“You’re one wild party animal, Wizard. I don’t know how your lady keeps up with you.”
The Miller tune wrapped. Shamus leaned into the mike and let ad-libbed patter dance off his tongue, cuing back-to-back cuts of Benny Goodman’s “One O’clock Jump” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”
I like to listen to Shamus on the air and off. He has a voice that makes Barry White and James Earl Jones sound like carnival barkers with strep throat. To radio people, he’s the Velvet Tongue.
From 1:00 A.M. to 6:00, every day but Sunday, Shamus spins what he calls “the music that won the big war,” and recounts tales of the night life of that long-ago age.
The other nineteen hours of the day, KPMC eschews music in favor of talk radio. Management would prefer to shut down during those five least-listened hours, but their broadcast license requires them to serve the community 24/7.
This situation gives Shamus the freedom to do anything he wants, and what he wants is to immerse himself and his insomniac listeners in the glories of the Big Band era. In those days, he says, the music was real, and life was more grounded in truth, reason, and good will.
The first time I heard this rap, I expressed surprise that he would feel such affinity for an age of active segregation. His answer was, “I’m black, blind, seriously smart, and sensitive. No age would be easy for me. At least the culture had culture then, it had style.”
Now he told his audience, “Close your eyes, picture the Duke in his trademark white tux, and join me, Shamus Cocobolo, as I ride that A Train to Harlem.”
His mother named him Shamus because she wanted her son to be a police detective. When he went blind at three, a law-enforcement career ceased to be an option. The “Cocobolo” came with his father, straight out of Jamaica.
Picking up the black plastic card, holding it by the top and bottom edges between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he said, “Some stupefyingly stupid bank give you a credit card?”
“I was hoping you could tell me what it says.”
He slid one finger across the card, not really reading it, just determining its nature. “Oh, Wizard, surely you don’t think I need meditation when I’ve got Count Basie and Satchmo and Artie Shaw.”
“So you know what it is.”
“The last couple years, people have given me maybe a dozen of these things, all different inspirational thoughts, as though blind people can’t dance, so they meditate. No offense, Wizard, but you’re entirely too cool to give me a plastic fantastic spiritual whizbang like this, and I’m a little embarrassed for you.”
“You’re welcome. But I’m not giving it to you. I’m just curious what it says in Braille.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. But why curious?”
“I was born that way.”
“I get the point. None of my business.” He read the card with his fingertips and said, “‘Father of lies.’”
“‘Father of flies’?”
“Lies. Untruths.”
The phrase was familiar to me, but for some reason I couldn’t make sense of it, perhaps because I didn’t want to.
“The devil,” Shamus said. “The Father of Lies, Father of Evil, His Satanic Majesty. What’s the story, Wizard? Is St. Bart’s old-time religion just too boring these days, you need a whiff of sulfur to give your soul a thrill?”
“It’s not my card.”
“So whose card is it?”
“A nurse at County General told me to drive pedal-to-the-metal, into the desert, toss it out a window, let the wind take it.”
“For a nice boy who makes an honest living with a fast spatula, you sure hang around with some seriously whacked people.”
He slid the card toward me, across the microphone island.
I got up from my stool.
“Don’t you leave that brimstone Braille here,” he said.
“It’s just a plastic fantastic spiritual whizbang, remember?”
My twin reflections watched me from the dark-blue lenses of his glasses.
Shamus said, “I knew a practicing Satanist once. The guy claimed he hated his mother, but he must’ve loved her. Cops found her severed head in his freezer, in a sealed plastic bag with rose petals to keep it fresh.”
I picked up the meditation card. It felt cold.
“Thanks for your help, Shamus.”
“You be careful, Wizard. Interestingly eccentric friends aren’t easy to find. You were suddenly dead, I’d miss you.”
FORTY-FOUR
THE RED DAWN CAME, THE SUN LIKE AN EXECUTIONER’S blade slicing up from the dark horizon.
Elsewhere in Pico Mundo, a would-be mass murderer might have been looking at this sunrise while inserting cartridges in spare magazines for his assault rifle.
I parked in the driveway and turned off the engine. I could wait no longer to learn if the shooter who popped Bob Robertson had also murdered Rosalia Sanchez. Yet two or three minutes passed before I found sufficient courage to get out of the car.
The night birds had fallen silent. Usually active at first light, the morning crows had not yet appeared.
Climbing the back-porch steps, I saw that the screen door was closed but that the door stood open. The kitchen lights were off.
I peered through the screen. Rosalia sat at the table, her hands folded around a coffee mug. She appeared to be alive.
Appearances can be deceiving. Her dead body might be awaiting discovery in another room, and this might be her earthbound spirit with its hands around the mug that she had left when she’d gone to answer the killer’s knock on her door the previous evening.
I could not smell freshly brewed coffee.
Always before, when she waited for me to arrive to tell her that she was visible, the lights had been on. I had never seen her sitting in the dark like this.
Rosalia looked up and smiled as I entered the kitchen.
I stared at her, afraid to speak, for fear that she was a lingering spirit and could not answer.
“Good morning, Odd Thomas.”
Dread blew out of me with my pent-up breath. “You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive. I know I’m a long way down the road from the young girl I used to be, but I don’t look dead, I hope.”
“I meant—visible. You’re visible.”
“Yes, I know. The two policemen told me, so I didn’t have to wait for you this morning.”
“Policemen?”
“It was good knowing early. I turned out the lights and just enjoyed sitting here, watching the dawn develop.” She raised her mug. “Would you like some apple juice, Odd Thomas?”
“No thank you, ma’am. Did you say two policemen?”
“They were nice boys.”
“When was this?”
“Not forty minutes ago. They were worried about you.”
“Worried—why?”
“They said someone reported hearing a gunshot come from your apartment. Isn’t that ridiculous, Odd T
homas? I told them I hadn’t heard anything.”
I was sure that the call reporting the shot had been made anonymously, because the caller had likely been Robertson’s killer.
Mrs. Sanchez said, “I asked them what on earth you’d be shooting at in your apartment. I told them you don’t have mice.” She raised her mug to take a sip of apple juice, but then said, “You don’t have mice, do you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“They wanted to look anyway. They were concerned about you. Nice boys. Careful to wipe their feet. They didn’t touch a thing.”
“You mean you showed them my apartment?”
After swallowing some apple juice, she said, “Well, they were policemen, and they were so worried about you, and they felt much better when they didn’t find that you’d shot your foot or something.”
I was glad I’d moved Robertson’s body immediately upon finding it in my bathroom.
“Odd Thomas, you never came around last night to get the cookies I baked for you. Chocolate chip with walnuts. Your favorite.”
A plate, heaped with cookies, covered with plastic wrap, stood on the table.
“Thank you, ma’am. Your cookies are the best.” I picked up the plate. “I was wondering…do you think I could borrow your car for a little while?”
“But didn’t you just drive up in it?”
My blush was redder than the spreading dawn beyond the windows. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then, you’ve already borrowed it,” she said without the slightest trace of irony. “No need to ask twice.”
I retrieved the keys from a pegboard by the refrigerator. “Thank you, Mrs. Sanchez. You’re too good to me.”
“You’re a sweet boy, Odd Thomas. You remind me so much of my nephew Marco. Come September, he’ll have been invisible three years.”
Marco, with the rest of his family, had been aboard one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center.
She said, “I keep thinking he’ll turn visible again any day, but it’s been so long now…. Don’t you ever go invisible, Odd Thomas.”