Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [16]
The place looked like a grown-up lived there. A grown-up who kept tonic and limes in the refrigerator, turkey bologna, hummus, some very nice imported Colby cheese, one percent milk, OJ with calcium, always a couple of beers, usually a leftover pasta primavera or soggy salad in a box, fruit in the bin and Zen muffins in the freezer, along with a slew of frozen diet entrées. A grown-up whose most-used appliance was the blender, with an industrial-sized crock of vanilla protein powder at the ready.
And there was this man in my kitchen, wearing a black short-sleeved knit shirt that had to stretch to get around hard, polished biceps, a zipper at the neck with some logo dangling off, tight jeans with a thick belt that pushed his alleged love handles up (sleek as a bull, he was always fighting ten invisible pounds), loafers, no socks. Long, crazy hours had taught Andrew to keep a change of clothes neatly folded in a gym bag in his trunk.
He had skinned a grapefruit and set perfect pink sections, no stringy white stuff, on each plate.
“How’d you do that?”
“Sharp knife.”
“I don’t have any sharp knives.”
We were sitting at the glass dining table. Glass wasn’t such a good idea, but I liked the bamboo legs. He pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket, including a contraption that fanned out like a geometric puzzle into screwdrivers and ice picks, featuring an impressive blade.
“Surgical steel.”
He then folded each tool back with a meticulousness that reminded me of the way he ordered the pruning shears. Andrew had a talent for mechanical things.
“What’s the program?” he asked.
“Rick thinks it’s time to polygraph the parents.”
“Cool. I’m going to walk the Promenade. Canvas the merchants again.”
“I’ve assigned an agent to do that,” I told him.
“My job.”
“I think it should be one of our guys.”
He looked up from mixing salsa with the eggs. “What is this, pulling rank?”
“I just know Rick is going to want it covered.”
“Do what you need to do. I’m going to look for the transient, Willie John Black.”
“What for?”
“Take him in for a composite.”
“Good idea. If you want to know what they look like on Mars.”
“He’s been helpful to me in the past. You can’t discount everything he says. A social services guy told me they can be lucid. Their delusions are a defense.”
“Against what?”
“Whatever their personal terror might be.”
We were picking up the dishes. “Andrew, why? I need you at the Meyer-Murphys’. You know they’re going to freak about the polygraph.”
“You can handle the M&Ms,” Andrew said, “and besides”—he leaned back against the sink and drew me close—“I have to ask you something. Do I have safe passage?”
“You have safe passage.”
“It’s a favor.”
Sighing hugely, “Okay, what do you need?”
He laughed. “You sound like my lieutenant. Only he’s nicer.”
“I’m nice.”
We were nuzzling.
“Yes, you are.”
“What kind of favor?”
“I’m a little short right now, and some unexpected things came up. Do you think you could loan me nine hundred bucks?” Then before I could answer he winced self-consciously and added, “It’s for the Harley.”
He might as well have said it was for a poor starving child in India since that is how he felt about the stupid bike. He worked on it every weekend; he did the Love Ride to Lake Castaic every year.
I knew all that, and yet sometimes you see a vision of the person as he was or will become. In Andrew’s pleading eyes there begged a young boy in the shade garden of the home of his adoptive parents, a pretty place, and yet he is unsure about the ground on which he stands. Something is unstable in his world, something he