Stephen White - Blinded

If the whole center of Indianapolis erupted in a spontaneous conflagration and burned to the ground that night, it would have to be considered a cremation, not a fire; that’s how dead it was downtown.

If there were twenty people in downtown Indianapolis that evening, I somehow managed to miss fifteen of them. Even the faux-homeless guy with my money up his sleeve had packed up and gone somewhere for the night. Probably a suite in a fine hotel.

The clerk manning the desk at the motel where I was staying was a Sikh with a turban and an accent that made me smile. He suggested I try to find something to eat at the Marriott over by the RCA Dome. “Go there. They have to be open” was the precise nature of his melodic culinary recommendation. If he ever decided to change careers and shun all the opportunities available in the motel desk clerk business, I thought he had a promising future with Zagat.

I walked over to the Marriott, found an open restaurant inside, and got a table and a menu. A waitress wasted no time in ambling over and smiling a sincere midwestern smile. She asked, “You from out of town?”

I looked up and made good eye contact with her. “What, you get locals here? Like ever?”

She laughed.

“Didn’t think so.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “I’m bored, okay. It’s a slow day. Do you mind? I’m pretty good at this. Not as good as Wendy. She’s like a champion, but she’s off through Sunday. I’d say you’re from Wisconsin. Maybe… Michigan-but northern Michigan, like Traverse City.”

“Not bad, Christy.” Her name was written in capital letters on a plastic tag above her ample left breast. “Born and raised in Minnesota. But I’ve been in Colorado for a while now.”

She snapped her fingers. “That’s what threw me. The Colorado part.” She said “ColoRADo,” emphasizing the penultimate syllable in a way that made me want to grate my teeth.

Behind her a woman stood in the restaurant’s entrance craning her neck this way and that. I figured she was checking the room for her husband, or her date, or her girlfriend. I nodded in the direction of the foyer. “There’s somebody over there who needs your help. I’ll be ready to order in a minute, I promise. I’d love a beer when you get a second.”

“What kind?”

“Surprise me.” I’d already managed to forget that alcohol was on my post-MI do-not-consume list. Truth is, it wouldn’t have made any difference had I remembered.

“You’re nice,” she told me.

“Nah, I’m not really,” I said.

I could tell she didn’t believe me. A bad judgment on her part. I had no doubt that if I had a beer with Christy, the first thing I’d learn from her was that all her boyfriends had been assholes.

Growing up, my family always had soup the night before Thanksgiving. It was part of our tradition. My mother, bless her heart, could throw together a big pot of soup faster than I could say, “What’s for supper?” She considered soup a light meal that was appropriate in anticipation of the richness of the coming holiday feast. But Mom’s soups were never really light-she wasn’t a consommé kind of gal. Her soup was always something thick and chunky, hearty with sausage and white beans or kidney beans and plenty of rich cheese.

I endured a moment of sadness as I realized that all the love she’d put in her soups was now coating my arteries like spackling on a wall.

I’d returned my attention to the menu, looking for some soup not too much like my mom’s, when I felt the waitress approach again.

“Almost ready,” I said. “How’s the minestrone? Come from a can?”

She didn’t reply. I looked up.

The woman from the doorway stood with a hand on the top of the other chair at my table.

“May I?” she asked.

She was pretty. Well dressed. Polite. And tall. I was bumping into a run of tall women on my road trip. I thought of the Wolf sisters and the turducken that was about to begin roasting in their slow Georgia oven, and I lamented that not a single bite would cross my lips the next day.

I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like I was some old fool who just realized he hadn’t remembered to replace his dentures, before I said, “Actually, I’m fine all by myself, thanks.”

She pulled back the chair and sat down.

Christy the waitress had a fresh place setting in front of her within seconds.

I stared. The pieces of the puzzle floated in front of my eyes. But they didn’t come together.

My uninvited guest said, “You’re having the minestrone?”

Two weeks ago I would have sent her packing. Two weeks ago I thought I had a healthy heart and a marriage that would survive until Christmas. Two weeks ago I wasn’t sitting alone in a restaurant in a faceless Marriott in Indianapolis. Two weeks ago I hadn’t met Gibbs Storey, and I’d never heard of a turducken.

“Have a seat, why don’t you?”

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” she said.

I hated questions like that-questions that taunted with I-know-something-you-don’t-know. I reconsidered my decision not to send the woman packing. To buy some time to contemplate, I answered her first question. It had been more civil than the second. I said, “I like minestrone.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Carmen Reynoso.”

I made a little ptttt sound with my lips. The sound was part of my recognition that I hadn’t made her as a cop. That troubled me. I thought I could make a cop in the fog with plugs in my ears and my hands tied behind my back. I didn’t shake Reynoso’s outstretched hand. Nothing personal to her; it wasn’t one of my things.

The waitress brought my beer.

Detective Reynoso said, “I’ll have one of those, too, please.”

“You here looking for Julie Franconia?” It wasn’t so much a question as it was my way of letting Reynoso know that I wasn’t a complete dummy. I added, “The case is closed. Body was found south of here near Martinsville. Looks like your boy Sterling did it. If you get up and hurry over to the airport, I bet you can be home in sunny southern California in time for your turkey.”

She nodded, so I thought she was going to agree with me. But she didn’t. She said, “Actually, I’m here looking for you.”

“Did I do something… particular… to interest the Laguna Beach PD?” I was thinking maybe surfing without a permit, or illegally parking my Range Rover, but I didn’t say it out loud.

Once, after Alan observed me talking to a citizen about a crime I thought she might have committed, he complimented me on my interrogation technique. I said something to change the subject, which he ignored. He ended up going on and on the way he does sometimes, and told me that where conversation was concerned, I was good at making repetitive move ones, not falling into the trap of making reactive move twos. He said it served me well.

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

He, of course, explained it all to me. His lecture boiled down to this: In order to maintain control of a conversation, psychologically speaking, a person needs to make repeated assertive moves, not merely reactive moves. If someone says, “How are you?” the other person doesn’t need to respond, “Fine,” the other person can say, “Where were you last night at eleven?” He said I was good at that, at keeping control of conversations, at not making move twos.

I’d never thought about the linguistic structure of it all before. But he was right. I am good at that. It isn’t tactical on my part. I just don’t like feeling that somebody else is running the show.

It turned out that Carmen Reynoso was good at that, too. She ignored my sarcastic question about why the Laguna Beach Police Department might be interested in finding me. Instead she chose a fresh move one. She said, “I came looking for you because people say you’re good.”