I looked up. “You buy this shit?”
“That Hogg’s not in control?”
“Yeah.”
Lonnie chuckled. “Right, and the Pope don’t wear a funny hat. The guy’s just trying to keep his legal problems to a minimum. It’s like if Koresh had been outside the compound in Waco going: ‘Hey, it’s not my problem those people have locked themselves in there with all those guns.’ ”
I read on. Hogg had held a press conference by phone from his walled estate just in time to make the afternoon paper deadline. His wife died of a stroke, he said, and this had been verified from the group’s own doctor. Rumors of drug and alcohol abuse, and especially the vile rumors about suicide or even murder, were despicable and the work of the devil’s own children seeking to stay the hand of God in the world.
“Guy’s a paranoid psychotic,” I said offhandedly.
“Rooney tunes,” Lonnie said.
“I went down there today,” I said, distracted as I scanned the rest of the article. A sidebar related the history of hostage situations over the past decade or so. It was not an upbeat tale.
Lonnie cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah,” I said. “Talked to Howard Spellman. He’s in charge of the hostage negotiations.”
“We’re screwed now,” Lonnie said. “Hang it up.”
I glared over the top of the paper. “That was uncalled for. Spellman’s not so bad, once one gets used to him,” I said, forcing a stiffness into my voice.
“A horsewhipping’s not so bad, once one gets used to it,” he answered, mimicking my formality and raising his paper cup in a mock toast.
I looked down at the paper, below the fold to the second lead story. “You see this?” I asked. “They’re looking for Slim Gibson in the Rebecca Gibson murder.”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“Police are searching,” I read aloud, “for Randall J. (Slim) Gibson, thirty-seven, for questioning in the bludgeoning death of country-music singer Rebecca Gibson. Gibson, thirty-five, was found beaten to death in the bedroom of her Bellevue home at approximately four-twenty Monday morning. A police spokesman said the star returned from playing a concert with her ex-husband and two other musicians at approximately two-thirty A.M.”
“Nasty business,” Lonnie said. “You ever seen anybody beaten to death?”
I shook my head.
“It’s not pretty,” he continued. “I hear it’s a helluva lot of work, too. It ain’t easy to beat a full-grown human being to death. They don’t take kindly to it.”
I folded the paper in front of me. “I sure as hell wouldn’t.” I scraped up the last of my Szechuan chicken into a scrambled puddle of goop and swallowed it whole.
“Slim’s partner, Ray, came over to my office today. Said Slim’s running kind of scared. I advised him to check in. The cops have to come after him, it’s going to look real bad.”
“If that article’s true, he’s in deep sewage now. You know as well as I do that when the police say they want you just for questioning, that means your ass is rolled, floured, and deep-fat-fried.”
“Ray wanted me to help him, but I’m damned if I know what to do,” I said.
“Ain’t nothing you can do,” Lonnie agreed.
“Besides that,” I added, “they can’t afford me anyway.”
“Jeez, and all this time I thought you were a cheap date.”
Mrs. Hawkins, my seventy-something, hard-of-hearing little old landlady, was already locked in her bottom half of the house by the time I got home. It was dark, but still refreshingly warm after the long winter. I parked in the back, beside the rickety black metal staircase that led up to my attic apartment, then trudged upstairs to settle in for the night.
The necktie had already been loosened after my disastrous meeting at the insurance company, but now it was off and flung onto the bed before I even got my jacket off. I changed into a pair of jeans and an old flannel shirt, then flipped through the television listings to see if there was anything worth watching.
I realized, as I stood there desperately scanning the cable listings, how empty my evenings were without her. Before Marsha, my evenings were equally empty, but they didn’t feel that way.
I settled back in the chair next to my bed and pointed the clicker at the TV. I surfed around the early-evening stuff, pausing to watch a new Mary-Chapin Carpenter video on Country Music Television, then jumping over to Comedy Central.
“Make me laugh, damn you,” I muttered to the stand-up comic who appeared onscreen.
When the hell is she going to call? I wondered. On the local stations, there was nothing but a brief recap of the morgue situation, then the regular evening stuff. For Marsha, it would be just another quiet evening down in the bunker.
I turned to the phone on my nightstand by the bed. “Ring, damn you,” I demanded. That’s when I noticed the blinking red light on the answering machine. I pushed the mute button on the remote control.
“Aw, hell,” I exclaimed, figuring I’d probably missed her call.
I pushed the button on the machine. The computer voice came on: “Hello, you have one message.…”
Then a short beat, followed by Ray O’Dell’s frantic voice: “Harry! Where you at, Harry? They done arrested Slim, man! They done charged him with killing that bitch! Can you believe that shit? Call me, man, just as quick as you get home!”
There was a breathless pause for a second, followed by Ray’s voice again leaving me a number to call.
I mumbled another obscenity, pointed the clicker at the TV, and unmuted it. Hysterical laughter erupted from the set. Presumably the comedian had just told the funniest damn joke of the entire damn century.
And I’d missed the punch line again.
I slipped the car into a space on Seventh Avenue just across Church Street from my office. I walked back across Church, down the hill toward Broadway, and stepped up into the alcove that led up to the front door of my office building. It was eight-thirty at night, and there was already a bundled-up wino cradling a bottle of Wild Irish Rose sleeping next to the door. He stirred uneasily, caressing his bottle, as I hit the step in front of him.
“Just going into my office,” I said soothingly. “You go back to sleep.”
He mumbled something and rolled over as I struggled in the dim light to get the key in the lock.
The hall lights were off, the hallway illuminated only by the glowing red Exit sign at the other end. The stairway to my left had a silver cast to it from the streetlights outside shining through a dirty window at the landing. I hit the stairs two at a time, got to the landing, then turned back to my left and hopped up the last half of the flight.
“That you, Harry?” a voice boomed from my right, down the hall from my office.
“Yeah, Ray,” I called. “On my way.”
Ray and Slim’s office door was open, with the muted light from a shaded lamp barely illuminating the end of the hallway. I stopped at the door and looked in. Their office was bigger than mine, but still consisted of only one room jammed with file cabinets and desks. Ray sat at one of the desks, his feet up, a large acoustic guitar on his lap. His right arm draped loosely over the body of the guitar, his left hand dangling off the side of the chair.
“You okay?” I asked, wondering if he was drunk, stoned, shocked, or all of the above. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.
I sat on the edge of one of the desks. “When did they arrest him?”
“About six.”
“They chase him down?”
“No.” The chair creaked loudly as Ray shifted his weight. “I got hold of him and told him what you said. He called the detective in charge and went on down there. He said they just asked him a few questions, then Miranda’d him, then booked him.”