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“Of what?”
“I just said, I can’t talk about it over the phone.”
She asked me where I was calling from. I told her California.
“My Robbie and me, we honeymooned in San Diego after he got back from Desert Storm. The first war. Ate lobster. I was pregnant.” She started crying.
I rattled off something about how the death of a loved one is never easy, and asked if I could come talk to her about what had happened to her husband. I could drive out that afternoon, I said, if that worked for her.
“I don’t know you,” Emma Emerson said, sniffing back tears.
“No, ma’am, you don’t, but I knew your husband. And I know that if there were unanswered questions regarding my death, and he was talking to my wife, he’d want to get to the bottom of it, too.”
She wouldn’t give me her home address because she didn’t know whom to trust and whom not to, she said. We agreed to meet instead in the parking lot of a mini-mart on North Dysart Road, just off Interstate-10, in west Phoenix. If I checked out OK, she said, we’d drive to her house where she would show me “all the evidence” confirming her claim that her husband could not have killed himself. She’d be driving his truck, she said. His blood was still all over the inside of it when the police finally released it to her from the impound lot. She’d spent an entire day cleaning it up with rags and a half-gallon of bleach. It was, she said, the hardest thing she’d had to do in her life.
“And don’t think about trying nothing fu
“Mum’s the word.”
I showered, shaved, and brushed my teeth, courtesy of my exwife. After I combed my hair, I put on the clothes I’d bought the night before. The boxer shorts were too big in the waist and the pants too long, but they’d have to do. I was stuffing my dirty laundry in the Kmart bag when there was a soft knock at the door.
Sava
“You want some breakfast?”
She seemed surprised I’d say yes.
I leaned against the refrigerator, sipping coffee from a ceramic mug, watching my ex-wife scramble eggs. I was pondering the concept of forgiveness. In Buddhism, to forgive is to prevent harmful thoughts from wreaking havoc on your mental well-being. I realized I was way beyond that. The havoc that had been wrought still ran deep. I wanted to forgive. I wanted to tell her that I’d messed up big-time, and that in retrospect, she’d had every right under the circumstances to do what she did with Echevarria. But the resentments that consumed me in the wake of our divorce remained in place six years later. They’d eased over time perhaps, but they were still there. A palpable presence, a sour taste in my mouth.
“Bacon?”
“No, thanks.”
“That’s right. You don’t eat bacon.”
“Only when the Buddha’s not looking.”
“Tomatoes?”
“Sure.”
Sava
“Sometimes,” she said, slowly swishing the eggs back and forth, “I wish I’d never met Arlo.”
“Kind of makes two of us.”
The sun was begi
“Good chow,” I said.
“Glad you like it.”
Couples reunite after tumultuous breakups. They’ve even been known occasionally to live happily ever after. What if Sava
“The best thing I ever did,” Sava
“Boy howdy, do I know that feeling.”
She searched my eyes. I’d like to think she was looking for a hint of reprieve, some small clue to affirm her unspoken desire to strip me naked and have mind-altering, three-alarm breakfast-nook sex with me, but her face was a cipher. Hell, I never could figure out the woman, anyhow.
I finished the last of my eggs. “I need to borrow your car again.”
“Why? Where’re you going?”
“Phoenix.”
“You have an airplane.”
An airplane, yes, but no license to legally fly it.
“Plane’s in the shop,” I said, lying. “I need to get to Phoenix this afternoon.”
“What’s so important you have to be there this afternoon?”
“Can I borrow your car, Sava
“Not unless you tell me what’s so important in Phoenix that you have to be there today.”
I didn’t have time to deliver the whole truth and nothing but.
“Somebody died,” I said.
“Somebody co
“Possibly.”
“They were murdered, too, weren’t they?”
“More like suicide.”
“I asked you to stop all this, Logan.”
“And I told you, I can’t.”
“Right. Because Arlo saved you from getting hit by a streetcar. And I’m supposed to actually believe that?”
“Little-known fact: More people are killed every year by streetcars than killer bees.”
“You’re so totally full of shit, you know that?”
“Look it up, you don’t believe me.”
Sava
Someday. Maybe. But not today.
I set my plate in the sink.
“I need a go or no-go on the car, Sava
Sava
I eased the Jaguar to the end of the driveway and waited while the security gate swung slowly inward. I was thinking that the last thing I wanted to do was spend six hours driving across the desert to Phoenix to grill some woman I’d never met about whether her husband whom I barely knew did or didn’t kill himself. I had the FAA to do battle with, my pilot’s license to restore, a flight school to run into the ground. What did I care how Robbie Emerson died? I suppose the same could’ve been said about Arlo Echevarria. So what if I owed him my life? Had some dipstick in a Domino’s shirt lit me up like a Christmas tree instead of him, there’s no way that self-absorbed son of a bitch would’ve ever gone hunting my killer. Not after I stole his wife. I pondered the notion of giving Gil Carlisle back his money — what was left of it, anyway. But something stopped me. Not some lesson from the Buddha about fidelity to the memory of a friend — even if that friend turned out to be the opposite — and not some cheesy, ready-room pep talk about completing the mission regardless the cost. No, what kept me from putting the Jag in reverse and giving Sava
Immersed as I was in such thoughts, it took me a second to notice the black van with tinted windows that turned sharply into the driveway and skidded to a loud, screeching stop directly in front of Sava