Jan Burke - Goodnight, Irene

“Two kids? Your little sister has two kids?”

“Two boys, four and six-Brian and Michael Junior-hellions, both of them. But I’m crazy about them. Her husband is with the Highway Patrol. Cassie did okay by marrying Mike-he’s good to her. We’ve turned out to be one of those real cop families: my dad, Mike, and me.”

For a long while, we didn’t say anything.

“You know what’s crazy?” I asked.

“Yeah-the fact that we didn’t get in touch with each other more often.”

“Right.”

We watched a big black dog dive into the waves, swimming after a Frisbee. He returned soaked and sandy, but carrying his trophy proudly, prancing back to his owner, whom he showered with ocean water as he shook his dripping coat.

“I guess we could have tried harder,” Frank said.

“I don’t know. Timing was bad, I guess. We get to know each other, I move down here. You move down here, but you’re with somebody. You get in touch with me, but by then I’m with somebody.”

“What happened to that guy?”

“Greg?” I asked, grimacing. Greg, the man I was seeing around the time Frank returned to Las Piernas, was part of my Dating Hall of Shame. “In a word, nothing. I got tired of nothing and we broke it off. He just never got his act together. I think I was going through one of my desperate periods when I hooked up with him.”

“I can’t imagine you being desperate.”

I laughed. “Believe me, Frank, I have. And I ended up with some real doozies. True disaster cases. I pride myself on the fact that it has been a while since it happened. Maybe I matured enough to figure out that it was better to just ride out any panic I was feeling about being alone.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

“You think that only happens to women or something? I think it’s almost a universal experience for anyone who’s single long enough.”

“I guess you’re right. You were pretty serious about somebody for a while, weren’t you?” Of course, I was pretending Pete hadn’t already given me the salient details about the woman who lured Frank to Las Piernas.

“Yeah. Her name was Cecilia. She was with the Highway Patrol. I transferred down here to be with her, then she decided to go back to Bakersfield. It was just as well.”

“I suppose I should be grateful to her.”

He looked at me. “You don’t have to be grateful to anybody.” He looked back out at the water, suddenly self-conscious. “I should have looked you up again. I’ve thought about it lots of times.”

“Yeah, I thought about you, too. Guess I didn’t want to find out you were married or in some steamy romance with somebody.”

He laughed. “I’ve come close to being a monk.”

I decided not to reply that close only counts in horseshoes. I also decided I’d be better off not recounting the details of my last decade.

A big wave hit the shore and came within inches of soaking our behinds.

“Time to move on?” I asked.

“Sure.”

We started an easy stroll toward the pier. It took a while, but we made it there just as the afternoon winds were starting to come up. I could see that his ribs were bothering him by the way he walked, and that he was starting to wear down.

“Let’s take the boardwalk back,” I suggested, seeing that the afternoon crowd had thinned out.

“Okay,” he said, and took my hand. We walked like that all the way back to the house, not saying a word, just watching people. I had noticed earlier that Frank had the cop’s habit of casually but constantly taking in all that was happening around him.

When we got to the house, I followed him into the kitchen, where he opened a fairly empty refrigerator, then asked me if I had plans for dinner.

“No, but you look tired. Why don’t I run to the store and pick up some groceries-I’ll make something for us here.”

“I’ll go with you. I’m enjoying being out.”

He looked pretty beat to me, but I said, “Okay.”

“If you won’t call me a yuppie, I’ll invite you to sit in the hot tub later on.”

“So that’s what’s in the corner of your yard. Yuppie, huh? You’re not exactly in one of those lines of work they classify as ‘yuppie.’ I’ll have to stop at my house and get my suit.”

“Okay, great. Hang on a second.” He walked down the hall into one of the bedrooms while I waited. It took him a while to come back out.

When he did, he had his shoulder holster and gun on. I have to admit that it took my mood down a notch.

He caught the change and said, “I just want to make sure you’re safe while we’re over there.”

“It makes sense, I just wasn’t thinking along those lines.”

He put on a windbreaker and we walked out to the car. He had a hard time lowering himself into my little convertible. He managed it, though, and said, “God, I miss my old Volvo.”

“Sorry, Frank. You’re at the mercy of those of us who still have their wheels.” I backed out as gently as I could, not wanting to jar him around any more than I had to. But he seemed so glad to be out of the house, I don’t think he would have noticed.

“You’re not supposed to be doing this yet, are you?” I asked.

“That just makes it more fun,” he said.

When we got to my house, I was worried about him trying to get in and out of the car again.

“Why don’t you stay here-I’ll only be a minute.”

“Get real,” he said, and shoved himself up out of the seat. Except for a kind of exhaling noise he made when he stood outside the car, he wasn’t going to show me that it bothered him. I decided not to comment on it.

I wasn’t so shocked by the appearance of the house this time. I unlocked the door, but Frank made me wait while he checked the house. “It’s okay,” he said at last. He walked to the back of the house with me, and I thought he was going to follow me around, but he was going toward the back door. He opened it and checked out the door and lock. “The guy was smooth, I’ll say that for him.”

“Pete told you what happened?”

“Yeah.” He was looking out at the backyard. “Roses,” he said, as if he were a thousand miles away.

“Isn’t that supposed to be ‘Rosebud’?”

“Huh? Oh, no. Sorry. I was just thinking about pesticides.”

“You think there’s some kind of bug in my roses? I know my garden doesn’t look half as snazzy as yours, so I’m open to suggestions.”

“No, it’s something that Hernandez told me today. They’ve identified what killed the guy you saw in Phoenix-the one you call Hawkeyes. It was nicotine poisoning.”

“He died from smoking?”

“No, he didn’t smoke. Nicotine is very toxic. Someone put it in his after-shave-it’s been done before. If you absorb nicotine into your skin at a high-enough dosage-and it doesn’t have to be very high-you’re a goner.”

“Someone poisoned his after-shave?”

“Yeah. Weird. But like I said, it’s been done before. Hernandez said there was a famous case in England-woman did her husband in the same way.”

“So where do you get nicotine? Boil cigarettes?”

“I suppose you could, but I’m not sure. Hernandez said it’s sometimes used as a pesticide-especially on roses. I was just thinking that it would be easier to trace if it was a pesticide for something a little rarer than roses.”

“So he knew whoever killed him?”

“Most victims know their killers.”

“Hard for me to think of him as a victim.”

“I know what you mean. I’d say he probably did know the poisoner. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment kind of murder. It would take planning, knowledge of Hawkeyes’s habits, where he lived, when he’d be away long enough to gain access to his house to poison the after-shave. Maybe it was given as a gift, knowing sooner or later he’d use it. I don’t know what the level of nicotine was, but someone would probably not try it with a smoker except in a heavy dose-smokers sometimes develop a level of tolerance to nicotine. The poisoner also had to have some idea of his taste in after-shave. No use dosing something he’d never use.”