“I heard. Carney practically jumped me on my way in. I haven’t seen the old bastard that agitated since they cut out his right lung. He was a little sketchy on the details, but your name kinda got mentioned every third word.”
“Yeah, it was quite a party.”
“Do tell,” Johnny sat down at the bar where Kate Barnum had sat. “Do tell.”
I did. I told. Everything, this time. He wore his cop face, absorbing it all like a skeptical sponge. I hated that particular face, that cop face. The face that saw only enemies. The face that says: “Yeah, right! You lying scumbag. Stop wasting my time and tell me the truth. Truth? I wouldn’t believe it anyway coming outta your mouth.” I hated that face because it was reflexive and showed a MacClough I didn’t know, couldn’t know, didn’t want to know. I told myself he couldn’t help it. That attitudes couldn’t be left at the door like service revolvers and badges. But I still hated that face.
“Johnny Blue, huh?” the ex-detective peeled off the cynical make-up sooner than expected, almost too soon. “Good name for a rockabilly star.”
“So you’re not-”
“-Johnny Blue. No. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“And this doesn’t mean anything to you?” I fished the diamond heart out of my pocket.
“Not unless it means we’re goin’ steady,” he gave a cursory glance at the orphaned heart. “Thanks, Dylan,” he never called me that.
“For. .”
“For putting on the stall until we talked. Merry Christmas ya heathen Jew bastard.” He hugged me.
“You’re welcome, but now how do I tell the cops about these new details? I wasn’t shocky or anything. It’s gonna look pretty suspicious.”
“Here,” Johnny snatched the jewlry out of my paw. “I’ll handle it.”
“But-”
“But nothin’. I said I’ll deal with it and I will. I do the cop-speak thing pretty damned well,” he bragged, sounding more like the man I knew.
“So whaddaya think?” I tried turning the page back to the subject of murder.
“About what?” MacClough wanted to know, sniffing at the cold coffee I’d left on the bar the night before.
“About raggy mink ladies with orange make-up. About little yellow birds and bullet holes. About-”
“Where’s my sweater,” John cut me off.
“The cops. I told you. Nitrate tests. Remember?”
“Yeah,” he waved carelessly. “I never believed half the shit those forensic guys came up with. I swear they used to make their results up as they went along.”
“What about the murder?” I refused to let go.
“What about it? Murder is murder. When you strip away all the frills, all you got is a dead human being,” was the ex-cop’s strangely undetective-like conclusion. “The bird? Could be window dressing. Could be it just flew into her mouth. Maybe Frank Perdue is a serial killer. I don’t know. It’s fuckin’ Christmas Day. Can we get off the subject?”
“Sure,” I gave in uneasily. “Let’s clean up.”
“No, not today. I’ll do it tomorrow.” He squeezed the back of my neck with brotherly affection. “Let’s go open some gifts.”
“Okay, MacClough,” I shook his calloused right hand.
He took one long look at the barroom and stood, head bowed, for some seconds. It seemed oddly like a moment of prayer.
London in December
Whenever I could not write, I’d assemble mental lists of authors and poets I could barely approximate and never be. There were very many lists. I would never be F. Scott or J.R.R. or e.e. or T.S. or J.D. or W.H. or D.H. or H.D. I’d never be Ernest or Ezra, Wallace or William, Kurt or Carlos, Richard or Raymond, Ann, Anne, or Ayn. I would never be Leo or Isaac, Hammett or Hesse, T. Wolfe or V. Woolf. I would always be Dylan, but neither Bob nor Thomas.
I was furiously making lists today. I was making lists to camouflage the bald spot on my brain where the words had stopped coming from. I was making lists to distract my eyes from the mounting pile of crumpled white paper surrounding my desk like unmelting snowballs. I was making lists to ease the frustration of blank pages. Blank pages; the only thing that ever made insurance work seem like romance.
When the lists didn’t work, I’d read. I was reading today. I was reading my own stuff; the three poems and two short stories that’d been published since my change of career. Sometimes reading my own printed words would pump me up, slap me, throw cold water in my face, fool me into believing there was hope and promise in the world and within me. Today, I wasn’t fooling so easy. Early on, I tried to juice myself by staring at photostats of the publishers’ payment checks, but today their sparse digits only fueled the frustration.
I switched to the product of someone else’s pen. I picked up the Whaler and studied something other than the grocery ads for the first time in five years. God, she really was good. Her sentences were as clean and taut as an old sailor’s knots. Her skepticism was sharp, but veiled like the microscopic teeth on a scalpel. Didn’t you know? All knives have teeth. All knives. She had knives. She had teeth. She knew how to use them. Again the question came. What had she done to fall this far?
Yeah, I’d pulled Kate Barnum’s name out of my memory’s hat. Her prose, however, had not been so readily retrievable. I guess I didn’t really have much respect for tabloid journalism. To me, newspaper writing was like newspaper print; easily washed off, easily forgotten. It really was some feat, you know, my recalling her name. Considering a good part of my newspaper reading had been done between sips of burned-bitter coffee in dull, heaterless front seats during eternal nights of mostly fruitless surveillance, it’s a wonder I could remember my own name. Then another question arose. Why did I remember hers?
The phone clicked or buzzed or whatever it was that phones did now in the digital age. I let its chips exercise their synthesized lungs until another wonder of the age threw its robotic two cents in.
“Hi! I’m not in right now,” my recorded voice lied, “or I’m listening to make sure I’m in the mood to speak to you.” That was more like it. “In any case, leave your name, number and time you called. I’ll try to get back to you soon as possible.’Bye.”
“Mr. Klein, this is Kate Barnum. If you’re there, please pick up. .” she waited. I waited. “Okay, then,” she went on, “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at the bar the other night. God, I’m sounding like such a jerk.” There was real discomfort in that pronouncement and it was followed by real anger. “I hate these fucking machines. If I could go back in time, I’d go back and kill the bastard who invented them.”
“Not me,” I picked up, interrupting her vengeful ramblings. “I’d go back and kill Van McCoy.”
“Van McCoy?”
“Van McCoy. You remember. ‘Do the hustle, doo doodoo doo doo doodoo doo doo. .’ I hated fuckin’ disco music,” I was actually gritting my teeth.
“Oh, him. He’s already dead,” Barnum delivered the good news.
“Hey, the guy who invented phone machines is also probably dead,” I chimed in sarcastically.
“Yeah, it sure is a wonderful life.”
“Ain’t it grand, though,” I paused. “I know there’s a point here somewhere and don’t tell me you really called to apologize.”
“It gave me a convenient opening,” she admitted easily enough.
“To. .” I wondered.
“To invite you to dinner tonight.”
I answered with silence. The kind of silence heavier than spent uranium wrapped in lead. The kind of silence louder than sonic booms in the Grand Canyon. She understood.
“No,” she replied to the unspoken questions, “my motives aren’t purely social. And yes, I’ll probably ask about the dead woman and your lame story concerning the events surrounding her demise. Look,” she cleared her throat, “I was a bit of an ass the other night-”
“A bit,” I agreed.
“Thanks for making this so easy,” Barnum replied sarcastically.
“Think nothin’ of it.”