“Mercy on a poor man? Mercy on the blind? Spare change for one less fortunate than you?”
The voice was extraordinary in its own right, but doubly so considering the source. Clear, melodious, it was the instrument of a born singer who would deliver every lyric sweetly. It must be the voice alone that, in spite of his appearance, made it possible for him to live as a mendicant.
Ordinarily, in spite of his voice, Connie would have told him to buzz off — though not so politely. Some beggars became homeless by no fault of their own; and having experienced homelessness of a kind when she’d been an institutionalized child, she had compassion for the genuinely victimized. But her job required daily contact with too many street people for her to be able to romanticize them as a class; in her experience, many were gravely demented and for their own sakes belonged in the mental institutions from which do-gooders had “mainstreamed” them, while others had earned their perdition through alcohol, drugs, or gambling.
She suspected that in every stratum of society, from the mansion to the gutter, the genuinely innocent were a distinct minority.
For some reason, however, although this guy looked as if he had made every bad decision and self-destructive choice it was within his power to make, she fished in her jacket pockets until she found a couple of quarters and a ten-dollar bill worn soft with age. To her greater surprise, she kept the quarters and gave him the ten bucks.
“Bless you, lady. God bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you.”
Astonished at herself, she turned away from him. She hurried out into the rain, toward her car.
As she ran, she wondered what had possessed her. But it really wasn’t hard to figure. She had been given more than one gift during the course of the day. Her life had been spared in the pursuit of Ordegard. And they had nailed the creep. And then there was five-year-old Eleanor Ladbrook. Ellie. A niece. Connie could not recall many days as fine as this, and she supposed her good fortune had put her in the mood to give something back when an opportunity arose.
Her life, one wasted perp, and a new direction for her future — not a bad trade for ten dollars.
She got in the car, slammed the door. She already had the keys in her right hand. She switched on the engine and gunned it because it chugged a little as if protesting the weather.
Suddenly she was aware that her left hand was clenched in a tight fist. She wasn’t conscious of having made the fist. It was as if her hand had closed in a lightning-quick spasm.
Something was in her hand.
She uncurled her fingers to look at what she held.
The parking-lot lamps shed enough light through the rain-smeared windshield for her to see the crumpled item.
A ten-dollar bill. Worn soft with age.
She stared at it in confusion, then with growing disbelief. It must be the same ten bucks she thought she had given to the beggar.
But she had given the money to the tramp, had seen his grimy mitt close around it as he babbled his gratitude.
Bewildered, she looked through the side window of the car toward the Chinese restaurant. The beggar was no longer there.
She scanned the entire pedestrian walkway He was nowhere in front of the strip shopping center.
She stared at the crumpled money.
Gradually her good mood faded. She was overcome by dread.
She had no idea why she should be afraid. And then she did. Cop instinct.
10
Harry took longer than he expected to get home from Special Projects. Traffic moved sluggishly, repeatedly clogging up at flooded intersections.
He lost more time when he stopped at a 7-Eleven to get a couple of things he needed for dinner. A loaf of bread. Mustard.
Every time he went into a convenience store, Harry thought of Ricky Estefan stopping after work that day for a quart of milk — and buying a drastic life change instead. But nothing bad happened in the 7-Eleven, except that he heard the story about the baby and the birthday party.
A small television on the check-out counter kept the clerk entertained when business was slow, and it was turned to the news while Harry was paying for his purchases. A young mother in Chicago had been charged with murdering her own infant child. Her relatives had planned a big birthday party for her, but when her babysitter failed to show up, it had looked as if she wouldn’t be able to go and enjoy herself. So she dumped her two-month-old infant down the chute of her apartment-building trash incinerator, went to the party, and danced up a storm. Her lawyer had already said her defense would be postpartum depression.
Yet another example of the continuing crisis for Connie’s collection of outrages and atrocities.
The clerk was a slender young man with dark, sorrowful eyes. In Iranian-accented English, he said, “What’s this country coming to?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Harry said. “But then again, in your former country, they don’t just let the lunatics run around free, they actually put them in charge.”
“True,” the clerk said. “But here, too, sometimes.”
“Can’t argue that.”
As he was pushing through one of the two glass doors on his way out of the store, with the bread and mustard in a plastic bag, Harry suddenly realized he was carrying a folded newspaper under his right arm. He stopped with the door half open, took the paper from under his arm, and stared at it uncomprehendingly. He was sure he had not picked up a paper, let alone folded one and put it under his arm.
He returned to the cash register. When he put the paper on the counter, it unfolded.
“Did I pay for this?” Harry asked.
Puzzled, the clerk said, “No, sir. I didn’t even see you pick it up.”
“I don’t remember picking it up.”
“Did you want it?”
“No, not really.”
Then he noticed the headline at the top of the front page: SHOOTOUT AT LAGUNA BEACH RESTAURANT. And the subhead: TWO DEAD, TEN WOUNDED. It was the late edition with the first story about Ordegard’s bloody rampage.
“Wait,” Harry said. “Yes. Yes, I guess I’ll take it.”
On those occasions when one of his cases became newsworthy, Harry never read about himself in the papers. He was a cop, not a celebrity.
He gave the clerk a quarter and took the evening edition.
He still didn’t understand how the paper had gotten folded and tucked under his arm. Blackout? Or something stranger, more directly related to the other inexplicable events of the day?
When Harry opened the front door and, dripping, stepped into the foyer of his condominium, home had never seemed so inviting. It was a neat and ordered haven, into which the chaos of the outside world could not intrude.
He took off his shoes. They were saturated, probably ruined. He should have worn galoshes, but the weather report had not called for rain until after nightfall.
His socks were wet, too, but he left them on. He would mop the foyer tile after he changed into clean, dry clothes.
He stopped in the kitchen to put the bread and mustard on the counter beside the cutting board. Later he would make sandwiches with some cold poached chicken. He was starved.
The kitchen sparkled. He was so pleased that he had taken the time to clean up the breakfast mess before going to work. He would have been depressed to see it now.
From the kitchen he went through the dining room, down the short hall to the master bedroom, carrying the evening newspaper. As he crossed the threshold, he snapped on the lights — and discovered the hobo on his bed.