THIRTY

Detective Unruh searched for the right package of sugar, as though each were unique. “Nothing,” he said, answering Bea’s question. He snapped the packet of sugar back and forth, then tore the one corner. He poured the contents into his coffee. “Nothing happens.”

“They aren’t going to let the killer go free,” said Bea. She was unable to keep herself from saying what she really thought and for an instant was tight-lipped with chagrin. She believed my dad was as good as dead.

“Free,” Detective Unruh echoed, relishing the word without joy. “He’ll be out in a day or two. Home watching the soaps with Mom and Dad.” He had that brisk attitude people show when they are wise to the world and you aren’t.

“What should we order?” asked Bea, picking up a menu.

“The food here is pretty good,” said the detective. “My favorite is tod pramuk, a calamari dish, great stuff. Here they fry it up tentacles and all; some people don’t like that. I think it’s tasty. It’s got that special crunchiness.” He gave the last words a special lift, like someone making up an ad.

“I like squid, too,” said Bea. “But I’m not hungry.”

“You’re hungry for this,” he said. “Deep fried squid for three?” When we didn’t respond he said, “The pork satay is good here, too.”

“The DA’s just going to forget about the whole thing,” said Bea.

The detective put on one of his Lecture Faces, about to say something he had planned ahead of time, probably on the drive over after the hearing broke up. “I wanted to take you two out to lunch so I could have a chance to talk to you seriously,” said the detective. “Because I know how disappointed you are in what happened this morning.”

“The witness was telling the truth,” Bea said.

“I think he was,” said the detective. “I have no doubt. But you see how weak he is going to be as a foundation for an entire case.”

I could feel the weight of his attention, but I made no sound.

“That’s why they have preliminary hearings,” he continued, “to see what kind of disaster you might be facing if the case goes to court.”

“Mr. Van Kastern saw the crime take place,” Bea said.

“I know it. The DA knows it,” said the detective. “Everybody knows McNorr was the shooter. But our case is like the house built upon the sand.”

“You told me he wouldn’t see the light of day for a long time,” I said in a quiet voice.

“I said we could hope. I had a sense of this case from the beginning, what kind of problems we contemplated,” said the detective after studying his empty sugar packet, a little color picture of a Hawaiian beach.

“Maybe you can go out and interview more witnesses,” said Bea. “Maybe find some evidence.”

“I feel it, too,” he said. “I feel that kind of anger all the time. But I go on living. On the other hand, it’s not my dad sitting there in a wheelchair.”

I sat very still. Maybe, I thought, after a very long time, I might reach out one hand and pluck one of those C & H sugar packets out of the container.

“You don’t look at me when I talk to you, Zachary,” said the detective. “You know that?”

I kept quiet.

“You can look at my face once or twice. I used to be like you when I was your age. You-don’t believe that, do you? That I look at you and see myself?”

The waiter leaned in from the shadows, a soft voice asking us if we needed more time.

“More time,” said the detective emphatically.

When the waiter vanished, Detective Unruh leaned in my direction. “I want you to talk to a counselor.”

I unlocked the car.

I used to wonder what it would be like to be one of those men who never talk. It used to seem that little boys jabbered all the time and cried when they scraped a knee, while a certain type of man never complained.

“People go into prison,” she was saying, “and come out and do it all over again.”

I drove. The Bay Bridge traffic was skittish, a traffic jam broken up at last, everyone trying to reach the speed limit without getting killed. A large plastic garbage bag bounded along in the middle lane. One more bounce, and a semi loaded with scaffolding flattened it. I glanced in the rearview; it was gone, and I couldn’t even see what was left of it.

“Mom was buying a new chicken-wire cage for Carl,” she said. “He was too big for the other one.”

I was glad to be driving, very carefully, like when I took my Department of Motor Vehicles test, a man with a clipboard in the passenger seat saying not hello but “Before we do anything, we have to do what?”

“Carl definitely needs a big cage,” I said. I drove like someone in a training video, Traffic Safety and You. I signaled before I changed lanes; I kept a safe following distance between my Honda and the other cars all the way across the Bay Bridge.

“I argued against keeping him in an enclosure at all, but we have some cats in the neighborhood. You know how they are,” she said, as though following an inner command: whatever you do don’t shut up. “It’s not their fault. But we have to be practical.”

“No cat is going to be able to handle Carl Jung,” I said.

I swing the car over to the curb, a sprinkler playing water over her front lawn. It was late afternoon, country music twanging along inside the house. Detective Unruh wanted me to talk to a social worker, someone who specialized in victims and their families.

“You better come in,” Bea said.

I must have shaken my head.

I could see the argument she was about to make. “Mom was going to make chili. Not the kind that is so hot you have hiccups for an hour. A sweet, New Mexico-type chili she got out of a magazine.”

Before you do anything, the right answer was, what you do is buckle up. You could drive perfectly and if you didn’t do it with your seat belt on, you would fail the test.

We both heard it—a masculine laugh from inside the house, one of Rhonda’s men.

The bean plants were gone, nothing but brown twine and bare poles where green plants used to thrive. I used a pitchfork, working the garden. I got on my hands and knees and broke the ground with a tool like a steel claw, three prongs. When I surprised an earthworm, I was careful. It isn’t true that slicing a worm in half makes two living worms.

Mom brought home some lemon chicken and bok choy with black mushrooms. We ate with wooden chopsticks, the kind that come stuck together. You snap them apart, and it never works quite right; they are always a little jagged and splintery where they had been joined.

She said, “Daniel drew a picture of a man with fire coming out of his head.”

For a person who tells people how to organize an office, Mom spends a lot of time alone. Dad was the one who made friends easily, men and women wandering in and out of his life. He had hiking partners and bird-watching friends and pals who liked to shoot holes in a National Rifle Association slow fire pistol target.

Mom called her contact at the Tribune. McNorr was still in jail.

The next day Chief and I delivered a spa shell and a filter system to a condo in Albany and drove the old spa and rusted motor to a scrap dealer in West Oakland, a block away from the Nabisco plant, the smell of toasted wheat in the air.

When I got home that afternoon the phone was ringing. Normally I wouldn’t have answered it.

It was Mom. She said, “They let him go.”