Black House

Yeah, shurr, people get funny ticks when they’re drinking, Janna had said. There’s this one guy who starts doing this after a couple of belts. She had pinched her nostrils together with the tips of her fingers . . . only with her hand turned around so the palm pointed out.

Jack, still smiling easily, still sipping a club soda: Always with the palm out? Like this? And mimicked the gesture.

Janna, smiling, half in love: That’s it, doll — you’re a quick study.

Jack: Sometimes, I guess. What’s this fella’s name, darlin’?

Janna: Kinderling. Thornberg Kinderling. She giggled. Only, after a drink or two — once he’s started up with that pinchy thing — he wants everyone to call him Thorny.

Jack, still with his own smile: And does he drink Bombay gin, darlin’? One ice cube, little trace of bitters?

Janna’s smile starting to fade, now looking at him as if he might be some kind of wizard: How’d you know that?

But how he knew it didn’t matter, because that was really the whole package, done up in a neat bow. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

Eventually, Jack had flown back to Los Angeles with Thornberg Kinderling in custody — Thornberg Kinderling, just an inoffensive, bespectacled farm-insurance salesman from Centralia, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, wouldn’t dare ask your mamma for a drink of water on a hot day, but he had killed two prostitutes in the City of Angels. No strangulation for Thorny; he had done his work with a Buck knife, which Dale himself had eventually traced to Lapham Sporting Goods, the nasty little trading post a door down from the Sand Bar, Centralia’s grungiest drinking establishment.

By then DNA testing had nailed Kinderling’s ass to the barn door, but Jack had been glad to have the provenance of the murder weapon anyway. He had called Dale personally to thank him, and Dale, who’d never been west of Denver in his life, had been almost absurdly touched by the courtesy. Jack had said several times during the course of the investigation that you could never have enough evidence when the doer was a genuine bad guy, and Thorny Kinderling had turned out to be about as bad as you could want. He’d gone the insanity route, of course, and Dale — who had privately hoped he might be called upon to testify — was delighted when the jury rejected the plea and sentenced him to consecutive life terms.

And what made all that happen? What had been the first cause? Why, a man listening. That was all. Listening to a lady bartender who was used to having her br**sts stared at while her words most commonly went in one ear of the man doing the staring and out the other. And who had Hollywood Jack listened to before he had listened to Janna Massengale? Some Sunset Strip hooker, it seemed . . . or more likely a whole bunch of them. (What would you call that, anyway? Dale wonders absently as he goes out to the garage to get his trusty hose. A shimmy of streetwalkers? A strut of hookers?) None of them could have picked Thornberg Kinderling out of a lineup, because the Thornberg who visited L.A. surely hadn’t looked much like the Thornberg who traveled around to the farm-supply companies in the Coulee and over in Minnesota. L.A. Thorny had worn a wig, contacts instead of specs, and a little false mustache.

"The most brilliant thing was the skin darkener," Jack had said. "Just a little, just enough to make him look like a native."

"Dramatics all four years at French Landing High School," Dale had replied grimly. "I looked it up. The little bastard played Don Juan his junior year, do you believe it?"

A lot of sly little changes (too many for a jury to swallow an insanity plea, it seemed), but Thorny had forgotten that one revelatory little signature, that trick of pinching his nostrils together with the palm of his hand turned outward. Some prostitute had remembered it, though, and when she mentioned it — only in passing, Dale has no doubt, just as Janna Massengale did — Jack heard it.

Because he listened.

Called to thank me for tracing the knife, and again to tell me how the jury came back, Dale thinks, but that second time he wanted something, too. And I knew what it was. Even before he opened his mouth I knew.

Because, while he is no genius detective like his friend from the Golden State, Dale had not missed the younger man’s unexpected, immediate response to the landscape of western Wisconsin. Jack had fallen in love with the Coulee Country, and Dale would have wagered a good sum that it had been love at first look. It had been impossible to mistake the expression on his face as they drove from French Landing to Cen-tralia, from Centralia to Arden, from Arden to Miller: wonder, pleasure, almost a kind of rapture. To Dale, Jack had looked like a man who has come to a place he has never been before only to discover he is back home.

"Man, I can’t get over this," he’d said once to Dale. The two of them had been riding in Dale’s old Caprice cruiser, the one that just wouldn’t stay aligned (and sometimes the horn stuck, which could be embarrassing). "Do you realize how lucky you are to live here, Dale? It must be one of the most beautiful places in the world."

Dale, who had lived in the Coulee his entire life, had not disagreed.

Toward the end of their final conversation concerning Thornberg Kinderling, Jack had reminded Dale of how he’d once asked (not quite kidding, not quite serious, either) for Dale to let him know if a nice little place ever came on the market in Dale’s part of the world, something out of town. And Dale had known at once from Jack’s tone — the almost anxious drop in his voice — that the kidding was over.

"So you owe me," Dale murmurs, shouldering the hose. "You owe me, you bastard." Of course he has asked Jack to lend an unofficial hand with the Fisherman investigation, but Jack has refused . . . almost with a kind of fear.