The Triggerman Dance

It was Menden who broke the meditation. "Have you had any contact from the shooters? Anyone making a claim to it—a note or a call—anything?"

Weinstein's attention snapped back to the present. "Eighty-six letters, twelve postcards and a hundred and fourteen calls. They surprised me. I knew Orange County was conservative, but I didn't know there was that much hatred, just under the surface. Hatred and fear. Exactly one letter seemed credible to us, the rest were unconnected—we're pretty sure. We've followed up most of them as best we can—most of them aren't signed. The one we take seriously is from some people calling themselves 'The Freedom Ring.' It was computer-generated, on a nice sheet of twenty-five percent cotton bond paper. Here's a photocopy."

Weinstein removed a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. John Menden downed the fresh shot, then pushed his beer and shot glasses out of the way. He flattened the paper against the table.

Rebecca was a mistake and we are sorry. Baum is the tumor we tried to remove.

What happened to Miss Harris can happen to anyone who seeks to abridge our rights.

We will not have the foundations of America torn down by people who prosper under our system, only to disrespect it.

—The Freedom Ring

Menden handed the sheet back to Joshua, who folded it into his coat pocket. "Well, Mr. Weinstein, do you have a suspect, or don't you?"

"We do."

Weinstein looked at Sharon Dumars as he said this, and registered with some satisfaction the astonishment on her face. She ingested the news like a bad taste, then shook back her dark wavy hair with a toss of her head and lifted the beer glass to her mouth with extreme knowingness. She is learning, he thought, but right now her galvanics would send a polygraph into fits.

"But I can't know who it is," said Menden.

Weinstein looked at John, then centered his beer glass before

him.

"No," he said. "You can't know that. . . yet."

Menden shrugged and sat back. "Then why are you here?"

"I'm here, Mr. Menden, because you want to listen to me."

Menden raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation, then let them down again. "Why do I want to listen to you? With this whole world full of people with their stories to tell and their axes to grind, why do I need to hear yours?"

His tone of voice and his eyes were so placid now that Sharon Dumars couldn't tell if Menden was cunning, innocent, or possibly, just plain stupid. The alcohol seemed to fortify his mask.

"Because you were in love with Rebecca, you smug sonofabitch."

Sharon Dumars emitted a tiny breath, then coughed to cover it. She couldn't take her eyes off of Weinstein. His ears—those wonderful Ichabod Crane ears of his—were a molten red now. The poor man was as tumultuous inside as a volcano. And his thirsty dark eyes fixed onto John's face and didn't let go. They seemed to be trying to locate something almost invisibly small. Yet Menden returned the long assessment with a gaze of utter calm. Weinstein was the active, Menden the passive; Weinstein the river, and Menden the rock against which it raged.

"I," Josh continued, "was engaged to her, as you read in the papers. And while I was, you were courting her at the Journal offices, where you both worked. You talked to her, you lunched with her, and later, you entertained her in your home on Sun Valley Drive in Laguna Canyon. You felt something for her that you believed you had never felt for a woman before. You did love her, didn't you? I don't see how you couldn't. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my whole life. It was easier than breathing. I'm not wrong, am I?"

When Dumars managed to look across to John Menden, his expression had not changed. She looked hard at him, but for all her training and perspicacity, for all of the reverberating context that she now understood, she could not read any reaction at all. It was almost unbelievable. Was he a sociopath? A psychotic? Was Joshua quite simply wrong?

"Don't answer," said Weinstein. "What you answer doesn't matter to me, because I know what happened and I know the truth. The truth, Mr. John Menden, is that Rebecca was in love with you, too. Surprised? Then certainly it's a pleasant surprise. Remember the picture they ran, of Rebecca in the rain by the planter? Of course you do. You were in it, though you weren't recognizable. Didn't you wonder why her left hand was naked, why the ring she'd worn for eight months was suddenly gone? I'll tell you. She took it off that morning and gave it back to me. She said she couldn't, there was someone else. She cried. She didn't just cry, she raged. She stormed. That night, the night after she died, I went to her apartment and found two letters she'd written. Here's yours."

Weinstein produced a smallish envelope, pink with a faint floral pattern, and set it on the table. It was sealed. On top of the envelope, he set something small that shined warmly even in the dim light of Olie's Saloon.