Undue Influence by Steve Martini Page B

friend’s. She uses me,” he says, “like for wheels. It’s not that I mind,” he says. But I can tell he’s embarrassed, performing shuttle duties for his sister, who is two years younger, to her boyfriend’s house. Unlike her brother, Julie’s social plane is pressurized, and designed to fly in the stratosphere. She dates boys older than Danny, guys who think nothing of calling her at ten to have her over at eleven. Julie is a honey-blonde, with blue eyes, good bones, and a feminine form that is ripening faster than her ability to reason. She is learning all too quickly that good looks, rather than good works, can often get you what you want. The downsides, the temptations of excess and the price to be paid, still elude the telemetry of her radar. At thirteen she is the sexual equivalent of a toddler with a nuclear warhead. Were I Julie’s father, I would have my broker investing heavily in a nunnery. I put the soup in front of Danny, no ladle, just a bowl, microwave hot.
    I draw up a chair across from him at the table. “There’s something I have to talk to you about.”
    He’s spooning it down, looking up at me with doelike eyes. His cap is politely off, on the table next to his dish with crackers. “There was an accident tonight at your dad’s house. A bad accident. A shooting,” I say. He takes the spoon away from his mouth, and still holding it, rests forearm and utensil on the table. The spoon is shaking at its tip. “Is my dad all right?” He’s looking at me wide-eyed.
    With all the anguish of an open custody battle, and Jack’s short temper with the boy, Danny still cares about his father. “Your dad’s fine.”
    He starts to eat again.
    “But Melanie is dead,” I say.
    He stops for a moment and looks at me, swallows hard. There was no love lost with Melanie, the usual friction of kids with a stepparent. But still I can tell that he is rattled by this news. To the young, life is an infinite, never-ending party. Even for kids like Danny, who live outside the loop of their peers, death is a vagrant who wanders another street. I had watched him at Nikki’s funeral. To Danny it was something surreal to have known someone, to have talked to and touched someone who was no longer with us. “How’d it happen?” he asks.
    “They don’t know for sure. The police are still investigating.”
    “The cops?” he says.
    “They investigate any cause of death that is not natural,” I tell him.
    “Oh I guess so,” he says.
    He’s back to the spoon. But I can tell things are rattling around upstairs under that mop of hair. “I guess Dad’s pretty shook up.”
    “You could say that.”
    I don’t tell him that the police are looking to question his mother. He will find out soon enough. I can hope that in the interim, circumstances might conspire to put her in the clear. Little sense in worrying the kid until I know more. “Are you okay?” I say. I’m eyeing him as this news goes down with the soup to be digested. “The wax,” he says, “is it white, pretty clear?”
    “For the model,” he says.
    “Ah. Yeah. In a block,” I say. “A white block, as I remember.”
    “Will you help me find it first thing?” he says.
    “Sure. Eat and get some sleep.” Earth to Danny. The kid is off on a frequency of his own. What is left of my family is coming apart, and Danny Vega is worried about wax. This morning I am running on adrenaline and something that looks like the discharge from the Exxon Valdez. I take a sip and my tongue curls like a slug in death throes. An hour’s sleep in a night can do funny things to your eyes. I wonder if maybe the sign over the little drive-in stall read “Esso” instead of “Espresso.”
    When I arrive, Harry Hinds is in my office, borrowing my morning paper.
    Harry has an office down the hall. We share a library and reception services and have talked about a partnership. It’s one of those things, we talk, but neither of us is willing to make the first move.