The Great Leader

In his room he was restless and couldn’t go further with Deloria’s Playing Indian but then he had already been through the book twice and tonight the subject utterly enervated him. Mona had stuck a Donna Leon mystery in his briefcase and he drew it out. He had been absolutely averse to mysteries because of his profession but then, after all, he was retired now and Mona’s recommendation had credibility. He was soon immersed in the mind of Commissario Guido Brunetti and an atmosphere he and Diane had loved during their three days in Venice. He was an hour into the book and having his nightcap deciding to turn out the lights early when an idea hit him with a jolt, not too strong a term. Why not go against all law enforcement ethics and have Mona construct some convincing prosecutor’s office stationery saying to Carla that she will be prosecuted for her conduct with Mona unless she turns evidence against Dwight for sexual abuse of minors? He could show this letter to Nebraska cops and they would come down on Dwight. Why play fair with this scumbag? Of course there was an outside chance he could be caught for forgery but it would be unlikely if he mailed a copy of the letter from Chadron. The idea was amusing enough that he fell asleep thinking of Charlene’s ample ass.

He was awakened at 6:00 a.m. by an uncomfortable dream about Jesus. It started in the Uffizi in Florence where he had been separated from Diane and couldn’t find her and one of the countless lachryma Christi paintings started talking to him in a foreign language, maybe Aramaic, trying to give him directions to find Diane. Jesus alternately smiled and wept but he recognized this Jesus from Bess’s, the old hotel in Grand Marais where the painting of Solomon’s Jesus was covered with a curious glass shutter that allowed a smile or tears from different angles. While eating a double order of pork sausage accompanied by oatmeal as penance Sunderson figured that he was hardwired for Jesus from all the church and Sunday school in his childhood. He doubted that he could go into a church without a sense of irony but then he was a modern man at the crossroads trying to go in all four directions at once.

He drew a lawn chair from his patio up to the locked wrought-iron gate to the street from which he could glass Dwight’s house. When a starched white employee came by he pretended to be bird-watching what with the area being saturated with twitchers. He was, in fact, looking at a tiny olive bird he knew to be a warbler when he segued back to Dwight’s rental where he saw Charlene walking up the porch steps right on schedule at 9:00 a.m. She came out of the house at 9:30 and when she parked in front of the hotel he whistled and waved at the gate. She looked mildly pissed and concerned.

“He tried to get me to blow him.”

“Did you?”

“Fuck you. No. I told him I had a tooth extracted yesterday, the best excuse. He called me a liar but took a rain check. Anyway I’m now a nine-thousand-dollar member. Everyone except two women named Carla and Queenie are camped out by Bonita. They leave at dawn in three days. Men are always saying that they’re leaving at dawn but they rarely do.”

“Where’s Bonita?” It sounded familiar to Sunderson. He wondered how many times he had heard the tooth extraction trick.

“North of Willcox. There’s nothing much there except a state prison. King David said he lived in Willcox a few months as a foster kid. You passed through Bonita on the way to Klondyke and Aravaipa where you camped.”

They went into his room where she seemed quite uncomfortable. This was a disappointment to his hopes for lovemaking. She took a photo out of her purse.

“I can’t make love to you because you look like my Uncle Harvey in Missouri.” She passed him the photo. There was a distinct resemblance over which he felt silly. He thought of saying “just keep your eyes closed” but he knew that pleading was a fatal tactic.

He checked out of the Arizona Inn mostly because Charlene said that Carla and Queenie told her they went there for lunch and the prospect of being seen was ghastly. He stopped at a camping store and bought a cooler and a coffeepot and a cheap summer sleeping bag and then went to an Italian deli called Roma that Charlene had told him about, buying bread, coffee, salami, mortadella, and provolone. The weather channel had said that it would remain warm with no rain in the immediate future.