“He’s got money. You saw it.”
“What if it’s hot money?”
“Frank’s no thief.”
“You know him less than an hour and you’re sure he’s no thief’? You’re
so trusting, Bobby.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment. How can you do the kind of work you do, and be
so trusting?” He grinned.
“I trusted you, and that turned out okay.” She refused to be charmed.
“He says he doesn’t know where he got the money, and just for the sake
of the argument, let’s say we buy that part of the story. And let’s
also say you’re right about him not being a thief. So maybe he’s a drug
dealer. Or something else. There’s a thousand ways it could be hot
money without being stolen. And if we find out that it’s hot, we can’t
keep what he pays us. We’ll have to turn it over to the cops. We’ll
have wasted our time and energy. Besides… it’s going to be messy.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
“Why do I say that? He just told you about waking up in a motel room
with blood all over his hands!”
“Keep your voice down. You might hurt his feelings.”
“God forbid!”
“Remember, there was no body. It must’ve been his own blood.”
Frustrated, she said, “How do we know there was no body?
Because he says there wasn’t? He might be such a nut case that he
wouldn’t even notice the body if he stepped in its steaming bowels and
stumbled over its decapitated head.”
“What a vivid image.” “Bobby, he says maybe he clawed at himself, but
that’s not very damned likely. Probably some poor woman, some innocent
girl, maybe even a child, a helpless schoolgirl, was attacked by that
man, dragged into his car, raped and beaten and raped again, forced to
perform every humiliating act a perverse mind could imagine, then driven
to some lonely desert canyon, maybe tortured with needles and knives and
God knows what, then clubbed to death, and pitched naked into a dry
wash, where coyotes are even now chewing on the softer parts of with
flies crawling in and out of her open mouth.”
“Julie, you’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“I’m the one with the overactive imagination.” She laughed. She
couldn’t help it. She wanted to thump skull hard enough to knock some
sense into him, but laughed instead and shook her head.
He kissed her cheek, then reached for the doorknob.
She put her hand on his.
“Promise we won’t take the case until we’ve heard his whole story and
have time to think about it.”
“All right.” They returned to the office.
Beyond the windows, the sky resembled a sheet of steel that had been
scorched black in places, with a few scattered incrustations of
mustard-yellow corrosion. Rain had not begun to fall, but the air
seemed tense in expectation of it.
The only lights in the room were two brass lamps on tables that flanked
the sofa, and a silk-shaded brass floorlamp in the corner. The overhead
fluorescence were not on, because both hated the glare and believed that
an office should be as cozy lighted as a den in a private home. Julie
thought it should look and feel like an office. But she humored Bobby
and usually left the fluorescence off. Now as the oncoming storm
darkened the day, she wanted to switch on the overhead and chase away
the shadows that had begun to gather in the corners untouched by the
amber glow of the lamps.
Frank Pollard was still in his chair, staring at the framed posters of
Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Uncle Scrooge that adorned the walls.
They were another burden under who Julie labored. She was a fan of
Warner Brothers cartoons, because they had a harder edge than Disney’s
creations, and owned videotape collections of them, plus a couple of
additional cells of Daffy Duck, but she kept that stuff at home. Bobby
brought the Disney cartoon characters into the office because (he said)
they relaxed him, made him feel good, and helped him think. No clients
ever questioned their professionalism merely because of the
unconventional artwork on the walls, but she still worried about what