Carcass Trade Page 8

  “Those weren’t bike plates.”

  “I know, silly. The bikes were in the truck. Listen, I better go. I got a call up in Fullerton. That’s going to put me in the worst traffic coming home.”

  “Hell, grab the overtime. I always do.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a greedy bastard.”

  “Sayonara, Sweetcheeks.”

  “You too. Talk to you later.”

  When I did get to Fullerton, the case was a carbon monoxide suicide in a garage that also took the lives of a dog and cat in the house. The man was a tenant of the woman who lived in the house. His furniture consisted of ten-gallon paint cans for stools, two small scratched tables, and a twin mattress on old carpet squares in the corner. The woman said she felt sorry for him, he was a distant cousin or something, but that she couldn’t have him stay in the house, he was just too dirty.

  “Now look what he done,” she said, weeping as if flesh had been torn from her bones. “He come in here and killed my babies.” Next to her on the couch lay a puff of white cat and a small black-and-beige dog. “No-good Jessups. That whole family has to look up to see the rim of the toilet. He comes back from the grave, I’ll kill him again.”

  My neighbor’s voice was on my machine when I got home. Mrs. Langston said her arthritis was bad today. Would I mind letting Farmer take me for a walk? He was driving her nuts.

  Mrs. Langston doesn’t have the kind of arthritis that shows. It’s in her muscles and connective tissue. To look at her, you’d think nothing was wrong with the pleasant retired schoolteacher, but I learned to recognize when the pain darkened the slight shadows under her eyes.

  “It feels like tiny crabs are in there,” she told me one time. “Pinching. I don’t mean to complain. It just aches.”

  All over her house are gadgets of wonderful design to alleviate her pain: hard rubber balls on flexible rods that she slings over her shoulders to pound her back; sawed-off broom handles she uses to roll down her legs as if flattening dough; thick plastic coat hangers she burns apart with a cigarette lighter to make a dull end so she can poke and prod the pain away; flat massagers the size of baseball mitts; purring footrests knobbed in rubber bumps; air guns meant to render a blast against the ligaments or in the hollows where muscles attach to bone. For all Mrs. Langston’s suffering, she tries not to mention it, but says some days, “Oh, I hurt,” in that way you know she’s said it over and over again to herself when no one was around to listen and has forgotten now there’s someone near who can.

  “A rough one today?” I said.

  Farmer gazed at me with smiling eyes, his auburn tail waving like a duster over the end table.

  “Somebody jumped me in an alley last night,” she said. “If you catch him, give him unholy hell.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  I’d seen the flapper pictures of her in her twenties, one long pale leg on the running board of a Model T, and in the hand cocked on her hip a racy cigarette. It was hard to put that picture with this, no matter that she looked fifteen years younger than her sixty-two years.

  A glance at the other end table told me she’d already put three long-stemmed, raspberry-colored daisies in a vase for me that I knew she’d give me when I brought Farmer back.

  “Get your leash, Farmer,” I said, and the springs in his legs went off. He wheeled into the kitchen to grab the leash off the high counter, his toenails clicking on the tile as he clutched to hold on.

  Farmer scared up a snowy egret. The slender white heron moved through the air in a lazy flap, flicking its head ever so slightly toward its right rudder with what I could imagine was a gesture of mild annoyance.

  At the sight of the egret, Farmer went to point, his body rigid as stone. I praised him and he relaxed, joyful, his rubbery grin so basic and elemental I smiled too.

  We covered much of our usual trek around Upper Newport Bay before dark, almost three miles. The bay is about half a mile wide. A salt company once dredged there, and another enterprise mined for shell deposits. I don’t make the trek every day, but maybe twice a week, and often with Mrs. Langston’s setter.

  Soon I was lost in the sage smells and the scent of brackish water, and I tried to see how many plants and bushes I could name in the gathering dusk. Always, my eye was out for the rare Laguna liveforever that clings precariously to the steep cliffsides, and the salt-marsh bird’s beak that looks like tiny birds and is washed under by high tides. But my mind was on other things, and in the rosy grayness, all the colors merged.

  Sometime during our walk, I knew I would be driving back to work, overtime or no overtime.

  Back at Mrs. Langston’s, I collected my three daisies and told her to quit staying out at the nightclubs so late, she’d feel better, then went to my place and microwaved a frozen dinner of lemon chicken and inedible peas. I watched the news and, without a moment of arguing myself out of it, headed to the morgue to see if I could read the chart for the Carbon Canyon victim and convince myself, as Nathan tried to do so desperately, it wasn’t Miranda Robertson lifted from the cinders at all.

  10

  Freeway construction shunted me off to an unfamiliar route on my way to the morgue. On a dark Santa Ana street, I drove toward the highest building I could see, a dull brown block against the charcoal sky. I was passing through a neighborhood of modest homes where third-shift police patrols get several disturbance calls a night and the parks each evening fill up with dope dealers like leaves blown across a lawn. Maybe it was too early, but I didn’t hear boom box music issuing from street corners or see many people about. All the same, I cracked the windows on both sides to listen for tire noise or footsteps. At stop signs I only slowed, taking the mild dips designed for water runoff with reasonable speed, watching my low beams bounce over startled cats’ eyes, root-lifted sidewalks, and twenty-year-old car bumpers with red cellophane taped over broken taillights.

  Downtown, I drove on virtually empty streets and didn’t wait for the full red-light cycles to complete. Here Spanish-named taverns shouldered shops that close before dark. Gutters glinted with broken glass. In the doorway of a storefront with iron accordion grates, a lumpy bag lady stood fussing with her grocery cart.

  At Third and Main, I caught the familiar yellow letters on the windowpane of a shop closed as long as I can remember: EVERYTHING IN THE STORE $6.90 OR LESS. I wondered what had become of the owner, and if his sons now wore Raiders jackets and flashed AK-47s from pickup beds. Raiders: Right After I Die, Everybody Runs Scared. That’s what one juvie told us it means.

  Monday night blues, or just a mood that had been creeping up for awhile, overtook me, and I wondered why any of us ever thought we could stop or even slow down the mudslide of dark forces.

  On a back street behind the morgue a few months ago someone fired a round at a police car as it was leaving the parking lot. Nonetheless, as I neared Shelton, I decided to come around the back way, daring something, I guess. That part of my personality someone will have to clue me in on someday.

  Now there was no life at all, only the low-wattage porch lights over butterscotch-colored homes, and the long expanse of the county parking lot scattershot with maybe two dozen dew-covered cars. When I opened the door to the building, a Muzak version of “Proud Mary” was playing. The disk was stuck on rollin,’ rollin’ on the river and didn’t unstick for a full minute.

  A tech with a long ponytail and a jaw still round with baby fat came from the back. I told him I was from the lab and showed him my ID. “Could I look at the file for Jane Doe Five?” He was new, didn’t know where anything was. I said that was okay, I did. After buzzing me in, he walked silently back to where he’d come from.

  All offices feel foreign when no one is there. I toyed with the light switch but couldn’t get more than a bluish middle fixture to come on. It was enough light to find the Doe log book, which gives the details of a case, and then to find the right folder. Janetta’s desk had boxes on it, so I took the file to one of the other four desks and sat
down, noting the miniature pink roses in a paper-wrapped pot near the telephone, and the tiny framed photo of a man with a little boy on his knee. The woman at whose desk I sat I didn’t know well, and I felt a bit intrusive.

  I turned the pages of the pathologist’s report. This bone and that bone, the organ weights and measures, and, because I’m sensitive to it, the phrase, “gross cervical dysplasia,” meaning a precancerous condition, the same as I had had. I read again my Jane’s estimated age, revised it to early forties. No kids. No evidence of stabbing or shooting. Nor had she burned to death, because her lungs were clear. A head wound, perhaps, but we had hardly any pieces to assemble to complete that puzzle.

  I flipped through the autopsy photos. Wedged against the corpse was the triangular stainless-steel block used to prop the body so it could be photographed from all sides. The block gleamed like a new railroad tie. The photos didn’t tell me anything new. The first X ray I came to was a side view. Dr. Margolis had noted the plastic implants that did in fact show as white disks on the film. I felt a wave of pity for the woman. It comes to this. A proud or vain woman, attempting to enhance her life; two white, hardened disks like new moons grinning through the black night.

  My reverie was broken by hearing Dr. Schaffer-White’s voice in the hallway as she gave instructions to the baby-fat lab tech. I replaced the file and went out to see her. Leaned against the wall, she was turning pages in a folder. She was in her lab coat and old-lady shoes, but the pearls were there and the diamond earrings. She noted me, smiled wanly, and lifted the folder higher. “A senior who may be an abuse victim,” she said, brushing wayward blonde hairs away from her face. She looked tired.

  “From a home?” I asked, meaning convalescent.

  “His daughter’s,”. she said, then added without looking up, “I hope there’s a short stairway to hell for those kind of people.”

  I said, “How ’bout we start a vigilante committee. I’d have no trouble getting charter members.”

  “He was scalded. He was starved. Who would you get to do the same to the daughter?”

  “I know a few cops.”

  “That’s not funny these days,” she said.

  “It never was.”

  She sighed heavily, closed the folder, and started moving toward the autopsy room. I trailed along. “What brings you out tonight, Smokey?”

  “Oh, just reviewing a case from last week. Burn victim, crash victim, we don’t know yet.”

  “That awful one?” she asked, and turned her blue eyes to me as we stopped in the doorway. She had a small cold sore on her bottom lip. Behind her, the vacant autopsy room was quiet and sterile as anyone could make it. With the intercom music off, I could hear the cooling unit for the refrigeration room hum.

  I told her about the male Doe we brought in from the campground. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “I did that one,” she said. “As I remember, he had a fractured skull, four ribs, femur, and tibia, and a dislocated patella.”

  “Worked him over good,” I said.

  She tested her sore lip with the top one, then said, “They used his chest for an ashtray.”

  “God. I didn’t see that.”

  “You wouldn’t, with the shirt on. There was wire around the neck, but that was not the manner of death. I sent it to Property.”

  “What did the wire look like?”

  “It was flat but had these little nubs on it, triangles, that dug into the flesh. It wasn’t even long enough to strangle him with. I think it was tied to something else that broke.”

  “Joe Sanders and I found some strange wire about ten miles from the campsite in a trash can.”

  She smiled and said, “I can’t believe you guys.”

  “Well, it’s a long shot.”

  In the autopsy room, she opened a lower cabinet door and looked inside, then two more. At the far end of the room a life-sized plastic skeleton held a placard painted with a skull and crossbones. The sign is used for morgue tours for drunk-driving arrestees: YOU BOOZE, YOU LOSE.

  Dr. Schaffer-White found what she was looking for. She brought out a book. “I’m studying law. I don’t want to do this forever. We had some downtime today, then it got busy.”

  “Law?”

  “Keep it to yourself, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  “I think I like what you do better than what I do, Smokey. But then some people are never satisfied.”

  “Well, neither of us exactly hold the glamour jobs,” I said. “But hey. What do they say around here? ‘Five hundred a week and all you can eat?’”

  “I don’t say it.”

  “Pardon me,” I said, smiling. “Our victim. He died of the beating, then?”

  “He died of a blow to the suprasternal notch, that hollow right here?” she said, and fingered the swale where the two collarbones meet. “Shatter that and all sorts of things collapse. Bones puncture vital blood lines. I saw one of these in med school, I’ll never forget it.”

  “They have to use a special weapon?”

  “The hand. The victim’s scalp had abrasions where someone grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. Someone else chops downward with the side of the hand,” she said, demonstrating. “I told your friend, ‘Your suspect will know martial arts.’” She sighed, patted her lab coat as if it had keys in it somewhere, and said, “You take care now, Smokey. I’ve got to run. One of my girls is sick and my husband’s having a tantrum. He’s a good father, but he can’t handle diapers and he can’t handle sick.”

  Before even reaching the end of the lot I phoned Ray Vega from my car and told him to get his fanny off the freeway and come see me.

  He said, “Are you crazy, girl? This is my night for stopping all blondes. Francine and me had a major fight. I need a new date.”

  “You are really disgusting.”

  “Ain’t I?”

  “Be a friend tonight, okay, Raymond?”

  “All yours, babe. Where you taking me?”

  “How about—?”

  “You up for fish?”

  We met in a seafood eatery next to a topless joint named Captain Cream’s in a dark corner of a lot just off the freeway.

  Every time I see Ray Vega in his CHP uniform, I think he’s just so darned handsome, like a TV cop.

  I gave him a rundown of my day. “I still have baby pee on me, Raymond, from a little boy who won’t have a mother to diaper him in the morning.”

  He squeezed my arm that lay on the table. He was quiet for a while. The waitress brought us water without asking, a surprise after seven years of drought, and took our orders. When she left, I said, “That’s not all.”

  “What’s up? Tell your old buddy, or what’s a buddy for? Shakespeare say that or something?”

  “Yeah, Shakespeare.”

  “So, what’s eating you?” He watched a young woman come in, her tight beige skirt like an Ace bandage over her perfect thighs. The shade of her stockings matched. “Jesus,” Ray breathed.

  When I got his attention again, I told him about my brother phoning me Saturday; about our walk around the island and my deep fears. I said I sensed Nathan’s ex-wife/present lover was a murder victim, despite none of the numbers adding up, really. And then I said, “I want to go and violate procedure.”

  “You’ve got to give me more than that,” Ray said, sipping off three inches of his ice water.

  “What I want to do, I want to go talk to her husband myself. See if he’s lying.”

  “Why are you telling me this? You want my permission? Listen. You go messing around, you better start makin’ blueprints for your home under a freeway. ’Cause you’re going to be fresh out of a job.”

  I thought back to how close I’d come last year to being, as Ray said, fresh out of a job, for involving myself in what should have been strictly a police matter. That time I gave myself permission because a friend was threatened. Miranda wasn’t a friend, but she wasn’t exactly a stranger either.

  “What
could it hurt, Raymond? That’s what I’ve been tossing around in my mind.”

  “You’re going Fifty-One-Fifty on me,” he said, using cop code for a crazy. “How about I just get you blitzed and we go over to my place? I just did the sheets. You’d be proud.”

  Vinegar and a plastic basket of calamari strips were set in front of us at last, and Raymond dug in without so much as a glance upward. In time, he mumbled, “You know that bumper sticker says ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk?’”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw one today says ‘Friends don’t let friends drive Subarus.’”

  “That’s funny, Raymond. What does it mean?”

  “It means a friend don’t let another friend go lookin’ down her own barrel. Do you want a job in a nice clean laboratory, or do you want to, like, start your own business as a bikini-wearing street vendor?”

  “I could open a detective agency. Maybe I’d meet Bruce Willis.”

  “He died hard, didn’t he? Man. He fell in the toilet. Who cares? He’ll be singing doo-widdy with you under the freeway.”

  Ray poked a calamari my way and I shook my head no. He said, “I don’t want to talk about this. It upsets me.”

  “Upsets you?” I was amused, insulted, and annoyed. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Francine wants to get married.”

  “You keep running into that problem,” I said.

  “How come that is? I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. Who’d want to marry you?”

  “Right,” he said, and didn’t blush, but let his guard down. “Smoke, do you suppose all the old people in the world have this thing figured out?”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “All those old people, having anniversaries all the time. Golden, diamond, whatever. You think it was better back then? People were smarter?”

  “I’d like to think so, Ray. But maybe they just give up. They know that’s about as good as it’s going to get, so they pretend they’re happy.”