This is probably why the hook set so deep-why I fell in love with Dead Jennifer. This case was unlike anything I had seen.
And like all addictive drugs, it promised something more profound than bliss…
Forgetfulness. I found myself staring across Jitters in a blinking stupor. Somehow ebb had become flow without me even noticing: the place was buzzing with patrons. Four old ladies next to me were laughing so hard that two of them were pawing their purses for tissue. Something sly and embarrassed in their expressions shouted dirty joke. I stood, squeezed past three young men who had to be Mormons-they were too squeaky clean otherwise. I felt like asking them what the trick was, believing in things that made archaeologists sigh and look to heaven.
I paused outside the entrance, imagined what the sky would look like if all you could see was bloated sun. I grabbed my Zippo, lit a cigarette. I savoured the smoke: blue slipping in, grey piling out. I wondered at that, the change in colour. I thought of the blue soaking into my lungs, swirling into my bloodstream, saturating my brain.
Beautiful blue. Like a second lens, it always had a way of drawing things into sharper focus.
Something was up. There was something slippery about Jonathan Bonjour, something that utterly eluded his wife.
I know it sounds implausible. Memory tricks aside, how could I detect something in a single sitting that Amanda Bonjour had never glimpsed in years of marriage?
It’s just the way. It’s not simply that familiarity blinds-and it does, catastrophically-it’s a Mars-Venus thing as well. The bulk of the male and female bandwidths may overlap, but there’s always a small range of gender-specific frequencies, things that only men can pick up in other men, and that only women are sensitive to in other women.
Jonathan Bonjour had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. I was almost certain of it.
Or maybe it was just an excuse to light another smoke. I slipped on my shades and began walking. It made me feel smart, wringing the blue out of the smoke.
I was just a few packs away from one hundred thousand cigarettes. Happy times. Track Four
MONKEY CHILDREN
Tuesday… Some prick driving one of those big-ass SUVs cut me off about an hour or so outside of Ruddick. I had just answered a call from Kimberley, so I apologized to her and rolled down the window-one of those manual cocksuckers. The wind dragged hot and oily across my face. I leaned on the horn to secure the guy’s attention-he was little more than a forehead over the rim of his passenger door-then shouted a friendly, “Dirty-mother-fucker!”
Now in the good old days, he would have rolled down his window and shouted back, something about my after-tax income, perhaps. Instead, he welded his eyes forward and gunned his behemoth. Anyone crazy enough to pick a road fight while driving an ancient Volkswagen Golf, he probably reasoned, had to have a gun in his glove compartment.
Which I did: an illegal Colt.45 automatic taped beneath a false bottom-a government model, no less. But still I found myself resenting the assumption.
“You’re driving?” Kimberley said when I picked the cell back up. “I thought you said you had stopped at a diner. ” Despite the roar of the road, I heard her draw on a cigarette.
“Are you smoking in the office?”
“No. I’m in the copy room. ”
“There’s no phone in the copy room.”
Another draw-nothing communicates impatience quite like a cigarette. “I’m. In. The copy room,”she repeated with Don’t-you-dare- start-with-me obstinacy.
I didn’t. I wanted to-I had told her precisely eleven times how alienating non-smokers found the smell of cigarettes, how she was literally driving away business. Each time she just shrugged and said, “I don’t smell anything.” Amazing really, when you think about it, how much you’ll put up with for a piece of ass.
So instead I asked, “What do you want?”
Another puffing pause. “That Chiefthing-a-ma-jingi called for you.”
“Nolen called?”
“Yup.”
“What did he want?”
“You. He wants you to come to his office as soon as you get into town.”
The Bonjours must have gotten busy with that list I gave them. Real people are like that.
“Cool… Love you, babe.”
I tossed the cell onto the passenger seat, rubbed the bridge of my nose beneath my shades. In my mind’s eye I could see the frustration in Kimberley’s look, the anger and the hurt as she sat all alone in the office. Solitude weighs heavier on strippers than most. I shook away the image simply because I breeze past things I don’t like. I make like everything is popcorn, knowing that few things are more powerful than a relentless good nature. I hurt people, knowing they will hide that hurt simply because the gag must go on.
Still, I knew I had to do something-and soon. She was in love with me. Like, totally. The drive into Ruddick was interesting. The first curious thing I noticed was that the speed limit dropped about a mile or so before you would think it should. Cracked sidewalks trimmed either side of the road, and side streets divided it at intervals you would expect in a circa-1950s subdivision, but there were no houses, only overgrown lots staked here and there by the odd lonely tree. The place was starting to remind me of Detroit.
I saw a dead squirrel, a shiny yellow toy knotted in weeds, a kid pounding dirt with a hammer. I even saw some small-town graffiti, FUCK UP NOT DOWN, scrawled across a houseless foundation. Things I needed to forget yet would always remember. You have to be prepared for the sudden onslaught of physics while driving-I know this better than most people-and yet my eyes perpetually flick this way and that, scoping out ass and other oddities.
Part of the U.S. military’s retirement package.
I passed a bustling Citgo, an abandoned GM dealership, and finally the white frame Church of the Third Resurrection before making it into the town proper.
What a dump, I thought. And I live in fucking Newark. I took a wrong turn at some point, because I somehow found myself in the industrial park peering at all the dead factories. The first was one of those rambling windowless affairs that made me think I was looking at mismatched container boxes from a distance. The second was a stripped skeleton of rust-burned I-beams. I felt vaguely disappointed: I had been hoping for something more crowded, more bricked and rotted-more Dickensian-not pastel cubes in a patchwork of vast industrial lots. Fucking modernity, man. Even our decadence and decline have become generic.
I turned around on some service road, backtracked. The downtown made me feel more at home. Someday someone will eulogize the strip mall, and I for one will shed a real tear. The way I figure it, humans have always lived and worked in aesthetic abominations. The people I saw looked stupid-walking or talking or gazing with an insolence I reflex- ively attributed to generational inbreeding. More urban chauvinism, I know, and the fact that I think everybody looks stupid. I see people the way I imagine animals must see me: nice head of hair, ape-boy, but what the fuck happened to your face?
I found the police department in a building surprising for its size. Later I would learn that in its manufacturing heyday, Ruddick had been three times bigger, population-wise. This little demographic fact would figure largely in what followed, as it so happened.
Nolen was out, of course, so I hunkered down in the vestibule with nothing more than a paunchy desk sergeant to keep me company, the kind of guy who ages watchful, if you know what I mean. Eyes so bulbous it seemed impossible he could ever shut them-entirely. A great look for a cop, actually. He was positively freaking me out, so much so I was actually relieved when my cell twittered to the riff from “Back in Black.”
“Manning,” I said in lieu of a hello.
“Hey, Disciple! This is Albert. Not catching you at a bad time, am I?”
“Naw. Just aimlessly wandering the aisles of Walmart, you know…” I winked at the glaring sergeant.
Albert Fellows was one of my bookworm buddies, a social psychologist over at New York University-one of a number of relationships I had cultivated over the years. I had called him the previous night while researching the Framers online, left a message. Since I only remembered everything people said, I continually sought people who could tell me what I needed to know. In exchange, I would score them a bag of weed here and there. You have no idea just how many academics are hard up for weed. And because they live lives so tragically insulated from crime, they tend to be almost comedically grateful.