Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“Well, to be frank, Liz,” said Dick, “Roland’s three-button coat is pretty yesterday.”

“She liked the suit,” I said, opening the next bill — satellite for the TV I almost never watched.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” asked Liz.

“It was a good date.”

“Just exactly how good?” demanded Dick.

“Let me run some figures on my calculator, and I’ll get back to you.”

I felt the afternoon warmth on my skin and finished paying bills. Picked up the New York Times Book Review, which always takes me a few days to get to. Full back-page ad for Hard Truth, Briggs Spencer’s rugged face staring at me.

Felt drowsy. Drifted back to Paige Hulet. Dick and Liz argued men’s fashions, then sex-or-not on the first date. Changed their own opinions and facts to create an argument. I wondered if Justine and I would have ended up like that. Didn’t think so. Had so little time for it. Though I’ll admit that, by now, at thirty-eight years of age, I’ve glimpsed myself in my parents and grandparents more than once. And every time I see me in them I vow to delay by any means possible their infirmities and combative dopiness and their frightening descents into habit. I also know by age thirty-eight that only time lasts forever.

One night after we’d made love, and not long after we’d met, Justine asked me to tell her seven things I believed in. Not believed, but believed in. They could be someone else’s ideas, but I had to use my own words. No one else’s. I tried and couldn’t. She ran her fingers through my hair and laid her head on my chest. Rattled off seven things that she believed in. True and clear and simple. Her voice a whisper. Red hair on pale shoulder in the half-dark. “They’ll keep you from going adrift. File your brief when you’re ready. Take your time.”

“Why seven?”

“Don’t be extra thick. Work on them.”

Never did.

When I woke up it was getting dark but someone had put a blanket on me and replaced my unfinished beer with a fresh bourbon over ice. I turned my head to see Dick wave at me as he sidled back to his casita.

I called Paige. She said she was driving down the mountain from Arcadia, on her way home. “When did you leave my place, Roland?”

“Just after four. How are you?”

“Profoundly hungover. God, I’m an ass.”

I took a small first sip of the bourbon and closed my eyes. In a flash I was back in that twenty-seventh-floor condo, half carrying this beautiful woman to her bed.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Home, by the pond.”

“Not the pool, the pond. Do you live in the country?”

“Kinda. Rolling hills.”

“Is the pond clean and pretty?”

“So far as ponds go.”

“I’d like to see it someday. What did you do last night after I went MIA?”

“Took the self-guided tour.”

A beat. “Find anything that interested you?”

“All of it. You were always smart and pretty. Didn’t realize you were an athlete, too.”

“I had no gift for tennis. Just worked hard.”

“I wondered which pictures were of Daniel. Wondered why you didn’t keep some of his things.”

Paige spoke softly and deliberately. “I took the pictures down. Too painful. I threw out his clothing in a fit, a year after he died. Every last sock. A few days later I regretted it. That was four years ago, before I sold our Kensington place and moved downtown. As you probably know, the sudden throwing away of a loved one’s things is a way of coping with loss. It is statistically common for widows and widowers.”

I hated the word widower . Maybe I was statistically uncommon. Because Justine’s closet was full. Not an item discarded.

I told her about the men loitering near my truck at four that morning, the big guy at the newsstand. “My first thought was they had tailed me there the night before. Then I wondered if they might have been set up around your place and I’d come up in the net.”

Paige went silent. I could hear the ambient noise of her car on a road, the very distant swoosh of other vehicles around her. “I saw two men Friday morning outside my building. Not residents. Not merchants, not tourists. They looked and felt wrong.”

I described Bald Mountain.

“Yes,” she said. “My first thought was Briggs.”

“Explain.”

I listened to the road noise as she gathered her thoughts. “I told you most of it. Once I got to know him, Briggs struck me as morbidly detached and antisocial. He was very possessive, unreasonably jealous of me. And we were nothing. So would he send men to find out what I was doing, or who I was seeing? I think he’s capable of that. I know he has contacts in the intelligence world. From the war. From the black sites he ran for the CIA. Don’t people like that help each other to do ugly things and get around the law?”

“Sometimes.”

“I’m worried for you,” she said.

“They didn’t touch me.”

“It was intimidation. Now you’ll be looking over your shoulder every waking minute.”

“I do that anyway.”

“Then you’ve chosen the right profession.”

More road noise, a patch of static. Burt’s car came up the drive, the sound of its engine overtaking Paige’s. “Did Clay ever mention having evidence of crimes committed in Romania?”

“Not directly. But sometimes, in therapy, he would talk about revealing the truth of White Fire to the world. Implying that he might have some other kind of documentation of what went on there. Why?”

“I have an idea I want you to hear. Something I’ve been chewing on since Clay butted into my text messaging with Sequoia.”

“Tell.”

“Clay’s a Nell Flanagan fan, right? He emailed her about telling his story on TV, on her show. He tried to persuade her with a ‘graphic component.’ But she didn’t respond to him.”

“I remember those emails. It upset him she didn’t answer.”

“Well, what if Nell changed her mind? And ‘her story editor’ is about to contact Clay about the story he wants to tell?”

Paige was quiet for a moment. “Sneaky.”

“But Clay trusts you. So this story editor would need you on his side. For an introduction, I mean.”

“Doesn’t Nell Flanagan have real story editors?”

“Not credited. There’s a producer, an assistant producer, and a director for each segment.”

“What if he contacts KPBS and there is no you?”

“I’d tell him I’m not affiliated with KPBS. I’m one of three story editors working for Nell Flanagan’s management agency in New York. And I happen to be the one who read his pitch to Nell and smelled a knockout story. I’d advise Clay to keep his communication with Nell to a minimum until she green-lights this piece. I’d remind him that Nell is a genius, has roughly one million other stories to consider, and she abhors complication. And that it would make me look good at the agency to make this story happen.”

“And if he calls KPBS anyway, and they put him through to her, and there’s no you at her agency?”

“Then, well — just kidding, Clay. This is PI Roland Ford and I think you should come back to Arcadia with me.”

“I won’t allow it.”

“It’s up to the Hickmans. Not you.”

Paige was quiet again at the other end. Her tone of voice went cool. “What’s this alleged story editor’s name and number?”

“First I’ll need to set up one of my burners.”

“Burners?”

“Throwaway phones.”

“You keep them just lying around?”

“I have two in a desk drawer. Still in their boxes.”