“Can’t figure why the hell I answered the door,” he said sourly.
“In your heart, you were hoping for a flower delivery.”
He moved backward. “Whatever your story is, just spit it out plain and simple. Don’t bother strumming on the heartstrings.”
“Can’t strum what I can’t find.”
His living room also served as his office. To the left stood a desk, two client chairs, one file cabinet. To the right a single armchair was aimed at a television set; a small table and a floorlamp flanked the chair. Bare walls. Books piled in the corners.
The drab furniture had probably been purchased in the thrift shop on the corner. The carpet looked as cheap as any loom could weave it. Everything appeared to be scrubbed and polished, however, and the air smelled like lemon-scented furniture wax and pine-scented
disinfectant. The place must have been the austere cell of a monk with a cleaning obsession.
A cramped kitchen lay visible beyond one of two interior doors. The other door, closed now, evidently led to a bedroom and bath.
As Farrel sat behind the desk, Micky settled in an unpadded, rail-backed chair provided for clients, which was uncomfortable enough to serve as dungeon furniture.
The detective had been working at his desk, on the computer, when Micky had rung the doorbell. The printer fan hummed softly. She couldn’t see the screen.
At a few minutes past ten in the morning, Farrel had also been working on a can of Budweiser. Now he picked it up, took a swallow.
“Early lunch or late breakfast?” Micky wondered.
“Breakfast. If it makes me look any more like a responsible citizen, I also had a Pop-Tart.”
“I’m familiar with that diet.”
“If it’s all the same to you, let’s can the chitchat. Just tell me your sad story if you really have to, and then let me get back to my retirement.”
Micky hesitated, wanting to start her story well, and remembered Aunt Gen’s prophetic words from Monday evening, not yet four days past. She said, “Sometimes a person’s life can change for the better in one moment of grace, like a miracle almost. Someone so special can come along, all unexpected, and pivot you in a new direction, change you forever. You ever had that experience, Mr. Farrel?”
He grimaced. “You are peddling Jesus door-to-door.”
As succinctly as possible, Micky told him about Leilani Klonk, old Sinsemilla, and the pseudofather on the hunt for extraterrestrial healers. She told him about Lukipela gone to the stars.
She withheld Preston Maddoc’s identity, however, afraid that Farrel shared P. Bronson’s admiration for the killer. If he heard the name, he might never give her the opportunity to win his involvement.
More than once as Micky talked, Farrel gazed at the computer, as though her story wasn’t sufficiently involving to keep him from being distracted by whatever was on the screen.
He asked no questions and gave no reliable signs of interest. At times he leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, so still and so lacking in expression that he might have been asleep. At other times, his features once again seemed as hard as mortared stone, and he made eye contact of such discomfiting intensity that Micky thought he had lost patience and would throw her down the stairs regardless of her threat to put up a fight.
Breaking off a nail-you-to-the-wall stare, he abruptly rose to his feet. “The more I hear, the more I know I’m not right for this. Never would have been right, even when I was in business. I don’t even see what you could want from me.”
“I’m getting there.”
“And I suppose you insist on getting there. So to lubricate my way through this meeting, I’ll need another beer. You want one?”
“No thanks.”
“I thought you were familiar with this diet.”
“I’m not on it anymore.”
“Hooray for you.”
“I’ve already lost all the years I can afford to lose.”
“Yeah, well, not me.”
Farrel went into the kitchen, and a fog of gray discouragement crept into Micky as she watched him through the open door. After taking a beer from the refrigerator, he pulled off the tab, drained a couple ounces in one swallow, set the can on a counter, and spiked the remaining Budweiser with a shot of whiskey.
Returning to the desk but not to his chair, Farrel seemed to vibrate with a barely throttled fury that Micky had said nothing to evoke. As he stood there staring down at her, his voice remained low, weary rather than angry, but also tight with a tension that he couldn’t conceal. “You’re wasting my time and yours, Ms. Bellsong. But mine isn’t worth much. So if you want to wait while I use the John, that’s fine. Or are you ready to leave now?”
She almost left. Noah Farrel appeared to be as worthless as he was indifferent to her problem.
She remained in the rail-backed chair, however, because the anguish in his eyes belied his apparent indifference. On some level, she had reached him even though he didn’t want to become involved. “You still haven’t heard me out.”
“By the time I have heard you out, I’m going to need eardrum transplants.”
When he left the room, he closed the door to the bedroom-bath. And he took the spiked Budweiser with him.
He probably didn’t need to use the John, and he certainly didn’t need another breakfast beer. These were excuses to interrupt Micky’s story and thus dilute its impact. Leilani’s predicament had affected him, sure enough; but Farrel was determined not to be affected to the extent that he would feel obligated to help her.
From bitter experience, Micky knew how useful alcohol could be when making a morally bankrupt decision didn’t come naturally and when you needed to numb your conscience a little in order to do the wrong thing. She recognized the strategy.
Farrel wouldn’t return until he’d drunk the fortified Budweiser. More likely than not, he would visit the kitchen for a third serving before at last sitting down at his desk again. Tuning Micky out would be easier by then, and he would be able to convince himself that the wrong thing was the right move.
If she hadn’t known the great kindness he’d done for Wynette, she might not have hung in here as long as this.
But she also held on to a thread of hope because Noah Farrel clearly didn’t have long-term experience with morning drinking or perhaps with drinking binges at any hour. Evidence of his nouveau-drunk status was evident in the self-conscious way he handled the can, first pushing it aside as if shunning it, but a moment later turning it nervously in his hands, tracing the rim with one thumb, clicking a fingernail against the aluminum as if to assess by sound how much brew remained, utterly lacking the casualness of a seasoned lush’s relationship with his poison.
Micky’s history with drink convinced her that pressing Farrel harder, right now, would fail to move him and that this was one of those times when retreat — and special tactics — would prove to be the wiser course. She needed him for his expertise, because she couldn’t afford another detective; she was depending on the kindness that he had shown Wynette and on his rumored weakness for cases involving children at risk.
A lined yellow legal pad and a pen by among other items on the detective’s desk. The moment Farrel left the room, Micky snatched up the pen and pad to write a message:
Leilani’s stepfather is Preston Maddoc. Look him up. He’s killed 11 people. Uses the name Jordan Banks, but was married under his real name. Where were they married? Proof? Who is Sinsemilla, really? How do we prove she had a disabled son? Time running out. Gut feeling — the girl dead in a week. Reach me through my aunt, Geneva Davis.
She concluded the message with Aunt Gen’s phone number and put the legal pad on the desk.
From her purse, she withdrew three hundred dollars in twenties. This was the most she could afford to pay him. In fact, she couldn’t afford this much, but she calculated that it was a sum sufficient to make him feel obligated to do something.