Austin Noir by Hopeton Hay

Author:Hopeton Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

SAVING

BY MIRIAM KUZNETS

Rollingwood

Spring 1987

“I’m fixing to ask you questions,” Detective Lee Ferguson said. When his secretary scheduled this meeting, I’d envisioned Ferguson as a potbellied man. Instead, I found him to be a substantial her with close-cropped smoky-gray hair, navy pleated trousers, and oxblood lace-ups.

“Questions? Shoot.” I was wearing my uniform of black tee, Levi’s, and black flip-flops, a Yankee in the Southwest.

Aside from askew diplomas and brass plaques, Ferguson’s office felt homey, decorated with a terra-cotta vase sprouting dried baby’s breath, a menagerie of windup toys, and an ironic poster depicting Day of the Dead masks. She asked whether Olga had a motive to commit suicide or if anyone might have wanted her dead.

“What? Car crash. But you already know that.” I grabbed a windup pig and spun it on her desk.

“If she killed herself, what would her motivation be? Illness? A soured relationship? Erratic moods?”

“She ate and drank life. Lapped it up.” Ferguson’s questions were gouging the flimsy scabs lacing over my grief. “Are you reading from a textbook? That’s like saying that if I killed you, what would my motivation be? I haven’t murdered you, and I have no intention of doing so.” Not yet, thought I, the pacifist. “I knew her for decades.” I’d even defended Olga when she’d lured away my college boyfriend two decades back.

The whir of the windup pig was trickling away, and I rewound it. A hint of Crest toothpaste wafted through the claustrophobic office. I used Colgate.

“I understand your shock and anger,” Ferguson drawled, hauling out the five-stages-of-grief nonsense. Psych 101 had taught me that the grief stages were developed to describe what someone with a terminal illness might experience, and only later were the stages sloppily applied to someone mourning. Anyway, grief couldn’t be fewer than ten thousand stages.

Ferguson was waving an expensive-looking pen back and forth, a sketchy hypnotic pendulum. Nonetheless, I was a dupe. I began to succumb to the intrusive images that jangled like those in all those noir films I’d first studied at NYU. Ferguson’s pen back and forth.

For the past two decades, Olga had been living testimony that I existed as a seventeen-year-old. She’d sparked the rooms that I’d slouched through way back when. We’d both known the stairs with the shaky bannister leading to her posh apartment with its fireplace and the wood floors painted four coats of impractical glossy snow-white. Olga and I had frequented the warm bakery near the college, the bakery that had since morphed into a generic Radio Shack. An hour before closing, she and I would arrive at Piece of Cake and though Olga had wads of cash stuffed into the pocket of her cigarette pants, we’d split a small coffee. The bakery manager, who of course had a crush on Olga, would sidle up to our table, offering free food. While we plucked the fresh blueberries off the top of the tarts, while we devoured slivers of cream-cheesy frosting from the carrot cake, we’d listen to the manager prattle on about Bob Dylan.

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