Simon might have had the best English but the girl, Areea, found us the ad. Areea: slender, doe-eyed, straightened hair, tan complexion, pretty. The Ethiopians, improving their reading, took both The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News and when they were done Areea brought them up to us. I think she had a thing for John, which showed she was no judge of character.
The ad was in The Denver Post.
Red Rocks Community College seeks teaching assistants for its joint diploma in Irish and Celtic Studies. Teaching exp. a must, college teaching exp. preferred. Contact Mary Block, RRCC, 303-914-6000
Areea thought this would be perfect, considering our Irishness and everything, but neither of us had teaching experience and although short of money this seemed just about impossible. John, though, had spotted something else.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, “Alex, look at this.”
The ad two below Areea’s.
Wanted: Young, enthusiastic activists, who care about the environment, no experience necessary, generous remuneration. Résumés to: Campaign for the American Wilderness, Suite 1306, 1 New Broadway, Denver, CO 80203.
I gave the paper back to John and shook my head.
“I don’t think so, Johnny boy,” I said.
John took me by the arm and led me onto the balcony out of Areea’s earshot.
“Alex, we just go see what it’s all about, we just show up, they don’t know us from Adam, they have no way of connecting us to Victoria or Klimmer. Klimmer was killed by two Hispanics, remember.”
“First of all, fuck that, second of all, we don’t have a work permit,” I said.
“Pat’s friend,” John said.
“John, it’s asking for trouble,” I said.
“Fuck it, Alex, it’s a bloody godsend, don’t you see, it’s why we were here, it’s almost a kind of message, we’re meant to work there, of all the ads Areea could have showed us, she showed us this one?”
“She showed us the one above,” I said.
“Alex, come on, don’t deny the significance of it.”
“John, you’re crazy if you think I’m walking into the lion’s den, just because of some stupid ad,” I insisted.
“Alex, it’s a job, we have no money for food, or, I might add, ketch. No one knows that we saw Klimmer, he said so himself. We wouldn’t be walking into the lion’s anything. The cops are looking for Hispanic guys in his death. There is no one to connect us to that at all. And once we’re back on the case, you could legitimately ask Mr. Patawasti for money again. Don’t you see, this is our way out.”
“Your way out of guilt,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.
“No, your way out of not starving and not going back to Ireland to a bullet in the brain. I’m going to see what it’s all about, you can come or not, up to you….”
I am seven feet away from Victoria Patawasti’s murderer. Here in this room. If Klimmer was right, one of those two men a mere three weeks ago took a.22-caliber revolver and shot Victoria in the head.
Charles Mulholland, Robert Mulholland.
But also sitting at the desk in front of me, Mrs. Amber Mulholland (Charles’s wife) and Steve West (vice president and personnel manager). The room: white carpet, nature scenes on the wall, a large plate-glass window that looked out on Barnes & Noble, McDonald’s, and the Rocky Mountains stretching fifty miles north and south in a huge panorama that took the breath away.
And something else that took the breath away.
Klimmer had been right about Amber Mulholland. You’d have to be crazy not to want to be with her.
How could you focus on Charles or Robert, trying to figure which one was the killer, when she was there?
Amber, tall, overwhelming, a blond, more than that, an iconic blond. A strikingly beautiful American woman of the type that I didn’t think they made anymore. Something old-fashioned about her. Sophisticated, clever. Hair falling in a cascade down her elegant back. A white blouse, pearl necklace, icy blue eyes, skin like porcelain, no, marble, no, vellum — soft, rich, extraordinary, in fact. Cheekbones like knife blades. Liz Taylor’s eyes. Audrey Hepburn’s neck. And no, again, forget comparisons. If the Führer had had his way all women would look like this. Radiant, regal, poised, strong.
She didn’t look fake like Miss America. Miss America would be the girl doing Amber’s nails. She was the real deal. You couldn’t overwrite her. She had star quality. Grace Kelly rather than Madonna. Hitchcock rather than Chandler.
Adroit, assured, and with the sort of sneering sangfroid that made you want to give her a three-picture deal, made you want to sell your family into a silver mine to spend the night with her. And something menacing about her too. This is the sort of woman who never had to lift a heavy box in her life. This is the sort of woman who could start a war between Greeks and Trojans.
I learned later that she was about thirty years old, originally from Tennessee but, fortunately, she didn’t have a Southern accent. That would have been the clincher. If she’d said “Free the South from the Yankees,” you would have been out looking for guns and horses.
And as Charles is talking and I’m standing there looking at her and not looking at her, two thoughts occur to me: she’s thin enough and beautiful enough to be a model or an actress or a person in her own right, not just Mrs. Amber Mulholland, and, second and more weirdly, she’s the inverse of Victoria Patawasti. In mathematics it is called the reciprocal. Victoria, bronzed and brown-eyed and heavy-lidded and dark-haired and beautiful. Amber, golden-haired and azure-eyed and pale-skinned and athletic and beautiful.
And maybe there was a sexual motive, after all. Maybe Charles was having an affair with Amber’s dimensional opposite.
Maybe.
Maybe it was too much to be with her.
You can only stare so long at the sun….
But anyway, the here and now.
The office, the mountains.
Charles himself. Thirty-eight, tall, clean-shaven, handsome, cool, hair in a blond wave, breaking extravagantly to the left of a large intelligent face. Gray eyes with a slightly surprised expression on pale cheeks. Linen jacket, open-necked white shirt, fluttering hands, charming, just the type who could kill someone and be blasé about it in front of the missus or the cops.
Robert Mulholland, the younger brother by five years, another blond. It’s like the Village of the bloody Damned in here. The same wave breaking on a barer beach, paradoxically, although younger, he’s losing his hair, but he’s still lean, handsome, pale, with glasses, taller even than his brother, more of a William Hurt look about him, black T-shirt, distracted, bored. Smarter? More cold-blooded? Fingers folded in front of him on the oak desk. Steady hand on a pistol grip.
Both brothers nice, friendly, inviting. You didn’t need Hannah Arendt to talk about the banality of evil, experience has taught me that either of them could be the killer.
I can’t help wishing I had John around.
Is John here to support me? No, he’s not. John lied. For when he’d convinced me to go to CAW and made me see the sense of it, he said that it was better I go alone, too suspicious, the pair of us, two Micks, showing up.
He was right, but even so.
I had made it through the first stage, an interview with a man called Abe, and now this was the final process.
The fourth person at the table, Steve West, a goateed, squat man, is doing most of the talking now. I don’t like him, he has his hat on indoors, and people like that can’t be trusted:
“Well, uh, Mr. O’Neill,” he continues, looking at my J-1 visa (from Pat’s mate, a proficient little forger who mostly worked with the large Mexican and Central American communities but for only another hundred dollars rustled up an Irish passport), “Abe has passed you on to us, so you must be the sort we’re looking for, let me, uh, let me explain a little about the position. At this stage we’re looking for another dozen campaigners, to increase name recognition and membership of CAW. It’s important, especially now we’ve moved to Denver, that we increase membership. Membership is important for revenue and for political clout. The more members we have, the more influence we can muster and the more members we’ll get.”