“Finally, a redeeming feature,” I said.
An amiable laugh. Matt cared as little as I did about organized sports, denying that it was because he didn’t make the team in high school. When the debating coach gets as much stipend and attention as the soccer coach, maybe our educational system won’t be an embarrassment, was our sweeping, collective opinion. All the world’s problems had simple solutions on a stroll by the ocean.
The evening was peaceful, the weather mild, and we agreed to keep our conversation equally serene. No talk of disease, diagnosis, or treatment, though I’d revisited all my health-related bookmarks. No talk of buckyballs, though I’d given myself a crash course from Internet sources, to update myself. Not even a strategy session on our next day’s meeting with Lorna Frederick.
We cut down a side street to Ocean Avenue, which ran behind the boulevard, where we’d parked Matt’s Camry. We’d covered about a mile and a quarter in all. I wanted to stretch out distance and time, to keep my senses full of the salt-air smells and the sound of the surf, to block out the real-life space-time coordinates that would throw us back into the universe of murder and disease—both too close to home.
Matt started the car, rolled into the northbound lane. “We’ve got some challenges ahead,” he said, as if he’d been in touch with my soul. “And, lucky us, we get to work on them together.”
“Lucky us,” I said. Lucky me.
I thought I’d walked into a catalog for horse owners—Lorna Frederick’s office was teeming with images of horses. Posters of horses; horse sculptures; horse designs on her wastebasket, pencil holder, and lamp shade; photographs of herself with horses and on horses. In one framed snapshot, Lorna, who looked about thirty-five or forty—too old to be jumping over fences in my opinion—was wearing a fitted black jacket and helmet and white pants. I was sure there was a special name for the pants. The word “jodhpurs” came to mind, but that might be those bright, silk outfits that racing jockeys wore, I thought.
Lorna, in person, wore a striking blue knit dress, utterly out of sync with the ranch-like atmosphere of her office. Over her shoulders she’d hung a shawl, or a stole, or at least a large piece of fabric in blues and purples. When she stood to greet us, the beaded fringes on the ends clanked against her telephone. I’d seen such arrays on models in magazine ads, but never on anyone I knew, and certainly not on anyone working in a laboratory. It looked as practical as a prom dress at a rodeo. But what did I know about rodeos? I asked myself. Amazing how I was being carried away lately by images of the Wild West. Texas, big as it was, was forcing its way into my world.
I found myself wishing we could arrest Lorna for fashion violation, to get her outfit off the streets. But in the less-than-perfect world Matt and I were in, we introduced ourselves and began the slow process of gleaning information.
“Sit down. Make yourselves comfortable,” Lorna said from behind her desk, with a flare to match her outfit. Her face was pinched together vertically, too small for her body; her light hair, many shades of blond, was short and curled unnaturally at the edges. “It’s not every day I get a visit from Revere’s finest. My secretary neglected to say what brings you here, but you are welcome to my humble office.”
Humble, indeed.
Matt, in the brown suit he wore every Tuesday, nodded his thanks and pointed to the display case of ribbons on the wall behind her desk. Blue, red, yellow, white, all with gold letters spelling something I couldn’t make out. I’d seen the raw materials when I’d reluctantly accompanied Rose to a party-supply store one time, and wondered how you could tell which ones were legitimate.
“Very impressive,” Matt said. There was no way Lorna could know that the police detective in front of her was afraid of large animals, horses in particular. I’d found this out through George Berger. Matt and I had sat with him and his wife at a department party, and he’d related an anecdote about how the rookie Matt Gennaro had refused to mount a police horse for a Veteran’s Day parade. He’d been able to make a deal with his captain, that he’d close at least three cold cases that week if they’d let him off parade duty. He’d closed four. Matt held a smug smile through the telling of the story.
“It’s department legend,” Berger said, when I asked him how he knew this, since he was much younger and couldn’t have known Matt in his early years with RPD.
Lorna sat down and picked up a photo from her desk, herself on a speckled gray-and-black horse. “This is Degas, my Appaloosa, one of my favorites. He’s won me one ribbon after another. Not many people realize Edgar Degas painted and sculpted horses as well as ballerinas.” Lorna leaned back, steepled her fingers. “I’ve been a horsewoman since I was eight years old. Cleaned stalls in exchange for lessons, and now I own more horses than my first instructor at Sunset Ranch did.”