I rattled off something about how the death of a loved one is never easy, and asked if I could come talk to her about what had happened to her husband. I could drive out that afternoon, I said, if that worked for her.
“I don’t know you,” Emma Emerson said, sniffing back tears.
“No, ma’am, you don’t, but I knew your husband. And I know that if there were unanswered questions regarding my death, and he was talking to my wife, he’d want to get to the bottom of it, too.”
She wouldn’t give me her home address because she didn’t know whom to trust and whom not to, she said. We agreed to meet instead in the parking lot of a mini-mart on North Dysart Road, just off Interstate-10, in west Phoenix. If I checked out OK, she said, we’d drive to her house where she would show me “all the evidence” confirming her claim that her husband could not have killed himself. She’d be driving his truck, she said. His blood was still all over the inside of it when the police finally released it to her from the impound lot. She’d spent an entire day cleaning it up with rags and a half-gallon of bleach. It was, she said, the hardest thing she’d had to do in her life.
“And don’t think about trying nothing funny, cuz I got a gun and I know how to use it,” Emma Emerson said. “It’s an Army gun. My Robbie kept it when he left the service. Just don’t tell nobody.”
“Mum’s the word.”
I showered, shaved, and brushed my teeth, courtesy of my exwife. After I combed my hair, I put on the clothes I’d bought the night before. The boxer shorts were too big in the waist and the pants too long, but they’d have to do. I was stuffing my dirty laundry in the Kmart bag when there was a soft knock at the door.
Savannah was in her blue robe. Her hair was mussed. She looked like she’d been up all night.
“You want some breakfast?”
She seemed surprised I’d say yes.
I leaned against the refrigerator, sipping coffee from a ceramic mug, watching my ex-wife scramble eggs. I was pondering the concept of forgiveness. In Buddhism, to forgive is to prevent harmful thoughts from wreaking havoc on your mental well-being. I realized I was way beyond that. The havoc that had been wrought still ran deep. I wanted to forgive. I wanted to tell her that I’d messed up big-time, and that in retrospect, she’d had every right under the circumstances to do what she did with Echevarria. But the resentments that consumed me in the wake of our divorce remained in place six years later. They’d eased over time perhaps, but they were still there. A palpable presence, a sour taste in my mouth.
“Bacon?”
“No, thanks.”
“That’s right. You don’t eat bacon.”
“Only when the Buddha’s not looking.”
“Tomatoes?”
“Sure.”
Savannah diced a tomato on a cutting board and ground sea salt into a bowl containing half-a-dozen raw eggs. She added some cream, forked the eggs to a froth, then poured the concoction into a stainless-steel skillet simmering on her center island cooktop.
“Sometimes,” she said, slowly swishing the eggs back and forth, “I wish I’d never met Arlo.”
“Kind of makes two of us.”
The sun was beginning to peek over the ridgeline, fingers of light probing the lush green arroyos and the hills below. We sat in the corner nook of Savannah’s kitchen, close but not too close, and ate breakfast — I did, anyway. Savannah’s hands were clasped to her mouth as if in supplication, her down-turned eyes fixed on my plate. I noticed she was still wearing her wedding band.
“Good chow,” I said.
“Glad you like it.”
Couples reunite after tumultuous breakups. They’ve even been known occasionally to live happily ever after. What if Savannah and I did? The thought rumbled around inside my head as I ate. I was tempted to throw it out there for discussion. But what if she said no? I’d come off looking weak. Or, worse, what if she said yes, let’s give it another go, one more shot? I’d be left wondering how long before she sautéed my heart once more and walked out on me again.
“The best thing I ever did,” Savannah said, “was marrying you. And the worst.”
“Boy howdy, do I know that feeling.”
She searched my eyes. I’d like to think she was looking for a hint of reprieve, some small clue to affirm her unspoken desire to strip me naked and have mind-altering, three-alarm breakfast-nook sex with me, but her face was a cipher. Hell, I never could figure out the woman, anyhow.
I finished the last of my eggs. “I need to borrow your car again.”
“Why? Where’re you going?”
“Phoenix.”
“You have an airplane.”
An airplane, yes, but no license to legally fly it.
“Plane’s in the shop,” I said, lying. “I need to get to Phoenix this afternoon.”
“What’s so important you have to be there this afternoon?”
“Can I borrow your car, Savannah, yes or no?”
“Not unless you tell me what’s so important in Phoenix that you have to be there today.”
I didn’t have time to deliver the whole truth and nothing but.
“Somebody died,” I said.
“Somebody connected to Arlo?”
“Possibly.”
“They were murdered, too, weren’t they?”
“More like suicide.”
“I asked you to stop all this, Logan.”
“And I told you, I can’t.”
“Right. Because Arlo saved you from getting hit by a streetcar. And I’m supposed to actually believe that?”
“Little-known fact: More people are killed every year by streetcars than killer bees.”
“You’re so totally full of shit, you know that?”
“Look it up, you don’t believe me.”
Savannah shook her head. “Someday,” she said, “you’ll tell me the truth. Maybe.”
Someday. Maybe. But not today.
I set my plate in the sink.
“I need a go or no-go on the car, Savannah.”
Savannah sighed. “The keys are on the desk in the study,” she said. “Just bring it back full.”
I eased the Jaguar to the end of the driveway and waited while the security gate swung slowly inward. I was thinking that the last thing I wanted to do was spend six hours driving across the desert to Phoenix to grill some woman I’d never met about whether her husband whom I barely knew did or didn’t kill himself. I had the FAA to do battle with, my pilot’s license to restore, a flight school to run into the ground. What did I care how Robbie Emerson died? I suppose the same could’ve been said about Arlo Echevarria. So what if I owed him my life? Had some dipstick in a Domino’s shirt lit me up like a Christmas tree instead of him, there’s no way that self-absorbed son of a bitch would’ve ever gone hunting my killer. Not after I stole his wife. I pondered the notion of giving Gil Carlisle back his money — what was left of it, anyway. But something stopped me. Not some lesson from the Buddha about fidelity to the memory of a friend — even if that friend turned out to be the opposite — and not some cheesy, ready-room pep talk about completing the mission regardless the cost. No, what kept me from putting the Jag in reverse and giving Savannah back her keys was the ill-formed notion that somehow, if I could just piece the puzzle together and deliver her some closure, that she would be there, waiting for me in the end, and that we could resume life together as if Arlo Echevarria never existed. Improbable, I realized, but there it was. Whatever I owed Arlo Echevarria, I decided, would be paid in full by my making the trek to Arizona. My conscience would be assuaged, the ledger balanced.
Immersed as I was in such thoughts, it took me a second to notice the black van with tinted windows that turned sharply into the driveway and skidded to a loud, screeching stop directly in front of Savannah’s car.