Woman with a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine Page A

his good hand, Sumida took a drink of water. “Tell me what happened when you went to the precinct.”
    Czernicek shrugged. “Everybody there acted like they didn’t know me.”
    â€œâ€˜Acted’ like they didn’t know you or . . . didn’t know you?”
    â€œYeah, that’s the question, Hamlet,” Czernicek said. “Do I be or don’t I be?”
    Sumida was surprised that Czernicek was capable of playfully appropriating Shakespeare. And he was disturbed by the appropriation—it was more than merely playful. It was the same question he’d been asking himself.
    But didn’t their recognizing one another put it to rest?
    Why did it feel to Sumida like the answer might still be no?
    â€œOf course, stranger yet was that I didn’t recognize any of them,” Czernicek said as he mindlessly picked out sugar cubes, one at a time, from a porcelain container next to the salt and paper shakers, lining the cubes in rows of six, parallel to the edge of the Formica tabletop before him. “Still, I walked across the homicide department toward my office, greeting these imposters as if they were compadres. At first, they ignored me, confused. When I got to my office door I found my name wasn’t on it anymore. That’s when two of them grabbed me by the arms and threw me out like I was some kind of crazy civilian. I’ll get the bastards, in time. You can count on that. But first I got to figure out what’s going on.”
    Sumida nodded.
    â€œWhat about you?” Czernicek asked.
    Sumida reviewed his own facts from the last eighteen hours, starting with the breaking of the film at the movie house. Of course, he left a few things out of his story. Like his visit to his home in Echo Park, where, according to the morning news on the car radio, Tony Fortuna had been killed. Who was to say that Czernicek wasn’t putting all this on just to get him to confess to the crime? And Sumida also left out his visit to the cemetery, as he didn’t want to bring up Kyoko’s name—not with the man who’d considered her insufficiently important to take finding her killer seriously. Sumida couldn’t afford to get tangled up in that resentment again. Not when Czernicek seemed his best hope to figure out what was happening. But he told Czernicek about his parking claim check at the downtown lot being two months old and about his aunt and uncle’s house now being occupied by strangers.
    â€œI was sitting in a coffee shop last night reading a book,” Czernicek said. “Hemingway’s new one, For Whom the Bell Tolls . I’d just bought it at Williams’ Book Store in San Pedro. Not even ten pages in . . .”
    â€œI wouldn’t have pegged you for a reader,” Sumida interrupted.
    Czernicek glared at him.
    â€œBeing a man of action, I mean,” Sumida added.
    â€œThere’s plenty of action in Hemingway,” Czernicek observed. Then he returned to lining up the sugar cubes in rows. “Suddenly, the lights in the coffee shop flicker. And then all the electricity goes out. Blackness. Even outside through the big picture windows. No moonlight, starlight, nothing. Just like you describe in the movie house. Only for a second or two. And when the light comes back on I’m still sitting in the booth with the book in my hand, like nothing’s changed, except that everybody in the place is different.”
    â€œDifferent?”
    Czernicek began to stack the parallel lines of sugar cubes atop one another, forming a wall three or four inches high in front of him. “I mean a whole set of different people, at the counter and in the booths. And then my regular waitress, who’s the reason I put up with the crap food at this place, comes over and asks for my order. As if she ever has to ask. Hell, I order the same thing every time I go there: chicken fried steak. Just like I always get the pastrami