The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller

by Noreen Ayres

  I couldn’t help it: I thought of my Does. No yachts with banners in a marina for them. Only the moon in its cool dispassion, and a slow-moving security cruiser behind us, checking to see that everything was as quiet, as barren and lifeless, as it was supposed to be.

  TWELVE

  Thirty miles south, along San Juan Creek in San Juan Capistrano, an army of Audubon volunteers set out to hack plants invading the natural habitat of native birds, and I meant to join them.

  I don’t agree with all of Audubon’s politics, attend no meetings, and know the officers’ names only by newsletter. I am more bookish than fervent. Still, and in spite of a slight headache from debauchery, I decided I’d rather engage in bush wars than stay and do household tasks that put me in glum moods.

  I gathered old gloves, a hat, and an insulated bottle painted in military camouflage I’d picked up at a garage sale. Before leaving, I looked in at Motorboat. He stared at me from the open end of a hollow log, his lower jaw shifting, the teeth ever in need of grinding. I said goodbye and told him to keep out of trouble.

  I’d drawn a map to the cleanup site on a big yellow sticky and stuck it to the center of the steering wheel. I’d be making my turn onto Ortega Highway, one part of which is dubbed Ricochet Alley by members of the highway patrol because of the cars that careen off the roadside into the ravines below. At another spot known as Pushover Point junked and stolen cars, perforated by weekend shooters until they look like tea strainers, nestle in the shrubs.

  Today I wouldn’t be going that far. But just being on the road made me recall a murder scene Joe and I had covered where a man had been beaten, then strangled with a rig of barbed wire.

  Before long, I was driving down a quiet road lined with oak, sycamore, and the aggressive foe I’d soon be fighting, the bamboo-like cane known by its scientific name as arundo donax.

  In an open grassy area, a white banner was stuck in the ground identifying SOUTH COAST AUDUBON. At a table where a man and woman were deep in conversation about home plumbing fixtures I signed in, giving my name, address, and whom to contact if I should fall over dead by spider bite, wasp sting, or rattlesnake strike. The man pointed to some tools laid out on the grass: pruners, shovels, rusty rakes, and a machete. “Take what you want. The ones with orange tape belong to the district. Those without belong to J.G.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and lifted a machete whose blade was nicked and streaked with plant life. I swooped it through the air, then decided I’d probably wind up chopping my own ankle instead of clearing bird habitat, so I put it back and opted for long-handled pruners. All around, volunteers were rustling brush and throwing cut trophies behind them. A couple of kids ran about. An old Hispanic man swung a machete with ease.

  I walked down a shaded gully to a fortress of cane near an electrical tower and leaned my hat against a stump hollowed by decay. Inside, a bug turned frantically on a tiny lake of captured water. The cane stalks were gray at the base from mud-splash. I knelt and worked the blades of my pruners into a pack so tight I had to make two cuts before I could yank the first stalks out.

  For two hours I cut, pulled, and manhandled cane. At times I’d think of my recent cases but tried to shunt it aside, knowing the mind needs rest so the pieces of puzzle can come vibrating home like shavings compelled to cleave to a magnet.

  After a particularly strenuous fight with a stubborn stalk, I dropped my pruners and searched for my thermos, now buried in a fan of green leaves. I pulled it free, then glanced at the tiny bug still churning in the stump water, slipped off my dirt-heavy glove and dipped my finger into the lake to lift out the bit of struggling life. Wiping the creature onto the edge of the stump, I said, “Second chance, bub.”

  “Bulldozer coming through!” A sun-burnished man surveyed my pile of destruction. “You do that all by yourself?” He smiled, showing bright, even teeth. “My name’s Gil.”

  “Smokey,” I said, and uncapped my camo jug.

  “Smokey?”

  “I prevent forest fires.” I took a drink, watching him.

  He said he was recruiting to load the Dumpster.

  “Sure,” I said. We took the path, Gil leading. On a dry knoll the dark profile of a bird asserted itself, its tail high as it strutted in pace with us. “Brown-headed cowbird,” I said. The female lays her eggs, one here, one there, in the nests of other species. Her young emerge first, then bully or starve out the other hatchlings.

  “All I’ve seen out here this morning are blackbirds, scrub-jays, and a Tammy Wynette,” Gil said. Creases formed at his eyes. “A Nashville warbler.”

  “That’s bad, really bad,” I said.

  “I got a million of ’em.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  We headed for the brown sheet-metal container where a pickup piled high with cane was backed into the loading end. There was a man throwing stalks forward from the tailgate and another standing in the Dumpster to direct the flow.

  The woman I saw at the check-in table came up, wiping her brow with her arm. “I’m taking the kids home for a bit, Gil,” she said. “You want to tell people there’s castor bean that needs to come out up on that rise?” I looked at the lady with the red face and football-player legs, and thought I never would have made her and Gil for a couple.

  Gil said, “I’ll put Drew and Shannon on it, but we’re just about full up here. We shouldn’t pull any more.”

  “It really needs to come out, Gil,” she said, then moved off.

  I knew castor bean contains ricin, one of the world’s deadliest poisons. Originally from Africa, a mere two beans could kill you. In Europe there was a famous espionage case in which a man was murdered by a tiny metal burr coated with ricin and jabbed into his leg by the tip of an umbrella as he made his way in a crowd. The mature plants look like old scrub, but the tiny shoots pull up easily from the ground. The woman called back to Gil: “And if you find any more dead bodies, do it while I’m gone.”

  I thought she was kidding, some joke about the castor bean. But then Gil said, “They found a body out here Friday.” I felt numb but didn’t show it. “Yeah. A guy and his dog found it.”

  “Where?”

  “Down there by the creek. Lynelle’s the one who told me.”

  Her small red pickup was just pulling away.

  It wasn’t unusual I wouldn’t know about the case. With 120 people at the lab, any of us could be on a case and the news not get around until the next department meeting. But the location made me uneasy. “A transient, do you know?”

  “I think so.”

  Then why hadn’t I heard a about it? Maybe it wasn’t a Doe.

  Gil climbed into the pickup bed when the one man jumped down to unload the wheelbarrow. I followed, then leaped over to the Dumpster where the second man was, and the three of us threw and caught stalk till the level at the back of the pickup was low and the back of the Dumpster was high. The man beside me began to trounce on the cuttings. I did it too. The load crackled like popcorn; you couldn’t help but laugh, this odd trampoline.

  Then Gil jumped over and the other guy got off, so it was Gil and me jumping and bouncing until the both of us were giggling and out of breath, flat on our backs and eyes away from the sun. When his gaze met mine, he said, “Nice to meet you, Smokey.”

  I got up and brushed my pants and said I guessed we’d better get back to the cutting.

  He said, “We can’t do any more, really. The city says we have to have it all picked up by the time we leave. Mike’s going to stack it near the road and come back with the truck later.” He jumped down and lent a hand. “How’s lunch sound? There’s fast-food places down the way.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you, Gil.”

  “Maybe some other time?”

  “I’m sure I’ll run into you and Lynelle again.”

  “If you’re thinking we…the two of us…? Oh, no. Lynelle and I aren’t together. Not me. Uh-uh.”

  I smiled but said thanks anyway. Gil w
as handsome, in a blond sort of way, but I was not in the market for a new man. I reached to get the pruners, and Gil came up again.

  “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “In Newport, at Back Bay. What’d I do? All I said was I saw you a couple of times.”

  “If you saw me,” I said, “why didn’t you say so before?”

  “Whew, that pushed a button.”

  I looked around for my sunglasses, didn’t see them. In my time, I’ve been stalked, followed, and discovered, all three. It doesn’t take a lot to set my senses on alert.

  “It didn’t come to me, I guess,” Gil said, “until we were back there at the Dumpster.”

  “What’s your last name, Gil?”

  “Vanderman.”

  I kept him in my vision while I still looked among the leaves.

  “Lose something?”

  “Sunglasses.” As I lifted cane fronds, Gil lifted some too. I didn’t need his help, didn’t want him there. I finally found them wedged in leaves.

  When I looked back at Gil, he was peering into the stump. Two gnats this time stirred the dark sheen of water. He dunked a twig and lifted out both bugs, blew on them, then flung the thing away, riders and all. “Ready?” he said, as if we were a couple going somewhere. Once in the clearing, he dug in a back pocket and opened a wallet, took out a card and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “My card,” he said, as if any moderately bright person could assume.

  In the top left corner was the stylized head of a great blue heron. In the middle, Gil Vanderman, and under it, Naturalist. A phone, a fax, and the words Tours, Photography, Lectures completed the card.

  “See, Smokey? There may be a dead guy in the culvert,” he said, “but I didn’t do it.” His voice was softer, his eyes even kinder than before. He could be a Ted Bundy, that smooth style.

  THIRTEEN

  Numero quatro.

  In a storm drain off Ortega Highway, Juan Doe Number Four was found lying face down in a couple of inches of water.

  Trudy Kunitz was on it. “He had a good haircut,” she said, “like from a salon, shaved close on the sides, with three horizontal lines above the ear.” She said he still had a knit cap on, nailed by a bullet. T-shirt and jeans. Old dress shoes, no socks. There was a watch with a busted leather band and an alligator on its face. “I’m faxing the sketch to Homicide in about twenty minutes. They’ll put it out to the papers tomorrow. You watch. That haircut, we’ll get an ID overnight.”

  I said, “I took a chance somebody would be in who knew about the case.” I was using my cell phone.

  “Somebody was.”

  “Go home now, Trudy.”

  “It’s like a tomb in here,” she said. “Couple of guys in Tox, is all.”

  “Then I’d say it was time to go home.”

  She was silent a moment, then said, “It’s worse at home.”

  As I drove north, I reviewed the cases like a journalist figuring the Four W’s and an H: What, Where, Why, When, How. I added another: Who? Four GSW’s to the face. All Does. Why?

  I was nearing Technology Park. Beyond it, a blue cloud was poised over the twin blue humps of the Saddleback mountains like a stalled flying carpet.

  Farther on, a single green tractor with yellow wheel-rims was perched, manless, in a tilled field.

  Once I’d seen a man with a roll of plastic set upon his shoulders, the free end fleeing down his back and onto the cultivated rows to cover new plants as he slow-walked in silhouette against a gold sunset. When he was done the sheeting would turn these fields to lakes of silver.

  Though I had just come from cane cutting, I longed to be out there, quiet, anonymous, fruitful. In the fields there’s a willfulness of life that pleases me. A mouse daring a hawk. A stumbling beetle racing for shade. Poke a seed, spit on it, it grows. I wanted to be there, away from what mankind inclines to do to itself in all the varieties of cruel intrusion.

  “How was cane cutting?” Joe said.

  “Dirty, hot, and fun. You can join me sometime.”

  “Not on your life. A couch, a beer, a game, and thou, my dear.”

  I balanced the phone on my shoulder while I went to look in at Motorboat. Squinched at the back of his log, he pipped. I raised the cage lid. He darted out, then back. Guinea pigs should be called greased pigs. They go as fast in reverse as forward.

  “I just talked to Trudy Kunitz,” I said. “A body was found Thursday afternoon in San Juan Creek, down where I was working today.”

  “You have anything to do with it?”

  “A card, that’s what you are,” I said. “Think of it, though. Another one. What the heck’s going on?”

  “Worry about that tomorrow. Today’s still Sunday.”

  I let that sink in, then asked, “Okay, so what are you doing this afternoon?” He said he was going out with his son to buy tires. “Oh yeah,” I said, “he told me about that.”

  “He told you?”

  “At the parade.”

  “What a dummy, huh?”

  “That boy’s almost as smart as his father,” I said.

  He laughed and said, “I’m meeting him at Jennifer’s. It’ll be in the air, like our son wouldn’t be acting weird if our marriage hadn’t taken a left turn over Iceland.”

  “I’m sorry, Joe.”

  “I look at her, this woman I spent twenty-two years with, it’s like I don’t know her at all and wouldn’t want to if I just met her. I wish her well, I want her to have a good life, but…”

  “This is the first time I’ve heard you say anything the slightest bit critical, which tells me you’re either a hero or you spent so many years together even her faults don’t interest you anymore.”

  “It’s called forgiveness.”

  “You’re smart, sexy, and sweet, you know that, Joe?”

  “Then why ain’t I rich?”

  “Ambition’s about how sharp your elbows are.”

  “Are you saying I’m not ambitious?”

  “I’m saying you’re perfect the way you are.”

  “That all?”

  When I came out of the shower I wrapped up in a robe, got a glass of milk, then went to check on Motorboat again. He was still hiding. I set the glass down and overturned his log and lifted him out. First he purred. Then he sneezed. It sounded like a hiccup. I brought him close to my cheek and felt his ears fiery on my skin. I got dressed, put him in a box, and drove to the emergency vet’s.

  “It’s a rodent. Don’t people hire exterminators for these things?” I said when I was in the examining room.

  The vet ruffled the tiny golden head, then stood him on his forelegs to inspect whatever’s at the rear axle. Motorboat shrieked loud enough to make paint peel. “They chill easily,” he said. “He’s got a cold. Just keep him out of drafts and give him Vitamin C.”

  Back home, I brought his cage into the living room. I settled onto the sofa and watched a show on building an Adirondack patio chair, then turned pages in a book I’d gotten out of the basement library at the lab last week on taxidermy.

  Late afternoon I felt at loose ends, so I put on sweats and a fanny-pack with my new S&W in it, and walked across the road to the bay. It’s not so wise a thing to take a walk down its shrubby paths in the dimming light, but the 700-acre bay has a drawing power hard to resist. Days, it is host to bicyclists, boaters, fishers, joggers, and busloads of children on field trips. Nights, it seethes with a Mardi Gras of birds and beasts.

  Before I moved here there’d been two murders, one a schoolgirl, another a woman with roses stuffed between her legs. The only trouble of late has been a few shouting matches between “wheelers” and “walkers.”

  The writer Marcel Proust had a horror of sunsets—so operatic, he said. I thought of that while I admired the brass-rose sky. In the air was a sweet smell of damp sage, tidal brine, faint decay, and cliff flowers.

  An older couple came down the trail ahead of me. A dove that had huddled unseen on the graying path spurted of
f between us. The couple said there was a heron back there choking down crab like no tomorrow.

  “Really?” I said. “I’ll look for it.”

  They moved beyond me. Then the man looked back and said, “It’s getting kind of dark. I’d be careful if I were you.”

  The woman was a comfortable contrast, yet it was she who added, her forefinger raised, “You young people sometimes forget how bad it can be, all the weirdos in the world these days.”

  “Right,” I said. “Have a good evening. I won’t go far.”

  “That’s good,” they chimed.

  FOURTEEN

  I wanted to see the ankles of Doe Two. The damage there might show more clearly now, this subtle development called a “second event.” A coroner’s deputy named Mona told me, “No problem,” picked up a camera, and rose from her chair with an effort that strained her black twill pants. On her blouse was a large, brightly painted version of a carrot-haired Bette Midler. I commented on it. Mona got a satisfied grin on her face and said, “My alter ego.”

  In the cooler by Doe Two she folded the plastic cover down. “The marks do appear to be consistent with punctures from canine teeth,” she said.

  “But if that occurred after he was dead there would be no blood, right? There was blood.”

  “I’m not a doc but that would be my assumption. Here’s something else,” she said, “up here.” She pointed to irregularities on the bridge of the victim’s nose and under both eyes. “My guess is he was held tightly, very tightly, by some sort of binding. He could have been cuffed too. We have faint red at the wrists.”

  “Nothing like a belt or cuffs at the scene,” I said. She just shrugged a shoulder and said she’d snap off some shots for me and bring them into the autopsy room, which was my next stop.

  I said thanks and went on. The techs and docs were at their stations. Lenore was not among them. Trudy wasn’t there either, whom I half-expected although it is not a requirement for the forensic jock to attend.