The Last Nightingale (12 page)

It would never work to back away from her confession. The current state of criminal law in San Francisco was to lean toward the harsh side. The beleaguered population was in no mood for sob stories; every one of them had a few of their own.

Blackburn had gone into the case knowing that the city needed to take a close look at the wife, even if they did not have enough to justify charging her. The rush to nail Marietta Pairo felt wrong to him as well. His failure was all but guaranteed on the assigned task. So when the strange note arrived, he had taken it at face value and thrown it against the wall, where amazingly, it stuck like fresh horse flop. The easy power of it nearly took his breath away. Pure bluff and nothing else. Even in this grim atmosphere, miracles still happened. And as far as Mrs. Sullivan's vow of putting out appeals to high-powered friends went, well, those same people were also the friends of Captain Harlan Sullivan—shot through the head while he was defenseless. Mrs. Sullivan was going to have to get used to prison food.

The kid with the note, though: He was more interesting than some pitiful self-made widow. What was his connection to this
woman, that he could be so eerily intuitive about her? How was it that he could be dead right about all of it?

Blackburn could feel that this mystery somehow fit into the strange aura hovering over the city. It had been there ever since disaster struck. With that first shock wave, everything about the physical world came under an unstoppable destructive force. So had the more ethereal things, such as one's view of the way the world functions. In the aftermath, the strangeness of a magical clue being delivered by some ragged and anonymous boy somehow fit into the post-quake picture, right along with the ubiquitous piles of rubble. The land down near the bay shore had turned to quicksand from the sheer intensity of the great vibrations. Now everybody in the area lived in a world in which the ground itself could not be trusted to hold still, or even remain solid. So why not a boy with a magic note?

It was a fairly short walk but he made slow time, stepping among the makeshift shelters that now served as homes and businesses for the die-hard populace. Block after block, pale stalks of smoke twisted up from countless cooking fires. He cringed at the thought of another conflagration. Meanwhile, grim and determined faces peered out at him from swaths of stained blankets and ragged clothing. The city was surviving, but the eyes of its people were universally dark and hollow.

Everyone in the region shared the same invisible wound. Blackburn kept his own shoved far down, but he imagined that others could see the effects on his face as clearly as he saw it in theirs. The worst of the shaking had taken place inside of the people. It left them with the question: How far back inside of yourself do you have to retreat, to find a bit of stable ground?

Blackburn was stuck with that challenge as much as anybody else, and he felt moved to stand up for these people. This part of town was mostly a stalwart population, immigrant pioneers of hardy stock. He could see in their behavior that they remained honorable and clung to their families. No one was lying around drunk or en-
gaging in gambling. Everybody in sight was either doing some sort of business or tending to their makeshift homes, with all but the smallest of children occupied in one handy task or another.

In spite of his admiration, he moved among them as an audience member, seldom a player. While walking his beat he was still only an observer, unless action was necessary. The act of constant observation commanded a certain distance that was grimly effective insulation against human warmth, so that walking past these tightly knit families filled him with a lonely ache. If he were off duty, it would be a perfect moment for a whiskey or two. Instead he left the hunger hanging and moved on.

When a rat the size of a house cat darted in front of him, he kicked at it without coming close. The rat disappeared in a flash of matted fur. It was finally becoming more rare to see them. The swarms that roamed the streets with impunity right after the earthquake were fading back into the broken sewer lines and scattered rubble piles. Since confrontations with humans frequently ended in death, the rats were discovering that it was easier to hide in daylight and forage in darkness. He wondered if any of them really carried the plague. If there were any victims, it seemed strange that he had heard nothing about it.

He reached the Mission Dolores well after midnight, so he bypassed the church and went straight to where the little graveyard fronted onto the road. The place was dark, with silhouettes of the larger tombstones and funerary statues defined by faint moonlight. At first the whole cemetery appeared deserted. But he stood for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the thicker darkness under wide boughs of the older trees. Smudges began to take sharper form.

There, in the very back, was the outline of a toolshed. A bright lantern was burning inside. He silently entered the graveyard and made his way back toward the shed. Once he got within a few yards, he could see a rectangle of light projected onto the ground outside the shed's door. A boy's skinny and distorted shadow passed back and forth in front of it, and a faint muttering sound drifted up
from the shed. The boy seemed to be reciting or chanting, but Blackburn couldn't hear the words.

He glided forward a few more feet until he could get a good look. The kid was lanky, nearly skin and bone, but did not appear to be sickly. Twelve or thirteen years old, probably. Not shaving yet. His thick, tousled hair looked like he cut it himself and his work clothes were cut for someone else. His shoes and socks looked right for his size but the leather was worn through, enough to notice at this distance. All in all, he gave the impression of being a coiled spring wrapped in skin and hair.

He was reading aloud by the light of the single oil lamp. He paced back and forth holding a newspaper open in front of him. His voice was soft but clear, and he seldom stumbled over the bigger words or odd pronunciations. Blackburn was struck by the sight. He knew that in this time and place, illiteracy was as common as the fog. Yet somebody had seen to it that this scrappy kid thoroughly learned his ABCs.

At that point Blackburn finally realized what he was hearing— for some reason, the boy was reading from the newspaper's society pages, those fluffy stories telling all about the parties and celebrations and glittering lives of the town's noted citizens. The boy read carefully, pronouncing each word as if they were all equally important. He was so caught up in his pursuit that Blackburn got within a few feet of him without being detected.

The fog outside of Shane's toolshed was growing thick enough to slip through the open door in low wisps, but he was too engrossed in his reading to notice the cold. When he read out loud, he was somehow able to send the words straight from the page through his mouth, undisturbed. More than that, he spoke with confidence. His goal was almost fingertip close, now: to burn the sensation of speaking deeply enough into his brain that he could speak just as well when there were no pages.

The voice outside his door startled him. "Is that how you heard about the case? Reading the paper out loud?”

Shane dropped the newspaper. A gust of wind swept it away from his feet and out into the darkness. He whirled to face the speaker and saw that it was the police sergeant, Randall Rlackburn, the one Shane left the note for.

And, he now realized, the last one, besides Shane, to see the Nightingale women killed where they lay.

He caught himself staring at the ground, so he forced his eyes to look up and meet Rlackburn's gaze. Rut his mouth wouldn't move. The best he could do was to offer a wan smile and nod. It took the big sergeant a moment to catch on, then he realized that this was all the response he would get. He smiled and also nodded. And then Sergeant Rlackburn just stood there, sizing Shane up with an unreadable expression. Shane thought that the sergeant seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but what?

He stepped over to an upturned flowerpot and sat on it. Sergeant Rlackburn seemed to smile a bit. He reached into the shed and pulled a large pot out of his own through the doorway. He stopped outside the door, leaving the interior for Shane. Shane was taken aback; the gesture almost felt polite. Or was the cop just guarding the doorway? Rlackburn flipped the big pot over and sat where they could see each other. Shane knew that the thick ceramic planter weighed more than he did, and yet the sergeant handled it like a tin washtub. It made him feel like he was made of paper himself.

It was that sense of fragility that left Shane hanging halfway in the moment and halfway back in the pantry at the Nightingale house. That was the last place that he had felt so much physical power emanating from a single person. In the Nightingale house, the madman also radiated a presence that left no doubt that you were in the company of chaos and doom. Shane's instincts told him that the cop had the strength to easily kill him, but he was just as sure that there was no such danger.

The sergeant seemed to decide something. He shook his head, then spoke up. "Well, I already know it was you who left me the note, and ordinarily I wouldn't bother you about it, except that you solved a case. Not just solved it, actually. You stopped it cold in its tracks when it was running away from me. So you can see how I might be curious." He smiled.

Was it a real smile or a trick? Shane tried to breathe slowly.
Don't think about the house. Don't even picture it.

“All right, then. Always start with the basics. My name is Randall Rlackburn. Sergeant, SFPD." He waited a moment. ". . . And you are?”

“Shane Nightingale," he answered, except that it came out "Shh-Sha-Sha-Shhane Ni-Ni-Night-Nighting-ga-ga-gale.”

“Shane Nightingale, you say?”

Shane nodded.

“All right then, Shane. Now ordinarily you could address me as Sergeant Rlackburn and that would be that. I'm thinking that the practical thing to do is stick with something easy. It's going to be a mouthful to use my rank, so let's just drop that and assume that you know how wildly important I am. That leaves either Randall or Rlackburn. I'm thinking that Rlack-burn is not a good combination of sounds for you. So what about Randall? Can you just sort of slide into that one? Randall?”

Shane tried. "Raaand-Rand-Raaa . . .”

“All right. Rack up a bit. Let's try Sergeant, after all. What do you say?”

“Se-Ser-Ser-Se-Ssss-Serg . . .”

“You know, I might have been too hasty discarding Rlackburn. You should at least try it once or twice.”

“R-R-R-lack-Rlack-Rlackie-Rlackie . . . Rlackie.”

The big cop laughed out loud. "Rlackie? Surely not!”

“N-n-no! No. I meant R-R-Rlack-Rlackie . . ." He sighed in frustration.

“There you go! Winner by default! So you're Shane and I'm

Blackie." He laughed again. "It's still Blackburn when you can manage it, but we'll settle for Blackie to save time, fair enough? And the reason I'm here right now, Shane, is because your note, well, it was a powerful thing today. Once you explained Mrs. Sullivan's way of thinking, I was able to go in and trick her with a phony story about a new science called fingerprinting. She caved in and confessed it all.”

Shane's heartbeat refused to slow down. At any instant, the other shoe was sure to drop.

“So you see," Blackburn went on, "you broke the case.”

There it was! Shane felt panic rolling through him. Shane had broken the case. Blackburn's case was broken and it was all Shane's fault. That's why he was here. Now there would be trouble. He was an idiot to write that note.

Blackburn seemed to catch his concern. "Breaking a case is a good thing, you see." He grinned. "Beally you can do it all you want.”

He paused for a few more heartbeats, then went on. "But you see, that leaves me with a mystery. How does a young fellow like you, working over here at night in the cemetery at the Mission Dolores, figure out what's going on inside the mind of a grown woman you've never met who lives on the other side of town? And yet I don't see any flying broomsticks around here, or a crystal ball. Did you find out by magic? Did a little bird tell you? Did an angel light upon your shoulder and—”

“My family," he got it out all at once. "Wa-wa-watching.”

“. . . You learned why Mrs. Sullivan shot her husband by watching your family.”

Shane sighed and shook his head.

“All right, we won't get impatient. Just have a go at it a little at a time. I've got a sandwich we can split, if it gets late." He smiled, then folded his arms and waited.

Shane realized he had to attempt an answer, even if there was far too much for him to say. His first sentence did not promise an
easy task ahead. "If you, you, you, be sti-sti-still and wah-wah-watch a woman in fro-fro-frrr-front, front of a mi-mi-mirror, you'll see." He glanced over at Blackburn, but the sergeant was gazing straight at him, patiently waiting for him to form his words. He wasn't glazing over yet, the way other people did.

So Shane went on, sentence after painful sentence. Torturing himself with the effort and tormenting his listener with the time that it took. But whenever he looked at Blackburn, the sergeant was attentively listening with no trace of impatience or exasperation. It was the first time since the night that Shane escaped the burning house that anyone allowed him to speak more than a few words without interrupting him or simply walking away.

Before long, he was able to concentrate on the story he wanted to tell, and he let the struggle for the words take care of itself.

Shane spent five minutes explaining that he was an orphan raised by the friars at St. Adrian of Canterbury's Home for Delinquents and Orphans—quick to stress that he was an orphan and not a delinquent. About a year prior to the earthquake, he was adopted into the Nightingale family. These English immigrants had no extra family in the region, so they adopted Shane for a servant.

Shane spent at least ten minutes getting across that since he was more of a servant than a family member, despite taking their last name, he often came and went unnoticed. Many times, he saw Mrs. Nightingale agonize in front of the mirror about the fit of her clothing and the body that constantly betrayed her. The depth of her insecurity and preoccupation with the failings she perceived in the mirror were a real source of pain. Her husband was kind to her, and never made any complaints about her figure that Shane overheard. Even so, her frustration with herself was there for Shane to see. The lessons stuck.