaning on Nolen to let us check out the two places-as bad as an ex-wife carping about child support.
“Get used to it,” I said. “This is the way it works for people like you and me. Most of the time you’re stuck on the outside looking in.”
“But what if there’s any, you know, clues?”
The thing about popular misconceptions, I’ve found, is that they typically involve people knowing more rather than less. We always know less than we think. We always control less than we hope. Even forensics is so hit-and-miss that there’s a real question as to whether it should be called a science.
“You were watching CSI again tonight, weren’t you?”
I took the fact that she said nothing as a big fat yes.
A moment of silence passed between us, one that seemed to cement the fact that we were stranded on a cracked sidewalk, walled in by dead brick buildings. Funny, the way you can just sense things, like how late it is by how cool the cement is… I felt a distinct absence of daytime heat.
“What are the chances?” she asked in a numb voice I had never heard before. My second therapist once told me that this was why I womanized-not because I was carrying out some ancient evolutionary program to spread the sperm, but because I could only love women when they were new.