Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [128]
“Thank you. Deirdre good?”
Barbara’s face lit up. “Almost walking. Cruising on the furniture, you know …” Then her voice dropped, as if I wouldn’t know. “So where are you off to?”
“Jail.”
She laughed. “Oh, come on!”
“No joke. Mark Rauch is arguing to revoke bail as we speak.”
“Why on earth—?”
“Violation of the agreement. Because I went after Brennan.”
“What a crock.”
People kept padding by. Overweight men wearing windbreakers and carrying briefcases. Tiny Asian grandmothers in black. Suddenly I knew I could never ask her to take me into her home.
“Well … I just wanted to say hi. See your smiling face.”
She saw the hurt and put her arms around me. “I feel so bad for not calling.”
“Don’t,” I sniffled. “You’re not the only one.”
“Tell me. Quickly. How are they going to argue? I have to interview another new baby-sitter, or else I’d—”
“It’s okay. Another time.”
“No! I don’t care, she’ll quit in a month when her boyfriend gets back from Tibet.”
“Tibet?”
She blocked my way. “I want to hear.”
“It’s over for me, Barbara. I’m looking at hard time, for real.”
She insisted on that zany Catholic optimism. “What is Devon County doing for you, right now?”
“Background checks on witnesses.”
“So he’s just getting started!”
I snorted. “It’s great bedtime reading. The dirt on the dirtbags. Remember that Margaret Forrester, the dame Andrew slept with—one of many—at the Santa Monica police? I told you about her.”
“Kind of.”
“She’s the one who ratted me out.”
“Jealous?”
“A nutcase. Turns out she’s making a ton of money selling seashell jewelry to yuppie stores …”
“Aside from the police job?”
“She was awarded $52,674 when her husband died in the line of duty, although apparently—”
Barbara pushed the blowing hair out of her eyes. “When was this?”
“A year and a half ago. Why?”
She had that Barbara look.
“It’s a funny number, that’s all.”
“How funny?”
The Human Computer is never wrong about numbers. Never wrong about anything that has happened during a bank robbery, if it is in our files, in the last five years.
“That’s the same take as the Mission Impossible caper.”
“The exact amount the suspect took from the bank?”
Barbara nodded, brows furrowed with concentration.
“There was more in the safe deposit boxes, but he didn’t find it or he didn’t have time …”
The details of the robbery would have continued to spit out like runaway ticker tape if I had not stopped them by suddenly gripping her arms.
“Oh, Barbara,” I whispered.
Barbara ditched the baby-sitter and came with me to the apartment in the Marina because, she said, it would not be a good idea to go back there for the first time alone.
The key turned happily, as always, in the brass faceplate that was worn yellow in the spot where the rest of the keys had hit every day for the past ten years. These are the marks we leave on the world.
“They wouldn’t trash it,” Barbara kept promising during the drive, but still I pictured desolation and ruin left by the crime scene techs. When we got there I hesitated with the key, giggling foolishly, because I was afraid that once we opened the door the loss would be overwhelming.
All that was missing was a piece of carpet, a neat surgical square out of the center of the living room where there must have been bloodstains, but there were black fingerprint powder smudges left on the walls, and the furniture had been moved and put back in a haphazard way. It looked as if they had been messing around in the garbage disposal. Like Juliana overcome by brutal flashbacks, I was hit with spiking memories of the destruction that had happened here, as if nameless obliteration were still shaking the floor, as if Andrew and I had been citizens caught in some mistaken blitz: What in the name of God did we do to each other?
“Don’t cry,” said Barbara briskly. She dropped her purse on the glass dining table and strode to the windows and yanked the curtains back. “Let’s get some air in here.”
When the light swept in, and the white-hot view of the brilliant boats and the sharp smell of kelp and gasoline, I saw