“So you think it’s a coincidence?” Noleen said. “All these worms suddenly, out of the blue?”
I stared at her. Then I turned and stared out across the flat dusty fields that stretched away to the south of Cuento beyond the slough. Something was glimmering deep in the puddle of pinot grigio that passed for my brain this morning. Dusty fields full of crops and the daily gross-out in Last Ditch bedrooms and … Diego’s fish, three and counting, were in there and even, somehow, my fantasy bacon and egg butty.
“No,” I said. “Not a coincidence. But I can’t see what the link is. It’s close but it’s … ” I screwed my face up and concentrated really hard. From the combination of the hangover, the stomach roll when I saw the worms, and the long day of nothing much to eat the day before, as I wound up every fibre of my being in an effort to catch the thread, the inevitable happened.
Reader, I farted.
“And in a Zak Posen teddy too,” said Todd.
“Don’t worry, Stinker,” said Noleen, throwing an arm around me and squeezing me fit to pop my collarbone. “You’ve found your
people. Wait till chili taco night. I’ll show you gas.”
“Stand back, Lexy. She’s all mine,” Kathi said. She shut the door on room 216 and we went to Todd’s, where this morning’s coffee, he told us, was vanilla and there were pains au chocolat warming.
∞
“Who wants to come with me to view a days-old corpse and see if we can tell that it had handcuffs cut off it?” I said twenty minutes later, dabbing chocolate off my lips with a checked napkin, for all the world as if I didn’t have sweet milky tea drying down the length of my fart-contaminated teddy.
“I’m manning the office,” said Noleen. “I should be there now.”
“I’m in the Skweek,” said Kathi.
“I’m going into work to have an interview with HR,” said Todd.
“I could come to that with you,” I said, “if you do my thing with me.”
“You’d be such a help!” said Todd. “With your deep knowledge of California employment law, hospital policy, and my confidential file. Dream on.”
So I went on my own. I was sure it was a good idea. Well, I was half sure it was the best way forward from where we’d run aground. That is to say, I couldn’t see any major disaster that seemed absolutely guaranteed.
Mizz Visalia took some persuading. She was in bed when I got there, which wasn’t a great sign. Serpentina showed me into the bedroom and then went to fetch me an entirely unwanted cup of café con leche. It seemed like it would take the longest out of what she offered me and I wanted a good crack at Visalia on her own. Jan, she told me, was golfing.
“It’s the … secondary actions,” I said. “I don’t know why the police think two people were involved in the … operation. The only thing I can think of is that there’s some kind of mark on Clovis’s body. And there’s no way anyone’s going to let me in to see Clovis’s body, is there? But if you want to visit him, and you need someone to be with you for support … Do you see?”
“But I don’t want to visit him,” Visalia said. “I find all of that quite morbid. That’s why I was so keen to have him cremated.”
“You were?”
“Well, what I mean is, that’s why I was agreeable to his wishes when they strike so many as quite heathenish and outlandish.”
“Yeah, but that’s the fireworks, isn’t it?”
“No, Lexy, it isn’t,” Visalia said. “The destruction of his earthly remains is what worries Father Adam. How will Clovis rise up, on the Day of Judgment, to sit at God’s right hand, if he’s a pile of ash?”
“How will he if he’s a pile of compost?” I said. “If Judgment Day takes a while, I mean. And anyway, you’ve got Father Adam completely wrong. He said to me yesterday that he believes—truly believes—Clovis is up there right now, looking down and smiling.”
“That’s not at all what the Church teaches,” Visalia said.
“Well, you don’t have to look,” I said. She blinked a bit until she caught up with the switch back then she shook her head, as if she had water in her ear.
“If I don’t look, who’s going to believe I’m there to see him?”
It was a good point.
“Wear dark glasses,” I said. “Like Jackie O. Say your eyes are strained from weeping and lack of sleep.” I looked closely at her. If anything, her eyes were clearer and brighter than they had been in the last few months of thrashing out the end of the marriage with Clovis. And when I took a really close look, her cheeks looked a bit plumper too and her colour was good and the tremor had gone from her hands and her jaw. Her hair was soft and shining as well. But it was also a different shade of mauve, so I could put that down to the hairdresser’s visit rather than whatever black magic had made an octogenarian bloom with dewy health after what she’d been through.
“I don’t even know where he is,” she said. “He’s not at the funeral director’s yet anyway.”
“My guess is he’ll still be in the morgue,” I said. “While they wait for all the test results to come back. In case they need more samples of anything. You know, for the chain of evidence.”
Mizz Visalia twitched her bed jacket sleeves into place. I loved that she wore a bed jacket. “My, my,” she said. “You seem awfully well informed all of a sudden. You told me you didn’t follow any of those dreadful shows.”
I had told her that and it was the truth. But Noleen and Kathi had never met a CSI they didn’t TiVo and they had shared the benefit over the vanilla coffee and pastries.
“Vi,” I said, “I’m trying to help you. Do you remember three days ago, in court, in a shade of orange that, I’m sorry, did nothing for you? You were released on my signature—”
“Cosignature,” she said. “So you see, you have helped me, Lexy. And you gave me an alibi. Where would I be without you?”
“Well, no, I didn’t,” I said. “Three burly firefighters gave you an alibi, Vi, if you remember.”
“Not everything goes the way it’s supposed to,” she said.
I felt my chin pull back into my neck without my doing a thing to make it. The way it’s supposed to? I mouthed the words over to myself. Like … I was supposed to give her an alibi but she got a flat tire and so the firemen did the job for me?
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
Vi was retying the neck ribbon of her bed jacket. “Hm?” she said, mildly. Then, “Oh! I mean, they save the burly beauties for the calendar and fundraisers and the weedy little runts get to run around the back roads changing tires. Those men were nothing to break out a fire-ax over.” She clucked at the memory of her disappointment. “Why? What did you think I meant?”
“Not important,” I said. I waited for my insides to sit down and stop dancing the Macarena. A few more shocks like the worms and that little bomb she’d just dropped and I’d be necking Pepto like the rest of this troubled nation. I don’t know if it’s the portions, the stock market, or some kind of collective colitis, but indigestion is huge here. Turn the corner of a mid-sized chemist’s shop and the tablets, powders, effervescents, and chalky solutions stretch to a vanishing point in the distance, like the Matrix weapon store. In fact, it’s not just the stomach. There’s not an inch of tubing from the face to the anus that Americans—wait, I can only really speak to Californians—don’t think they can get closer to and improve. From snorting saltwater up one nostril and down the other if they catch a cold to the Zen balance of senna and Imodium they’re always on the hunt for. Not to mention the yoghurts and yakults and yomilks, and of course the associated soyomilks and goyomilks and alyomilks (because cows are just the almonds, goats, and soybeans of the past and their days are numbered!). I don’t know how they do it, because I certainly could not start every day with a product whose serving suggestion was basically eat before shitting, but Californians don’t seem to
mind. I’m convinced if someone marketed a yuk-blurk called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Faeces Already, they’d retire to the Caymans with a yacht.
The Caymans!
I blinked myself back to Visalia’s bedside, ready to double down and persuade her if it killed me.
But she had changed her mind all on her own.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Forgive me, Lexy. I’m not myself and I’m not thinking very smart thoughts. I never meant for you to get mixed up in all this sordidness.” She smiled. “But I’m very glad you are. I couldn’t do this without you.”
“Well, that’s kind of you,” I said. I wasn’t thinking very smart thoughts either, of course. Vi wasn’t herself after sudden widowhood and incarceration, but what was my excuse? “I’m glad you’re beginning to think of me as a friend,” I said, “because I can’t be your counsellor again after this. We’ve lost every trace of our professional relationship.”
It didn’t help that, at that moment, Visalia was climbing out of bed and heading towards her bathroom to ready herself for another trying day. “Really?” she said as she shrugged out of her bed jacket. “You think we’ve blurred the line? I’ve been keeping note of your hours to settle up when it’s all over.”
“There’s no charge for friendship,” I called after her.
“I don’t agree,” she called back. The shower went on. “I will reward you for this somehow, Lexy. What do you want most in the world? What’s your heart’s desire?”
“Um,” I shouted. The sink taps were running too. “I’m pretty easy really. Nothing much I’m pining for.”
“I’ll surprise you then,” she shouted. “Even though we might be thousands of miles apart, I won’t forget you.”
“Seeing you free and at peace and Clovis’s killer brought to justice will be plenty reward,” I yelled over the sound of the toilet flushing.
She put her head round the door, probably thinking I couldn’t see her, forgetting the mirror behind her. “Well, will you please tell that nice detective about the Poggios, in that case?” she said. “Because I’m more convinced than ever that one of those stronzi is responsible for this.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “I kind of burned a bridge there, but I’ll try. And you know what? We might not be thousands of miles apart.”
I had no idea where that had come from. Part of it was the sight of Visalia’s old lady body, her skinny legs and her droopy bottom and the long curved line of her back with her bird bones and the swags of skin. Life, it told me, was short. So maybe it was a good idea to go through it saying “wheeeeee!” Maybe I shouldn’t assume that I’d be back in Dundee before my next haircut. I’d never seen the redwoods yet. Or the desert. Or—
“Well, no,” said Vi. “Not thousands. You’ll be in Scotland and I’ll be in Sicily.”
“You’d really defy the Poggios even after this? Don’t they frighten you?”
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” she said. Then she looked over her shoulder as a plume of steam spread around her. “Water’s wasting. Ima go make myself purty for Cousin Clovis.”
I stared at the space where she’d been. You’d be looking at this morning’s mission a long time before you thought of a hot date, but there was no other way to take what Visalia had just said. I shrugged. Like the internal workings of a blood feud, this was just one more thing I didn’t understand.
Twenty-One
He looks,” I began an hour later, in the viewing room at the morgue. I knew what I was supposed to say: so peaceful.
“Dead,” said Visalia, and it was hard to argue. Cousin Clovis on Monday had been dead beyond a shadow of a doubt. Cold, stiff, and pale. But looking at him then I could see how Mary Shelley might have got the idea for Frankenstein, one night after a good dinner in that villa in Italy, as the mints went round and the candles burned down. Looking at him now, four days later … I could only imagine her out for lunch with her editor in London, giving the two-minute pitch, and the editor saying, “I dunno, Mary. What else you got for me?”
That same orderly was standing off to the side, scrolling through his texts. Hard to believe there was a signal down here, but he was certainly engrossed in something.
I had tried to strategise on the drive over, suggesting that Mizz Visalia throw a wobbler and have to be taken away, leaving me alone with the body. She pointed out that anyone falling ill on county property would be whisked into the ER in case of litigation and she’d had a “potful of county facilities at the jail and could do without the hospital chaser.” Then I suggested she faint and grab hold of the sheet on her way down, uncovering the body and letting me take a quick couple of photos while the attention was on her. “ER for me again,” she said, “and jail for you when they hear the camera click.” I suggested the application of some more dead guys—presidents, to be specific. Visalia pointed out that the staff member would gladly pocket the money and then keep coming back for more until we were both destitute.
“I’ll take care of it, Lexy,” she said. “Leave it to me.”
She sighed and smiled at the orderly. He scrolled. She cleared her throat. He scrolled. She said, “Pardon me.” Maybe he thought she was excusing a burp, but in any case, he scrolled.
“Sir?” I said. “I think Mrs. Bombaro would like to ask something.”
The orderly raised his eyes. They were deader than Clovis’s in their way, since Clovis at least had that residual look of surprise he was taking into the hereafter. My heart sank. This guy had no spark of humanity about him anywhere. Whatever Visalia had in mind, he’d snort and go back to scrolling.
I was wrong.
“Can I look at him?” Visalia said. The orderly glanced at the table and poked his head forward, just once, about six inches. I had no idea what he meant to convey but Visalia, for all she was (Bakersfield) Italian, did better with the minimal gesture than me.
“Oh, yes of course,” she said, “It’s wonderful to see his sweet face, but can I look at … more of him? Can I look at … all of him? He was such a passionate man and marriage is such an intimate relationship and we’ve been married so long … ”
It was a masterstroke. There was no way for the orderly to refuse her request without implying that he was repulsed. And repulsion takes investment. Repulsion is a shit that must be given.
To prove he didn’t have the fixings, the orderly shrugged and went back to scrolling again.
Visalia looked pointedly at me. I had nothing to prove, possessed several shits, and gave them all: repulsion, trepidation, regret, nausea, light-headedness, and—oddly—a clear memory of Clovis’s brown slip-on shoes and long cream-coloured silk socks. But this had been my idea, so I stepped forward and folded back the white sheet, uncovering his pale, hairless chest with its badly-stitched seam, his white belly, concave now after the removal of so many organs and samples, and … Hallelujah, a pair of paper drawers the same cement-grey as the staff scrubs. I kept unrolling the sheet, past his purple, bruised wrists, his doughy thighs, scraped knees, spindly shins, purple, bruised ankles, and long yellow feet.
“Underwear off?” said the orderly in a lazy drawl. Visalia gasped and he finally betrayed an emotion. A smile-like lift struck one side of his mouth very briefly.
“Underwear on,” I said. I had never been more grateful for the wide streak of Puritanism that still ran through American society, even all the way over here on the wacky West Coast, three thousand miles and a cannibalistic Christmas picnic from the pilgrims’ landing. Breastfeeding under a tarpaulin and trying to give smear tests by touch alone was never going to seem any more normal to me than inside cats and lunch at eleven, but I was a big fan of morgue shorts. Big fan.
If I ever needed to tell someone what I did for a living but didn’t want to end up offering therapy—on a plane, for instance, with a chatty neighbour—I was going to say I worked for a company that manufactured paper underwear f
or cadavers. That would stop a conversation like rolling a marble into a cowpat.
I turned my attention (at last, perhaps) to the bruises on his wrists and ankles. I happen to know that handcuffs come in different sizes. And Clovis was not a big guy. Yet the marks of his restraints were enough to make me wince and want to rub them with balm. His wrists had been badly pinched and mashed together. I looked down at his ankles and saw the same story there. And something else. There was a rectangular dent about the size of the smallest Lego brick, the one with two bumps, except without bumps.
At my side, Visalia let go of a long low breath. “Goodbye, my dear old friend,” she said. “Goodbye, love of my long life. Goodbye.”
I pulled the sheet back up to his chin, said, “Goodbye, Clovis,” and then let it drop over his face. “We’ll see ourselves out,” I said to Scroller Boy and, hand-in-hand, Visalia and I made our weary way up to the ground floor and out of the formaldehyde chill into the fetid breath of the day.
“I loved him,” Visalia said.
“I know.”
“He made me want to take off my shoe and beat him to death sometimes.”
“Of course.”
“But if I had my time all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
I decided she meant up to but not including Sunday and just patted her hand gently.
“Did you recognise the pattern the restraints left on his skin?” I asked, once we were underway again. “They didn’t look like handcuffs to me.”
Visalia gasped. “Handcuffs?” she said.
“That’s definitely what Bilbo said the police told him.”
Visalia took a huge breath. I was convinced she was going to say something momentous. But in the end all it was, was: “I’m an old woman and I want to rest. It’s so damn hot.”
Scot Free Page 21
