The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller Read online

  The jumbo swallow was headed for our side again. I told Ray the bird’s beak was the wrong color. Let him know, Ray said. So I did, amateur birder that I am. “Your bill should be yellow,” I called, and immediately regretted it.

  The giant swallow froze and glared at me, folded a wing onto his hip, and said, “I beg your P-A-R-DON?!” He touched his holster. I shrank back, and with that the critter was well appeased, for he whirled again and went for a troop of small Indians alongside a rickety covered wagon with the word BUCKAROOS painted on the canvas, but not before flipping his long, dragging, split tail at us.

  “Mooned by a swallow,” I said.

  “I hate a parade,” said Ray. He was out of his usual beige-and-khaki California Highway Patrol uniform, wearing instead the outfit of the Fiesta Posse: white shirt, black hat, jeans, and boots, and a bolo cinched by a blob of turquoise. If he were of a mind today, he’d haul off any man found clean-shaven or any outlaw of either sex found drinking nonalcoholic beverages or not wearing Western attire. They’d be thrown in the hoosegow—husgado, Ray called it—till they could pay their dollar fines and be set free.

  But by the look of it, Ray would do no more than tip his hat to the ladies and be the handsome cop-dude he was. Ray is funny, naughty, sexy and single, my friend and only my friend, though sometimes there’s a lot of flirting going on. Not to flirt, to Ray, is not to breathe. “Where’s Sanders?” he said. “He owes me a beer.”

  “Joe’s bringing his son,” I said. “I’m a little nervous. ‘The other woman’ thing.”

  “You’re not the other woman.”

  “His parents break up after twenty-three years of marriage and then there’s this, this—”

  “—babe,” Ray offered.

  “—in his dad’s life.”

  “You know it wasn’t that way.”

  “Does that help a kid deal with it?” I said. “I don’t know.”

  Behind the buckaroos came a pitiful-sounding junior high school band, the girls with flat chests and orange legs from choosing the wrong shade of panty hose. Close on their heels a herd of dogs in cowboy scarves towed volunteers from the animal shelter by leashes.

  Ray said, “What’s David now, twenty? He’s way more interested in his own next piece of ass than his father’s.”

  “Thanks for framing it so delicately.” Ray formed his middle finger into a circle with his thumb and moved it toward me as if to flick me on side of the head. “Watch it,” I said.

  “I could give a dink about the rest of this,” he said. “Where’s those Soiled Doves they promised?” He let his gaze follow a woman astride an ebony horse whose hair matched her horse’s color. She was dressed in a turn-of-the-century green velvet dress. The gleaming strands of the mount’s tail spilled to the blacktop, then broke for another six inches like dark water over a fall. For a reason I didn’t know I flashed on the scene with Nita Estevez in the Santa Ana hovel.

  When Ray hiked up on a low stone wall and sat there banging his boots against the rock, I joined him. “I almost didn’t make it today. I had a callout this morning in Irvine, off Alton. Single round to the head.”

  “Gang stuff? I’m tellin’ ya, we should build a camp. Shut down San Onofre Nuclear Plant, put all the wetbacks down there cleanin’ it up, no spacesuits to wear. Fry their frijoles.”

  “How can you say that? Your ancestors were from over the border.”

  “My ancestors didn’t have any border—comprende? You guys stole California and made up a border.”

  “Get over it,” I said.

  He rubbed his hand over my back. “Mm. No bra.”

  “Come on. Let’s see if Joe’s here yet,” I said. We threaded through the crowd, which thickened near makeshift mercados displaying souvenirs, and made our way to the front of a saloon called The Swallow’s Inn. Men and women stood jammed in the doorway holding beers. The women wore lacy garter belts over their jeans and the men sported giant brass sheriff’s badges and hats slid high on their foreheads.

  Ray said he’d forge one way looking for Joe and I could take the other. A woman squeezed by Ray with an appreciative look. She wore a shirt printed like the Classified ads, one circled in red: “Cowboy Wanted.”

  I detoured to the room where the band was playing for all it was worth and dancers had about a foot to move in. Glued to the ceiling were tin buckets, tractor seats, boots, ballet slippers, and a naked, chubby toy doll with a cigarette dangling from her rosebud lips. I didn’t see Joe and came back up to the main room, then spied him in a line by the restrooms. He was with his son. David looked like him. Taller, maybe six feet, but his blue eyes were Joe’s and his hair was a mass of dark curls already shot with silver. He wore white jeans and a brick-colored Western shirt to his dad’s blue denim. David shook my hand, and if there was anything readable in his eyes having to do with me being his dad’s girlfriend, I missed it.

  Ray came up on the side, and Joe introduced him too. “Don’t mess with these two,” Joe said. “They’ll pop you for ripping labels off pillows.” Ray was eye-flirting with every woman within ten feet.

  I asked if I should order them something while they were standing in line. Joe cut his hand across his eyebrows, full to there, while David shook his head no. “Okay, see you in a minute,” I said, and headed for the bar just as a woman tapped Ray on the elbow and nodded toward the dance floor. Next time I looked, the two were scrunched among the born to boogie, making moves to “Teach Your Children” by the Red Hots. I snagged a beer, then worked my way outside.

  The courtyard in back contained a jacaranda tree in purple bud, surrounded by a wrought-iron bench with no one on it. I grabbed it and watched smoke from a wagon-type grill off to the side ascend into the air as a hefty man in an apron turned patties.

  When I looked back at the doorway, Joe’s son was framed there. A woman in a shirt that said BITE ME noticed him too. David stepped down and came and sat on the bench alongside me, leaning forward with a hand at the end of one knee.

  “So what do you think?” I said.

  “About what?”

  “This shindig.”

  He shrugged, then straightened and leaned back.

  “Your dad tells me you’re attending U.C. Irvine,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “How’s it going? You like it?”

  Two nods is what I got for an answer this time. I took a stick of gum out of my shirt pocket and offered him one. He took it, then neatly re-folded the foil wrapper to tuck it back into the outer one the way his father did. I wondered why he came to sit by me at all and decided to be quiet and let what would emerge, emerge. Finally he said, “This isn’t about you.”

  I said, “I’m sorry?”

  “You work with my dad, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You see a lot of things.”

  “You could say so.”

  “Let me ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The tip of his boot jostled a clutch of gray sow bugs in the grass between the patio bricks. The smallest tanks tucked into themselves like beads; the biggest tried to lumber away. David deliberately blocked it until it, too, curled shut. Then he pulled in his legs and leaned forward, not making eye contact with me. His voice was low and weighted when he said, “Did you ever find yourself having to…like, roll over on somebody?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Roll over on someone. Rat someone out.”

  I paused a moment. “It’s not something I usually think about on our side of the line. Why?” He just met me. Why wasn’t he talking to his dad if he had something on his mind?

  Ray appeared in the back door holding a beer, scanning the area till he saw us. I raised a hand behind David’s back to signal “Stop,” and he nodded and stepped back in.

  “Your dad loves you a lot, you know,” I said.

  David stood. “Is there a phone around somewhere?”

  “We can go find out.”

  �
�No, that’s okay.”

  I’d lost him. “Wait,” I said. “I think I know where one might be.” We went out onto the sidewalk, where a woman in traditional Spanish costume with flowing skirts and mantilla led three little girls in similar dress ahead of us until we crossed the street. We headed for a restaurant converted from a railroad freight car, where I waited on the wooden platform while David went in. From a tree limb above me, a brown towhee in his creamy bib and dark necklace made sounds like a coin falling into a pot.

  The boards under me moved and I heard a deep sigh and knew it was David. “All set?” I asked. He gave a quick nod but didn’t move. “Want to walk? You could buy your girlfriend an Indian necklace or something.”

  “I don’t feel like looking at things.”

  We headed for the shade of the sycamore Ray and I had stood under a while ago, only now we were a level above the street. There, we sat at an old picnic table at the edge of a vocational school. Signatures, dates, gang signs, and obscenities were cut into the tabletop. David pulled a twig from a crack in the table and began scoring its bark with a thumbnail. “Question,” he said.

  “Fire away.”

  “You’ve got a friend…”

  “One or two.”

  “This person’s real smart. He’s twenty-six and already has half a mil in the bank.”

  “Sounds like a good friend to have.”

  “Maybe this friend—hypothetically, now…”

  “Sure.”

  “Say he’s into something he shouldn’t be. Like, illegal.”

  “Would that be drugs?” I thought he was clamming up again, but then he said no. “This thing. Would it be threatening to you?” Behind him, a boy crossing the playing field balanced a soccer ball on his upturned fingers.

  David flicked the twig away. “That’s not exactly it.”

  “Have you confronted him?”

  “It’s not like that. I can’t…bring it up to him. It’s complicated.”

  “Is there someone on campus you can talk to?”

  Now his eyes searched mine as if finding something different in each one. He looked so forlorn I wanted to reach out my hand and touch him on a shoulder, but I grew timid. He got up and moved to the tree and stood there, the back of his shirt forming a rusty wedge down to his waist. I went to stand next to him. Below, the parade crowd had thinned. “Whatever it is that’s troubling you, David, I think you should tell your dad.”

  “Don’t say anything to him, please,” he said urgently.

  “There’s nothing to tell, now is there?”

  “Just don’t say anything.”

  “I won’t. But eventually it’s best to get it out in the air.”

  Hanging his thumbs in his back pockets, he kicked at a gray tree root risen from the ground in search of water so that it bore the height and shape of a concrete bumper. Below on the street two blondes and two cops stood at the end of the parade line talking. The women wore black leather jackets and fringy denim shorts, their long legs ending in boots. I thought David was looking at them too, when I heard him say, “He’s here!”

  “Who?” His face had gone slack. “Your dad?”

  Abruptly, he turned and took a few steps away toward the playing field, where the grass was still yellow from Southern California’s brand of winter. The sky was the clear blue you see in magazines, and piled with white clouds.

  He recovered and said, “No, not my dad. Listen, it’s theft, okay? My roommate’s stealing stuff. I thought I saw him down there just now. But it couldn’t be him.” His laugh bore a shading of scorn. “He wouldn’t be caught dead at something like this.”

  “Stealing stuff? Property, money, what?”

  David shook his head as if he were stupid or the whole universe was.

  “Can you prove it,” I said, “what he’s doing?”

  “Rat out your friends and you’re just a different species of rat.”

  “Not always,” I said.

  “So-called ‘situational ethics,’ right? I took a philosophy class once. Some things are not so wrong if right? But I can’t buy into it. You just don’t tattle.”

  “Well, then, I guess we’ve pretty well covered it,” I said. Something more than a moral stubbornness played here, but I didn’t have a clue as to what, or why he would disclose this stuff to me, a virtual stranger, and frankly I was a little annoyed at this boy I didn’t know, and hungry for a beer.

  Across the street when we reached the sidewalk, a white terrier in a front window of a house stood on the back of a couch and barked wildly.

  In second grade, I watched a friend slip her hand in the pocket of a green coat belonging to another child while all the other kids were at the tables making Play-Doh animals. Her fist was closed when it came out, and when she opened it, her palm held a silver dollar. She saw me, but neither of us said anything, not then, not later; not to the teacher nor to the little girl who owned the coat and who was crying at the bus stop when I walked by that afternoon. I hated myself for not doing what I should have: gone up to the offender and told her to give the coin back. Instead, I avoided my friend who’d turned thief before my eyes until avoiding her became part of the crime itself, and it niggled at me after all these years.

  We were nearing the street to turn on to reach The Swallow’s Inn when David said, “Thanks for trying.”

  “Somehow I think you’ll find the right thing to do,” I said.

  He smiled a little and said, “Dad says all I have under my hat is hair.” We walked by a silver Jaguar parked at an angle, taking up two parking spaces. Dave said, “Overpriced bucket of bolts.”

  “You couldn’t tell it by me.”

  He said, “Ever back up over gate prongs?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “I did that.”

  “For fun, or what?”

  “I forgot a book at school, backed up before I thought,” he said, shaking his head. “It’ll be fun all right, paying Dad off.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, but had to smile.

  In the street in front of the mission, line-dancers were doing the Texas Swing to “Bad Moon Rising” blasting from enormous P.A. speakers.

  The saloon was still packed with people shouting over dozens of others. We found Joe and Ray in a corner with a couple of cops and a sunburned brunette in a little bitty blouse, the bunch of them red-eyed and having the good time they should on an off-duty day.

  I decided to head home and let them call me a party-poop if they would. And they did. But I kissed both Ray and Joe on the cheek, nodded to the brunette and the deputies, and shook hands with David, telling him to take care. He held on a fraction more than he needed, it seemed, and again I felt I’d lost somehow but didn’t know exactly why.

  On my way out, a man in a white cowboy hat who looked East Indian asked me if I knew the two-step. “Next time, Duke,” I said, and squeezed through the doorway.

  It took me a minute to get through the crowd and around the building, and when I did I saw Dave Sanders outside again in the courtyard, alone, sitting on the same bench we sat on earlier, with his head bent to his hand as if he had a headache that just would not let go.

  THREE

  On the way home from the parade I stopped at a car wash, got the jiffy job, and watched a limping Hispanic man with white sideburns slap rags on car roofs and wipe milkshake off consoles and road-tar off wheel covers.

  I thought of the victim in Technology Park, of healthy size and youthful years. Who would miss him? What woman did not yet know he was gone? I thought about the endless chain of grief until I tired of thinking about it and walked over and got a drink of water and read the bulletin board.

  It was almost five when I got home and climbed the outside stairs to my condo overlooking Newport Bay. The sun was painting the bluffs gold, while the water lay black and still as an oil spill.

  My guinea pig in the laundry room whistled for attention. “Just a minute, baby,” I called. The phone was ringing too.
r />   Joe was on the line. “So what’d you think? He’s a hunk, wouldn’t you say?” His voice carried post-parade effects.

  “Definitely starter material,” I said.

  “Damn tootin’. Takes after his dad.”

  “You’re going to feel terrible in the morning.”

  “Hey, doll, how’d you like to meet me at The Quiet Woman?”

  “That might be good.”

  At that, he said, “I’m thinking of taking some vacation.”

  “Did I hear right? If you cashed in all your accumulated days you could take off permanently.”

  “Take tomorrow off with me.”

  “I’ve got half a dozen cases I should be working on,” I said. “The Doe this morning doesn’t help any.”

  “What’d you tell me about that, again?”

  “Later. I’ve got to feed my guinea pig. If you can, amidst all that fun you’ll be having, call me tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Goodnight. Tomorrow.”

  Stu had left a message on my desk to come see him first thing. We had another unidentified gunshot victim.

  “Find us something on this one, Brandon,” he said, looking up over his glasses from his desk. “Two Does, two days. Not good. And I don’t want to hear ‘I’ll do my best.’ Best isn’t good enough. Find something.”

  I didn’t mind working for Stu, but he’d been an administrator too long. At six a.m. his shirtsleeves were already rolled. His desktop was a picture of perfect geometry, papers stacked squarely, pencils parallel.

  “Homicide on this is Boyd Russell. Maybe I’ll send Sanders out. You want Joe? I’ll see if he’s free.” He reached for the phone.

  “Joe’s taking a vacation day.” Stu gave me a look as if that were impossible. Stu, about Joe’s age, pegged me as still a rookie though I’d been in the lab seven years and had logged two earlier in uniform in Oakland. “I’m thinking about a day off myself, maybe Friday?”

  “Is it necessary?”

  “Stu, I’ve had one day off in eleven.”

  “‘Can’t stand the heat’…” he said.

  “Isn’t there a policy on that, so many days in a row?”