Verwandte Artikel zu The Music of What Happens

9780553572056: The Music of What Happens
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553572059 ISBN 13: 9780553572056
Verlag: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

A defense investigator working out of Sitka, in the Alaskan coastal archipelago, Cecil Younger walks a narrow line between the truth and what his clients pay him to find....The Music of What Happens.

Younger's got the child custody case from hell, and a client to match.  Shrill, confrontational, and obsessed, Priscilla DeAngelo is sure her ex is conspiring
with a state senator to wrest her son from her.  When she storms off to Juneau for a showdown, Younger's custody case swiftly turns into a murder.  Fired from her defense team, Younger stays with the investigation.  He's not sure what keeps him bulldogging the case--Priscilla's sister, his lost love; his regard
for truth as a rare commodity; or the head injury Priscilla's ex gave him--but he won't let go until it's solved.  

But this time, the truth is less likely to set him free than to get him
killed....

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Straley lives in Sitka, Alaska, with his wife, a marine biologist who studies whales. He is the Shamus Award–winning author of The Angels Will Not Care, The Woman Who Married a Bear, The Curious Eat Themselves, The Music of What Happens, and Death and the Language of Happiness.

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Priscilla had the dental probe pointing directly at my eye. Toddy took one step forward from the corner. He was wringing the long tail of his shirt in both hands. Todd is my roommate and he's about my age in years. There is some debate as to what his mental age is. He put his hand on Priscilla's elbow and whispered to her, "I'll make us something that is exceptionally good. Would you like a cup of hot chocolate with some marshmallows? I could get that for you quickly. Then perhaps we could have some venison soup. Would you like venison soup?"

Priscilla relaxed slightly. Her features softened and the atmosphere seemed to brighten somewhat like the moon coming from behind a cloud on a stormy autumn night. She dropped the probe back on the table. I had tried to pick my own lock with it several weeks back and it had broken off in the key set so now our door stays unlocked all the time. That was fine because the key was lost anyway.

She said, "You don't know what it's like, Cecil. You just don't know what it's like."

That was true. I stood next to Priscilla and gave her a one-armed hug that touched her back and waist lightly. She didn't appear to have anything else tucked in her belt.

"Tell me what it's like," I said.

"It's all his fault. Him and his family. They never wanted me. They never wanted me in that crowd. They think because they've got so many connections they can do anything they want. They're gangsters. I hear now they want to make a deal. That means I'm beating them. I don't care what anyone else says. I'm not dealing with gangsters."

Here the shadow was starting to darken. I released Priscilla and walked closer to Todd out in the kitchen. He was pouring milk into a saucepan.

"Cilia, let's have some cocoa," I said. "We can't think of everything on an empty stomach."

She walked toward me and then right past. She stood in the window that overlooks the channel. My house is built out on pilings and the tide was high so you could hear the water lapping on the boat ramp underneath. She stood by the window and I saw her image reflected on the scene of the harbor: gulls swirling around the fish plant's outfall pipe, a seine skiff with a woman standing in its bow ready to jump to the dock of the marine supply store, the water rippling across the entire pane, highlighting the dark shadows that hung from Priscilla's eyes.

"What kind of deal do they want to make?" I asked her.

"Oh, I don't care. I'm not even going to find out about it. I'm not making any deal." Her fists were clenched. She spoke to the window. "It's just not right. It's just not right that he should have him and not me. My sister says I should compromise. She says I should be reasonable. Reasonable. They can be reasonable."

Priscilla never talked about love. She never used Young Bob's name, in front of me anyway. Priscilla always talked about justice. She was certain of the truth. She wanted rectitude and balance, but I never quite understood why. Or whether, if she got everything she wanted, she would have to invent a whole new personality just to keep her hatred moving.

Todd handed her a cup of chocolate that had marshmallows floating on top. Priscilla was offended by Toddy. Toddy didn't seem to fight against any label. Social workers had given up on the categories. He wasn't retarded, he wasn't classically autistic, and although he had an active and stilted vocabulary, he didn't really fit as an idiot savant. His file had his name on it. He was his own category. I think this is the real reason that Priscilla was uncomfortable with Toddy. He didn't fit into her multilayered conspiracy theories.

She also didn't like Toddy because he was on a vigilant search for the nature of Heaven. This seemed to Priscilla to be not only a waste of time but an irritating and threatening distraction. Todd's mother had died of hypothermia when Todd was a little boy but this didn't keep her from visiting him. She would appear in her old clothes if Todd hung them in a particular way above her shoes. On these visits his mother would tell Todd all about Heaven. Eventually she told him she was worried that he was becoming too concerned with Heaven and that she wanted him to live his life in order. On her last visit, Todd's mother told him always to tell the truth and not to worry. Then she was gone. Her clothes were empty for good, and Todd had no memory of any of the details of Heaven.

Todd took his dead mother's advice about telling the truth very seriously, but he had a struggle because nearly everyone he told his story to didn't believe him. They tried to talk him out of his beliefs. Sometimes he became agitated, but never violent. Todd had been in state custody for several months when I finally managed to become his guardian. Now his two passions were dogs and trying to read every volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He felt certain these were the keys to his remembering Heaven.

But any talk of death seemed to anger Priscilla. She grabbed the hot chocolate and put her back to Todd, speaking to me rapidly.

"Cecil, I want you to bug Judge Gaffney's telephone.

"I'm not going to do that."

"Do you work for me or not?"

"I'm not going to bug the judge's telephone, Priscilla."

"The evidence is there, Cecil. Someone got to the judge. I know it was the Senator. I know it was. All we need is proof."

The shape of Priscilla's conspiracy theory was elegantly abstract. Almost like the recent theories of cosmology. The universe was bowl-shaped and the black holes were not eternal but emitted energy. For Priscilla, the courts, the Legislature, and the Department of Social Services were like black holes. She could never get information out of them and anything that went in funneled down to a secret that was abstract and infinitely dense.

State Senator Wilfred Taylor was such a black hole for her. Priscilla had peppered his office with Freedom of Information Act requests for his journals and his personal phone records. The fact that the records never were produced was proof positive to her they were critically important. I had spoken to Senator Taylor several times. He had been patient at first but later flatly refused to accommodate any request from Priscilla or me. Old Bob Sullivan, Priscilla's former father-in-law, was a friend of Senator Taylor's. Priscilla was convinced that the Senator had used his influence to corrupt Judge Gaffney, who had ruled in Young Bob's custody case. Wilfred Taylor was a state senator from Anchorage, a charming man who was routinely reelected largely on his strengths with big oil and the interior Native corporations. He was also a politically active Christian, who knew that free enterprise was the first of the "family values." I had stood in the hall of the state capitol and shaken his hand. He'd said, smiling, "There is nothing here. Tell Mrs. Sullivan or Miss DeAngelo, if that's who she is, that if this keeps up she will be making more trouble than any of this is worth." He shook my hand with a firm but fleshy grip. Then the elevator bell rang and the Senator moved into the crowd of suits reaching for his elbow.

Priscilla leaned against the top edge of my woodstove. She sipped her hot chocolate and looked thoughtfully down into its sweet steam. Her face changed once again from pleading to stony resolve. She set the cup down on the stove.

"Then I'll take care of this myself."

"Priscilla, you can't bug someone's office. If you end up in jail do you think you'll ever get Young Bob back?"

"Thank you for your concern, Cecil. But you and I are no longer associated in this matter." She was about four and a half...

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Verlag
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553572059
ISBN 13 
9780553572056
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
242
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