Growing up, my family always had soup the night before Thanksgiving. It was part of our tradition. My mother, bless her heart, could throw together a big pot of soup faster than I could say, “What’s for supper?” She considered soup a light meal that was appropriate in anticipation of the richness of the coming holiday feast. But Mom’s soups were never really light-she wasn’t a consommé kind of gal. Her soup was always something thick and chunky, hearty with sausage and white beans or kidney beans and plenty of rich cheese.
I endured a moment of sadness as I realized that all the love she’d put in her soups was now coating my arteries like spackling on a wall.
I’d returned my attention to the menu, looking for some soup not too much like my mom’s, when I felt the waitress approach again.
“Almost ready,” I said. “How’s the minestrone? Come from a can?”
She didn’t reply. I looked up.
The woman from the doorway stood with a hand on the top of the other chair at my table.
“May I?” she asked.
She was pretty. Well dressed. Polite. And tall. I was bumping into a run of tall women on my road trip. I thought of the Wolf sisters and the turducken that was about to begin roasting in their slow Georgia oven, and I lamented that not a single bite would cross my lips the next day.
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like I was some old fool who just realized he hadn’t remembered to replace his dentures, before I said, “Actually, I’m fine all by myself, thanks.”
She pulled back the chair and sat down.
Christy the waitress had a fresh place setting in front of her within seconds.
I stared. The pieces of the puzzle floated in front of my eyes. But they didn’t come together.
My uninvited guest said, “You’re having the minestrone?”
Two weeks ago I would have sent her packing. Two weeks ago I thought I had a healthy heart and a marriage that would survive until Christmas. Two weeks ago I wasn’t sitting alone in a restaurant in a faceless Marriott in Indianapolis. Two weeks ago I hadn’t met Gibbs Storey, and I’d never heard of a turducken.
“Have a seat, why don’t you?”
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” she said.
I hated questions like that-questions that taunted with I-know-something-you-don’t-know. I reconsidered my decision not to send the woman packing. To buy some time to contemplate, I answered her first question. It had been more civil than the second. I said, “I like minestrone.”
She held out her hand. “I’m Carmen Reynoso.”
I made a littlepttttsound with my lips. The sound was part of my recognition that I hadn’t made her as a cop. That troubled me. I thought I could make a cop in the fog with plugs in my ears and my hands tied behind my back. I didn’t shake Reynoso’s outstretched hand. Nothing personal to her; it wasn’t one of my things.
The waitress brought my beer.
Detective Reynoso said, “I’ll have one of those, too, please.”
“You here looking for Julie Franconia?” It wasn’t so much a question as it was my way of letting Reynoso know that I wasn’t a complete dummy. I added, “The case is closed. Body was found south of here near Martinsville. Looks like your boy Sterling did it. If you get up and hurry over to the airport, I bet you can be home in sunny southern California in time for your turkey.”
She nodded, so I thought she was going to agree with me. But she didn’t. She said, “Actually, I’m here looking for you.”
“Did I do something… particular… to interest the Laguna Beach PD?” I was thinking maybe surfing without a permit, or illegally parking my Range Rover, but I didn’t say it out loud.
Once, after Alan observed me talking to a citizen about a crime I thought she might have committed, he complimented me on my interrogation technique. I said something to change the subject, which he ignored. He ended up going on and on the way he does sometimes, and told me that where conversation was concerned, I was good at making repetitive move ones, not falling into the trap of making reactive move twos. He said it served me well.
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
He, of course, explained it all to me. His lecture boiled down to this: In order to maintain control of a conversation, psychologically speaking, a person needs to make repeated assertive moves, not merely reactive moves. If someone says, “How are you?” the other person doesn’t need to respond, “Fine,” the other person can say, “Where were you last night at eleven?” He said I was good at that, at keeping control of conversations, at not making move twos.
I’d never thought about the linguistic structure of it all before. But he was right. I am good at that. It isn’t tactical on my part. I just don’t like feeling that somebody else is running the show.
It turned out that Carmen Reynoso was good at that, too. She ignored my sarcastic question about why the Laguna Beach Police Department might be interested in finding me. Instead she chose a fresh move one. She said, “I came looking for you because people say you’re good.”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t happen too often, but sometimes people are right.” That, by the way, was a classic move two on my part, which meant that Reynoso was firmly in control of this conversation.
It was okay with me for the moment. I was confident I could take back the wheel whenever I felt like it.
She said, “We’re the only two people I know who believe that Sterling Storey is actually still alive.”
“How do you know what I believe?”
“I’m a detective.”
She didn’t yield an inch of territory. I smelled Lucy. “My partner told you I was here?”
She smiled for the first time. Her lips were sealed during the entire grin. I was thinking she didn’t like her teeth. Yellow or crooked? I guessed crooked, then instantly reconsidered my conclusion. Maybe she was a smoker. I sniffed at the air, didn’t detect anything foul that wasn’t coming from the kitchen. Still, she struck me as someone who’d maybe once smoked.
She said, “I’m picky about revealing my sources.”
“You mean your snitches? What do you want with me, Detective Reynoso?”
“You Catholic?”
“I thought you were a detective. You should already know the answer to that.” I wasn’t sure whether my response had been a move one or a move two. But I thought it was pretty clever.
“I am. I’m Catholic. My father considers St. Peter’s-you know, in Rome-the holiest place in the world. Notre Dame-the university, not the cathedral in Paris-comes in a close second. In my family Saturday afternoons in the fall are just as holy as Sunday mornings. Fighting Irish football? Anyway, this is a roundabout way of wondering if you’ll accompany me up to South Bend.”
I’m not Catholic. To the contrary, I hate Notre Dame University with the same kind of passion that heretics despised the Inquisition. Why? Lots of reasons. But mostly because Notre Dame stole Lou Holtz from the University of Minnesota.
Some things aren’t forgivable. But I’d learned over the years that it wasn’t a safe area of discourse with Notre Dame fanatics, who tend to be about as rational about their beloved Fighting Irish as the real fighting Irish are about the British, so I kept my enmity to myself.
“Why?” I asked. My resolve about not revisiting the Coach Lou hijacking was weakening already; I was sorely tempted to go into my well-practiced Notre Dame harangue.
“If Sterling’s alive, I think that’s where we’ll find him.”
I left half my beer on the table. She left slightly less of hers. I never got a chance to taste the minestrone, but I suspected that it wouldn’t have satisfied like my mom’s bratwurst and cheese soup with ale. As Reynoso and I were walking out of the Marriott, I said, “There are three, by the way.”