Nicola Griffith - The Blue Place

I left the air-conditioning off, the windows down, and enjoyed the fat heat that snaked through the car as I drove.

What kind of car did Michael Honeycutt, banker, drive? What did he look like, how did he sound? I wanted to see him, to weigh the fabric of his suit, smell his cologne, judge his haircut, watch his body language, listen to the way he shaped his vowels.

One of the first times I had been called on the carpet as a police officer had been back when Denneny was still a lieutenant, back in the days when he could still tremble with fury, or laughter, or worry for one of his people. I couldn’t even remember the details of the incident; all I remember was him pacing up and down his office, shouting at me: “You can’t just break in and start banging heads, Torvingen! Knowing isn’t good enough. You need proof, because our justice is legal justice, not street justice.” So I would need to assemble my proof, I would need to bide my time. Besides, while personal indicators would tell me things that no dossier could, they would also give me nothing like the whole story.

People are twisty animals. I have met unpleasant men and women whom I do not like because I suspect they are at heart cruel, or take absolutely no joy from life, or believe some sections of society are little better than vermin and should be exposed at birth; but I have trusted some of these same women and men with my life because they have learnt to bind their natural inclinations with cages of rules and ethical behaviour that I know will hold and guide them under almost any circumstance. Equally, I have met people whom I have liked instinctively, on sight, but would not trust because they have never been tested, not even by themselves, and have never had to formulate rules to get by. Think about two young adults who go to college. One is brilliant, a genius who floats above her colleagues like a cirrus cloud, the other is merely a plodder: dogged, determined, competent. Throughout their education, the genius has always been able to leap obstacles as though they’re not there while the plodder has, through necessity, learned patiently to climb walls. One day, say in the second year of their Ph.D. programme, that genius will come across a wall so high even she can’t jump it. But she doesn’t know how to climb. The plodder, on the other hand, rubs his hands, checks his equipment, and starts hammering in the first piton. Who do you think will reach the top first?

So although there were certain things I could only learn about Michael Honeycutt by meeting him face-to-face, there was a great deal I could find out by looking at his track record, his habits, and his job.

At the Ponce de Leon branch of the Fulton County Library I parked carefully under the pathetic sapling in the middle of the lot. Better than nothing. There was a minivan four spaces down. The sliding door was open. A man was lying back in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, keys dangling from the steering column. Probably waiting for his wife. It would be so easy to slip into the passenger seat, break his neck with one twist, bundle him into the back and drive away. Less than forty seconds. No witnesses. People are so stupid.

“Anthony,” I said to the plump, balding man blinking in the sunshine leaking through the enormous skylight over the reference desk, “I need some information on Massut Vere, investment bankers.”

He sighed—he always sighed and acted like a fifty-year-old who had been forced to get out of his cosy fireside armchair and shuffle off in his slippers on some unpleasant errand, even though I doubted he was a day over thirty—and repeated, “Massut Vere.”

“Corporate structure, personnel, specialist interest, political flavour, anything that would give me a feeling for what kind of institution they are. Pay particular attention to any mention of a man called Michael Honeycutt.”

“When do you need it by? Yesterday, I suppose.”

I didn’t smile; Anthony thought smiles frivolous and out of place in a library. “I’ll be here for forty minutes or so.” He would have a first cut for me in less than half an hour. The more he looked forward to a task, the more he grumbled.

At the New Fiction section I skimmed the rows of E. Annie Proulx, Anne Rice and Robert James Waller and moved on in disgust to Non-Fiction. There was a new biography of Albert Murray that looked interesting. Farther down was something called Gender Critique in Body Modification . Helen had said something about that performance artist being into “gendered body art,” so I picked it up. I took those and a text on cults to a carrel and started flipping through. An index can tell you a book’s parameters. Everything I looked up in the Murray was there: Romare Beardon, Malcolm X, Count Basie, Ralph Ellison, The Omni-Americans, Wynton Marsalis, geopolitics. The cult book, on the other hand, was less promising: Cohesiveness, Conditioning, Controlled Drinking, Conformity…. The body modification volume had something it called a hyperindex, no doubt put together by someone who thought they were designing a web page. I flipped through charmingly obtuse text and stomach-churning graphics.

After half an hour I took the Murray and bod-mod books to the reference desk. Anthony was presiding over a pile of books, catalogues and printouts looking sour: his version of smug complacency. “These you can check out”—he pointed to the books—“these you can keep”—a handful of still-warm photocopies—“and this is a list of files, some of them more general than I would like, that I’ve pulled from a quick electronic search. Just two references to Honeycutt.”

I didn’t thank him—he would start to stutter—but I would as usual send a cheque for the library’s Children’s Books fund that was Anthony’s particular passion. Maybe I’d put that one on expenses.

I stared past my monitor and into the back garden. A chipmunk picked up an old, old pecan, threw it down in disgust. Two cardinals trilled liquidly at each other, bright red against the emerald green. One of the neighbour’s cats slunk belly down through the grass towards them. Snakes in fur coats, Dorothy Parker had called cats. Sometimes I could see why.

Anthony’s references had not been much help. I had tedious details about Massut Vere, who, despite the unlikely name, were one of the oldest and richest merchant bankers in the South, with interests in everything from tobacco, cotton and railroads to bioengineering, cable television and pizzas. Michael Honeycutt had been with them for just under two years, coming to the company from a bank in California. There was a small black and white photograph that could have been anybody.

The cat stopped, twitched its hindquarters to and fro, and pounced; not at the birds, but something hidden in the grass. Probably a shrew. The garden teemed with them. They dug burrows all over the lawn and if you crouched motionless on the grass, sooner or later you would hear them rooting about under what was left of last year’s leaves. They were always there, even in the rain. Shrews can’t store or metabolize fat. If humans ate proportionally as much as a shrew, we would have to consume the equivalent of two pigs, thirty chickens, two hundred pears, three pineapples, and twenty bars of chocolate every day. Busy life.

I turned off the computer. Time to go to the second leg of my plan.

I called Eddie, the special assistant and researcher to Elaine Merx, a popular columnist at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution .

“Hello, Eddie.”

“Aud. Good to hear from you. And how are you?”

“Good.”

“Let me guess, you want some help on something.”

“Of course.”

“There’s a new restaurant I’ve discovered. The Horseradish Grill….”

“Anytime after next week.” It would be expensive—it was always expensive when he picked—but the food would be wonderful, the service even better, and we would both enjoy ourselves immensely. I have known Eddie for a long time. “I want to know everything about two different people. Charlie Sweeting, who lives—”