We shared a hearty laugh over how transparent the code was. I picked roman from the menu, and when the menu box cleared, I was looking at Max Grover’s last letter.
Mr. Phillip Crenshaw
P.O. Box 332
Kearney, NE 68849
Dear Phillip:
You’re a brave young man and a sweet one. I’m enclosing the cash for your ticket to a new life. I only hope I can help you find your feet here in the big city.
It’s not as bad as you’ve heard, especially if you have friends. I’m an old man, but I have a lifetime’s worth of friends. I know they’ll want to help you as much as I do.
Godspeed,
Max
P.S.
I’ll be at the gate with bells on (and your uncle’s dog tags, too).
“Think that’s the guy?” Jack asked.
“I know it is,” I said. Phillip Crenshaw.
Kearney, Nebraska. Farm boy territory.
19 ~ Typhoon
“Do you honestly think he’ll come?” Eleanor was wearing a scoop-necked sleeveless silk top the color of fresh salmon, an antique necklace of silver, marcasites, and jet, and four thin black bracelets that kept sliding up her arm like designer shackles. Those bracelets had prompted a number of perverse fantasies in the past, and from the way I kept drifting away from the topic, they hadn’t lost their power.
“Will he dare not to come?” I asked. “Maybe. But look what he’s done already. He risked his life to go back to the house to get the tags, and he went crazy when he couldn’t find them. He called me at home and actually left his number on my machine.”
“A number in an empty apartment.”
“Still, there were other people around, tenants, the manager. The sheriffs have a description now. Whatever information is on the tags, it’s more dangerous to him than a physical description. Max’s letter says they belonged to his uncle, but of course the kid told him that, and I don’t think we should put too much credence in anything the kid says. Whoever they belonged to, though, there’s a connection, a big look here sign that points right at him. He needs to get them back.”
“You don’t think they were his?”
“I don’t think he’s old enough to have been in the military. And I think they belong to someone he hates.”
Eleanor had decided on Typhoon, a modishly upscale pan-Asian restaurant that occupied the old control tower of a private airport and drew an unnaturally good-looking, semicelebrity clientele. It had been crowded when we arrived, full of people who were certain they’d be better known tomorrow and had decided to pick at sashimi and Burmese chicken while they watched the planes glide in and waited for a segment on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. We didn’t have a reservation, but the manager had taken one look at Eleanor and led us straight to the best table in the house, overlooking the runway and far enough away from the semifamous to allow conversation. Eleanor always gets tables like that. She thinks everybody does.
“If the tags are so dangerous, why would he fool around with them in the first place?” She was really tucking into a plateful of steamed vegetables, which the restaurant insisted on calling Buddha’s Delight; she’d wolfed down two forkfuls in only fifteen minutes.
“Schultz says they’re a totem of some sort.”
“Schultz,” she said, making what she probably thought was an ugly face. She hadn’t liked him the first time they’d met, and he hadn’t much opportunity since to exercise his dreadful charm on her.
“He knows his stuff, although I wish he’d speak English. He says they’re ‘imprinted objects.’ ”
She interrupted her feeding frenzy, suspending in midair a fork containing a single snow pea. “I know about imprinted objects. They’re superreal, like objects in a dream, usually associated with a trauma of some kind. They attain a kind of ritualistic importance.”
“You should be eating with Schultz,” I said.
She batted her lashes at me. “He didn’t ask me.”
“ ‘Ritual’ is the word he used. He also used ‘fetish.’ Those are the ones I can pronounce.”
“Why do you enjoy acting stupid?”
I poked through the shredded remains of my Filipino Beef Strings or whatever it was, looking for something I could chew. “I’m good at it. We all like to do things we’re good at.”
“Fetishes enable some people sexually,” she said. “I wonder if he means that these dog tags enable your kid from Nebraska to commit murder.”
“They are,” I said, paraphrasing Schultz, “essential accessories to the act.”
“Dog tags are a kind of identification. They probably turn his victim into the person he really wants to kill.”
I looked under the table for Schultz. “You know,” I said, “you could make small amounts of money and work unreasonable hours assisting the police.”
“And put up with people like Spurrier? Thanks anyway.”
I stole a forkful of her vegetables. “You like Al and Sonia.”
She watched her vegetables all the way to my mouth. “They’re different.”
“No,” I said. “Spurrier’s different.”
Eleanor caught a man at a nearby table staring, and gave him a smile that made him drop his spoon into his soup. “What are you doing about Nebraska?”
“Nothing yet. Post office is closed on Sunday. I’ll call tomorrow and see what I can find out. For all we know, though, he sets up shop in a new town every time he decides to go back into business.”
“What a life. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.”
“Spend it on someone who deserves it,” I said. “Are you going to finish those?”
“Give me your plate.” I passed it to her, and she slid most of the vegetables onto it and handed it back. “You’re not drinking,” she observed.
“Only in secret.”
“It wouldn’t do you any harm to cut down.”
“Right,” I said. This was familiar territory.
“For heaven’s sake. You should see yourself. Your face is all squinched shut. You look like you’re chewing an aspirin.”
“I’ve quit aspirin. It leads to Anacin, and eventually to Excedrin.”
“Be that way,” she said. I was good at stupid, but she was superlative at indifferent. I probably bore some of the responsibility for that.
I stabbed my fork into the center of the mound of vegetables and left it standing there. “After he scared the shit out of me,” I said, “I got drunk, and it made things worse. I was half-drunk when he phoned me, and he scared me then, too. Somehow, getting drunk doesn’t appeal to me.”
“So you’re inviting him to a party.”
“With a million people around.”
“All in costume.”
“If it weren’t for the costumes, I know he wouldn’t come.”
“Sort of Catch-22, isn’t it? If people aren’t costumed he won’t come, but if they are costumed you won’t know which one he is.”
The restaurant was octagonal, windowed on all sides, and jammed. About a third of the tables were made up exclusively of men: couples, foursomes, one large and ecstatically raucous birthday party, complete with paper hats and noisemakers. The birthday boy was made up like a cat, and when he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom-something he did with a frequency that indicated a small bladder or large nostrils-I’d seen that he had a long black tail protruding from the seat of his trousers.
“Halloween,” I said, making the connection.
“Wednesday night. And you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Eleanor said, following my gaze.
“There should be a lot of people there,” I said idly. “Tuesday, I mean.”
A small plane coasted in, its frail-looking wings seesawing up and down before it evened off and hit the blacktop. “You haven’t said much about Ferris Hanks.”
“He’s orange and he’s little and he keeps his house colder than a meat locker and he laughs like this.” I gave her my version of Ferris’s heek noise. “For someone who probably thinks of Justine as a training manual, he acts pretty normal. Los Angeles normal, I mean. Anywhere else, I’m sure, they’d put him in a jar in some medical museum.”