A World the Color of Salt Read online

“Take me with you when you go.”

  Joe was talking as we walked back to the cooler. He told me how his son, David, was doing his first year in college. Midway, he stopped, turned back to the door. “You don’t have to do this, Smokey.”

  “I know I don’t.”

  “We have enough people here.”

  “If I didn’t want to be here I wouldn’t have called to ask to be in on it, Joe.”

  He swept a finger under his eye. I knew the gesture: He did it when he needed a moment to think. And then we walked the rest of the way, his left hand lightly holding my elbow. He handed me a mentholated stick, the kind you rub around your nose when you have a cold, and the kind some idiots boil down and inject for a cheap but complicated meth hit. Bodies don’t smell that bad this early, but the distraction of a strong smell helps bring you back to yourself. The touch on the elbow, the quiet voice, and now this gesture of concern: These are some of the reasons he does what he does to me and my grown-up self.

  I was looking down on an awful red mess. I couldn’t see Jerry’s face yet, the hips rolled to the side, the head away from the door opening, and I didn’t want to; I stepped back. “He should have been safe here.”

  Billy Katchaturian appeared behind me. Even with the menthol, the sharp smell of mothballs leaked through. Billy was from the East. People from the East smell like mothballs. I looked over. He was examining the Polaroids, about three feet from me. Joe saw this and said, “You need more, Billy?”

  “No, sir, go ahead. These are good.” He held the pack of them out like a sharpie showing cards to an audience.

  I moved closer in toward the cooler. A square of butcher paper was laid down where Billy K. had lodged a step stool to get overhead shots; I saw the stool’s rusty black impressions on it. For some reason, I didn’t want to step on the paper.

  Right away I saw bone in the bubbly stew above the knee that was once Jerry’s leg.

  “Jesus,” I said. “They used heavy stuff.”

  Joe said, “You can see bits of the slug at the top of the wound there.” He pointed with a pen.

  “Almost looks like a Glaser,” I said.

  “Crooks don’t have them,” Joe said.

  “You and I can’t get them, is all.” Leaning farther in, what I could see of Jerry’s head told me the downside would be worse. I’d seen Glaser safety slugs demo-ed at the range, but I’d never shot one myself. They’re mean pieces of devastation with thin copper sides, designed to burst on impact.

  The air in the cooler wasn’t cold, the door open for so long, and I could hear the motor cycling. Moisture shone on the walls. It was a tight place, lots of open food boxes there containing the stuff Jerry or his dad would put in the microwave for us. White boxes marked “Hamburg.” In one corner, the soft-ice-cream makings. Jerry Dwyer’s father was going to lose more than a son here. More than his heart, I mean.

  Joe said, “We know they had a twenty-two auto up front: six casings on the floor. One slug in the Lotto machine, one in the post by the register. Three in the wall. One slug must have caught him, and then he ran.”

  He paused, pulling his hands onto his hips and talking down to the floor, a move he makes when something’s got to him. I knew .22’s could do funny things—kill you in an instant, if placed in the right spot, or merely drill a hole in you like a paper punch, swell the tissue like an allergic reaction, and that’s about it. One case I knew of, the victim took a round in the top of the heart, in and out. He ran two blocks home, lay on his sofa for fifteen minutes before paramedics arrived. Today he sells health insurance down the street from my bank. You can get whapped with a .22 round in the back of the head, the shell will fly apart, the pieces burrow under your scalp like worms trying to find the sun, but you live.

  He said, “The one in the head, if I had to guess, would be a five-seven.”

  My throat went tight. I started to walk to the back door, and then felt Joe beside me. The rook was staring at us as we passed, as if he wanted to ask Joe a question.

  Joe said, “The kid was holding the door, trying to keep them out. Looks like he was a big guy. Was he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He might have been able to do it, except he kept slipping in his own blood. You can see that, with the smears. I think with that first shot they must have got him somewhere in the face or head, the amount of blood there was. See the spatter inside the door?”

  I had. Blood on the cooler door, like on the door up front, only more of it, and lots at the bottom.

  “It runs down on the floor while he’s trying to keep them out,” Joe said. “He slips, keeps sliding, can’t hold it. See the skids?”

  I nodded.

  Joe went on. “Victim’s pushing, pushing. They get the pistol barrel in—there’s tool marks on the edge and frame; Billy’s got shots of it—they get the gun in, shoot him in the leg. He goes down, whoom! It’s all over.”

  Joe stepped closer, lightly leaned his shoulder against mine. I didn’t move.

  He went on. “We know there were two.”

  I managed to say, “There’d be blowback from where they got him in the head.”

  “Somebody’s sailing around with dirty clothes. Shoes’d be good, too. We got definite sole prints.”

  “Transfers anywhere?” I asked. This would be blood transferred from clothing, say, to another object. Often there are identifying fibers or other trace evidence to be found.

  “We got five red fibers off the outer-door frame near the floor, don’t know what they mean, could be old. We got boot-heel and sole prints. A half-palm transfer on the register. I think it’s got some gunpowder residue in it. We’ve done about half the latents.” Latents are fingerprints not readily visible to the naked eye.

  He looked around him and said, “It’s going to be tough in a place like this. And no video, of course.” Video cameras in the regular chains might have captured something. Dwyer’s Kwik Stop was a mom-and-pop without the mom, the mom doing something or other in the Midwest after a divorce. I remembered Jerry saying once that his mom was a good businesswoman.

  “One more ‘we got,’ please,” I said. “Say we got a witness.”

  “Don’t I wish,” he said.

  “You say it happened when?” How could there be no witness, a store near a freeway? We were outside now, and the late November chill was taking its toll. I wrapped my arms around my waist.

  Joe gave me his freak-of-time speech. I’d heard it a million times applied a million ways. A freak of time kills people. A freak of time makes people fall in love. With the wrong people. A freak of time sometimes puts two and two together to make a case; a freak of time puts the right judge or the right prosecutor on it to get a conviction. This freak of time bore no witness. Sometimes it works for you. Mostly it doesn’t.

  “Jerry Dwyer deserves these guys on a stake,” I said.

  “Have at it, baby.”

  “Joe . . .”

  “Nobody heard me.”

  “That makes it worse.”

  “Sorry.”

  The sky was a darkening purple because of the haze and the dying sun, and the traffic light at the intersection glowed a raw red. Next door, a tanker at the Texaco station was backing up, making dinging noises. Car engines whined up the on-ramp to the 5 South. Life was going on.

  I half smiled at Joe. My third knuckle touched the back of his hand when I stopped for a second.

  “What time will you be back?”

  “Early.”

  That meant seven. Joe was not really an early guy. Early is like five, six at the latest, but it’s still dark then, and besides, most of us, unfortunately, are, I hate to say it, government workers. Look at our paychecks. I know people who work in aerospace, and those people get up early.

  “I’ll be here.” I started to head out to my car when I had to ask, “How’s Jennifer?”

  “Fine, fine. She got a promotion.”

  “She’s happy, I guess?”

  He shrugged.

  I
followed his gaze to the same ribbon end fluttered down at the stand near the ladies’ restroom. The door was cracked open, something I hadn’t noticed before. We looked at each other. “Somebody used it,” I said.

  “Damn,” Joe said.

  Joe was turning the corner, ready to scare the bejesus out of the rookie, I guessed, by the time I got my key in the car door. When I opened it, the interior light shone on something in the grass under the hedge I parked near. I reached down and picked up a roundish, gold metal object about the size of a walnut. It had a small hole in the back and flanges around the rim.

  I didn’t want to go back in when Joe was doing his thing, didn’t want to fuss with Billy K., didn’t want to find a bag-and-tag for something that probably wasn’t even evidence. The metal thingy had been over too far in the grass, a long way from the outer perimeter tape. In a moment of doubt, though, I pushed my car door closed and took one or two steps toward the store and Joe. And then I returned. Why distract him now, when he had some chewing out to do? Once in the car, I pulled out a Kleenex from the box on the console and set my gold gadget in it, twisting the top of the tissue for a handle, and put it in my right pocket.

  On the way out of there I was thinking about the FNG and feeling sorry for him. I thought, If the rookie took a wee in the ladies’ because the men’s was taped, maybe no harm. At least it wasn’t the taped one. Maybe. Tomorrow. We’d see.

  CHAPTER

  3

  I could get silly with Patricia. She’d be good for me now. I called and asked if we could meet at Chi-Chi’s in Huntington Beach, near her house. How she and I ever became friends is beyond me. We’re so different. Nearly six feet of pretty, all legs, Patricia has deep red hair bottle-streaked with blonde, and a child’s voice. The first time I heard it, I thought she was putting me on, but it’s hers. And the men just love her. She jokes about her lack of frontal topography, but if so, it sure doesn’t interfere with the number of possible dates one woman could have in a lifetime.

  The day I met her I was in the parking lot at Alisos beach after some breathless jogging—whose idea was that anyway, I asked myself, swearing off it forever. I was putting gear back in the car when she came up from the sand, walking on the side of her foot, saying “Ow-w!” and laughing at the same time. The small guy with her danced in front of her, holding her at arm’s length around the waist as he kept saying, “Bummer, man.” With one hand she clutched at the top of his head, and with the other grabbed up her ankle to inspect her foot, the blood on the bottom bright and shiny as an open tomato and the sand like white salt around the rim. To the rescue I came. I gave her a minipad from my purse, told her to stick it in her shoe till we could get her someplace. The little dude split, saying he’d be in touch. I said I knew where there was an emergency hospital. On the way to ER, she kept telling me how nice it was of me to do this, and then she’d convulse with giggles. I thought, What we have here is a certifiable loony, until she told me that the little dude had been following her around all afternoon so she wound up smoking dope with him in a cove. She hadn’t been able to figure out how she was going to tell him she wasn’t going home with him, and that made her nervous, which started her laughing, and he just thought she was having a good time.

  Sometime during our drive to the hospital she asked me if I was home on spring break, meaning, was I a college student? No-o-o, I said. But I didn’t mention what I did. I just said thanks for the compliment. I said I worked for the county. Later, by months, I told her precisely how.

  At Chi-Chi’s, six overhead TVs were tuned to rock video, as always. Go to the restroom and you get piped-in KROQ, as in K-Rock. Food servers sing those annoying songs on your b-day, and I suspect people pretend they have birthdays when they don’t, for the free dessert, because you can’t get through a meal without at least two attacks of happy singers interrupting your conversation. But the thing is, voices and laughter shoot off all the hard surfaces, and you’ve got two choices: Drink and join in, or curl up and die.

  I walked in, the food smelled wonderful. Broiled everything. Cilantro and lemon. Good green things. Patricia wouldn’t be there yet. I waited for the hostess. Someone forgot to write the special of the day in the smeary center of a blackboard. At the top, painted words read, “What Foods These Morsels Be.” When the hostess came, she was wearing a blue-and-white flowered island dress pinched high up one leg. I asked for a certain table facing the water, even though it was night. In the daytime, you can see a square foot of Pacific Ocean with a shadow of Catalina Island behind it. I just needed to know it was there. Through fake fig leaves I watched the men at the bar. Red faces, heads whonked up out of their shoulders as they waited for a football moment on the TV. Two big guys. I thought of Jerry Dwyer. He would have been watching the game, Rams losing to the Forty-niners; a Rams man nonetheless.

  “Hi,” Patricia said. She sat down across from me. Over a deep-purple skirt she wore a hot-pink nubby-silk business jacket, which was frankly stunning with her red hair. Big glass purple-and-pink earrings glinted at her jawline. Her face is round and soft-looking, as if it doesn’t belong to her lengthened and considerably sinewy body. It’s a voluptuous face, if you can say that about a face, and it sports two dimples: one where you might expect, by the mouth; the other in an odd place I still find myself wondering at—the muscles pull in to form a little hole just under her right eye, riding the crest of her cheek. These twists of muscle make her look twice as happy. She smiles, you can’t help smiling back.

  “Guess what,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I passed my real estate exam.”

  “Congratulations. You can buy dinner.”

  “I will.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Leaning in, she said, “I can quit my friggin’ job now.” She worked at a small import electronics firm in Laguna Hills, performing everything from minor sales to inventory control, but basically she was a clerk. I remember when she started wearing jackets with her dresses so she’d be taken more seriously. “When I sell my first million-dollar home, that is. Till then, tote that barge.”

  “Next week,” I said.

  “Next week,” she agreed. “We’re in a recession, right? Well, they are just not going to quit building homes, no way. I was driving up from San Diego last week and could not believe my eyes.” Her red curls swung. It was not hard to imagine her telling a potential buyer, Have I got a dollhouse for you.

  Any fool could have sold houses two years ago, and though this year’s market collapsed for the ritzy ones, there was still potential in the more modest homes, she said. And she was right. Hills everywhere are shorn and scraped to white bone. Rows and rows of pink, peach, white, sand, and buff structures cut across the horizon in layers, with about twenty feet between them and no visible trees. Whole communities spring up virtually overnight. First you notice the giant water tanks rising like stacks of beige poker chips on the brown hills. Later, quick-growing trees will hide them. On the freeways pickup trucks with illegal aliens in the beds, their hats pulled low, arms dangling on their knees, travel to the new sites to work landscaping and any other back-breaking labor. Above it all float the dislocated ravens, circling, perching on light standards or scavenging cast-off lunch sacks, always with their mates, but sometimes in congregations of four or six, croaking, saying, What the hell is going on here, folks?

  Though I live near the beach and work inland, I drive south often with my neighbor’s dog just to feel I’m getting away. I walk the washes or park on a hill, take out my binoculars to look for birds, and see instead the methodical scouring of Orange County. Especially in the spring, you can’t escape the steady pock of carpenters nailing roofs, shirts off and muscles gleaming in the sun. Or the low rumble of earth movers. Once, in a sort of valley, the sun had pinked the sky to the west, the workers had gone home, and there, in the blue shadows of a horseshoe-shaped set of hills, I counted thirty-one beige hulks, gathered like insects settling in for sleep. It was scary.
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  I said to Patricia, “You realize there’s going to be no more room for marines or illegal aliens anymore? They might get rid of Pendleton,” referring to a base down the coast.

  “Won’t that be too bad,” she said. She’d been staring at my hairstyle for a long time without saying anything. I’d had my hair cut three weeks before, readying myself for my return to work. Ever since, I’d been feeling like a victim of a Carol Burnett skit. With the sunny part clipped off, the hair was definitely blah, more brown now, but not a pretty brown. She finally said, “Your hair looks good.”

  “You’re full of shit. Thank you.”

  “No, really. I’d go even shorter. You got the ears.” She pulled her own hair back to show off flaps, I will admit. I smiled. It’s not often you get a compliment like that. Then, changing subjects by making a funny wince, she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get by.”

  “No problem. I wasn’t crazy about seeing people.”

  “I hate hospitals.”

  “So do I.”

  She’d already waved down the waitress and told her what I’d drink, ordering for herself a vodka Collins to my Bud. Patricia used to kid me about Colorado Kool-Aid when I drank Coors. What I really like is whiskey. The reason I like it is the reason I stay away from it.

  I said, “We got a serious murder my first day back.”

  “Aren’t they all? I couldn’t handle it, I really couldn’t.” She was holding her glass with both hands, wagging her head at me. She rested both thumbs on the side of her nose and peered at me over the glass.

  “You think I’m bad. You should meet a coroner.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “There’re some cute marines working autopsy.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Big, handsome guy the week before I left. You would’ve loved him. He’s cuttin’ skulls and clippin’ ribs with the best of ’em.” She was looking at me with the silent fascination and repugnance most people show on their faces when I get feisty and talk about it. I said, “Of course, the reason he was there was because he was on detention. One too many DUIs, so they put him on morgue duty for a week. No indoctrination. Just, wham! Here’s the hedge clippers, here’s the saw. You’d think that would deter the stupid shits, but it doesn’t. Last year they had a guy doing cut-ups one week, two weeks later he’s back, only this time through the rear door. Stubborn.”