Motherless Brooklyn

“I’m on the giant’s tail,” I said, squeezing out the words. “Well, not actually on his tail, but I know where he’s going.”

“You’re still looking for your giant,” she said thoughtfully. “Because you feel bad about that guy Frank who got killed, is that right?”

“No. Yes.”

“You make me sad, Lionel.”

“Why?”

“You seem so, I don’t know, guilty.”

“Listen, Kimmery. I called because-Missmebailey!-because I missed you. I mean, I miss you.”

“That’s a funny thing to say. Um, Lionel?”

“Yes?”

“Did you take my keys?”

“It was part of my investigation. Forgive me.”

“Okay, whatever, but I thought it was pretty creepy.”

“I didn’t mean anything creepy by it.”

“You can’t do that kind of thing. It freaks people out, you know?”

“I’m really sorry. I’ll bring them back.”

She was quiet again. I coursed in the fast lane with a band of other speeders, every so often slipping to the right to let an especially frantic one go by. The highway driving had begun to inspire a Touretic fantasy, that the hoods and fenders of the cars were shoulders and collars I couldn’t touch. I had to keep adequate distance so I wouldn’t be tempted to try to brush up against those gleaming proxy bodies.

I hadn’t seen any sign of either Tony or the giant, but I had reason to hope that Tony at least was already behind me. The giant would have to stop for gas if he hadn’t, and that was when I would pass him.

“I’m going to a place you might know about,” I said. “Yoshii’s. A retreat.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said grudgingly, curiosity winning over her anger. “I always wanted to go there. Roshi said it was really great.”

“Maybe-”

“What?”

“Maybe sometime we’ll go together.”

“I should get off the phone, Lionel.”

The call had made me anxious. I ate the second of the roast-beef sandwiches. Massachusetts looked the same as Connecticut.

I called her back.

“What did you mean by guilty?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, Lionel. It’s just, I’m not really sure about this investigation. It seems like you’re just running around a lot trying to keep from feeling sad or guilty or whatever about this guy Frank.”

“I want to catch the killer.”

“Can’t you hear yourself? That’s like something O. J. Simpson would say. Regular people, when someone they know gets killed or something they don’t go around trying to catch the killer. They go to a funeral.”

“I’m a detective, Kimmery.” I almost said, I’m a telephone. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know. I just can’t really accept it.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I thought detectives were more, uh, subtle.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of detectives in movies or on television.” I was a fine one to be explaining this distinction. “On TV they’re all the same. Real detectives are as unalike as fingerprints, or snowflakes.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m trying to make you laugh,” I said. “I’m glad you noticed. Do you like jokes?”

“You know what koans are? They’re like Zen jokes, except they don’t really have punch lines.”

“What are you waiting for? I’ve got all day here.” In truth the highway had grown fat with extra lanes, and complicated by options and merges. But I wasn’t going to interrupt Kimmery while things were going so well, ticless on my end, bubbly with digressions on hers.

“Oh, I can never remember them, they’re too vague. Lots of monks hitting each other on the head and stuff.”

“That sounds hilarious. The best jokes usually have animals in them, I think.”

“There’s plenty of animals. Here-” I heard a rustle as she braced the phone between her shoulder and chin and paged through a book. I’d had her in the middle of the big empty room-now I adjusted the picture, envisioned her with the phone stretched to reach the bed, perhaps with Shelf on her lap. “So these two monks are arguing over a cat and this other monk cuts the cat in half-Oh, that’s not very nice.”

“You’re killing me. I’m busting a gut over here.”

“Shut up. Oh, here, this is one I like. It’s about death. So this young monk comes to visit this old monk to ask about this other, older monk who’s just died. Tendo, that’s the dead monk. So the young monk is asking about Tendo and the old monk says stuff like ‘Look at that dog over there’ and ‘Do you want a bath?’-all this irrelevant stuff. It goes on like that until finally the young monk is enlightened.”

“Enlightened by what?”

“I guess the point is you can’t really say anything about death.”

“Okay, I get it. It’s just like in Only Angels Have Wings, when Cary Grant’s best friend Joe crashes his plane and dies and then Rosalind Russell asks him ‘What about Joe?’ and “Aren’t you going to do anything about Joe?’ and Cary Grant just says, ‘Who’s Joe?’ ”

“Speaking of watching too much movies and television.”

“Exactly.” I liked the way the miles were flying past for me now, ticless, aloft on Kimmery’s voice, the freeway traffic thinning.

The moment I observed the way our talk and my journey were racing along, though, we lapsed into silence.