To know I was leaving they had to know my schedule. I tried to placate my paranoia by accepting the possibility that Harnes had simply made a few inquiries about me in the past twenty-four hours after all the news broadcasts. A man of his wealth and position wouldn't find it too difficult to garner information. It made more sense than the idea that he'd been hovering over me-or perhaps Crummler-for weeks.
"What's your name?"
"Jocelyn."
"I'll be with you in a moment," I said, and turned my back to her. I didn't like being accosted, checked up on, and followed right to the door of my girl's place. Jocelyn hardly made a sound walking down the walk to the Mercedes limousine again, but Katie watched her leave.
"Call Lowell," she said. "Whatever is happening, you're going to need his help. I'll call him now."
"No, it's all right."
"You have to do everything alone, in your own way, don't you?"
"It'll be fine."
"You're going to get hurt." She stood quickly on her toes, threw a kiss at my lips that sort of missed, spun back inside and shut the door.
The driver was hardly more than spectraclass="underline" a thin, ashen-faced man in a bad-fitting black suit who smelled like he'd gotten into Oscar Kinion's bathroom and used up the rest of his cologne.
Another guy with a white crew cut stood half out of the passenger seat, as if ready to come in and get me if I hadn't been persuaded to follow the woman. The etched lines of his face bent around his mouth like a poorly folded map-his sneer had been affixed to him for decades. He looked a very healthy, fit, and forceful sixty. His upper lip dipped at an improper angle, almost like a harelip. Once he'd been punched in the mouth so hard that he'd bitten out a large piece of his lip, and the sew-up job had mauled him further. The lower half of his front teeth showed through, yellow and dry. He said, "Stop looking at me."
The woman opened the rear door of the limo, and I got my first glimpse of Theodore Harnes.
Nondescript was the best description I could come up with. Nothing about him stuck with me, no simile or metaphor came to mind. I sat beside him with my body slightly twisted in case he wanted to shake hands. He stared straight ahead. Jocelyn got in beside me, pressing me over until I sat in the middle between her and Harnes. If this was a Chandler, Block, Williams or Vachss novel I'd have been "scrunched between the heaving shoulders of two guys named Vincenzo and Popgun Rolly." The woman felt like smoke beside me, a presence but not a pressure. Harnes, though we didn't touch, was the opposite. A live pressure but no sense of a living presence.
I was starting to think that getting into the car was a bad idea.
Theodore Harnes, who had married one of my grandmother's bridesmaids, said, "I want to thank you.”
“You do?"
"Yes."
"For what?"
"Catching the man who murdered my son."
An autopsy report wouldn't be completed for at least another day. The kid's teeth had been broken and scattered and it would take a while for him to be identified by his dental records or whatever other means they had. I wondered why, under these circumstances, a father wouldn't reach out with both hands for even the slightest hope that his child wasn't dead.
"It might not be your son. There's no real evidence yet that…”
In a tranquil, toneless voice, he said, "He did not come home."
“But there's a chance that …"
"My son always came home."
I could see he was a man who brooked no opposition of any kind, not even by natural events. All things had to follow in the same course, at his insistence. What he expected must come to pass. His demands would be unrealistic and unobtainable. Only death proved to be an acceptable excuse for Teddy. What would having this man for a father do to a boy? To what lengths would someone forced to live in that shadow go to get away?
"I don't think Crummler did it," I said.
He showed no bewilderment, as if prepared for my response. "A raving lunatic covered in blood holding the murder weapon? He is guilty."
"Crummler wouldn't hurt anyone."
He ignored my comment and said, "I've heard of your past, helpful interests in certain investigations. The kidnapped Degrasse child. The sheriff's recent troubles. You found the murderer of your parents. You and your grandmother, I believe. You are a formidable pair. She sounds like a most intriguing woman."
"Oh cripes."
So, he would take the tack that he didn't know Anna, or perhaps he'd forgotten her, or only remembered her in a haze from before he had such power to wield.
"Why was Teddy at the cemetery?" I asked.
Jocelyn gazed at me, the driver glared into the rearview mirror, and the other guy kept his grin up, as if nobody ever asked Harnes a question, or maybe nobody ever mentioned Teddy.
"His mother is buried there," Harnes said.
"Was he visiting her grave?"
"I believe so."
"Tell me about him."
"Why?"
"Why not? Who were his friends?"
"You should have murdered that madman," Harnes told me, and a static charge built around him. I thought if I reached out and touched him, sparks would skitter off my fingernails. He gave me a sidelong glance, showing nothing. "Believe me, Mr. Kendrick, it would have been worth your while, if you had killed him."
He said it the way anyone else would talk about turning in their recycled cans for cash. I stared at the side of his face, trying to get a bead on him, but he moved in and out of focus from second to second.
"Is there anyone I can talk to?"
"Talk? About my son?" Barnes snapped back into himself, so unassuming that he seemed to fade in and out of existence. "No, there is no one with whom you can talk."
The guy in the front seat turned to grin at me some more with that scarred mouth. He had the air of a man who knew a secret and wanted everyone else to know that he knew it. Whatever he wanted to tell me, he'd eventually get around to it. I smiled pleasantly at him, showing off my nice upper lip. I wasn't getting anywhere with Harnes anyway. "What's your name, Sparky?"
He opened his mouth slowly and I saw that part of his tongue was missing as well, leaving it slightly forked. He said, "It sure as hell ain't Sparky," just as we pulled up to the airport. Jocelyn got out and I followed.
Harnes said nothing, and didn't even glance toward us. Jocelyn slipped back into the Mercedes, slammed the door, and they left me there.
I realized that Harnes hadn't given me a lift in his nice limousine to thank me for finding his son's killer, not at all. He hadn't even seen me, really. He'd been looking right through me and staring at Anna.
~ * ~
I called my grandmother from the airport but got my own voice on her answering machine. I said, "If Harnes comes around call Lowell immediately." Then I called Lowell and told him that I thought Theodore Harnes was going to be great misfortune in one form or another.
He laughed and said, "You giving me a bulletin, Jonny? Guy's got kids in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nicaragua, all the places you can't even point to on a map-"
"I think I could get Nicaragua."
"-they do nothing but work on the line making shoes for sixteen hours a day that are sold on Rodeo Drive for six hundred bucks a pair. He has a house full of Burmese servants who probably get paid off in table scraps and half the minimum wage. He makes the old men in the sawmills and out on the road camps thank their stars they've at least got shooters and beer to slump into in their dirty trailers at night. Thanks for the advice, I can't express in words how much I appreciate it. Why don't you go shelve some more books out there in the big bad city, Jonny Kendrick? What's that noise, you dropping change into a pay phone? What, you didn't get your cell phone yet?"