Michael Connelly - The Poet

My face must have shown my thoughts on the prospect of spending the day with Thorson.

"I'm not exactly thrilled to pieces myself," he said to me. "But I do what I'm told. Now, if you just want to stay in bed all day, that'd be no skin off my back. I'd just tell-"

"I'm getting dressed. Give me a few minutes."

"You've got five minutes. I'll meet you in the alley at the car. If you're not there you're on your own."

After he was gone I looked at my watch on the bed table. It was eight-thirty, not as late as I had thought. I took ten minutes instead of five. I held my head under the shower and thought about being with Thorson for the day, dreading every moment of it. But most of all I thought about Rachel and wondered what assignment Backus had given her and why it didn't include me.

After leaving my room I went up to her door and knocked but got no answer. I listened at the door for a few moments and heard nothing. She was gone.

Thorson was leaning on the trunk of one of the cars when I got out to the alley.

"You're late."

"Yeah. Sorry. Where's Rachel?"

"Sorry, sport, talk to Backus. He seems to be your bureau rabbi."

"Look, Thorson, my name isn't sport, okay? If you don't want to call me by my name, just don't call me anything. I'm late because I had to call my editor and tell him there was no story coming. He wasn't happy."

I went to the passenger door and he went around to the driver's side. I had to wait for him to unlock it and it seemed like he took forever to notice I was waiting.

"I don't really give a shit how your editor was this morning," he said over the car before sliding in.

Inside the car, I saw two containers of coffee sitting on the dashboard, steam from them fogging the windshield. I looked at them the way a junkie looks at the spoon held to the candle but didn't say anything. I assumed they were part of some game Thorson was going to try to play.

"One of those is yours, sp-uh, Jack. You want cream or sugar, check the glove box."

He started the car. I looked at him and then back at the coffee. Thorson reached over and took one of the containers and opened it. He took a small sip, like a swimmer dipping a toe into the water to test the temperature.

"Ahh," he said. "I take mine hot and black. Just like my women."

He looked over and winked in a man-to-man gesture.

"Go ahead, Jack, take the coffee. I don't want it to spill when I move the car."

I took the container and opened it. Thorson started driving. I took a small sip, but I did it more like the Czar's official food taster. It was good and the caffeine hit came quickly.

"Thanks," I said.

"No problem. Can't get started without the stuff myself. So what happened, bad night?"

"You could say that."

"Not me. I can sleep anywhere, even a dump like that. I slept fine."

"Didn't do any sleepwalking, did you?"

"Sleepwalking? What do you mean?"

"Look, Thorson, thanks for the coffee and all but I know it was you who called Warren and I know it was you who was in my room last night."

Thorson pulled to a stop at a curb marked for deliveries only. He threw the car into park and looked at me.

"What did you say? What're you saying?"

"You heard what I said. You were in there. I might not have the proof now but if Warren comes up with anything ahead of me, I'll go to Backus anyway and tell him what I saw."

"Listen, sport, see that coffee? That was my peace offering. If you want to throw it in my face, fine. But I don't know what the fuck you are talking about and for the last time, I don't talk to reporters. Period. I'm only talking to you now because you have special dispensation. That's it."

He jammed the car into drive and lurched out into traffic, prompting an angry rebuke from the horn of another driver. Hot coffee slopped onto my hand but I kept silent about it. We drove in silence for several minutes, entering a canyon of concrete and glass and steel. Wilshire Boulevard. We were heading toward the towers of downtown. The coffee no longer tasted good to me and I put the cap back on it.

"Where are we going?" I finally asked.

"To see Gladden's lawyer. After that we're going out to Santa Monica, talk to the dynamic duo that had this dirtbag in their hands and let him go."

"I read the Times story. They didn't know who they had. You can't really blame them."

"Yeah, that's right, nobody's ever to blame."

I had completely succeeded in taking Thorson's offering of goodwill and flushing it down the toilet. He had turned sullen and bitter. His usual self as far as I could tell, yet it was still my fault.

"Look," I said, putting my coffee on the floor and holding my hands in an I-give-up gesture, "I'm sorry, okay? If I'm wrong about you and Warren and everything else, I'm sorry. I was just looking at things the way they seem to me. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong."

He said nothing and the silence became oppressive. I felt like the ball was still in my court, that there was more I needed to say.

"I'll drop it, okay?" I lied. "And I'm sorry about… if you're upset about me and Rachel. Things just happened."

"Tell you what, Jack, you can keep your apology. I don't care about you and I don't care about Rachel. She thinks I do and I'm sure she's told you that. But she's wrong. And if I were you, I'd watch my ass with her. There's always something else going on with her. Remember I told you that."

"Sure."

But I drop-kicked that stuff as soon as he said it. I wasn't going to let his bitterness infect my thoughts about Rachel.

"You ever heard of the Painted Desert, Jack?"

I looked at him, my eyes squinted in confusion.

"Yeah, I've heard of it."

"Been there?"

"No."

"Well, if you're with Rachel, then you're there now. She's the Painted Desert. Beautiful to look at, yeah. But, man, once you're there, she's desolate. There's nothing there past the beauty, Jack, and it gets cold at night in the desert."

I wanted to hit him with some kind of comeback that would be the verbal equivalent of a roundhouse punch. But the depth of his acid and anger stunned me into silence.

"She can play you," he continued. "Or play with you. Like a toy. One minute she wants to share it, the next she doesn't. She disappears on you."

I still said nothing. I turned and looked out the window so I wouldn't even have him in my peripheral vision. In a couple of minutes he said we were there and he pulled into the parking garage of one of the downtown office buildings.

After consulting a directory in the lobby of the Fuentes Law Center, we silently rode the elevator up to the seventh floor. To the right we found a door with a mahogany plaque set to the side of it that announced the law offices of Krasner amp; Peacock. Inside, Thorson placed his opened badge and ID wallet on the counter in front of the receptionist and asked to see Krasner.

"I'm sorry," she said, "Mr. Krasner is in court this morning."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. He's in arraignments. He won't be back until after lunch."

"Down here? Which courthouse?"

"Down here. The CCB."

We left the car where it was and walked to the Criminal Courts Building. Arraignments were held on the fifth floor in a huge, marble-walled courtroom heavily crowded with lawyers, the accused and the families of the accused. Thorson approached a deputy marshal sitting behind a desk at the first row of the gallery and asked her which of the lawyers milling about was Arthur Krasner. She pointed to a short man with thinning red hair and a red face who was standing near the court railing talking with another man in a suit, undoubtedly another lawyer. Thorson headed toward him, mumbling something about his looking like a Jewish leprechaun.

"Mr. Krasner?" Thorson said, not waiting for a lull in the conversation the two men were having.