Late in the Standoff Page 11

  Danny rolled his window down for air. The coming day smelled damp. He changed stations, hoping for more news, but all he got was a white-boy preacher trying to sound black. The preacher pitched his words like a talking blues twang, but he was smooth vanilla all the way—didn’t fool Danny, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to sucker any blacks. “Something moo-ving underneath,” he rumbled through the static. “Can you feel it, friends? Can you feel it? A mighty mighty shaking going on, underneath the cotton, underneath the oil, under Jesus’ fertile fields where the sweet sweet water be flowing on down to the sea …”

  Danny tried to think. He’d call Libbie or Carla as soon as he got to a phone, ask them to meet him at his place.

  Lord, Lord, she’d ripped it this time.

  First it was debt, then her loud-mouthed Latin lover—the Morning Palomino … palimony, Danny thought, Palo-meathead. No-Pal-O-Mine.

  He needed more coffee, something to eat. His eyes stung as he thought of his last “See you soon” to Anna Lia, three days ago in her place at the Continental Arms. He’d hoped for a coming-together again when he’d straightened out the money. By now, she must have learned that no one else would swallow her crap (one thing the old man taught him was how to stick). And though, lately, their time with each other was sloppy and rushed, she always seemed happy to see him, to talk. It could, he thought, it could be good again.

  But now Smitts had gone and fucked her up.

  By the time Libbie and Carla reached the Continental Arms, Danny was prowling the parking lot behind the strip of yellow tape that said “Police Line—Do Not Cross.” Two uniformed officers tried to ask him questions, but he wouldn’t stand still.

  Libbie double-parked the van. The lot was jammed with cars, onlookers, reporters, cameramen from Channel n. She couldn’t hear what Danny was saying. He was waving his arms and pointing at a dark-haired man who stood quietly, hands clenched, by a row of wilting irises. The man seemed to have a problem with his legs—jittery and stiff, and when he moved he tilted to the left. His jeans were baggy and long, so Libbie couldn’t tell what was wrong.

  She glanced up at Anna Lia’s balcony and gasped. The sliding glass door had shattered. The wooden railing was splintered and charred; the door to the utility closet, at one end of the balcony, had fallen off its hinges. Libbie noticed Anna Lia’s hibachi, her tiny red smoker, and a black wrought-iron chair on its side.

  Carla leaped from the van in Danny’s direction, but a skinny cop stopped her at the tape-line. Libbie walked slowly past the camera crews, her eyes on the balcony. She expected Anna Lia to appear any minute and shout, “Just a joke, guys! You can all go home now!”

  Danny ducked beneath the tape, hugged Carla, then Libbie. “They’ve already made up their minds!” he said. He jerked his thumb at the cops. “I don’t believe it.”

  Carla held his arm. “Tell us, Danny. What’s happened?”

  “They’re saying she killed herself.”

  “She’s dead?” Libbie said. She’d refused the word till now, though she’d felt the fact of it when she saw the balcony.

  “Blew herself up. Making a bomb.” Danny stabbed a finger at the man with dark hair. “I told them,” he said. “I told them this asshole’s their culprit, but they got no fucking ears.”

  The man, who by now had been joined in the doorway of his apartment by a guy who looked just like him—only older—turned back inside. His knee didn’t bend when he walked.

  The uniformed cops tried to shove Libbie and Carla back across the tape-line. Carla screamed, “We’re her friends!” Tears sprayed in all directions when she shook her head.

  The policemen told them to stand by. “We may need you for a statement,” one said. As soon as the cops walked away, the reporters approached in a cramped, sweating bunch like a basketball team. “Did you say you were friends of the dead woman?” a short man asked. He wore a striped cotton shirt. “Was she a Communist? Were you all in some kind of group together? What were you planning to do with the explosives?”

  “What?” Libbie’s eyes hurt—volcanic cinders. “What are you talking about?”

  “The police captain says she’s a foreigner. A foreign Communist. Where was she from?”

  “Eye-talian, I heard,” another reporter said.

  Libbie blinked hard. “I don’t—I don’t have—”

  “No comment,” Carla shouted. Her voice was husky. She blew her nose into a flowering wad of Kleenex and shouldered past the newsmen. Libbie followed her, then sat on the gravelly bottom step of the stairs to Anna Lia’s apartment. She wondered where the body was. Still up there? She didn’t see an ambulance or anyone she’d recognize as a coroner from all the TV crime shows she’d seen.

  Though the sun kept sliding in and out of the haze in the air, the morning was already steaming. The clouds were grouped like the dinosaur ribs she and Hugh had seen once in a natural history museum: thick, smooth, lightly curled at the ends, mightier than anything you’d care to lift.

  She closed her eyes. The crowd’s voices looped around her, a mad swirl like an old sixties drug tune: Sgt. Pepper-ish. At one point, a cop asked her name. She had to repeat it. “Schwinn,” she said. “Libbie Schwinn. Like the bicycle.”

  He said he’d get back to her. Then Carla was sitting beside her. “Listen, Danny can’t handle all this.”

  “Have they told you anything?” Libbie asked.

  “No. They’re giving us one story and the press something else—”

  “Why?”

  Carla shrugged. “Danny wants us to stay with him tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “In his apartment. He’s in no shape to go anywhere, and he says he can’t be alone. What do you say? I’d feel better if you were with me.

  Libbie rubbed her face. She felt filthy in all this grime. What had she planned to do today after school? Run by the caterer’s. Right. And visit the florist. That silly little flower man had already screwed up twice. What else? She’d have to call Hugh—

  “Sure,” she said.

  “All right.” Carla squeezed her arm. “Wait here. I’m going to phone my sis and tell her where I’ll be.”

  Libbie studied the balcony. It didn’t look solid—more like a prop.

  She tried to cry but couldn’t.

  Anna Lia wasn’t her first friend to die. Jenny Morgan and Lisa Turner had both been killed in car wrecks when Libbie was in the eighth grade. In high school, Tom Snipes, whom she’d dated once or twice, died of a heroin overdose. Brain cancer claimed Emily Dawes, her best buddy in grad school, a brilliant premed from the heart of the Big Thicket with her love of cats and the children she wanted to cure.

  Libbie’s folks worried her, too—diabetic, both of them, plagued by ulcers, arthritis, high blood pressure—but they managed, somehow, in that little two-bedroom they’d bought in the fifties soon after their wedding. Each day they fell into a yelling match (“My aches are worse than yours, you’d think you could do this one little thing for me, a glass of water, that’s all I ask, is that too much after forty-five years, a glass of water with a little bourbon in it, maybe, and some ice while you’re at it”). Now, Libbie believed they’d survive even her, outgrieving each other by her graveside.

  She’d never reconciled herself to losing her friends, especially Emily, sweet Emily, but at least she understood their passing. Accidents, drugs, tumors, a cranky old age—these were the things people died of.

  But blowing yourself up? In your own apartment? No one died that way. No one you knew, anyway. Mafia men, maybe. Terrorists. B-movie actors. But not Anna Lia.

  2

  As afternoon hushed into evening—receding traffic, birds feeding in trees, the soothing chrrr of faraway crickets—the crowd at the Continental Arms thinned out. The newspeople went home. The ash in the air cleared, but it was replaced by mosquito spray from the city’s sanitation trucks.

  Libbie spent three hours, off and on, telling a young, pimpled cop how she’d come to know the woman he in
sisted on calling the “victim,” what she knew about Anna Lia’s marriage and affairs.

  The cop shuffled through papers stapled loosely inside a manila folder. “She a Communist?” he asked Libbie.

  She was exhausted; the question irritated her. “Absolutely not.”

  “Right here.” The officer tapped the folder. “Communist Youth League.”

  “Every kid in Italy joins the Communist Youth League,” Libbie said. “It’s like the Girl Scouts. It doesn’t mean anything. Anna Lia was the most apolitical person I’ve ever known, and if you’re going to stamp her as some kind of spy—”

  “Ms. Schwinn.” The young man waved his hand. “I’m just trying to establish—”

  “You better get your facts straight, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “You know any Girl Scouts ever make a bomb?” He smirked.

  Libbie stood. Most of the afternoon, she’d sat on the concrete steps beneath Anna Lia’s balcony. A few yards away, on another set of steps, Danny was being questioned, and beyond him, Carla spoke to two other detectives.

  Libbie overheard Danny tell a uniformed policeman how, last year, he’d saved enough overtime to secure a loan for the record store, Discomundo, which specialized in Latin music. It had been Anna Lia’s dream to run a place like that.

  Yes, Danny said, he supposed that’s where she’d met Roberto Capriati. He must have come in looking for the latest hits. Danny didn’t know. That’s right, he’d continued to support her after their separation. He was paying her rent. “It’s not like we’d stopped speaking to each other,” Danny said. “I mean, we both lived right here. I saw her pretty often. I was still attached to her.”

  Yes, he’d known she was having affairs …

  Libbie’s first tears came then, but briefly, and not for Anna Lia. She wondered what she could cook for Danny tonight, to make him feel better.

  Before the policemen left for the day, they walked Libbie, Danny, and Carla to different areas of the apartment complex so they couldn’t see or hear each other, and asked some final questions. Libbie supposed they wanted to check each person’s story against the others.

  She had questions of her own, but the cops seemed more interested in broad outlines than in details. Specifically, she wondered how Anna Lia—a nonnative speaker—could read a bomb-making manual. Her English was good, but she’d had no training in technical or scientific vocabulary, and she was most definitely not mechanically minded.

  This fact continued to trouble Libbie, even after the police had sketched their Revenge Plot—they claimed she wanted to kill Roberto Capriati—and said they were closing the case.

  Around noon, the cops had asked Danny if they could search his apartment.

  Before they’d settled on Most Probable Cause, which then hardened into their Final Report, they’d explored the possibility that someone had murdered Anna Lia or that she had committed suicide. Now, they’d decided that the physical evidence canceled both of these options. Danny didn’t believe them. He looked Libbie’s way, but she was busy with another cop.

  An officer said, “Mr. Smitts says she was angry about the past—about the men in her life.”

  “I don’t know,” Danny said.

  “Well, if she had revenge on her mind, sir, this disk jockey she was after—maybe he was just Round One, see what I’m saying? We need to make sure you’re not in any danger.”

  “I’ m not.”

  “She had regular access to your apartment, is that correct?”

  “Yes, but—Smitts is feeding you a load of horseshit. She had no reason to hurt me,” Danny said.

  “Still, we’d like to be certain. Would you object if we had a look around?”

  “Be my guest. But you ought to check Smitts’s rooms. It’s the goddam Pentagon in there.” He didn’t know that for sure, but both Anna Lia and her friend Marie had mentioned Smitts’s guns, his obsession with knives.

  While Danny was waiting for the cops to finish up in his kitchen, he remembered a dream he’d had one night soon after Anna Lia moved out. In the dream, he was slouching by the stove, making coffee, wearing only a pair of skivvies, the way his father used to do. Anna Lia stood near him, naked, brushing her hair. He pleaded with her to stay with him, apologized for any trouble he’d caused her, promised he’d change. She didn’t answer. He looked up; behind her a haggard stranger wearing a red windbreaker loomed in the kitchen doorway. The man’s jaw was slack, his eyes big and phosphorescent. “Who are you?” Danny asked. The man lumbered forward. Danny tried to move, to protect Anna Lia, but his feet stuck to the floor. He began to scream and woke himself shouting, sweaty and cold.

  He trembled now, feeling again the dream’s blunt force.

  Smitts wandered into the parking lot. Libbie and Carla had disappeared, now, with the other detectives. Danny glared at the man.

  Smitts lit a cigarette, loitered in the patchy shade of an oak. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he said.

  Danny said, “I’m looking at a killer.”

  The man winced and rubbed his thigh.

  How could Anna Lia bear to touch this piece of shit? Greasy hair. Long red neck.

  “Listen, Clark, if you don’t shut up about me—and if you don’t stop staring—I’ll tear your eyes out of your goddam head, you understand me?”

  Danny laughed.

  “Watch yourself,” Smitts said. He turned and limped away: a maimed dog.

  Late in the day Libbie called Hugh from Danny’s apartment. They had planned to meet at the florist’s. She apologized for not showing up and told him what had happened.

  “Jesus. Someone at work told me about an explosion,” Hugh said. He was a history instructor at Marion Junior College. “But I had no idea … Anna Lia? A bomb?”

  “The police say she was going to plant it in Roberto’s car. I guess, after he jilted her …”

  “Roberto? Who’s Roberto?”

  “You know, the Love Stallion? On the radio.”

  “Oh, right, right. And?”

  “End of story. They just want to close the case and get it over with,” Libbie said. “It’s incredible. They’ll dream up a hypothesis and force the evidence to fit it. The other thing is, they already knew an awful lot about Anna Lia. They had learned about her separation from Danny before he even showed up. He was on the road. Makes you wonder how private our private lives really are.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Tired. Confused. But yeah, I’m holding up. I can’t cry about it. It doesn’t feel real to me.”

  “Well, don’t worry about the florist, okay?”

  The florist? Already she’d forgotten the flowers. In no time at all, her routines, her daily concerns, had slipped into a former life, the one before today.

  She told him she and Carla were spending the night with Danny in his place. They’d want to speak to the police again early tomorrow morning. She’d try to call him later tonight.

  “Do you want me to come over?” Hugh asked.

  “No. There’s nothing you could do. And I’m all right, really. We just want to be here for Danny.”

  “Okay. Listen, if there’s anything you need, let me know. I can be over there in a flash.”

  “Thanks, Hugh. I love you.”

  “Love you, too. I hope you get some sleep.”

  Danny had collapsed on his bed. Carla closed his bedroom door. In his den, she turned on his TV. The local news would be on in ten minutes. In the meantime, Libbie checked the newspaper. A brief account of the story had made the evening edition of the Chronicle:

  BOMB AT APARTMENT KILLS WOMAN

  A woman who was apparently building a bomb at her southwest Houston apartment was killed when it exploded accidentally early today. The explosion occurred about 3:40 a.m. on the patio of her second-story apartment at the Continental Arms, 8300 Towne Park. Anna Lia Clark, 32, was killed instantly by the explosion which shattered several windows. The damage was confined to her apartment and there was no fire, investigators sa
id.

  The fire part wasn’t true. She read on:

  The explosive device was described by police and fire officials as a pipe bomb, about eight to ten inches long and one inch wide. It was capped at one end and filled with gunpowder. Houston homicide detectives went to the scene where they were joined by investigators from the HPD bomb squad and agents of the FBI. Homicide detective J. C. Marsh said the FBI is routinely called on bomb investigations. Investigators originally believed the bomb might have been planted in the closet of Ms. Clark’s patio. Once the police searched the apartment, however, they discovered several books on bomb-making. Also found were a battery and a clock that police believe the woman planned to attach to the bomb. Detectives said she was wearing a glove on her right hand. A neighbor of Ms. Clark’s, Diane Curry, 22, was sleeping when the explosion woke her up. “I thought it was a gun, then my window cracked and I thought somebody was trying to break in,” she said. “I went to the window and saw some smoke and then heard a thud. I looked up and there she was.” Ms. Clark collapsed on the patio floor after the explosion. She suffered a massive chest injury and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said they had no idea why the woman would build a bomb.

  The reporter must have been on early deadline, Libbie thought: he’d missed the cops’ Revenge Opera. Or maybe the police weren’t ready to release their theory to the press.

  Carla turned up the television. Apparently, Anna Lia was Channel 11’s lead. Their annoying news theme sounded (four computerized notes repeated, up and down like a coffee percolator) against wide-angle shots of Houston. Then the date scrolled across the screen: Tuesday, June 17, 1986.

  Two anchorpersons, female, male, sat stiffly behind a flimsy brown desk. Behind them, the words Apartment Explosion. “Good evening, everyone,” said the man. “Tonight on Eyewitness News, a charity drive by the Houston Fire Department has now been ruled to be against city ordinance. Also, a faulty crane near the University of Houston has injured one construction worker. But topping the news this hour: Houston police tonight say there is no evidence that a woman who lived on the city’s southwest side was involved with any terrorist organization, but the woman was making a homemade bomb—and her scheme to kill her ex-boyfriend literally backfired.”