D b, p.12
D. B., page 12
“You don't ever get used to that,” said Frank.
“I've done a few,” Peck said.
Both men nodded and looked around for their wives as Rispoli and Jerry Brown joined the conversation. Rispoli was drunk and fingering his pack of Marlboros, wanting to light up. He was currently undercover and the butt of a lot of Serpico jokes around the office because he'd let his hair grow long and was sporting a ratty porn star mustache.
Brown, neatly dressed as always, pulled up a chair and said, “Here's to the old school, Frank.”
Frank tipped his drink to that. He considered Brown not only a solid agent but a stand-up guy. He'd graduated top in his class at Annapolis and cracked several high-profile cases in the organized-crime division. The press loved him and he had become the Bureau's “go-to guy” when there were cameras around and the Bureau wanted to put its best diversified face forward.
“Sit down,” Frank said, “Peck was just pumping us about D. B. Cooper.”
“That's a shocker,” Brown said.
“And ancient fucking history,” said Rispoli. “Everybody knows the guy ate it on the way down.”
“You tell him about that woman in Arizona?” Brown said.
Peck waited to see if they were fucking with him. “What woman?”
“The one who claimed to have been Cooper's mother, what was her name?”
“Darlene Dink,” Frank said. “She'd also dated Elvis and Buford Pusser and supposedly had an affair with one of the Kennedys. Their love child's in an institution, drooling into his pajamas—one of them idiot savants who can carve small wooden animals.”
“Sent Frankie boy naked Polaroids of herself,” Arluck said. “I told him he shoulda sent the beaver shots into Hustler with a little number for D. B. to call.”
When the others finished laughing, Peck said, “Was there anything to her story?”
“Darlene's story had a lot of holes,” Frank said. “They all did, but it was my job to follow up any nut that claimed to be Cooper or married to Cooper or shared a beer with him or gave him a ride or square-danced with him. Hell, one guy told me he was Cooper in another life and then there was the speed freak who said he'd stabbed Cooper. I've got a file of letters this thick. You name it, I've heard it.”
“So nothing?”
“There was one guy, though.”
“Yeah?” Peck said.
“Buy me a cup of coffee and I'll tell you about him.”
“There's always one,” Rispoli said. He polished off the rest of his vodka and leaned in close to Frank, asking, “You got a minute?”
Frank nodded and started to ask him what was the matter when Rispoli vibed Arluck sitting there with his radar up. “Nothing,” he said, trying to play it off. “I'll get you later.” He tamped out a cigarette and said he was going outside to smoke even though Peck had already pushed the ashtray across the table for him.
He left and Arluck clapped his hands and said, “How about we talk baseball?”
“Okay,” said Brown.
“Where were you born?”
“Saint Louis.”
“And so that makes you a Cards fan?”
Brown shook his head. “Nope, I'm a Dodgers fan.”
“As a rule I don't trust people who don't root for the team they grew up with. It shows lack of loyalty.”
“Well,” Brown said, “have you ever been to Dodger Stadium?”
Arluck said he had not.
“I could look at that grass all day. I been using the Scott's Turf Builder on my own lawn—you know, trying to get that deep green, experimenting with different mowing patterns.”
“Well, that's still not an excuse,” Arluck said. “Me, I was born an As fan and I'll die an As fan. Vida Blue, I'm for you.”
“I suppose you have views on the DH,” Brown said.
“It's wrong.”
“I disagree. It prolongs careers. You gotta hate the Yankees, though.”
“Everybody hates the Yankees. I'm not fond of the Astros either. Scott's fine, but those uniforms—what the hell were they thinking?” He turned to Peck. “Peck?”
Peck said he didn't watch baseball.
“Where you from?”
“Cincinnati.”
“Shit, the Reds and you don't watch baseball?” Arluck made a V with his fingers and jabbed them toward his eyes. “I'm going to be watching you, Peck.”
Peck smiled uncomfortably as Arluck ranted about other un-American activities such as drinking Canadian beer and rooting for Ali.
Frank raised his hand to stop them. “A perfect reason why we don't talk baseball.” They were quiet a moment. Frank watched a woman perched on a bar stool nearby. She had nice legs and knew how to smoke, letting the cigarette linger inches from her lips before taking another drag. Got him to thinking about Marlene Dietrich.
“Painful,” Arluck said, giving him a wink and a nudge, indicating the woman.
“Who's going to track down leads on the Cooper case?” asked Peck.
Frank shifted. “I'm retired. But if you want, I'll pass you the file. It's out of gas, that is, unless some solid-gold tip comes in. Then maybe they'd throw a few man hours at it.”
“This some kinda hobby of yours, Peck?” Brown asked as his wife, Leona, appeared behind them, coats draped over her smooth arm. “I mean, it was kinda before your time, wasn't it?”
Peck nodded. “When I was younger I wanted to escape like he did.”
“Don't tell me you had a bad childhood,” Arluck said. “My old man used to chase me around the house with a band saw blade and I'm a better man for it.”
“No, it's not that. I just liked the idea of being able to get away like that.”
Frank eyeballed him. “Like what?”
“You know, jump out of a plane with all that money and never be heard from again.”
“Only thing Cooper accomplished was getting the airlines to redesign planes. What's that thing called?” Brown snapped his fingers, trying to remember.
“A Cooper Vane,” Peck said quickly. “It prevents the hatch from being dropped while the plane's in the air.”
Brown chuckled as his wife tapped him on the shoulder. “Yeah, the Cooper Vane. Guy jumps out of a plane and that's probably all he got for his troubles.”
Frank rose to say good-bye.
Brown did the same. “You know,” he said, “I've been sitting here trying to think of something to say all night and all I could come up with is something my father used to say. Whatever it is that gets you up in the morning, don't let it go. Does that work for you?”
“Only if he lived a long and happy life.”
“Don't know about happy, but long, yes, he lived a long time, maybe too long,” he said.
“Well, I've got a few things,” Frank said.
“Listen, you ever wanna go to a game—”
“Yeah, I know, call. Right?”
Brown smiled and they shook hands, knowing Frank would never call
He let Brown's hand drop from his grip, hating these moments of false wisdom. Brown nodded, hooked an arm around his wife and led her to the door past the pod of pimple-faced busboys in stained aprons who were waiting for the party to end.
Frank sat back down and listened to Arluck explaining the dead-case file to Peck and how the Bureau let things slip, especially if there were no victims left to complain and stir the pot. “Things get reshuffled and reprioritized,” he said. “One year they get their ass in a crack about paperhangers and so we go after paperhangers. Next year it's the drug dealers and so we go after drug dealers. Then it's kidnappers. Hell, it gets to the point where we're just chasing our own tail.”
Frank suddenly remembered a tattoo of a snake swallowing its own tail he'd seen on a young street kid who'd been a witness in a kidnapping case. She'd startled Frank by fixing up into her scabbed fist behind a pizza shop and then asking Frank if he wanted to fuck her. He gave her twenty dollars instead and bought her a coat, insisting that she pick something out that wasn't black. All these years later and all that remained when he tried to conjure her face was the tattoo—solitary and black like a bruise or delicate brand against her pale skin. He recalled how the whole incident had sobered him with the knowledge that a large part of the job was sorting through the menagerie of the lost, stolen, and counterfeit, the guilty and innocents who'd been caught up and hijacked, shot, stabbed, held for ransom, accidentally dismembered, kidnapped, chopped to death, blackmailed, beaten with blunt instruments, disappeared, lied to, coerced, bribed, tortured, and deceived. He glanced over at Peck and thought, if you didn't know this going in, you sure as shit did going out.
“Come on, Frank, anything else?”
He looked at Peck. “About Cooper?”
And so, with Arluck chiming in, Frank covered the case again, the whole thing bubbling out of him just like the bedtime stories he used to read to Lucy, the words long since burned into his brain. He went over the discovery a few years back of the bundle of bills with matching serial numbers that had washed up along the banks of the Columbia and how subsequent searches had been unable to find any additional clues.
Peck pulled out a small notebook and jotted down a few notes. “I've been wanting to ask you about that.”
“We figure the money was part of a stash he intended to come back for,” Frank said. “Or maybe he landed in the river and drowned, but that doesn't explain how come we didn't find more.”
“Did you check the deeds along the river?”
Frank thought, trying to remember through the ground fog of booze and party fatigue. He wanted to go home but when he looked into Peck's eyes he saw the same look he himself had when he used to talk about the Jane Doe in the pond. This wasn't just idle shoptalk anymore. Even Arluck sat silently, waiting for Frank to answer.
“What do you mean?” he asked Peck.
“If he meant to come back for the rest of the money he must have thought it was in a safe place, a place he was familiar with, maybe a friend's house or something like that.”
Arluck cut in. “What good would checking the deeds do? If you haven't noticed, Peck, it's a big fucking river with thousands of miles of drainage. The money could have come from anyplace.”
“I was just thinking that if he hid that little bit, maybe there's more somewhere else.”
Frank sniffed his fingers. They smelled like dead rose. “Two hundred and ninety-four twenty-dollar bills—about six thousand bucks—and if I remember right, the thinking at the time was that it could have been a decoy.”
“Decoy?”
“Enough to throw us off his trail and make us think he'd drowned or something. Only it backfired and got lost until that kid decided to build a sand castle and found the money.”
“So you didn't check the deeds?”
Frank rubbed his face. “I don't remember.”
“If you think there's something we missed, have a chat with Woodrell about it,” Arluck said. “Tell him you wanna be put on the Cooper case, and after he gets done laughing his ass off he'll stick you on the tip line.”
“It's okay,” Frank said. “It's just it's late and I'm too tired to remember, but if you've got a question, call me. I can't guarantee I got any answers for you, but I'll do my best.”
Peck nodded.
“You heard the man,” Arluck said, pointing at Peck's notepad. “Now put that away.”
Clare came over and pulled Frank aside and told him that he should at least make an effort to mingle and thank people for coming.
So he followed Woodrell and Sanitsky out to the parking lot, saying good-bye and thanking people for coming, and just as he was about to go back inside he saw Rispoli leaning against the cinder block wall smoking, flicking his Zippo open and shut with trembling hands. He made his way over through the tip and glare of headlights.
“You okay?” he asked.
Rispoli took a long drag and squinted. “Actually no, I'm not okay,” he said, running a hand through his sweaty hair and shivering. “Thanks for asking, though.”
“You wanted to talk to me before?”
“It's nothing.”
“You sure?”
Rispoli shrugged. “Yeah, I'm good.”
Frank didn't push it. All he really knew about Rispoli was that he'd worked a lot of the organized-crime stuff before going undercover and that lately there'd been talk about him being a little too undercover. Creeped up with the criminals—no longer in on the act but part of it. An awkward silence descended on them as they watched a skinny Mexican kid toss leaky trash bags into a spattered Dumpster, where they landed with a hollow gong.
Arluck poked his head out the door, saw them standing there, and motioned for Frank to come back inside.
“You'd better go,” said Rispoli.
“Somethin' you wanna tell me about?”
Rispoli shook his head. “I wouldn't know where to begin and you wouldn't want to know even if I could.”
“Go on, I'm listening.”
He started to say something but stopped, tacked on a smile, and instead said, “Forget it, you're retired, Frank.”
“What's that mean?”
“Nothing, except you made it to the end and there was a lot of love in that room.”
“Horseshit.”
“Well, okay, respect. You did the job right and that's gotta count for something.”
There it was, Frank thought, the night, his career, maybe even the rest of his life in a nutshell. He'd put his head down, laid his shoulder to the wheel, and where had it gotten him? “No,” he said. “I don't know what counts for anything anymore.”
Rispoli took a drag and winced, chucking the half-finished cigarette away. “Well, that's fucking depressing, Frank.”
“You change your mind and wanna talk . . .”
Rispoli's sucked-out stare spoke volumes even as he told Frank to have a good one and strolled to his car without looking back. Frank returned to the restaurant and watched Arluck yakking away at Clare, who was holding the black Heckler & Koch case away from her body as if it might explode. She looked over and tossed him a tight smile—the green light to get out of there.
Before leaving, he found Peck again and told him to call, that he'd tell him everything he knew about Cooper and some stuff he didn't exactly know for sure but believed to be true. He meant every word.
CHAPTER FIVE
At first the campers thought that Baron was just another colorful nut who would shuffle down the road dragging his flock behind him the moment some better opportunity presented itself, but as the rainy season approached, Baron and his crew showed no sign of pulling up tent stakes and continuing their hejira. The bus remained double-parked between the unfinished dome and Reba's busted VW Camper van, its side panels cloaked with speedy green vines. Saplings had sprouted from the bug-clogged grillwork and birds had built nests under the side-view mirrors. Someone had soaped the word CROATOAN across the front windshield and the only sign of life was the occasional squeal of leaf springs whenever Ethel moved to yell out the window to complain of the heat.
Reba began to feel increasingly threatened by Baron's chatty and haphazard campaign to undermine her matriarchal authority. Not only did he refuse to read any of the Buckminster Fuller books, but also he went around camp dismissing them as elitist, loudly proclaiming his preference for Isaac Asimov, who in his reckoning would someday run neck and neck with Einstein. Whenever campers argued with him he'd make small zapping noises and call them Reba-bots.
He carried a large soup spoon in his pocket and was quick to paddle food down his throat only to feign injury at cleanup time. And when Magnolia asked for help pulling the long-rooted weeds that seemed to grow overnight in the vegetable patch, Baron would go into one of his fogs, clutch at his back, and say, “Bad lumbar. An old nine-pin injury come back to haunt me. My nickname was Mr. Three Hundred, and I had the generous sponsorship of Trout's Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury. But that's all gone now.” Then he'd offer one of his acolytes' services.
He pressed Castaneda paperbacks on people, demanding that they know the identities of their four enemies and rambling on about the crack between the world of diableros and the world of living men.
Several of Baron's women followers began going topless. Old and veined in odd places, the women were walking conversation stoppers and mosquito magnets.
Cooper became suspicious when, during one of his periodic strolls into the jungle to check on his stash, he ran into Delroy, one of Baron's minions, tapping on rocks and digging small holes. Worried that Delroy might accidentally stumble on the money, he cornered him, demanding to know what he was up to.
“I seek Montezuma's lost treasure caravan,” Delroy said.
“It's not here,” Cooper said.
“Well, my research tells me the caravan marched 275 leagues north of Mexico City and then west toward some mountains.”
“I didn't know we were 275 leagues north of Mexico City.”
“Depends on your definition of a league. As far as I know, there's no historical consensus.” He went on to explain how the treasure would be covered with layers of guano and small animal bones and how he'd invested in a pallet load of solvent to clean the gold with.
Cooper trailed behind until he was sure Delroy had no interest in the soft hillside where he'd buried the fireproof boxes of hijacked loot. In Delroy's opinion, no right-minded Aztec would bury his nation's fortune in simple topsoil. So Cooper returned to the small wooden tool shack to resume work on the gas generator that April had picked up at a flea market. The generator was to be the first step in her rural improvement project, providing Cooper could get it to run.
The shack was a jumble of paper oil quarts, machetes made from rusty mower blades, petrified glue pots, seized flocking guns, hex wrenches, nippers, and stiff tack clothes made from old tie-dyed T-shirts. Over the single window hung a Tecate poster featuring a señorita in a low-cut Mayan tunic and on the door there was a schedule for the 1954 Cleveland Indians.
