Maybe I slept, maybe I passed out. I say maybe because later, when I learned how much time had gone by, sleeping or passing out seemed the only explanation; I feIt as though I’d been lying there only a few minutes. Occasionally I would raise my head to see if the body was still there. But then I must have fallen asleep, because a voice woke me. Cale, the voice said, what are you doing?
I opened my eyes. A very big shadow was standing over me.
“Wade?”
“What are you doing?” he said again.
I held my hand up in front of my face. I still had the knife. “I’m guarding the body of Ben Jarry,” I said. When Wade didn’t answer, I said, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me there’s no body over there.” When he still didn’t answer, I raised my head from the floor and looked over in the direction of the body. There were a bunch of cops and there was something on the ground with a sheet over it. I nodded. “Finally. Finally got a body. There’s no eluding me forever.”
“No,” came Wade’s voice out of the big shadow, “there’s no eluding me forever.”
“I knew you’d get him sooner or later,” I explained, “I always had confidence in you. No matter how tough the assignment, you were bound to snare him. Millions of murdered men, true, but not having a head is a distinguishing characteristic. No way you can escape notice very long if you don’t have a head. You guys are aces. You guys are crackerjacks.”
“What are you doing, Cale?”
“In the archives of the library are the legends of murdered men, Inspector. Maybe some are real and maybe some aren’t. I’m familiar with most of them at this point. I’ve been smuggling their legends into my tower, I’ve been poring over them in my sleep. My favorite is the one of the man murdered in this kitchen. This very one. Like Ben over there, except this murdered man would be a little harder for you to track down, since he had a head. He was shot with a gun. Do you know about this man?”
“No.”
“In this very kitchen. Shot with a gun. By an Arab of some sort. Late one spring night and many people saw it. He bled on the floor and did not die immediately. He aspired to lead his people and at the moment he was shot he was in the throes of triumph, his people had acclaimed him on this very night just outside this very kitchen. Before him, his own brother had led the people, and his brother was another murdered man, and the brother that came before them was a murdered man as well. A whole family of murdered men. They were born in America.”
“America One,” came Wade’s voice from the big shadow, “or America Two?”
I got up off the floor. I stood toe to toe with him and held the knife hard. I held the knife as hard as his eyes held me. “Not America One or America Two,” I said, seething. “Just America. They were born in America.”
Wade licked his lips. “I have to arrest you.”
“Because we have a body here and we have you holding what by all appearances seems to be a murder weapon.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “That’s Ben Jarry over there. You can’t arrest me for murdering Ben Jarry. You’ve already set me free for helping you murder Ben Jarry, remember?”
Wade slowly blinked. “Put your clothes on.” He looked down at my side where I held the knife hard, and he put his hand out, palm open and draped with a white handkerchief. We stared at each other a good half minute before I put the handle of the knife on the white handkerchief. He wrapped the knife and called over Mallory and gave it to him. I put my clothes on. We walked from the hotel kitchen up the stairs into the lobby. I could still see the light of the lounge where the bar was. “There was somebody else here earlier tonight,” I said to Wade, nodding at the light. “Some sort of actor, your height, fiftyish. I talked to him.” Wade lumbered over to the lounge, looked in and came back. “No one I can see but check it out,” he said to Mallory. Check it out, Mallory said to the cop next to him. Wade walked on ahead, and Mallory and another cop led me out into the night, where we followed Wade to a boat down by the beach, where there were still more cops.
They had spotted me taking off with the boatman that evening. They hadn’t picked me up at the time because they wanted to see where I was going and why. They’d lost us in the fog and only when they got the boatman coming back could they make him show them exactly where in Hancock Park he’d dropped me off. You must have made great friends with the little blond hooker, Wade said to my surprise, she wouldn’t tell us shit. They’d been stymied again until they got a report from a schooner that docked in the south harbor with a small boat tied to its tail.
Back in town they took me to the station. It was now nearly dawn. A few cops were standing outside smoking and in the front room a couple of women who did not look as though they worked the lagoon but over by the East Canal were sitting on a bench that ran along the wall. Next to them on the bench a guy was slumped over. Wade talked to the cop behind the desk and then after a few minutes we went through the door down a green hall to a small windowless room. Everyone was exhausted. I should have been exhausted too. Instead everything in me was fired, I couldn’t remember when I had feIt this tired. Perhaps I had never feIt like this, even before prison. I had this ridiculous sense of being in control of everything, I had this feeling of calling all the shots. It was ridiculous because I wasn’t calling any shots at all, it was ridiculous because everyone thought I was out of control. We sat in the small windowless room at a single table with two chairs. I was in one of them and Wade was in the other. Mallory stood by the door and another cop stood in the corner. I sat looking wild and fired; Wade looked exhausted. “Have you settled down now?” he said to me.
“What do you mean?” I looked at the other cops.
“Are you clear in your own head?” he said.
“Everything in me is fired,” I explained. With perfect timing someone knocked on the door, and Mallory opened it. It was the police doctor. He said he wanted to take some blood and a urine sample. Wade said, Fuck that, this man isn’t drugged. “Everything in me is fired,” I explained to the doctor. The doctor had me open my shirt; he took my pulse and put his hand on my head. He turned to Wade and said I was burning up, and I said, What did I tell you.
“I don’t care about that,” Wade said slowly, “this man and I are going to have a talk now.”
“This man should be hospitalized,” said the doctor. He and Wade argued, and that ended with Wade still sitting in his chair and the doctor outside the room and the door locked between them. “Tonight,” Wade said to me, “you’re going to tell all about it.” He was still speaking very slowly but biting the words so hard I could hear the pain in them. “You’re going to tell me who you went to meet in the lagoon tonight and why.”