“What about Banning and Lissa?” I asked softly.
“Is anyone trying to kill them?” Callas countered.
“I don’t know.”
She shook her head. “My guess is, either Mr. Banning or Lissa Cousins, or both, could be a problem for you.”
I couldn’t absorb that right away.
“They’re both untrained and vulnerable. Mr. Banning is a definite risk, and I’m always suspicious of female altruism, unless there’s a romantic motive.”
I shook my head.
Callas flattened her hand on the desk as if for a game of mumblety-peg. She stared down at it. “Lying could be fatal, Hal.”
“There’s nothing between us.”
“What happened last night to make you abandon your hotel room?”
“Banning thinks someone broke in and planted a can opener and a can of peaches,” I said. “I used the can opener and ate the peaches. He thinks I might have been tagged.” I explained what that meant.
Callas regarded me with morbid curiosity. “Do you feel ill or out-of-sorts?”
“No.”
“Could you get the can opener analyzed?”
I thought that over. “Yes,” I said.
“Why was your brother in New York?”
“I think he was putting together the last pieces of a puzzle,” I said.
Callas looked away and shook her head. “You’re claiming your enemies, whoever they are, work like the Shadow—they cloud men’s minds. No?”
I felt like a bug under the tip of a huge and descending pushpin.
“Why couldn’t they cloud your mind, too?”
I couldn’t give that a comfortable answer.
“It’s all up for grabs, isn’t it?” Callas said. “Everything we know about sanity and free will.” Her knuckles rapped the desktop lightly. She looked through the broad steel-frame windows. “I eat a lot of fresh produce. They know where I live. What happens if they decide to cloud my mind? What good am I to you then?” She let out her breath. “I’m returning Mrs. Cousins’s check.” She pushed Lissa’s check across the desk. “The detective work is gratis. Think of it as an exchange for alerting me to some interesting facts. And for what it’s worth, from a professional who doesn’t feel very smart anymore, some advice. Get a gun. Forget everything you think you know about life and decency and civilization. Stay away from your friends.
“And stay the hell away from me.”
24
I joined Banning and Lissa in the street outside the warehouse. “We’re too weird for her,” I told them. I handed Lissa the check. “She knows I don’t trust Rudy, and Rudy doesn’t trust me. And she thinks perhaps you shouldn’t trust me, either.”
Banning nodded as if that only made good sense. “I had a relationship with your brother,” he said. “It takes me a long time to trust someone—I’m sure by now you can understand why.”
Lissa looked at me sadly. “Whom should I trust?” she asked.
“I think Mrs. Callas is right,” I said. “We should all go our separate ways.”
“I’ve performed my duty to your brother, to the extent I was able,” Banning said. He sucked in his cheeks, making little hollows, before adding, “Now I hope to return to obscurity and failure. Best of luck.”
We watched him walk down the street to his beat-up brown Plymouth, a diminishing figure in the perspective of the walls and windows of the warehouses.
“This is stupid,” Lissa said. “Where will you go?”
“Wherever, I’ll be on foot,” I said. I started walking south. The engine of Banning’s old Plymouth coughed. I smelled its blue smoke.
“Right!” Lissa shouted after me. “No money, no car—just your goddamned shoes! You are so incredibly stupid!”
I stopped. Lissa stood on the broken sidewalk, wrists corded, fists clenched, face tight and splotched with red. She was furious and frightened. My resolve, not the strongest to begin with, weakened.
I had been alone for so long I had forgotten how much I despised it. But Banning could go, and I would never for a moment miss him. Let’s face it; I did not want to turn my back on Lissa. There’s an instinct in most men that keeps us tied to beautiful women.
It’s a real, honest-to-God weakness, and it’s part of what makes us die younger.
“It cannot end here,” she said. “I don’t want it to end this way.”
I swore under my breath and jogged past her to the Plymouth. It took a while for the car to warm up. Banning rolled the window down a crack and gave me a wary, sideways look.
“Nothing funny, now,” he warned.
“Did you pack the can opener?” I asked. “May I take it?”