Smiling, indicating his glass with a nod of her head, she said, “And what about your vanilla Coke?”
Having sat at Geneva Davis’s kitchen table for fifteen minutes, Noah had adapted to the spirit of her conversation. He raised his glass as if in a toast. “Delicious. You said your niece phoned you?”
“Seven this morning, yes, from Sacramento. I worried about her staying there overnight. A pretty girl isn’t safe in a town where there’s so many politicians. But she’s on the road now, hoping to make Seattle by tonight.”
“Why didn’t she fly to Idaho?”
“She might not be able to grab Leilani right away. Might have to follow them somewhere else, maybe for days. She preferred her own car for that. Plus her budget’s too tight for planes and rental cars.”
“Do you have her cell-phone number?”
“We aren’t people who have cell phones, dear. We’re church-mouse poor.”
“I don’t think what she’s doing is advisable, Mrs. Davis.”
“Oh, good Lord, of course it’s not advisable, dear. It’s just what she had to do.”
“Preston Maddoc is a formidable opponent.”
“He’s a vicious, sick sonofabitch, dear, which is exactly why we can’t leave Leilani with him.”
“Even if your niece doesn’t wind up in physical danger up there, even if she gets the girl and brings her back here, do you realize what trouble she’s in?”
Mrs. Davis nodded, sipped her drink, and said, “As I understand it, the governor will make her suck down a lot of lethal gas. And me, too, no doubt. He’s not a very nice man, the governor. You’d think he would let us alone after already tripling our electricity bills.”
Mopping his brow with a paper napkin, Noah said, “Mrs. Davis—“
“Please call me Geneva. That’s a lovely Hawaiian shirt.”
“Geneva, even with the very best of motives, kidnapping is still kidnapping. A federal offense. The FBI will get involved.”
“We’re thinking of hiding Leilani with all the parrots,” Geneva confided. “They’ll never find her.”
“What parrots?”
“My sister-in-law, Clarissa, is a sweet tub of a woman with a goiter and sixty parrots. She lives out in Hemet. Who goes to Hemet? Nobody. Certainly not the FBI.”
“They’ll go to Hemet,” he solemnly assured her.
“One of the parrots has a huge vocabulary of obscenities, but none of the others is foul-mouthed. The garbage-talking bird used to be owned by a policeman. Sad, isn’t it? A police officer. Clarissa’s been trying to clean up its act, but without much success.”
“Geneva, even if the girl isn’t making up all this stuff, even if she’s in real danger, you can’t take the law into your hands—“
“There’s lots of law these days,” she interrupted, “but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she’s the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything’s upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?”
This was a different woman from the one with whom he had been speaking a moment ago. Her green eyes were flinty now. Her sweet face hardened as he wouldn’t have thought possible.
“If Micky doesn’t do this,” she continued, “that sick bastard will kill Leilani, and it’ll be as if she never existed, and no one but me and Micky will care what the world lost. You better believe it’ll be a loss, too, because this girl is the right stuff, she’s a shining soul. These days people make heroes out of actors, singers, power-mad politicians. How screwed up are things when that’s what hero has come to mean? I’d trade the whole self-important lot of ‘em for this girl. She’s got more steel in her spine and more true heart than a thousand of those so-called heroes. Have another cookie?”
Lately, Noah’s preferred sources of sugar were all liquid and came with an alcohol component, but he felt the need for a metabolic kick-start to hold his own with this woman and to get his most urgent point across to her. He took another cookie from the plate.
Geneva said, “Have you found any record of Maddoc’s marriage to Leilani’s mother?”
“No. Even with Internet resources, it’s a big country. In a few states, if you have a convincing reason and some friends in the right places, you could arrange an in-camera marriage, in the privacy of a judge’s chambers, with the license issued and properly tiled but not published. That’s not easy to track. More likely, they were hitched in another country that’ll marry foreign nationals. Maybe Mexico. Or Guatemala’s a good bet. A lot of resources could be saved if Leilani would tell us where the wedding took place.”
“We were going to ask exactly that when she came to dinner the second time. But we didn’t see her again. I guess the mother’s real name and proof that the brother existed aren’t any easier to track than the marriage license.”
“Not impossible. But, again, it would help if I could speak to Leilani.” Frustrated, he put down the unbitten second cookie. “I’m sitting here listening to myself talk like I’m completely on-board for this, and that’s not the case, Geneva.”
“I know it’ll be expensive, and Micky didn’t give you much—“
“That’s not the problem.”
“—but I have a little equity in this house that I could borrow against, and Micky’s going to get a good job soon, I know she is.”
“It’s hard to get a good job and keep it when you’re on the run from the FBI. Listen, that’s the point. If I do any work for you, knowing that your niece intends to snatch this girl from her legal parents, then I’m aiding and abetting a kidnapping.”
“That’s ridiculous, dear.”
“I’d be an accessory to a felony. It’s the law.”
“The law is ridiculous.”
“In fact, to protect myself from any chance of being charged as an accessory, once I’ve given back your three hundred bucks, which I’ve brought with me, I have to go directly to the authorities and warn them what your niece is intending to do up there in Idaho.”
Geneva cocked her head and favored him with a look of amused disbelief. “Don’t tease me, dear.”
“Tease? I’m dead serious here.”
She winked at him. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not.” She punctuated her words with another wink. “You won’t go to the police. And even if you give back the money, you’ll still be on the case.”
“I will not be on the case.”
“I know how this works, dear. You’ve got to establish what do they call it? — plausible deniability. If everything goes bad, you can claim you weren’t working on the case because you took no money.”
Withdrawing the three hundred from a pocket of his chinos, he placed the cash on the table. “I’m not establishing anything. All I’m doing is quitting.”
“No, you’re not,” she said.
“I never took the job in the first place.”
She wagged one finger at him. “Yes, you did.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did, dear. Otherwise, where did the three hundred dollars come from?”
“I,” he said firmly, “quit. Q-U-I-T. I’m resigning, I’m walking, I’m splitting this gig, gone, finito, out of here.”
Geneva smiled broadly and winked at him again. This time it was a great, exaggerated wink of comic conspiracy. “Oh, whatever you say, Mr. Farrel, sir. If ever I have to testify in a court of ridiculous law, you can count on me telling the judge that you Q-U-I-T in no uncertain terms.”
This woman had a smile that could charm birds out of the sky and into a cage. One of Noah’s grandmothers had died before he was born, and his grandmother on the Farrel side had looked nothing like Geneva Davis; she had been a chisel-faced, chain-smoking, ferret-eyed crone with a voice burnt raw by a lifelong thirst for whiskey, and during the years that she and Grandfather Farrel had operated a pawnshop that fronted a bookie operation, she had routinely terrified even the toughest young punks with a mere look and a few snarled words in Gaelic, even though the punks didn’t speak the language. Yet he felt that he was sitting here having cookies with his grandmother, his ideal grandmother rather than the real one, and beneath his frustration quivered a warm and fuzzy feeling that he had never known before, which had to be a dangerous feeling under the circumstances.