Even if I didn’t recognize Mom, which I sometimes don’t, I’d recognize her hair, a long, reddish-gray braid that’s beginning to look skimpy. She must be what—fifty-eight—now? She’s taken to wearing a baseball cap—an item easy to find on the beach. Today it’s a Padres cap, and her braid, mostly reddish in the sun, erupts from the hole in back like a dragon’s tongue.
Her cart looks a little lighter than when I saw her four months ago, just five blocks from here at a Rubios Taco Shop. It’s the 1970s era TV she pushed around for a year or more that’s gone. It’s hard to imagine pinching a useless TV from a homeless woman.
Why is she on the street? I’m told there’s no facility that can keep my mother off the street for long. San Diego’s Health and Human Services office has tried many times.
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Delaney,” the woman in a lavender pants suit told me a long time ago, thumbing through Mom’s chart when I went in to ask . That was probably a decade ago—back when I still hoped Mom’s problems could be solved.
“Andrea. Call me Andrea,” I told the woman, hoping to create camaraderie at that point.
“Andrea, right. Well, your mom outfoxes us every time. She can pick any lock, disarm guards with her smile, and shimmy down the wobbliest gutter.” Ms. Gutierrez chuckled, then covered her mouth. “She’s very inventive. And so affable.”
“I know.” There was a time when I thought of Mom’s resourcefulness as a good thing, too—when it got us the food we needed to survive, when it got the rent paid or the school authorities off my back for missing classes.
“Since Audrey’s so affable (there’s that word again) we let her be. Not confrontational like she’s when confined—so we mostly leave her alone. She’s managed to accumulate a group of local residents who feed and look after her in a fashion. One called a month or two ago to say she was sick. Nice, wasn’t it?”
Nice in its way, but living on the street, a woman’s so vulnerable. I thought of that flying into San Diego today when my eyes hit a headline in the local paper.
“Girl Found Strangled on the Beach.”
I picked the newspaper up long enough to read the story. It reminded me for a minute of those deaths on Long Island, but it’s too early to know if this girl’s associated with the sex trade. Is it something about beaches that make women so defenseless there?
Does Mom remember the names of these folks who look out for her any better than she does mine? I still remember the first time she forgot it. Introducing me to someone on the street, she was tongue-tied for a minute, and then called me Suzie. Was Suzie a name she came up with on the spot? I searched for some meaning in it and find none.
I used to get angry when people questioned me—when an EMS technician, a doctor on the phone, or a cop on the street said, “Can’t you do something about this?”
If a two hundred fifty pound cop couldn’t wrestle her into a van, what chance did I have?
I want to say tell them—all of those people employed some government service—not to judge me. None of you know about the days there was no food in the fridge; the nights she set fire to her bed with a cigarette; the occasions she showed up at school wearing a foil hat to protect her from “the forces;” the stuff of mine she hocked to buy her booze or Kools. There is no one to tell these stories to.
The items in my mother’s cart are different from those in a northern state. No need for heavy winter coats, boots, or an ice scraper. The guy who’s staked out my entrance to 1-94 in Chicago has built the kind of tent city I used to make as a kid. Blanket after blanket connected in some jerry-rigged system to keep him warm, to protect his stuff. Even a shovel to dig his way out pokes out a hole. When I stopped to slip him a five last month, several cars behind me beeped.
“You’re part of the problem, lady,” someone yelled. I gave him the finger, which shut him right up. The possibility I suffer from road rage douses any follow-up remarks. Oh, yes, I have some of my mother coursing through my veins.
“Know me?” I ask Mom now when I finally ratchet up my nerve today. “It’s Andrea.” When she doesn’t blink, I add, “Andy?” Still nothing. “Your daughter?” And finally, “Suzie,” which gets a small smile.
Though she doesn’t usually seem to know me, I think I must represent possible captivity. Or maybe my face or actual name—Andrea not Suzie—summons up some vestige of remorse. But in the swirling eddy inside her head, my face does not bode well for hand-outs or a Subway Sub. So I rarely get a smile.
Today, she shakes her head and begins to rearrange her cart. She’s gotten her hands on a bright blue boogie board, which she strokes possessively. She’s a vessel of maternal gestures she never expends in the usual ways. The boogie board’s in good shape so it won’t last long. But she makes no attempt to hide it under her dirty beach towels, her copies of La Jolla Light, her pile of T-shirts.
“Going surfing?” I ask, trying for a little humor. She considers my remark, her bright blue eyes sizing me up. She’s a big thinner than the last time I saw her—four months ago now. Handouts for the homeless must have an ebb and flow.
These trips to the coast three or four times a year stretch my paltry salary as an EMS dispatcher to the breaking point. They also raise my level of stress for weeks before and after each visit.
“Why don’t you just move back there?” my friend Rachel asks me every so often.
Why indeed?
A full half-minute passes before Mom laughs, showing me another tooth is missing. The reason for this is simple: homeless people sift through trash cans, and the most common item in that trash can is a sugary drink. Mom’s chief diet staple is a Slurpee. That’s why both her health and her teeth suffer.
“How about getting some lunch?” I say.
There are several possibilities for a healthy lunch on the street, but since I can’t take her inside, we walk to a taco stand where I order the healthiest items on the menu: a tossed salad, a chicken taco, and a carton of milk. She carefully removes the beans and lettuce from the taco, the cucumber and avocado from the salad, then eats it eagerly without saying a word. The milk carton is hard for her to open, and she executes a nice hook shot into the trash can before I can intervene.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask again. “Remember me, Mom?”
She gives me her brightest smile, the one she probably offers to anyone who buys her a meal. “Of course, I do,” she says, getting up. In a second, she pushes off.
She stops at a trash can half a block away to retrieve a Big Gulp drink, thirsty I’m sure.
I see her again the next day and the day after, doing what I can each time to clean her up, feed her, and finally, fumbling with her behind a vacant auto parts store to change her clothes. She hates me touching her; hates me making her step into a new pair of pants; shudders when I momentarily expose her bare breasts to the dark windows above us; wiggles her feet when I try to trim her toenails before putting on a new pair of sneakers. It’s frustrating, but there is something curative for me at least in the feel of her flesh under my hand.
I used to smuggle her into the showers on the beach or the one in my motel, but no one, including Mom, liked that idea. So any washing or a change of clothes must be done on the street. Over time I have learned how to do this discreetly.
Before I take off, I call the social service agency to talk to Ms. Gutierrez, who still takes an interest in my mother. A harried-sounding man tells me she’s on vacation—won’t return until the next Monday. Where does someone who lives at a resort go for a vacation, I wonder?
In my childhood in the Encanto section of San Diego, I never heard of anyone taking a vacation. A trip to the amusement park at Mission Beach was a big deal, a weekend at a grandparents’ place in Rosarita even bigger. I left home at seventeen, searching for an entirely different view to look at from my window. At that time, Mom was neither a street person nor homeless. Just a woman living on food stamps and handouts from men she picked up. Odd, forgetful, but not completely daft. She sometimes eve
n took the occasional job until her list of deficits became clear to a potential employer.
“Now, keep in touch,” she said as I headed out the door that last day. “Send a postcard when you get there.”
Did she imagine I was going to Hollywood to become a movie star? Did she think I was off to see the Queen?
I keep up with Mom, or at least the city where she lives, through an online subscription to U-T San Diego, the local newspaper. Pacific Beach’s the northernmost section of San Diego. I have never been clear on how Mom found her way there from Encanto. Probably a date drove her up there one night and she liked what she saw and stayed. It’s a good place for the homeless, not too toney but fairly safe. I often wonder if the homeless migrate to the southwest for the better climate. Like birds finding a more hospitable roost as their former one become unwelcoming.
As I click through stories about the mayoral race, the rise in housing prices, a new film being shot in the Hillside area, the price of guavas and exotic chilies at Whole Foods a few days later, I find a story that makes me sit up. It’s about that dead girl found on the beach—Mission Beach it turns out—just down the Boulevard from Pacific Beach. She was dressed in a wetsuit and found strangled on the sand by a sunrise class in Tai Chi. It still gives no name—five days later now—which may mean they haven’t been able to ID her.
I don’t think about this news story much over the next few days—people who’ve lived in Chicago any length of time aren’t surprised by such things. But when another girl turns up strangled a week later, I begin to feel some dread.
This time it’s Carlsbad, thirty minutes up the coast. I’m not actually afraid for my mother—these were both girls after all. The first woman has now been named Rebecca Sweet. And it turns out she’s not a surfer at all—but a twenty-five-year-old day-tripper who must have wanted to try her hand at surfing. Or maybe not. There’s speculation she wasn’t surfing, but had been dressed in the wetsuit by her assailant—something about the size of it being wrong. I follow the story closely in the days ahead, hoping for more information about either case. Is the murderer looking for day-trippers, young girls, surfers, or none of the above?
Maya Velasquez, the second victim, was not a surfer, not dressed in a wetsuit, not a day-tripper, and not under thirty, I find this out three days later. She was a thirty-five-year-old tax accountant from L.A., down in Carlsbad for a meeting. She’d been expected back by eight o’clock but never turned up. There’s a photo online. She looks attractive even though the lighting isn’t good and her hair is yanked back—it’s probably a picture from a driver’s license.
With the third murder, three weeks later, I go into alarm mode. They post pictures of the three victims side by side—large photos now—and the third woman’s said to be a hooker found on Imperial Beach. Felicity Brown serviced the servicemen and was probably abducted from her usual post and taken, still alive, to the beach. She was found under an abutment of rocks, had probably been there for several days. An unusual period of rain had kept the beach empty.
They have a better photo of Maya Velasquez in this edition, too, and it’s easy to see the one object the three victims have in common. It’s not surfing accoutrements, nor an age similarity, nor the location of their bodies. It’s that all three women wear their hair in a braid, and apparently these braids were used to strangle them. Or suffocate them rather: the hair was stuffed down their throats. Pushed so far down, in fact, that strands of hair were found in the lower esophagus of all three women. Did he use an instrument to do this, I wonder? Some sort of barbecue skewer perhaps.
My mother wears her hair in a braid and has her entire life. I used to ask her why, back in the days when she could still answer a question.
“Hair on my face makes my skin itch,” she explained, “and a braid it easy to do.”
I’ve tried giving my mother a phone, but each time it was gone before I even left San Diego. She cannot learn to use one either. People, far more sentient than Mom, struggle with such devices.
I call Ms. Gutierrez’s number as soon as it’s nine a.m. on the West Coast.
“I’m sorry,” a woman says, “She doesn’t work her anymore.”
“Is she in another office?”
“No. With the government cuts, she was laid off.”
Laid off? She had to have spent at least ten years in that office. I try to remember the first time I called her. How deep were these cuts?
“Has someone taken over her caseload,” I ask, realizing as I say this that Mom is not part of anyone’s caseload. At best, she’s someone who pops up on the radar from time to time. Because she was affable, no one really paid much attention to her. Could anyone in the State of California ID her in a morgue? How would anyone know where to call me should such a thing happen? I am stunned at my own negligence. Stunned at my inability to foresee such a large hole in my flight plan.
“We’re sorting it out now,” the woman said. She sounds exhausted and it is only 9:02 in the morning. “What was her name again?”
“Audrey Delaney.”
“And her address?”
I sighed inwardly. “She’s homeless. That’s why I can’t get in touch with her.”
“We give cell phones to the homeless now. Especially the women. It’s a new program. So they can call in for help.”
“She’s not that kind of homeless person. She wouldn’t be able to hold onto a phone.” When the woman didn’t say anything, I add, “I’ve given her at least three phones in the last five years. And even if she could keep one, she’d never use it.” Why am I explaining this to her?
Pause. “God helps those who help themselves.”
I am speechless after that bon mot from a servant of the state so it is she who speaks again.
A huge sigh and then, “Well, I’ll see what I can do. Might take a few days. Can you give me your name and number?”
Without a shred of hope that I’ll hear from her again, I give it to her and she promises to get back to me, adding, “Did you ever consider coming out here to help her out. Your mother, I mean.”
I hang up the phone.
But that’s what I do—fly west.
I can ill afford this trip, and have to use my last three vacation days. If I can’t resolve whatever it is I want resolved, I will probably have to quit my job or take an unpaid leave. And our office has no unpaid leaves as far as I know.
My little purple Fiesta rental gets me in Pacific Beach around one o’clock. The streets look as benign as ever—certainly not the locale for a serial killer. I don’t see a single woman wearing a braid, not that this is a common hair style. Perhaps it’s more popular on the beach than elsewhere though—a way to deal with wet hair. But I imagine any woman with a braid has changed her hairdo after those newspaper photos. Except, of course, for the sort of women who don’t follow the news. Like my mother.
The street in P.B. that Mom favors is Garnet, where restaurants, several supermarkets, and a Trader Joe’s offer the opportunity to pick up food, rest on a bench, and watch the foot traffic. She’s usually too out of it to pan-handle, and if she does, the money probably ends up in another person’s pocket. Most of the time, she will be somewhere on this stretch that runs from I-5 to the Pacific. Other times, I can find her down on the boardwalk that runs along the beach. The nest of benches there is usually occupied by her cronies, and like the birds that badger outdoor diners, the homeless sweep in for discarded food, too.
Today she’s in neither place. I stop a few of the sort of people who look like they might know her and ask, “Have you seen Audrey? Audrey Delaney?”
I try to describe her but my words sounds vague. I approach people on benches, the ones shuffling down the street, a guy lying comatose in an alcove, several on the beach, two propped up against the back wall of Vons. Head shakes, frowns, shrugs. Obviously it’s not a name they know. But do they know her face?
For God’s sake, why don’t I have a picture of her? Why has this never occurred to me before—th
e idea that I might need such a thing? Do I want to leave her behind—or at least her image—when I fly back east? Or is it her face, after years of living rough, is just too disheartening to hang on to?
“Check out the food bank,” someone advises. He looks like a man who’s spent decades on the street, too—so tanned that the hue looks like mud on his face, so whip-thin that no size pants will fit him. I offer him one of sandwiches I bought, but he waves it away.
“I’m on disability now,” he says. “Save it for—what’s her name—Audrey?”
I begin to describe her. “A reddish braid, a San Diego Padres cap, skinny, about five-five, a shopping cart?” I pause, thinking. “Although it might not be a Padres cap by now.”
“Lots of places she could be,” he says, “but probably out on the street. Supposed to get a shelter here but it never happened.”
I nod, having read about this in the local newspaper.
“She could be in a thrift shop, or a church, a donation center or a recycling place, a food kitchen, going through the trash somewhere. The cops could’ve picked her up. There’s a guy comes by couple times a week and gives people a lift to a food bank. Try there.” His eyes light up. “Maybe she has a boyfriend.”
I run across a couple—maybe twenty years old—with a sign that says, “Help send us back to Houston.”
“How long you been here?” I ask, nearly tripping over the tambourine they’re using to collect cash. I add a buck. Then another.
“’Bout a week,” the guy says, looking at his girlfriend. “Right?”
“Yeah, our break started about then,” she says, nodding. They are too attractive to have been here long. Did they set out knowing they’d have to pan-handle their way back to Texas or did some bad stuff happen? I don’t ask.
When I finally get to the boardwalk, I find an artist doing caricatures nestled between a burger place and a surfboard shop. He’s seated on a high stool with an umbrella attached to it, his long legs dangling.
Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon 2014 Anthology Page 13
