by Boston Teran
“Why don’t you come downstairs. A couple of the girls and their kids are gonna celebrate Christmas Eve. One of them went to Ralph’s and bought a couple of pounds of Christmas cookies. Come on, we’ll listen to Christmas carols and get a sugar rush. It will be good for you.”
Case rolls her cigarette between her thumb and forefinger. “When I was down in San Diego in 1992, that was the second time I tried to kick. And the director of the program, this chicana named Liz, well, there had been some ritual murders of these German shepherds. They were hung, then gutted, blood was drained …”
Case’s voice tails off a bit, becomes darkly remote, as if the story itself were again living in moments of her own life.
“Well, Liz got the cops to talk to me about these crimes. At first the cops weren’t too hip to the idea. After all, I was some tattooed junkie ex-cult-member freak. I saw how they looked at me. Enough said about that.”
Case blows on the tip of her cigarette and the ash pulses red hot. “Well, I’d seen this shit before. Body parts and blood are used for potions, you know that? You drink the fuckin’ shit. It’s supposed to give you magical powers. I did all that. Can you believe it?”
“Case …”
“The cops didn’t have any idea. This was Greek to them. It took me about one day to find where they were gettin’ them dogs from. One day to figure it. I walked all the animal shelters. Walked ‘em. Never said a word. Just went lookin’ for dogs. But all the time I’m checkin’ out the workers. I know what to look for.”
She points to her own arms, which bear a line of tattoos from her shoulders down to her wrist. “People on the Left-Handed Path have the sign. You just have to know what to look for.”
Anne watches Case. Her hand’s beginning to tremble, so she has to put the cigarette down.
“I helped them some after that. Of course, I was always a freaked-out aberration. There ain’t no pity for the pitiful. All’s fair in love and war, right?”
Anne takes Case’s hand in hers.
“I got a good look at everything I’d done back then, looking at them dogs, after I was off junk, finding one strung up from a tree, still alive, but dying, eyes all …”
Case’s mouth is too dry to go on. But even in the dark, the whites of her eyes stand out, desperate and stark.
“Don’t be alone. Come on downstairs.”
“The third time’s the charm.”
“Come on. Don’t sit here and hurt yourself.”
Case presses her fingers against her temples. She hears somewhere within the cell of her life something like skin being cut open. She looks up at Anne. “I was thinking about writing the Sheriff’s Department in Clay.”
7
Newsrats squeeze onto the roofs of their minivans, working zoom lenses to clear the line of trees that edge the Bouquet Canyon Cemetery and lock onto the plat of hillside where Sarah and Sam are being laid to rest two days after Christmas.
Bob looks across the caskets toward that lineup of vans. It has taken only three days, about the length of time needed for your average crucifixion and resurrection, to destroy a handful of lives and rewrite them through the distilled words and images of the theater we call our free press.
The Valley News reported that John Lee Bacon, head of the Clay Sheriff’s Department, believed that because of Arthur Naci’s wealth and the fact the murder was so well planned, it might have been a kidnapping, or at least a kidnapping gone wrong and covered up to look like a cult murder.
BETA, the black cable channel, suggested in an editorial that the murders may have been racially motivated, arguing first, that this was the Northern Valley, a last bastion of crusader mentality where “black was the color, and none was the number,” and second, that only thirty miles to the west, in Simi Valley, a jury of decent white Christians had acquitted the officers who had beaten Rodney King. Third, it posed the idea that this could have been “blacklash” against a more Christian jury who, thirty miles to the south, had acquitted an American icon, O. J. Simpson, in the murder of his ex-wife.
The L.A. Times and the National Enquirer both chased down a similar lead. An alleged tip, a phone call from an unnamed source, suggested that the murder was an act of revenge against Bob Hightower. To this end, both papers had a hard look into his background. Was he a good cop who was paying the price for putting someone away? Or was he, like so many other cops, dirty enough when the opportunity arose and now he had been issued a silent warning for some transgression?
Photographers hid in the trees behind his property. He had to fight through a bulwark of cameras just to cross his driveway.
The tip turned out to be sadly wrong. Bob Hightower was a desk jockey. A decent “cardboard” cop. A nickel package fill-in. A late-night cruiser when someone was sick.
They even went so far as to suggest he was a “kept” man. That he had remained on the force for two reasons. First, his ex-father-in-law was best friends with John Lee Bacon, the head of the department. And second, John Lee Bacon’s wife, Maureen, a prominent businesswoman and Arthur Naci’s partner, was godmother to the missing girl.
It was all part of a national spectacle, a shared depradation of another’s privacy, another’s grief.
Bob looks over at Arthur as he begins the eulogy. Arthur’s voice is hoarse. It comes up labored and slow, and he sounds like a man much older than fifty-three. He stands there grimly poised between John Lee and Maureen. John Lee with his hands folded and she with one hand gently touching Arthur’s elbow. A triptych study in friendship and grief backlit by the sun so their faces are cast without form and their shadows stretch out over the two mahogany hulls that will ride into the earth.
Bob stares down at the open hole and begins to cry.
Following the funeral, family and friends congregate at Arthur’s house. Dusk is working its way across the canyon, leaving the upscale tract homes of Paradise Hills in deepening shadow. Food is served, Maureen works the bar. A small group has gathered around John Lee to ask him about the case. He starts, of course, by telling them there are certain details, known only to the police and the FBI, that he cannot discuss. But as he fields their questions, it becomes more and more apparent that nothing substantial has broken in their favor. Not yet. But in time … He speaks with the kind of dedicated earnestness that inspires assurance, and which comes from a lifetime of honesty or years of successful lying.
Arthur is overtaken by nausea and lies down in the den. Bob brings him a pillow, draws the blinds, and shuts the drapes. Arthur takes Bob’s hand. “We have to take care of each other now.”
“I know, Arthur.”
“We’re all we have.”
“Yes.”
“We have to find her.”
“We’ll find her. Rest some.”
“We will, won’t we?”
“We will.”
“I’m scared, son.”
“I am, too.”
“You don’t think she’s …”
“Don’t talk about it. Please.”
Bob drifts outside alone. He stares off into the contour of the hills where the homes are neatly arranged toward the horizon. Lights have begun to be turned on in kitchens and living rooms. They seem like distant fires upon some stony heath. Beyond that, he can make out the low drone of the freeway, trucks and cars racing on toward the Mojave, toward the colorless sage of the night deserts of Arizona and Nevada. The world seems suddenly endless and devoid of perspective. Beyond his grasp. A feeling surges over him of the earth’s sheer power at sweeping away the memory of everything that was. Everything. And he is frightened.
He goes and sits by the pool. Across the slow movement of water the last strips of daylight are like running blood, and he is shocked back into remembering how he found Sarah floating …
“I brought you a drink,” says Maureen.
He turns. His face is pale, his mouth bent back against his teeth in pain.
“How you holding up?”
“Not so good,” he says.
<
br /> He takes the glass of Scotch she’s poured.
She pulls up a chair and sits beside him. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Set the clock back five years.”
“If I could,” she says sadly, “I’d go further back than that.”
Bob nods halfheartedly. She glances at the living room where John Lee is holding court. “If they only knew what a shit he is to live with.”
“Not tonight, Maureen.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
They sit there quietly. When she gets a chance she watches Bob. There is a handsomeness to him that goes unappreciated by most but that she has found quietly enticing.
Maureen sat on the edge of the bed in the half light of late afternoon. She’d been out in Lancaster looking for some property over by the fairgrounds when she found this out-of-the-way motel called the Ramona. It was one of those forties-style attached bungalows with portal windows and stucco facing, one block off the Sierra Highway from when the town was just an excuse for a gas station and a diner. Now all that could be said for its rooms was that everything was in its place and had been washed or at least Lysoled.
She took a hit off a joint. She wished she felt shame in these situations, not because the thorny business of one’s conscience makes demands on our pleasure and inspires us to stop, but because shame was pleasure in itself. A little Christian shame made the act all the more exciting. The shower stopped. Moments later Sam came out of the bathroom. He was naked and he stood over her by the edge of the bed. She sat there, his legs pressed close against her shoulders.
“I have an idea,” says Maureen.
Bob is drifting, but he looks up from his drink.
“I had a long talk with Arthur. And we both agree. I know this might not be the right time, but … we’d like to have you come to work with us.”
He is too tired to be surprised by anything and barely acknowledges the offer.
“Think about it. Let’s talk. You don’t need to be …”
“A ‘cardboard’ cop. Isn’t that what I’m called in the rags?”
“We didn’t offer ’cause some tabloid has to lie up a headline. It’s just—”
“The truth,” Bob snaps back. “Yeah. You know it, too, Maureen. I let Arthur massage John Lee into dropping me behind a desk, and I’ve been dropping ever since.”
“You have not.”
“Oh, please. All that time and field training gone to waste ’cause I let … visions of departmental sugar plums dance through my head. I guess I believed I was worth more.”
“Your concern was for Sarah.”
“With a few pinches of selfishness sprinkled in for Bob Hightower.” He pauses, shakes his head, as if hearing something he wishes now he’d acted upon years earlier. “After the divorce I should have asked—no, demanded, that John Lee put me back in the field. But I was dropping through despair to downright self-hate and didn’t care to stop the fall.
“So I’m turning your offer down, Maureen. I’m gonna thank you, but turn you down. Unless, of course, I end up with no job at all. Then we’ll see.”
She leans over, and her hand rests delicately on his thigh. “Anytime. We just thought maybe the change would be good for you.”
John Lee has gotten up and is standing by the patio windows watching Maureen and Bob talk. He notices her hand, and it isn’t the first time he’s seen those quiet little moves of friendship.
8
From Christmas to New Year’s, through the Epiphany, and on to Valentine’s Day, the dates are marked off Bob’s calendar with quiet desperation as the Sheriff’s Department and the FBI labor blindly forward. Leads, slim as they are, disappear quick as a spindle of dust on the desert floor.
John Lee feigns strength and quiet support, but his guts eat away at him during every meeting when the least fact that might lead to Cyrus shows its face.
Every morning Bob goes to church and prays. Every day at work he scours the mountains of paperwork for some new fact as yet uncovered. On the weekends he travels southern California, interviewing the state’s most respected forensic experts and homicide detectives. His car becomes a vault of files, photographs, and notes. At night, in the kitchen of the house he once shared with Gabi and Sarah, beer bottles and cigarette butts pile up as he goes through every call, every fax, every letter sent to the department, no matter how ridiculous and absurd.
The world around him has become the bizarre geometry of the dedicated and the delinquent. Of paranoids and conspiracy theorists. Of computer freaks posting hot lines with purported clues and women writing their regrets while sending photographs of themselves and offers of marriage.
Web sites carry a litany of unofficial “Gabi” sightings, and Christians send faxes of support against the nation’s amoral vileness they say this murder represents. Other letters blame the media or pornography or drugs. A sacrificial few offer themselves up if someone, anyone, will just come and get them, or at least pay their bus fare to L.A.
The whole of this floods the kitchen table, overflows cardboard boxes and filing cabinets. Paper stalagmites tower up from the floor, obscuring notes and fragments of information stickpinned to the walls.
The room has become the cluttered and dishevelled landscape of everything Bob feels. A delirium out of which no order can be created.
At midnight Bob walks alone behind the tract, drunk, his boots chafing at the gravelly ridge. Branches of dead leaves brush his face with the last of winter as he tries to slog his way through the naked madness of it all.
By the middle of February Bob’s search has brought him to the dregs. He reads through letters sent from the hard-timer in prison who overhears someone say … from the ex-felon on the street who for a few bucks would … from the pathetic creature in the mental institution who is certain the killers are living down the hall and keeping his daughter in a foot locker …
It’s only then that he comes across Case’s letter.
9
On the evening of February 27 there is a knock at Case’s door. An ex-nun who had been addicted to painkillers and now lives by the elevator tells her she has a call on the pay phone.
Case leans against the wall listening to Bob introduce himself. His voice is deep and gravelly, his questions direct and precise. As Bob discusses the letter, Case watches a teenage mother at the end of the hall, seated on the fire escape. She is a fragile thing with a small daughter buoyed in her lap. They sit on the grating taking in the sky as it yields itself up to the night in purple streaks.
Case is surprised that after all this time he’s called. He asks a little more about her background, and when she’s done there is silence. She figures he’ll just hang up, but instead he asks if he can come down the following night to talk further and show her some files and photographs.
How desperate he must be to finally come to her. After Case hangs up, she watches the mother and child fade to dim outlines against the deepening black behind them. She stays by the wall thinking, thinking about the man and his child, until all that is left is a glow of light from a single bulb at the end of the hallway and a night the color of steel and the promise of rain.
It rains on the twenty-eighth. A rain taken to gusts and slashings. Bob drives down to L.A. after dark. The freeway is a ragged line of vehicles slip-streaming through a gap in the foothills toward a dim triangle of light.
The whole trip is an hour of silent running. Just him and a blue emptiness inside the car, which is streaked with the shadow-line of rain trailing down the windows. As the wispy mirage of the city spreads out before him, he begins to consider who this Case Hardin is, beyond what the police in San Diego have told him.
He takes the Hollywood Freeway to Gower, then Franklin west to Garfield. The 1700 block of Garfield runs between Franklin and Hollywood Boulevard. It’s a potluck of low-end apartments, two-story stucco and terrace, and a few straggling homes from another era, the little class they once had flaking away. Some of the buildings have rental signs
on them written in Armenian.
He finds the recovery house about five doors up from Hollywood Boulevard. An old brick three-story affair that looks like it has wheezed through the last twenty years.
Case sits in the darkened window seat of her tiny living room watching the street. She smokes, she is apprehensive. She sees a car slow and cruise the buildings’ numbers and thinks this might be him. The car does a U-turn into a driveway and finds a spot to park near a barred and boarded-up grocery.
She leans in close to the window. In the murky glass the reflection of her eyes and the burning tip of a nervous cigarette are all she sees until a man wearing a black oilskin raincoat with the hood pulled up clears the trees. He makes his way along the sidewalk, carrying a brown leather case. He turns quickly up the walkway, his boots kicking up sprays of water.
It must be him.
She grapples with the moment. “I am here … and now,” she tells herself, stumping the cigarette out against the top of a Diet Coke. She repeats, “I am here … and now.”
The lobby of the building has been turned into a reception and waiting area. A bivouac of cheap metal desks and fake leather couches, sagging from long-term use. A goateed security guard holds the fort from behind a desk. He looks up from a sitcom. Arms folded, leaning back in his chair, he has that air of “try me.” “Yes, sir. How may we help you?” He puts some measure into the word “we.”
“Case Hardin. I’m here to talk to her. I have an appointment.”
“Name?”
“Officer …” He cuts himself off. “Mr. Bob Hightower.”
Hearing the word “officer” draws a few looks from the female residents hunkered down on the sofas in the waiting area. They stare at Bob. He can see right away they assume the worst, and their alliance, like warborn partisans, is with one of their own.
A woman behind Bob says, “I’ll take care of Mr. Hightower.”
He turns. Anne steps out of her office, offers him her hand. “I’m Anne Dvore. Resident manager.”
