Matter of fact, she was the only black woman he had ever known, the only woman of whatever color he ever hoped to know in the near or distant future. He considered it fortunate that she felt the same way about him, that somehow in this troubled tribal universe, two people from very definitely different tribes had met and decided to give it an honest shot. He thought it miraculous, and so did she, that in the face of overwhelming odds, they were actually making a go of it. Just think of it. A little colored girl from Diamondback grows up to be a deputy police chief, and a white boy on a bicycle he won grows up to be a police detective, and in this hurried hating city, they find each other. And fall in love with each other. Go tell that to your Hutus and Tutsis, your Albanians and Serbs, your Arabs and Jews.
They both knew that the God, Country, and Brotherhood bit they’d each and separately had drummed into their heads in school wasn’t quite where it was at today. They were a black woman and a white man living together in the real world. What they shared was not some idealistic democratic sentiment premised on alikeness. They knew that much of what they felt for each other had to do with identical likes and dislikes, yes, but that really wasn’t all of it. They had similar senses of humor, yes, and they were in the same line of work, more or less, and yes, they had the same tastes in movies and books and plays and they both liked basketball and they both voted identically and yearned for a house and three kids if that was in their future somewhere-but this was America, you know, and so they wondered and worried about that future, and were cautious about wishing too hard for it. In the darkness of the night, where there was no color or lack of color, if they ever thought about whether their samenesses had created the strong and unusual bond between them, they each and separately might have concluded that it had also been their differences.
They were not color blind.
Any white or black person in America who told you he or she was color blind was lying.
In fact, Kling had been attracted to her because she was black and beautiful and he was curious, and Sharyn had been attracted to him because he was so goddamn blond and white and good-looking and forbidden. There were differences between them that spanned continents and oceans and spoke of jungle drums and sailing ships and slaves in chains and white men bartering in open markets and blood on the snow and blood on the stars and blood mixing with blood until blood became meaningless. These very differences brought them closer together. In each other’s arms, in each other’s lives, they shared an intimacy each had never known before, Kling not with any other woman, ever, Sharyn not with any other man, ever.
“A black and white bicycle, huh?” she said.
“Black with white trim.”
“You sure it wasn’t white with black trim?”
“I’m sure.”
“You know what trim is?”
“I know.”
“You know what black trim is?”
“I know.”
“How come you know such dirty things?”
“How come I love you so much?” he asked.
“Sweet talker,” she said.
“You love me, too?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said.
When they went to see Norman Zimmer again, they were prepared to threaten him with a grand-jury subpoena. Instead, he seemed ready to cooperate. This was now Friday morning, the third day of December. They had last seen him on Tuesday. They assumed he’d had time since then to talk to his lawyer, and fully realized the folly of impeding a homicide investigation.
They sat in his corner office overlooking Stemmler Avenue and Stockwell Street. On The Stem, six stories below, thick traffic crawled by.
Even with the windows closed, they could hear the incessant honking of horns, an annoyance specifically prohibited by law in this city. Here in the privacy of his own office, Zimmer nonetheless projected as if trying to reach the last row in the second balcony, his booming voice easily overriding the traffic noises floating up from below.
“I’m sorry I was so short with you when you popped in the other day,” he said. “But we were just starting auditions, and I’m afraid I was a bit on edge. Things have calmed down a bit now. Ask me anything you’d like.”
He was dressed the way he’d been on that last day of November, the suit brown this time, the shirt a sort of ivory color, the jacket again draped over his chair, the tie pulled down, the sleeves rolled up, the suspenders picking up the color of the tie again, which was a sort of rust-colored knit. A big man, Mrs Kipp had said. Very big.
“First of all,” Carella said, “these rights.”
“The rights,” Zimmer repeated.
“Describe them.”
“Long story.”
“We have time.”
“I’m not sure I do,” Zimmer said, and looked at his watch the way he had on Tuesday. The detectives thought for a fleeting moment they might have to get that grand-jury subpoena after all. Zimmer took a deep breath.
