Susan Smith - Out at Night

Grace blinked. “I’ll put him in a kennel.” She started to get up.

“Sit. Sit. ”

Helix wagged his tail and sat.

“Not you, you. ”

Grace sat.

“Of course I’ll take him. What’s this about?”

Grace felt tears leak onto her hands. Jeanne yanked a Kleenex from a box and Grace reached for it blindly and dabbed her eyes.

“He wants to take her for Thanksgiving.”

“He’s her father, Grace.”

“Without me.”

Jeanne looked at her steadily. “How close are you?”

Grace licked a lip. Her mouth felt dry. She reached into her purse and took out a miniature bottle of bourbon and put it down on the worktable next to the bottles of ink and a glass container of doggie treats.

“Honestly, on the plane? When the stewardess made the announcement that she’d appreciate correct change, I told myself I was helping her out, buying this.”

Jeanne smiled briefly and reached for a new bottle of ink. “You didn’t drink it.”

Grace inhaled, blew the breath out.

“Take a meeting.”

“Can’t.” She felt rubbed raw. She stole a glance at the small bottle of bourbon and wondered if she could get it back in her purse.

Jeanne shot her a look and went back to work. Grace stared at the far wall. A crumbled set of terra-cotta pots lined a high shelf. Somehow Jeanne had managed to get tulips to bloom, and the bright yellow and orange and pink waxy petals bobbed on some invisible current as if they were watching a tennis match from the bleachers. Leaning against the wall under them was Jeanne’s cane, its thready topknot wearing a pink Barbie-sized baseball cap.

“I need to drive to Riverside County. Examine a body in a morgue.”

Jeanne looked at her a long moment. “It’s not Guatemala, Grace.”

“I don’t know if I can remember that, when I see it.”

“I could say it’s time you got over it, and you don’t want the bad guys to win by giving up a piece of who you are, but the truth is, we all give up pieces, every day, just to get by.”

Jeanne reached for a new color, a soft red the shade of old blood.

“I thought you couldn’t go back to work until they health-checked you.”

“It’s not the crime lab. I have an uncle who works in Palm Springs for the FBI.”

“Your uncle’s dead?”

Grace made a small sound. “You’re busy. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. You’ll ink in an extra leg.”

“I did that once. Told the client it was an Asian fertility symbol. I didn’t know you had an uncle in the FBI.”

Grace lined up bottles of ink. The bottle of black was bigger than the rest and she lined the cap up neatly so that the caps were straight across. A tear splashed onto a bottle called pink ochre and she wiped it off.

“He did something to my family that was pretty unforgivable.”

“That changed the course of family history?”

Grace dropped her hands. “I’m not joking, Jeanne. It was when my dad died, and things were bad. I haven’t talked to him in years, and the idea that I’m getting dragged into something that’s his, having to fix something that belongs to him —”

“Honey, if you want me to give you hell, you’re going to have to give me more to go on.”

Grace fished a treat out of the jar and fed it to Helix. “You’re lucky, you know that. I get you home, we’re working on that belly. Doggy aerobics.”

Helix smacked the treat down, snuffled the floor, picked up crumbs, and looked up at Grace expectantly.

“Don’t even think about it.” He thumped his tail and Grace scratched his white chin. He had a narrow jaw, little teeth. He slopped out his tongue and kissed her. Grace bent down and scratched the place right in front of his tail and he raised his rump and wagged his tail.

“I get called into this by some guy. Asks for me by name when he’s dying. So in the airport in Florida, between flights, I go to a business center and Google him. Turns out he stormed a lecture I was giving last month to forensic biologists on DNA and profiling. Storming a roomful of police nonsworns, can you believe it? Probably set some record for speedy arrest. Thaddeus Bartholomew.”

A clatter of bottles. Grace looked up.

“You okay?”

Jeanne had knocked over the bottle of red ink and it spilled across her fingers. Grace caught a swift smell of vomit and wood sap, a sharp image of bloody hands bent over a prone body, chest open.

Grace closed her eyes and waited it out.

When she opened her eyes, she was back in the tattoo shop. Jeanne groped for a Kleenex to mop it up. She missed the box and tried again.

“He’s a bad actor, Grace. Ted Bartholomew.”

“I wondered if Frank knew him.”

“We ran right into him, the day he died. Palm Springs isn’t that big.”

The skin around Jeanne’s eyes was getting crepey, and the eye shadow she used clumped in tiny balls of violet that made her eyes look very blue.

The teen in the chair stirred and Jeanne patted her calf heavily and stared out the front window. Grace had helped Jeanne paint the words rose tattoo in ornate red letters on that window years ago. Last year, Jeanne had added the words and removal, and Grace wondered how long it would take for the girl in the chair to come back for that part.

“Frank’s been putting this ag convention together now for over a year. That creep Bartholomew—sorry to be disrespectful of the dead—has been on his ass for most of it. Calling him a killer for GM-ing crops. Frank, ” Jeanne said wonderingly.

Grace remembered Jeanne’s boyfriend as tall, with long, expressive fingers, smelling faintly of mulch, wearing brown boots and a laminated California state ag tag on a plaid shirt. Two geeks in a pod, Jeanne called herself with Frank.

Jeanne had met him at a conference for genetically modified crops, an interest that had morphed naturally out of her retirement as a scientist, and dovetailed with her lavish gardening efforts. A recent blue rose crossbreed had earned her a blue ribbon at the Del Mar Fair.

“I heard Bartholomew was killed in some field.”

Jeanne’s mouth tightened. “Well, he was alive when we saw him in Gerry Maloof’s. Frank hasn’t bought a single new thing for himself in years, and I made him go with me to get some pants. He has to introduce the secretary of interior, for crying out loud. He’s so hard to fit, with his long inseam.”

Grace didn’t want to hear about Frank’s long inseam, or any other part of Frank’s body, either. The small, homely beats of a relationship reminded her too much of Mac and what she might never have.

“And that’s where you ran into Bartholomew.”

Jeanne stippled in the red and the unicorn glowed. “It’s a fine, fine store. They were having a sale on these lovely linen pants.”

“What was Bartholomew like?”

“I’m not exactly an impartial witness here, Grace.”

“Your impression.”

Jeanne moved the needle, drew another line on the pale skin. “Fiery. Passionate. Threatening to sue.”

“On what grounds?”

“You need grounds?” The needle made a small metallic whirring sound. “No government oversight. Accidental gene transfer to new crops. Disastrous, life-threatening killer bad stuff we don’t even know about yet, and somewhere, a monarch butterfly is keeling over dead in the food chain. The usual. And if that doesn’t work, he vows to shut down the conference by force, if necessary.”

“By force. He used those words.”

Jeanne nodded. She swabbed the skin with a fresh pad and the sharp odor of astringent cut the air. She dropped the pad into the trash.

“What was Frank’s reaction?”

“Subdued. He’s maxed out, Grace. Has meetings from early in the morning until late at night. Probably knows your uncle better than you do.”