“I don’t know, Clay.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She drank half the glass at one go.
“What about your brothers?” I asked.
She shot me a look: Don’t be ridiculous.
“I’m just eliminating the obvious,” I said.
“They’re hundreds of miles away,” she said. “I gave them the appraiser’s list. ‘Claim whatever you want.’ They don’t need to break in. Anyway they wouldn’t want it. We’re not gun people. I’d forgotten he even had it.”
“Do you know when he bought it?”
She shook her head.
“Why’d he want one in the first place?”
“To protect himself from that maniac, I assume.”
I said, “So, no one else who could get into the house.”
“What,” she said. Her lips were trembling. “You’re scaring me.”
I hadn’t meant to. More than anything, I wanted to come up with a benign explanation. For her sake.
She pushed her glass away. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“That’s his name?” she said. “Julian Triplett?”
I nodded.
She bit her lip. “I’m trying to figure out how to express this calmly. Because, right now, I’m really angry at you.”
She brushed hair off her face, took a deep breath, let it out. “Okay. I’m telling myself it’s considerate of you to want to protect me. Sweet, even. But dumb, Clay, stupid dumb. If I don’t know I need to be careful, then I can’t be careful.”
“I wasn’t sure that you needed to be careful.”
“That’s my decision to make.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Julian Triplett,” she said, enunciating slowly. “He’s about our age, isn’t he?”
“A little older.”
“I wonder if my friends who went to Berkeley High knew him.”
“He was arrested freshman year.”
“Probably not, then.” She shivered, took a drink of wine. “What should we do?”
“Report it to the cops. We can’t have a loose weapon floating around. At least now we can give them a reason to keep an eye out for Triplett. For your safety—”
“I know what you’re going to say. I’m not going back to Tahoe.”
“We’re talking short-term.”
“No. Forget it.”
“Tatiana—”
“I will not let him intimidate me.”
“You could come back to my place.”
She looked at me, wide-eyed. “You think he knows where I live?”
“No reason to assume that.”
“Then?”
“Humor me,” I said. “At least for tonight.”
Her smile took effort. “If you’re trying to sleep with me, there are easier ways.”
“I’ll take the couch,” I said.
She didn’t answer. She finished her wine, poured more. “Are you convinced yet?”
“Of what?”
“That Dad was pushed.”
“It’s late,” I said. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
A beat.
She shoved her chair back and dumped her refill in the sink.
“The couch,” she said, “sounds like a good idea.”
Chapter 25
The next day, I was a zombie at work, jittery and fatigued and doing a poor job of hiding it. On my lunch break I dashed out to the intake lot to call Nate Schickman. He hadn’t heard about the incident at Rennert’s house. As expected: a false alarm wasn’t sufficiently noteworthy to make the rounds. And while he sounded duly concerned to learn about the gun, his responses were guarded. I’d worn out the welcome mat.
I said, “I’ve been trying to track this Triplett guy down for a couple of weeks now. My best guess is he’s on the street.”
“You have a recent photo?”
“Just the mugshot from his file.”
“From twenty years ago?”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not ideal.”
“No shit.”
“You’ll keep it on your radar, though?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”
I came home that evening to a quiet apartment, a note from Tatiana stuck to the TV. She needed to get out a bit, clear her head, had gone to dinner with a friend.
Don’t wait up.
I ate a bowl of cereal, using my free hand to chicken-peck at my laptop. Got the data I needed, made a quick confirmation call, took a shower, and changed into street clothes.
The urban Foundry occupied half a square block on 7th Street, about a mile west of downtown Oakland but light-years removed from any spirit of renewal. I parked up the block and stepped out into a puddle of safety glass; walking along, I passed several more, as if to suggest that the price of a spot was having your window smashed.
Even so, optimistic developers had begun to nose around, erecting a run of townhouses in full view of the freeway. On the other side of a weedy lot, a BART train shuffled toward the city, never looking back.
The Foundry itself was a hump of corrugated sheet metal, part hangar, part bunker. The first sensation that registered as I entered — before I could take in the concrete vastness; before I smelled the slag or heard the grinding of machinery — was heat. Immense, pressing heat; heat with mass and force.
The floor plan was sectioned by craft, with signs rendered in the appropriate medium. SMITHY in black iron. BIKE SHOP in gears and chains. Multicolor NEON. Closest to the door was GLASS, three bellowing furnaces that were the source of the roasting air.
The folks working the various stations wore goggles and steel-toes and old-timey facial hair stylings. I had the feeling most of them had been to Burning Man and found it too corporate. They reminded me of kids I knew in high school who built the sets for plays, sneering and striding around purposefully, fistlike masses of keys clashing on carabiner belt clips.
The woman at the front desk had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist: a unicorn, vomiting up a rainbow. I asked for Ellis Fletcher and she pointed me toward the woodshop.
Class was winding down, nine men and three women doing last-minute sanding or returning tools to wall racks. A dozen incomplete Shaker tables sat out, degrees of wonkiness attesting to the broad range of native ability. Anyone could, and did, enroll.
It was easy to spot Fletcher; he was the one eyeballing the surface of a tabletop, checking it for evenness while its maker looked on anxiously. Age was also a clue: mid-sixties, the only person there over thirty.
He wore a broadcloth button-down shirt tucked into Levi’s. Both belt and suspenders had been enlisted in the battle between pants and gut. I liked the gut’s chances. It had gravity on its side.
I waited till the last student had finished sweeping up to make myself known.
“Reverend Willamette said you might be by,” Fletcher said. His hand felt like one single callus.
“I saw you were scheduled to teach tonight,” I said.
“Wish you’d called first,” he said, settling on a work stool. “I could’ve saved you the trouble of coming down here.”
“You’re going to tell me you don’t know where Julian is.”
“I do not. Haven’t seen him in ages.”
For form’s sake, I asked how long, expecting the same answer I’d gotten from everyone I’d spoken to so far: more than ten years. But Ellis Fletcher said, “Hell,” and removed his cap, blue with VIETNAM VETERAN stitched in gold. He rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Must be two or three years now.”
“No kidding,” I said. “That recently?”
He gave me a strange smile. “You call that recent?”
“No one else’s seen him since two thousand five,” I said.
Fletcher looked puzzled. “I — okay, I guess.”