“No. But here’s the thing: I set up a guy and had him beaten half to death and put in jail. Maybe it was necessary, maybe not. And I took some lumps too. But I didn’t like it at the time, the setup part, and my husband didn’t like it, and I sort of half think he was right. So I’ve decided that I’m going to try as hard as I can to resolve these cases peacefully. No, let me finish! I know other people might have tried, but the point is, I have to try, personally. That doesn’t work, I guess I can get as heavy as necessary. Which is heavy enough. The other thing is, my partner thinks you had guys whacked, which-I said, let me finish! — is your business, but I don’t want to hear about it, and if it gets stuck in my face so I can’t avoid it, I’ll rat you out.”
Duran was glaring at her, her face getting steadily darker; Marlene glared back, feeling, having said her say, more at ease with herself than she had in a long while. It had taken a good deal of the sting out of owning a gun.
As if reading her mind, as well as making up her own, Duran relaxed and, with a curt nod of the head, said, “Okay, it’s your play. Meanwhile, assuming nice don’t work for you, do you have protection?”
Marlene smiled. “As the nun said to Father Feeny. Yeah, I have a gun. How about yourself? I bet you have a big one.”
At this Duran laughed out loud, a hearty noise that blew the sour tension out of the room. She reached into a drawer and put a pistol on the center of her desk.
“Wow! That’s very impressive. May I?”
Duran nodded. “It’s loaded.”
“I guess,” said Marlene, who stood and picked it up. It was the most famous pistol in history, a Colt.44 Peacemaker, the one nearly everyone in the world has seen hundreds of times from early childhood in the hands of film cowboys and gunfighters. And like nearly everyone else who has ever picked up a Peacemaker for the first time, Marlene tried to twirl it on her finger. She found it was a lot harder than Hoot Gibson made it look.
“Here, give it to me-you’ll drop it and break your toe,” said Duran. She took it from Marlene butt first and did a snappy finger twirl, forward, back, and forward again, and mimed sticking it into a low-slung holster. “My grandfather’s,” she said. “He was a rodeo cowboy. And yeah, this is the one I used. I buried it before I called the sheriff so they wouldn’t take it.”
“Incredible!” said Marlene. “And here you are in the big city, the world’s only feminist chicana desperado. This is why they call you the Durango Kid, right?”
Duran snorted and slipped the thing back into its drawer. “Not such a kid anymore,” she said.
“Me neither, now that I think of it,” said Marlene. “Don’t you dare laugh, but I have to go home and feed my husband.”
Duran laughed anyway, long and loud.
Marlene went home, opened her gun safe, and took out her gun. She read the little manual supplied by Colt, field-stripped the weapon according to its directions, and cleaned it with the little kit the gun dealer had tossed in. As she was reassembling it, she suddenly noticed that the sounds that Lucy had been making while playing had ceased. By design, the playroom shared a wall with Marlene’s office so that she could keep tabs on what her daughter was up to while working at home.
“Lucy? What’re you doing?” she called out. No answer. She stopped what she was doing and listened carefully. At the same time she became aware of eyes on her back. She spun around in the swivel chair. No one. The door was closed. Then she raised her eyes up the rear wall of the office. At the top of this wall, where it joined the ceiling, was a long window, designed so that light from the street could pass from Marlene’s office into the playroom, which had no other natural light. There was a face in the window, grinning down at her from twelve feet up.
Marlene put the gun down and walked out her door and into the playroom. Lucy had placed her miniature desk on a toy chest and two chairs on top of that to reach the high inset window, on whose sill she now crouched.
“What were you looking at?” asked Marlene when she had helped the girl down and given her a stern lecture about neck breaking and the sorrows of the quadriplegic life.
“Nothing.” Embarrassed down-gazing.
“You wanted to see my gun, didn’t you?”
Nod.
“Okay, come on in. But next time ask me. Don’t be a sneak.”
Marlene gave Lucy the standard gun-safety lecture and, after explaining how they worked, allowed her to handle both pistols, unloaded.
Lucy pointed at the shiny revolver. “That’s my favorite kind. My one is like that.”
“Yes, but you understand the difference,” said Marlene sternly. “This is not a toy. And you are never, never, never-”
“I know, don’t touch it without you,” said Lucy, idly swinging the little revolver by its trigger guard. Then, of course, she had to try twirling it like a cow-person, and then Marlene had to show her how to do it, and fail, provoking laughter, and then the two of them traded the pistol back and forth, laughing like lunatics and seeing who could be the stupidest and clumsiest gunfighter.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Marlene, wiping her eyes, “if your father ever saw that, God, playing with guns, he’d go nuts. Let’s keep this under our hats, okay?”
Lucy gave her a sidelong look. “Isn’t that being sneaky?”
“Hey! I give the moral instruction around here, capisc’?”
Lucy giggled and said, “Shen gao huang di yuan,” in a singsong trill.
“Right on, whatever it means!” said Marlene. “Let’s go cook dinner.”
“This was an excellent dinner,” said Karp, smiling at his family. And it was: tomato soup made with actual tomatoes and basil, broccoli salad, a London broil sliced paper-fine and wrapped around fresh porcini, with madeira sauce, and a strawberry shortcake with real whipped cream.
“I whipped the cream,” said Lucy, not for the first time.
“Yes,” said Karp, “and I thought that was the best part of the dinner. I wish we could have your whipped cream on everything.”
Much proposing of horrible things to have with whipped cream, giggling until our milk gushes from our nose. Sent from the table, still giggling.
“She’s been a maniac all day,” said Marlene. “I don’t know where she gets her sense of humor. Both of us are as dry as toast.”
“Meanwhile,” said Karp, “I hate to say this, but being fed like this arouses my suspicions. Am I going to get hit with something?”
“Yes, I figured you would feel like that-because of the infamous Gun Meal-but really, it’s not the same, because then I was being smarmy and embarrassed, and making up to you by cooking something that you like but that I think is garbage, whereas in the present instance, I was really enjoying doing this one. For the man I love.”
Karp cocked a disbelieving eye at this, which Marlene pretended to ignore. She asked, “And how was your day, dear? Trying?”
Their old joke. Karp grinned and said, “Since you ask, I had a pretty good one. The evildoers took some lumps.”
“Did you do Bloom?” asked Marlene, who had not been following the case closely at all.
“Oh, God, no-it’ll be weeks and weeks before we get to him. Right now we’re just preparing the ground, digging the pits, sharpening the bamboo stakes. For instance, today I had Mrs. Ortiz up there, Fuerza’s administrative aide. Been at Health since before penicillin, in her early sixties, plain as a post, she’s going to retire soon, so they can’t offer her anything or shaft her too much.”
“She helped you out?”
“Oh, yeah. She knows where all the bodies are buried. Anyway, the basis of this charge was that Murray hired a bunch of associate medical examiners without Fuerza’s knowledge or approval. Broke the law, in other words. What actually happened was that Murray needed the examiners to keep up with his caseload, he went to Fuerza for approval, Fuerza told Mrs. Ortiz to find the money in the general Health Department budget, which she did, and Murray began recruiting. Fuerza actually wrote a note to him recommending a pal of his for one of the jobs. We also have a letter to the Mayor’s Office, signed by Fuerza, backing the recruitment of four pathologists.”