Know Me From Smoke, page 2
Jensen continued, “I’m just letting you know that the case is being looked into again. I'm not promising anything, and I'm not saying anything dramatic is going to result. I'm just letting you know that your husband’s murder is now an active investigation.”
Stella cleared her throat twice. Saliva gathered where her missing molar left a hole. She swallowed what tasted like blood and thought how to respond. What was he telling her exactly? None of this made sense—it didn’t sound real. “You've opened the case again?”
“That’s right.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“It concerns new techniques for working with DNA, Miss Radney. In the past, there was nothing that could be done with the poor quality sample that detectives recovered from the scene. Now, there is. That means we have new evidence to act on and investigate. New evidence means that a case can be reopened. I don't pretend to completely understand the science, but the short version is that we're looking into new DNA processing techniques for a number of cold cases—one of these cases is your husband’s murder. We’re looking for the man who killed your husband.”
“Shot him in the fucking shoulder. And then shot him square in the back, where it doesn’t come out.” Stella closed her eyes and sank to the carpet; she rested on her knees. “I still have a bullet in my hip from that sonofabitch.”
“I told you I can't promise anything. But sometimes this kind of new evidence amounts to something. Not in every case, mind you, but a certain percentage.”
“And this sonofabitch has been walking around a free man for twenty years.” Stella’s head throbbed. Burning tension built in the triangular region between her neck and shoulders. The thunderous thumping of her heart seemed impossible.
“The killer is still looking at a life sentence, Miss Radney. If we can identify and convict him.”
“And you know how long I have to serve? I got a life sentence for what that sonofabitch did to my husband. There’s no escape from death, Mr. Jensen, now is there? See, my husband’s in the ground—cold and dead and wasting away—and he always will be. Only problem is I’m still walking around. I’m still brushing my teeth and paying bills. I’m still tossing in bed at night and wondering what could have been. I’m still having that same nightmare again and again, the one when the love of my life gets killed for no good reason and I become a cheap lounge singer in a gray world I can’t stand. So, I’ll tell you what this is: he got off, free and clear, and I got a life sentence for something I didn’t do. And nothing's gonna change that now. Does that sound fair to you, Mr. Jensen?”
“No, Miss Radney—it doesn’t.”
“Well, what in the fuck are you telling me then?”
“Miss Radney…” Jensen trailed off as if he were thinking hard. “I’m telling you that I want to find your husband’s killer. I know the wheels of justice turn slow. And they shouldn’t. But they do turn—I assure you—and I’m the one who does the steering. Let me try to get some justice for your husband. And for you. I know it's been a long time coming.”
Stella opened her eyes and, again, summoned all her energy to push herself from the floor. She stood in the apartment, phone to her numb ear and cheek, wavering slightly as if caught in a cold breeze. It was supposed to be good news, she knew, but it didn’t feel good. Too many bad years in between to think it would turn out good. Not now. This must be another sucker punch, she thought. Here I am, in my late forties and I’m still getting sucker punched by life. I bet there’s a song about this somewhere, and I could sing it better than anybody else. My God. “I suppose you had to tell me the news, Mr. Jensen. I suppose you had to.”
“You have a right to know. It’s common decency.”
“I see. Well, there’s not much of that going around. I guess I should be thankful for what little there is. I need to get off this phone, Mr. Jensen. I need to get off this phone and—”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. I always have been.”
“But Miss Radney, I—”
“Goodbye, Mr. Jensen.”
It happens to all of us, Stella knew—we all put our loves in the ground. What you hope, though, is that you come first. But Stella didn’t come first, and she had to endure Virgil’s burial. She remembered the soft green of the sprawling cemetery. It loomed before her like a carpet unrolling toward the cityscape. She could see towering buildings arranged in a random pattern, the loping bridge curved over the black bay. Stella’s whole world grew dark when the doctors told her Virgil was dead. It was as if someone slid tint over her eyes. From then on, she saw everything in the darkest of shades. She opened the door and stumbled from the black sedan—driven by one of Virgil’s co-workers—and took unsteady steps toward Virgil’s coffin. Inside the cedar capsule, Virgil’s body was puffed full of chemicals and sewn together without a thought to how he looked. Tears ran down Stella’s cheeks—she had no control over them.
It was a small funeral. Virgil, like Stella, had no close family. She looked around and saw career bartenders, busboys, a restaurant manager. She saw a few of the regulars from the bar, solemn men hunched into dark, misfitting blazers and wrinkled slacks.
What had the pastor said?
“You grow into who you are, and Virgil grew into a respected man. He knew what it was to work, and to do a job until it was done.”
That much was true. She always thought of Virgil behind the bar, his mustache twitching slightly as he shook a cocktail tin or washed bar glasses with an unparalleled hustle. That’s what Virgil was—a working man. She couldn’t see how the funeral was real. It felt like a vision one has before sleep, a dream you snap out of, an image that yanks you back to consciousness. But she didn’t feel conscious; Stella felt like she was walking through liquid, a dark molasses from which there was no escape. The air seemed unreal, the light, the scene itself. How could it be that the love of her life was dead? For a long few minutes, Stella decided the whole episode was a dream. She convinced herself that Virgil was hiding somewhere, watching her with a smile on his face. She convinced herself that the pastor was an actor, that the bar regulars were in on some joke, and everybody else there too. She found it funny—hilarious. And Stella started to laugh. Right there at her husband’s funeral, Stella let loose a series of choked, ethereal, belly laughs. For those short minutes, Stella still had her husband. And his death, the thought of his death, the falsity of it, was funny.
But like all such instances in life, something pulled Stella back into reality. It was a man’s grip on her shoulders. She fell against him. He held her up, his slim belly pressing against her upper back. And Stella let go, fell into him—not against, but into—and his arms were wrapped around her, closing, squeezing, holding. Her laughs transformed themselves without Stella’s assent—all at once, with those arms wrapped around her, closing her in, Stella wept. She let loose a chain of hoarse cries, yelps. They boomed from the bottom of her throat, poured over her lips into the gray light. Her stomach muscles collapsed on themselves, pressed outward, rescinded. Stella’s legs stopped working and she collapsed. The arms—those pleasant, needed arms—fell with her to the soft, moist grass. The pastor was still speaking and she heard him at the back of her mind, but the moans in her throat were so loud. They were clear and heavy as stones, dead weight in the air and in her ears. To stop them, and only to stop them, she said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
A long pause as the pastor’s voice droned.
Stella looked at the man whose arms encircled her. He was slim with a fat nose and brown, animal eyes. She breathed in his smell, an odd mix of gin and cigar smoke, breath mints and gunpowder. She thought she recognized him. She said, “You’re a cop?”
“Yes, m’am. I’m a street cop.”
“What are you doing here?” Stella closed her eyes, tried to squash a nauseous burn in her stomach.
“I just wanted to pay my respects, that’s all.”
“Thank you…”
“It’s my job and—”
Stella groaned, tried to stand. With the cop’s help, she lurched to her feet, stood there on unsteady legs, her cheeks wet and red. “I’m okay now. I promise.”
The arms left her, moved away.
Stella lifted her chin. A breeze dried the tears on her cheeks, and the pastor’s voice subsided. It was the coffin now, the cedar capsule with her husband’s vacant body. Oh, she thought, God bless his hard working soul. There was a creak on the wind, and then another. Slowly, like an eyelid closing, Virgil was lowered into the dark Earth. His coffin touched bottom and Stella moved toward the grave. She plunged her fist into a pile of wet dirt. She held the dirt by her side for a minute, breathed hard against the wind and the heavy weight of grief. She looked into the hole; it was dark down there, and Stella felt a sudden grip on her heart—the uncontrollable power of death ran through her. It was liquid electricity through her veins, her arteries, her heart. A surge. A throb. We don’t know when we’re going, she thought. We have no idea when it all ends. It’s all just a crapshoot and a handful of luck. She tossed the wet dirt onto the coffin. It landed with a slap. “Bury him up,” Stella said to nobody, to everybody. “Go on and bury my husband until we can’t see him anymore. Put this dirt on top and keep him warm.”
Chapter 4
Air horns and barking dogs. Engine brakes below the overpass. Taco vendors shouting at tortilla men. Royal stepped off the city bus into a kind of noisy hell. My, my, he thought, one thing about prison is that you get—now and then, at least—a decent bit of silence. It was odd silence, true. The flavor of silence filled with distant clangs, the foreboding call of key rings, and the loss-laden clink of turning locks. But it was still silence.
There was no silence in the city.
Royal walked east on the boulevard; he was set to stay in a mid-city halfway house, the same neighborhood where he grew up. But again, he was—in the technical sense—a free man. Yes, he needed to live at the halfway house until he found a new place, but after that he was all on his own aside from his parole officer. It felt good, but it felt weird too, like staring down into a dark hole with no bottom. Like answering a phone with no voice on the other end. Like staring his younger self in the face.
So, it was the halfway house for Royal.
The good thing? Royal knew this neighborhood like the inside of his own head. He used to have a job delivering flowers for a Vietnamese florist over on University Avenue—he wondered if Mr. Tran was still around these days. Someone to look up when he got settled. Near an intersection, a blue Honda’s horn blared and the heavy hit of bass came from a dark sport utility vehicle. All the cars cruising the boulevard looked uncanny to Royal, more shiny and sleek somehow, like cars from books he read as a kid. Funny, how things looked the same in the city, but how they were all different too. Like waking up from a dream, that lumbering awareness that comes when you open your eyes and find you’re in bed—you get back to knowing what’s real.
Royal walked another block and passed a grocery store he’d never seen—a place called Pancho Villa’s—and he thought, man, imagine the balls it takes to name a place Pancho Villa’s in America. Woo-wee. He noticed a few Mexican guys hanging out in the parking lot and crossed the street toward them. He approached a short man with thin black hair and a half-ass mustache. “Yo, amigo, what are all you suckers waiting for?”
The man lifted his chin and grinned at Royal as he said, “We just got back from work. I come here for the work, man. Good jobs some days, and no taxes. Taxes are bad for me. And for you.”
“Shit, you ain’t kidding. Under the table, huh?” Royal studied the other men on the curb and thought, if he wanted to, he could outwork some of them. Then again, he’d seen small men outwork the biggest fuckers he knew. Really, to Royal, it was all about heart and soul. Work was like playing music. You got to feel it in a way nobody else can. “How much you get for a job, amigo?”
“I get maybe twenty dollars, sometimes fifty. Lots of construction on Monday and Tuesday. They pay better, but you have to be lucky.”
Royal said, “Suerte, am I right?”
“That’s right. Luck, and the best kind.”
Royal studied the man’s paint-stained polo shirt, looked him up and down before giving the guy a nod. “Shit, man. I know you got luck, amigo. There’s no other kind but the best. What do I have to do for some of that?”
“Come in the mornings. That’s it.”
“What time you get here?”
“You want my tricks already, huh?”
“I’m trying to get ahead like you, that’s all.”
“You know any carpentry? Can you fix things, maybe?”
Royal shook his head. He didn’t know shit about carpentry and about the only thing he could fix was a decent bourbon mule. He could rack the slide on a pistol, whittle a shank from a toothbrush. Not exactly résumé material. “Let’s just say my skills are a little outdated. I’ve been out of work for a long while.”
The Mexican guy shrugged and moved down the sidewalk. “Oh, I see,” he said over his shoulder. “Come at five in the morning. Maybe you can get something. That’s about it though.”
Shit. Royal figured the guy was playing him. He’d come at four if he wanted work. But first he’d see about the job the state set up for him. He headed south away from the grocery store and into the neighborhood streets. He encountered a whole series of adobe houses with pastel accent colors, a mix he remembered from before he got nabbed, but now a few of the houses were remodeled with elevated decks out front and nice greenery. He noticed a couple BMWs at the curb and, farther down the street, an Audi with tinted windows and rims. He liked those cars, wondered how much he needed to save if he ever wanted one. You need a driving license first, he warned himself.
That, too, Royal planned on making happen.
So many things he needed to make happen.
Maybe this time, his second life, he’d come through for himself.
Chapter 5
“You got some extra blues tonight, Stella. Am I right?” Checkers plunked at his soundless keyboard—it was switched off—and watched Stella lift the hem on her red cocktail dress and cross one leg over the other. He cleared his throat and dropped his thin pianist’s hands into his lap.
Stella adjusted herself on the high bar stool and glanced at the dining room crowd. The restaurant was a nice Italian place looking out on one of the trendy downtown streets. It wasn’t written up in the newspaper, but you could get a nice white sauce with homemade pasta if you wanted it. In one hand Stella balanced a champagne flute, sipped from the glass every few minutes to drench the back of her throat. Her mouth hurt like hell, but the bubbles in the champagne made her feel like things would be okay. A little pain never hurt Stella. Just made her crave a buzz. “I got some news today, Checkers.”
“Everything okay?” His old face scrunched up like a wet sponge. “If you need me to help you out, you know I can do that.”
“There’s nothing anybody can do, old man. It’s just the world stabbing me in the back.” Stella sipped her champagne and watched a suited man with diamond rings on his fingers slurp fettuccini from a white bowl. Stella turned deeply-shadowed eyes toward Checkers and tried a vague smile. “They reopened the case, about who killed my husband.” Another sip of champagne; she wanted to wash those words out of her mouth.
“What in the hell for?”
“Some kind of new science—DNA. I don’t really understand it, to tell you the truth.”
“Well, maybe they'll get him. And that’ll be good, right?” Checkers twisted his hands together, ran them through his slicked down hair. He thumbed a stain on his red tie and winced. “Still, it's a hell of a curveball. Must feel strange, after all this time. Nothing gonna change now. Nothing important gonna change.”
Stella pushed her lips together and watched the diners. She didn’t have a response worth muttering. It was how she felt since her conversation with the district attorney man, Mr. Jensen. Nothing in this life was worth a damn.
Gershwin, a short man with a potbelly, approached from the kitchen. He was the restaurant manager and always wore the same off-white suit with a mismatched tie. Tonight it was a pink tie loosened from around his sweaty neck. He looked at Stella with a serious expression and said, “You two starting back up soon? We got behind in the kitchen. A little music could hold some folks over.”
Stella shook her head and growled at him. “You think it’s our problem?”
“No. No. It’s not your problem, but I’ll tell you what: start up in the next couple minutes and dinner’s on me. Get whatever you want as long as it’s not steak. Who knows? A pasta? A salad? Be my guest, okay?”
Checkers punched soundless A-minor again on his keyboard and hummed a few notes. “No steak, like always. We’ll talk it over, Stella and me, see what we can do.”
Gershwin huffed back into the kitchen. His off-white slacks, pleated to the knees, dragged against the magenta carpet.
Stella finished her glass of champagne, moved off the bar stool and cleared her throat. Checkers flipped a switch and a soft hum buzzed from the PA system.
Stella said, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We hope you’re enjoying the fine Italian cuisine here at Rico’s. Friday evening is our favorite evening here, and let me tell you why: We’ve got a secret, me and Checkers. We’re old barflies, the two of us, and we love to sing for our drink money.”
A few diners chuckled. The clink of forks and knives rang through the dining room. Most people kept their eyes on the food.
Stella glared down her sharp nose at Checkers. “You go ahead and play it, honey. Me, I’m going to sing it.”
A-minor rang into the night.
Chapter 6
