Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [51]
“Ana of a Thousand Days! Or should I say nights? You’re at the office late.”
“Hey,” was all I could muster.
They brought the prisoner to a box and told him to kneel. The box was covered with carpeting. I wondered if it was government policy not to stress the prisoner’s ligaments; the kneeling position kept them helpless as the handcuffs were removed. The man was talking rapidly in Chinese and one of the agents kept repeating, “Do you want a translator?”
Suddenly he fell silent and bowed his head. Spellbound, I watched through the doorway as Hugh Akron inked the man’s fingertips, and one by one took possession of their uniqueness on behalf of the United States government.
The man kept his face bent toward the ground. His expression, what I could see of it, was stoic.
I stayed there and watched the whole thing: the ritual humiliation of the prisoner and its mysterious, erotic pleasure.
Andrew and I never did meet up that night. I wish I had done what I said I would do and just stayed out of his way. Instead, when he didn’t call or answer his page, I went looking for him.
The dull panic was rising.
I drove my personal vehicle, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible, to Wilshire and Third, parked in a red zone and walked by the fountain where Juliana first encountered the offender. It was clever, a dinosaur made of leaves that grew on a wire form. Water cascaded from its snout and collected in a rectangular pool. There was a dark wax stripe left by skateboarders on the edge. A toddler in a pink parka was running along it now. Undercover cops mixed heavily with the crowd.
I paged Andrew a second time, called his cell, got nothing, started to walk down the center of the mix. The sounds were clashing—a keyboard player only yards away from an Ecuadorian band of flutes and tambourines. It was a downhill stroll toward the indoor mall, a palace of dazzling consumption at the very end, during which you passed every manner of marketplace come-on—a mime spray-painted silver, portrait artists, trinket sellers, discount T-shirts off a cart, henna painters and one-man bands, a guy who would carve your fortune on a grain of rice.
We had been over this territory during the kidnapping. It was familiar ground. But the nighttime masquerade suited my mood of self-pity and longing, as I kept hands in pockets, kicking it, scanning for Willie John Black or Andrew, guessing he’d go back to his witness to corroborate what we now knew about the man with the camera from Arizona who called himself Ray.
I swerved down the alleys, asking bag ladies and parking valets if they’d seen the guy who lives on a bicycle or the big cop in the black leather jacket. Nobody knew anything. I passed the bench where we had dreamed of Amsterdam, occupied now by a balding man singing “Happy Birthday” into a cell phone.
We were apart, but we would get it back. We were not rotting meat like the M&Ms, withdrawn to opposite sides of a bleak corridor. Riding the Harley, playing golf, seven-layer bean dip and the Lakers on TV, or just falling asleep, Andrew made everything better. We were alive, we had juice. We genuinely cared for each other. What could be luckier than two buddies who had great sex with no other entanglements? This was a temporary blip. Another case, another bottom-feeding offender not about to knock us out. Hadn’t we each been stung by garbage like Ray so often that we had become immune?
I felt exhilarated, on a mission, zigzagging up Santa Monica Boulevard and down Broadway, out to the Pier and along the Palisade, maintaining a pace, cleansed in cool damp air, imagining Andrew at every turn. Then I realized it was 11:30 p.m. and I had been doing this two hours, and it had stopped being fun a while ago. The going was much less dense as I trudged up the Promenade one last time, giving up the game and stopping at the police kiosk to do the rational thing, which was to ask if other officers of the Santa Monica Police Department had seen Detective Berringer.
“Who’s looking for him?” asked a uniform behind a