Home Free by Sonnjea Blackwell

to
help. Unless she knew who had started the fire, I didn’t
know what that would be.
    Kevin showed up around dinnertime Monday
night, still looking like hell. I was on the phone when he came in.
I had finally caved in and answered. I mouthed the word Mom, and he
shook his head no and went in search of food.
    Twenty minutes later, I joined him on the
patio.
    “That was painful.”
    “Sorry, I’ve been avoiding her all day.
What’d she say?”
    “Well, the upshot was that it was really
inconsiderate of you to get yourself implicated in a murder
investigation in the middle of Brian’s election campaign.”
    He rolled his eyes and sipped his beer.
     
    I woke up the next morning and threw myself
into work again, trying to take my mind off of the obvious. The
phone calls had subsided but my concentration hadn’t improved. It
had only been a couple days since the fire, and already the police
investigation seemed to have stalled. The paper reported that Kevin
and Danny were still the only suspects. I was frustrated that the
cops seemed content with that idea without any concrete evidence. I
doodled on scratch paper, scanned some images into Photoshop and
played with some lettering. I looked at the computer screen after
awhile and saw that, for the Harbor Area’s Garden Tour poster I had
designed a cemetery with flames shooting out of a newly-dug grave.
I sighed. Probably not the look they were going for. Murphy came by
about that time and asked how I was doing.
    “Shitty, you?”
    “Fair to middlin’. Weird stuff going on
around here lately.” The master of understatement. He asked if I
wanted to have dinner later and I accepted, and he lumbered away to
do something handy.
    I could see I wasn’t going to be able to work
until I had some answers, so I called Pauline at work. She was an
account supervisor at the telephone company. Until the end of the
cold war, there had been an Air Force Base about seven miles from
Minter. When the government downsized defense and the base was
closed, a federal prison and the west coast regional office of the
telephone company had moved onto the property. Pauline had been
transferred from San Francisco two years ago when the move took
place, despite vows similar to mine of self-mutilation rather than
ever returning to Minter. Her office was now where the officer’s
club used to be, and she complained that at the end of her workday,
she smelled of beer and cigars.
    “Pauline Horowitz.”
    “If I wanted to find out if somebody called
somebody else at a certain time, what would I have to do?”
    “Hello. First of all, have a warrant. Then,
the phone number of the person who was called. With that, you could
get a list of incoming calls for a particular time period. You
could cross-check those numbers to come up with the name of the
person who the account is registered to, but of course, that
doesn’t necessarily mean that’s who placed the call.”
    “Okay, thanks. Hey, I’m having dinner with
Murphy tonight. That okay with you?” They had dated, after all,
even if it was over a decade ago. It seemed polite to ask. I
figured the first date was more of a business meeting and hadn’t
required explicit permission.
    “Fine by me. You know that giant truck he
drives?”
    Oh boy. “Yeah?”
    “He’s not compensating.”
    Oh boy.
    I minimized the Photoshop screen and clicked
the internet explorer icon and went to Google. I found an online
white pages directory, typed in Salazar, Daniel in the name
box and Minter, California in the location box. A few
seconds later, I had the listing, showing two phone numbers and an
email address, but no street or mailing addresses. I copied down
the phone numbers and logged off. I called Pauline’s cell phone and
left a message on her voice mail. You can’t trust those phone
company people.
    “Pauline, it’s me. I need you to check these
numbers for calls made Saturday night between nine and eleven
o’clock.” I gave both numbers and hung up.