She went to a department store open late Thursday nights. On the ground floor, she bought cosmetics and paid more than she was used to spending on them. She took the escalator to the fourth floor, bought a set of underwear, panties and bra, and then looked at clothes. She didn’t want to buy anything, but she tried on a short, beryl-blue dress that complemented her slanted green eyes. The salesgirl stood next to her as she looked in the mirror and told her she was just like a television star. Violet left the dress in the changing room. She wasn’t interested in television. Her eyes looked good enough without a beryl-blue dress.
It was after seven and the department store closed at eight. Violet went through the swinging doors and onto the sidewalk and hailed a taxi. She gave the driver her address, left her purchases just inside the door of her apartment, then went downstairs and got back into the taxi and gave the driver an address a block away from where Burnett lived.
[ 19 ]
Frankie Lundquist, a driver who did freelance surveillance work for the Kawamura Agency, was behind the wheel of the car with blackened windows, following two car lengths behind Burnett who was cruising along the Midwestern city streets heading home. His car made a turn and he drove into the garage and she pulled up to the curb and parked in the failing twilight near his apartment building. It was the second day she’d been following him.
Shimura had asked for her because she was the best driver they had outside the agency. The two in-house drivers were busy today. She was called to Shimura’s office where she picked up the keys and was told what she had to know about Burnett from what he’d learned from his client, Violet Archer. He gave her the description and registration number of the car. He handed her a camera with a telephoto lens and an agency notebook. He wrote Burnett’s address on an advertisement for a sporting shoe he’d torn out of a magazine. He pulled a snapshot of Burnett out of an envelope and gave it to her, waving goodbye, smiling politely.
Shimura didn’t know why Violet wanted to know more than she already knew about Burnett. It was an ordinary investigation and whatever else there was to know didn’t matter because he was being paid to do a particular job and when he was being paid to do a job he didn’t have to think about anything else.
The morning of the third day, Frankie went down the elevator to the garage and checked the gas gauge to see if there was enough in the tank for another day driving around the city following Burnett. She drove the car up the ramp and took it out onto the street. The morning traffic was heavy with cars and buses taking people to work. Frankie went straight to Burnett’s apartment building.
She waited for him to come out. He wasn’t awake yet, the blinds were drawn. She watched them discreetly with a pair of binoculars. Frankie made a few entries in a notebook that belonged to the agency, jotting down the exact time that she was parked a half-block from the subject’s address beneath the overreaching branches of an elm in the early morning sunlight.
The sensation of waiting struck her face like a wet paper towel. It felt good. The sunlight warmed the inside of the car even though the windows were tinted. She put a piece of nicotine chewing gum in her mouth. Burnett came out of the building in a hurry, looked up and down the street, then went back into the building. He came out of the garage in his car and swung left past Frankie. She turned the engine over and followed him.
Her shoes fell forward in the space in front of the passenger seat. She drove barefoot. Her toenails were painted blue, the same color as her eyes. Her teeth were unnaturally white. The polluted sky was without a cloud.
She moved quickly through the awakened city, Burnett was driving ahead of her fast through traffic. Frankie kept a car between them. Burnett rarely changed lanes. Traffic flowed smoothly until he turned right at Normandy and they came up on a jam with a truck stopped in the middle of Normandy and a man unloading a couple of wooden crates, using a hand truck to cart them through the entrance of a glass and steel building. Frankie ran her tongue across her front teeth, stuck her head out the side window, looked back, and saw the cars lined up behind her.
Two more crates were unloaded and placed on the hand truck and pushed into the building. A car sounded its horn. She saw the back of Burnett’s head, two cars up, through the windshield of the car in front of her. She looked down at her bare feet. The thick air that filled the street was amber-colored. Her eyes wandered past her toes to the clutch pedal, brake and accelerator over to the other side and her shoes. She liked the color of her shoes. She took the nicotine gum from her mouth and threw it out the window. A glint of sunlight caught her eyes. She winced.
She heard a grating sound and turned her head. A trash can standing in an alcove inched forward, scraped against the cement under it. A bare, brown leg came out from behind the trash can and the foot at the end of the leg wore an orange sneaker and the sneaker swung from side to side on its heel. She stared at it.
The trash can went on scraping the cement and it seemed to scrape at the inside of her head as it was pushed further out of the alcove to give more room to whoever was sitting behind it. An arm waved wildly around one of the handles, fingers gripped it, and the hand pushed the trash can far enough to the right for Frankie to see the eyes of a pimply-faced teenager wearing a Hawaiian shirt and peacock-blue shorts. Frankie winked at him, giving him a glimpse of her white teeth, but he didn’t see her. The trash can continued its scraping as the boy got to his feet, looking disoriented. He struck the side of trash can with a jerk of his knee and the lid fell off, making a clanging noise. He ran off and she watched him fade in the rearview mirror.
The truck was finished unloading, started up and went on along Normandy, turned right at Midland Road. Burnett followed the car behind the truck but didn’t turn at Midland, just headed west on Normandy until he got to Glendale Avenue going north to the city limits.
Frankie tailed him into various neighborhoods each with a different look and a different population, and there was nothing about them that gave her the slightest idea of what he was doing in them. She didn’t know what he was up to, but it wasn’t her job to find out anything more than the details of what he did for the length of time she was following him. She shook her head. It wasn’t going to be easy for anyone to make anything stick together from her report.
She’d almost filled her notebook with the names of streets and districts Burnett passed through and where he stopped his car and got out, and in the margins she indicated the time of each significant pause in his onward course with a description of what he did, when he got out of the car. She photographed him. She watched him through the telephoto lens of the camera that belonged to the Kawamura Agency.
Burnett did pretty much the same thing each time he pulled over to the curb just like he had a ritual to follow, without thought or improvisation. No jerky movements, but smooth, synchronized gestures. He switched off the engine and got out of the car and stretched his legs. He spread a city map out on the roof of the car, pressing his thumbnail into the crease to flatten it. He stared at what was in front of him. He held several loose sheets of paper, going through them with wide-open eyes. The sheets were fanned like playing cards in his hand. He checked the map against what was written on the sheets of paper, standing on tiptoe, leaning forward, with his weight on the door frame.
In the next moment he produced a red marking pen, raised it to shoulder height and made a stabbing gesture with it to mark the map. Looking satisfied, Burnett folded the map and put the map and papers on the front seat and got in after them, started the car and drove away.