Nothing jumped out at me and bit me on the ass. There were no revelations to make me slap my thigh and shout: “Eureka!” But, there was definitely something. Facts and things no longer stuck together like that bucket of worms. No, things were clearer. Arranged like the letters on my keyboard, the details of recent times were distinct but meaningless; or rather, their meaning was limited. With a typewriter keyboard, if you could hit upon the proper combinations, there were words and, sometimes, art. With my patchwork puzzle there would be no art, only solutions. Unfortunately, as in my vain attempts at writing, no particular combination appealed to me.
I slept a haunted sleep. Like a man who’d worked too many hours at his job, my dreams would not permit me to punch the clock. Sleep was work. There was a blackness to the disconnected images that flashed in my head. They weren’t dreams, per se. It was more like the album cover game we played in college. After tripping out on acid, we’d sit in a totally dark room. I mean totally dark. We’d even tape up the door space. One of us would pull out albums and spark a cigarette lighter just beneath its bottom edge. That brief spark would burn the vision in your head like a photographic negative. That’s what the pictures in my sleep were like, photographic negatives.
When I woke up, the negatives were gone, but my dreams had educated me. Even before pissing, I ran to the paper mosaic laid out on my floor. The answer was there. I was sure of it. Of all the names, events, articles and pictures that filled my sleep, there was only one I could not account for, explain away or discard. The key was a blurry woman getting into a blurry car in an overexposed photo taken from too far away. I should have understood that when I found her along with the articles and other pictures behind the portrait of the late O’Toole’s late son. She hadn’t been hidden there coincidentally.
I plucked her snapshot up from the floor, but I couldn’t determine anything more about her or her hazy universe than I had when we first met. She was the point on which this whole nightmare turned. I knew that, somehow. I just did. Precisely who she was and where she fit in this dark chain of being, I couldn’t say. She was an answer given in a foreign tongue to a question posed in English. Regrettably, I didn’t speak the language and none of the people who did, would or could translate. But I could guess. Sometimes, I was good at guessing. Just ask my ninth grade French teacher.
I had some other hunches, too, but now was not the moment to ponder. It was all a bit much for me in the morning without a piss and coffee. I cleaned up the patchwork puzzle decorating my floor, putting the pieces back in their proper folders, envelopes or pockets. My next appointment was in the kitchen with a coffee pot. That taken care of, I headed for relief. As I did my long-delayed business, I looked in the mirror, making plans to prove myself prophetic.
The phone let me know there was at least one someone out there with little or no interest in my pissing or future as a prophet. I let the phone do its chirping thing until my answering machine kicked in.
“Klein? Klein!” Detective Mickelson’s angry voice shouted over my recorded greeting. “I know you’re there. Pick this up!”
I was inclined to disobey, but sensed that in the long run it was preferable to try and fence with him now than to have him come get me later.
“Yeah, what is it? Who is it? What time zone we in?” I tried sounding deathbed ill and marathon tired.
“You sound like shit.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t lie. After all, he had bought the sick act.
“Seems like a regular thing for us, me calling you to come pick up a piece of clothing we run a nitrate test on. Maybe I should’ve been a French cleaners,” Buddha belly smiled through the phone.
“As long as the tests show negative, I can live with it.”
“Problem is, the stiff’s you find, can’t. Live with it, I mean.”
“That’s a joke, right, Mickelson?” I wanted this conversation to end.
“You know where to find me and your scummy leather jacket. You won’t find one without the other.”
It was tough, but I let that straight line pass untouched. “When should I find you?”
“Now,” he commanded.
“Not now. Maybe later.”
“Leave out the maybe. I’ll be waiting.” Something clicked in my ear.
I went back to the bathroom, finished what I’d started and got some coffee. I even got to drink some of it. I had a morning full of phone calls ahead of me. The first one was to Kate Barnum. We hadn’t spoken since the evening I used her chin for target practice and, in the interim, I’d had a chance to read up on her tumble from grace and her husband’s suicide. I decided no small talk would be best.
“Can you get me in to see the coroner or the doctor that did the bird woman’s autopsy?” I followed my own advice and skipped the niceties.
“And a fine good morning to you as well, Sir Walter. Have you been working on your jab?”
“Can you or can’t you get me in?” I refused to spar.
“Why?” A fair question.
“I need it for the soup.”
“If I had to, I could manage it,” she yawned.
“Manage it. Tomorrow or the next day,” I ordered.
“Anything else, Sir Walter?”
“Yeah. You gonna be in the office later?” I wondered.
“No. Why?” the reporter was reasonably suspicious.
“Because I’m gonna be in town later and I thought we might straighten a few things out.”
“Like my jaw? I don’t think I want to see you yet, Dylan.”
“Fine. ’Bye.”
Actually, in spite of my one word of feigned disappointment, I was glad that Kate Barnum would be out at Dugan’s Dump all day. I had some questions to ask her boss. They were the kinds of questions I couldn’t ask with her there to listen. They were the kinds of questions that had to do with hunches.
To play another hunch, I fetched my phone book and looked up a Louisiana exchange. I started to punch in the numbers for Baptist and Saviour Hospital in Baton Rouge when something paralyzed my finger. The number. There was something about the number. I’d seen it written someplace else, written in another hand. I shot up like I’d just sat on a skunk. I ran over to my writing desk where all the photos and files and articles were. I pulled out a list of phone numbers. Some were old and smudged and in pencil. Some were more recent and written in pen. And two of the numbers matched numbers in my phone book; one for Baptist and Saviour, the other for the Dixieland Pig and Whistle in Biloxi, Mississippi.
What an idiot I’d been not to make the connection until now. The day I found O’Toole dead, I had looked right at the sheet of phone numbers. Nothing had clicked then. It clicked now. MacClough’s late partner had been sniffing along the same trail as me. That much was clear. What I needed to know currently was if he had followed me down that trail or had I followed him. If the latter was true, I’d have to do some serious rethinking about Terrence O’Toole’s part in all of this. I put my fingers to the phone buttons again. This time I finished punching.
“Patient Records, Marie Antoinette Gilbeau speakin’,” I would have recognized that bright voice even if she had omitted her name.
“Hey, yo, Marie Antoinette.”
“Officer Bosco?” she hesitated.
“Detective Bosco, but dat’s good. I said ya had a good ear, didn’t I?” I couldn’t give her roses so a compliment was the best I could do.
“Did y’all ever catch dat-”
“S’why I’m callin’,” I cut her off to add to the sense of urgency. “We are real close, Marie Antoinette. I got an important question for ya.”
“Anytin’, detective, jus’ ask.”
“Ya said ya got two calls besides mine about Carlene Carstead; one from a reporta and one from a cop.”
“Dat’s right as mud on de delta,” she confirmed.
“Now try and go back, way before my call or de ones we just mentioned. As far as a year ago, did anyone else evuh make inquiries about Carlene Carstead by phone or in person?”