FOURTEEN

Detective Unruh was lifting a garment from the backseat of his Toyota Camry and carrying it to the open trunk. He stretched the robe carefully on the gray carpeting, smoothing the plastic dust covering carefully, straightening it so it covered the garment completely. I was hurrying back across the parking lot with a bag full of blueberry bagels, my mother’s request, the Sunday paper wedged under my arm.

Morning sun dazzled, the sort of light that made me wish I wore sunglasses more than I do. I had approached the detective, but now I wondered if I should bother him as he fussed with the folds of the robe.

“Zachary Madison,” he said, instead of hello.

Do you call a detective mister? I wondered. “My dad is okay,” I said.

“I was just inside,” he said, not smiling but delivering something with his bearing, a kindliness he could not have communicated with words. He tore two sheets from a roll of paper towels, one sheet after another, carefully.

“You’re a judge,” I said, nodding toward the robe under its One Hour Martinizing plastic. I meant it as a joke, but then I thought: I don’t know anything about this man.

“Church,” he said. My expression prompted him to add, “I sing in the choir.”

I absorbed this information as though it mattered very much to me, and in a way it did. The car was a metallic blue, about the same color as my Honda, with a residue of car wax etched in around the Camry. The windows were smoke gray, the interior a mystery. A bumper sticker had been removed, leaving a ghost, a smidgen of glue. As I watched, the detective sprayed Windex on a bird dropping on the roof.

“I forgot it was Sunday,” I said. Although my family had rarely gone to church, I was aware of religion as an activity, and I was familiar with Sunday as a day that began and ended the week, an island of relative stillness. We went to Glide Memorial in San Francisco once to hear an ex-mayor give a talk about famine in Eritrea, and one of my mother’s few friends was a thin, athletic woman who as a substitute organist played Bach energetically, mangling most of the other hymns.

“My wife convinced me to take it up,” he said. I was expected to say something about myself, what kind of music I liked, but instead I said, “You won’t be working today.”

His posture was that of a man who would be hard to knock down, his feet spread just wide enough, his body balanced squarely. He let the Windex soak into a second curlicue of bird turd for a few moments, and then he wiped it. I was caught up in watching how careful he was. Spit works, too, I wanted to tell him. It’s the enzymes in human saliva. Great for dissolving bug scabs, anything.

Detective Unruh took some pleasure in having an audience. “I usually work with a partner,” he said. “But she fell off a balcony.”

“Chasing a perpetrator,” I said, not asking, trying to get him to tell more.

“Termites and dry rot,” he said. “Old Victorian three story, party time. She has herself a herniated disk and two broken legs. They are using a new improvement in surgical pins, gold electroplate. It’ll be a while before she runs wind sprints again.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

My words surprised him a little. I was just being polite, but I was serious, too. People look at me like this sometimes, the men friendly and measuring, the women ready to flirt. People tend to like me. He was getting ready to tell me something, the words ready in his mouth.

“We have a witness,” he said.

I looked at him like someone stalling, trying to remember how to spell and define hypotenuse. But maybe it was the faintly religious weight to the word, like people who witness for Jesus, that confused me.

He said, “A man who saw the shooting take place.”

“Who?” I asked before I could think. I didn’t understand why it troubled me that someone had seen it happen, but it did, my dad suddenly helpless in broad daylight.

“A merchant,” said the detective.

The word sounded like something out of another century, caravans and camels, sacks of spices from the East.

“He came forward and said he saw it from beginning to end.” Everything the detective was saying sounded unreal and archaic. Came forward.

“There was a line-up,” I said, feeling far beyond my own personal experience.

“We use a line-up sometimes,” he said, to let me know it wasn’t an ignorant remark. “In this case we had photographs of people who have been arrested before.” I could sense him simplifying for me, keeping the information smooth.

A merchant had seen this crime and done nothing. Watched it happen and not run out into the street ready to risk everything to save my father. I had to take a deep breath and lean against the car, studying the speckles of the asphalt, the different shades of gray.

“We haven’t taken anyone into custody yet,” said the detective, letting me absorb a little more of his cop talk.

“You’re looking for someone,” I said. Someone with a name, a face. The sunlight was so bright I had to close my eyes.

“Our investigation continues,” he said. He said this with a little extra meaning, trying to peek out from behind the official phraseology.

“His wallet was empty, all the money gone,” I said.

“They didn’t leave anything of value,” said the detective.

“That means my dad gave him the wallet.” I tried to say this all in a rush. “Handed it to him. And he shot my dad anyway.”

Detective Unruh slipped a pair of sunglasses out of his breast pocket and took a while unfolding them.

Whenever I began to think that the hospital was a regular place, a building of people engaged in ordinary activity, I would glance into a room and see a woman lying with her mouth open while a nurse tapped her arm, looking for a vein. Or a man holding his stomach like it all might come out, watching while a bag of blood was hung on a pole.

Mom fished a bagel from the crinkly paper bag.

“They’ll catch him,” I said.

I didn’t understand the look my mother gave me, touching a bite of bagel into her mouth.

“You specifically said blueberry,” I said.

The Sunday newspaper amounts to several pounds of nothing, instant recycling. A television schedule is usually slipped deep inside the real estate ads, the rest of it stories they could write weeks ahead of time, another tenant hotel closing, the crab catch at a record low. But I hunted through the bale of newsprint until I found it, four short paragraphs. The article did not give the titles of my dad’s books.

My dad’s prospective PBS special was never actually shown on television. It won third place in a film festival in Mill Valley, and then KQED had a major cutback. I thought of my father as famous, but once I saw a letter my dad had torn into pieces. I nudged the fragments together without actually taking them out of the trash can, not wanting to pry. “Who cares about spittle bugs?” someone had written in the margin of my dad’s letter.

“I saw a priest,” said Sofia.

“People die here,” said Mom. Every now and then I could see Mom’s eyes lose their luster and stare at Sofia in the old way. But at other times something new was developing between them.

“He was wearing his collar. He looked our way and took a step in our direction, and do you know what? I stood right in the doorway,” said Sofia, as though she would be able to block the passage of any halfway determined person. My father must have been attracted to short women. “You know how Teddy detests that sort of thing.”

“The priest didn’t mean any harm,” said Mom.

Sofia made an incredulous little laugh. “What if you were stricken—” Her word choice impressed all of us. Stricken. Sofia blinked, had trouble maintaining her composure, and then continued, “and you looked up and saw a priest in the doorway?”