The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller

by Noreen Ayres

  The San Juan Creek Doe was as Trudy described. Haircut. Young. Hispanic. Dr. Margolis was the examiner. Good. I asked if he saw similarities in any of these cases. He pointed to the hole in the forehead and said, “Other than that, no.”

  When Mona brought in the Polaroids, I asked him what he thought caused the marks on the face and ankles of Doe Two. “I’d guess it’s a contusion from a leather belt,” he said. “See this?” He spread his gown to show a brown belt with lacing top and bottom. “Something to think about,” he said, then turned back to his work.

  At a Fifties-style diner a few blocks away I ordered a bagel and cream cheese and coffee. Dishes clattered, voices screeched. I looked out at the blue, blue sky and had a sudden feeling of disassociation, as if I belonged nowhere. I watched people come and go, their conversations heard yet not heard.

  A belt, I thought. Okay. Victim restrained, brought to that hill in Nellie Gail by the water tanks. No. Victim on that hill, then restrained, because he was carefully set against the tree, and it would be too hard to lug a bound body, living or dead, up the hill. Why there? What about the coyote bites?

  I ate my meal but still sat there, tapping my finger on the side of my cup, unwilling to go. Then I had it: The boy was shot while restrained against the tree, and left for dead. An animal came by. It chewed on the boy’s ankle, maybe trying to pull him down for better vantage. Perhaps the boy moaned. Perhaps the killer, still nearby, heard the moan, and came and sent a second round through the same portal as the first. But why, then, did I not find a second slug? No. The boy was shot. He did not die. Coyote came, sniffed. Bit. Boy, though unconscious, kicked. Coyote fled. Boy died. Coyote waits. Simple.

  I left a message for Stu that I was going back out to Nellie Gail. I was glad he wasn’t in because he would say there’s no point. A crime scene opened to the public can no longer deliver anything to serve as evidence for prosecution. But I went anyway, to satisfy myself. This time I brought a magnifying glass to more closely inspect the bark on the opposite side where the body leaned. I thought I saw faint impressions but could not be sure. It meant nothing. Nor was any shooter hiding in the bushes. No one to throw his hands up and say you got me girl, I surrender.

  Joe wasn’t in his office when I got back, but later I saw him involved in conversation with a detective at the bench by the microscopes so I didn’t go in. He left a message on my office voice-mail about getting together, and I left one for him. When I didn’t hear again, I figured maybe something came up with David.

  Late in the afternoon a colleague came by and told me she’d just come from a scene involving a starved and beaten child of four. The child was alive, the mother wasn’t; she finally did the world a favor and drank strychnine. My colleague broke down at my desk. I held and comforted her. Then she said, “Fuck. I’m getting out of here,” and left.

  On my way home I kept switching the radio on and off. The sky was dark with threatened rain. I stopped to mail a letter and rent a video, and when I filled my tank with gas I kept an eye out, watched the shadows, saw in every car or crowd a killer.

  Fifty. Five-O. Is it old? Is it young?

  All I know is, no matter how I march the numbers forward or back, stand them on their head, measure them off like tick-marks on a ruler, fifty, blessed fifty, is too young to relinquish impact upon this world. Fifty is too young to die.

  I was in the snack room the next morning around ten getting a cup of machine-dispensed chicken soup, reading a report at the same time from the FBI on how drug use is now higher in female juveniles than in males, and speculating on why that should be so. The cup of soup was scalding. I set it on the counter for a better grip so I could pour some of it off and add cold water, when I heard from the lips of a man in the hallway the words, “Oh, no! Shit, you say,” in that distinctive tone that tells you he’s just heard something you don’t want to. Then all I caught was a word here or there.

  But as the men moved past the aperture of the door, it was the last few words I heard that devastated my heart: “He was supposed to turn fifty next Monday, wasn’t he?”

  That would be Joe.

  I shot out into the hall and caught up with them. These were men I didn’t know well, men who’d probably not heard grapevine dispatches that Sanders and Brandon were a pair.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  One of them said, “Joe Sanders had a massive heart attack.”

  The floor fell away. I put a hand on the wall but recovered before they noticed. “When?” I asked.

  “Six o’clock this morning, at home.”

  The other one said, “A lot of heart attacks occur in the morning. That’s why I don’t do my exercises right off.”

  “Better just to stay in bed,” the first man said, “catch a few winks.”

  I piled into the director’s office. “What happened to Joe Sanders?”

  Paul Ferris looked up, paused, and said, “He died.”

  “No he didn’t,” I said, taut as a spring.

  “I’m afraid it’s true. I checked at Irvine Med Center.” He looked at me differently now, as if recalling that Joe and I are more than colleagues. “Why don’t you take a seat, Smokey?”

  “Who reported it?”

  “His ex-wife. That’s who they had on file.”

  “There’s some mistake. This can’t be true.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Paul rose and rounded the desk to come toward me.

  Fucker. Leave me alone, is what I felt. I walked away.

  I drove. I parked. Several times. I cried.

  On a long dirt road off Sand Canyon I sat under eucalyptus trees so tall they seemed to be the heavens. Sat there thirty minutes or so with the window down, studying rows of plants, the dry dirt beside the car, the patterns of shed leaves ranging in color from gray to wine. Above, the sky was without tone or variation. Birds flitted, but not with energy.

  I fell into a spasm of hard weeping, recalling moment after moment of Joe. Joe and me, Joe and Ray, Joe and others. This man could not be gone. My heart raged against life and anyone I knew who’d slighted him, shorted him, not given everything he’d expected. I myself stood high on that list for omissions and commissions, for why hadn’t I recognized the warning signs?

  My throat ached. My eyes burned as if I’d walked through smoke. The flesh of my face had a quivering life of its own.

  Within minutes of reaching home, I had a call from Joe’s son. We cried, recovered, cried again. I asked if he was going to be okay. He said yes, yes, but there was one thing. Then all I heard were sobs. “David, where are you? Are you at home?”

  “I’m not at my apartment.”

  “Your mom’s?”

  “No.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I’ll have to call you back.” He hung up.

  Then one of those reprieves you see only in your trembling dreams occurred. Paul Ferris called…to say Joe wasn’t dead.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said. “Apparently a nurse blew off her mouth when she didn’t have all the facts.”

  My knees were weak and I sat. Joe, alive!

  The director waited, then said, “You need somebody there?”

  “No. No.”

  “So they’re watching him real close now, that’s all I know. If you need some time off,” Paul said, “it’s okay.”

  “Paul, I just got off the phone with his son. He still thinks his father’s dead.”

  “His mother phoned us,” he said. “She thinks you might know where he is.”

  “I don’t. He didn’t say. He’s very upset.”

  When we hung up I grabbed my keys, flew out the door, raced down the stairs to my car. All I could think of was, “He’s alive.”

  They wouldn’t let me in. I couldn’t even be sure Joe would get the message I left at the nurse’s station.

  I fell into bed exhausted when I got back.

  The next morning Joe was still in ICU. I found his Jennifer’s phone number in
the book under Joe’s old listing and called her. We commiserated, then I asked about her son. She was worried sick: She still couldn’t reach him. My heart tore for him, but there was nothing I could do. I went in to work.

  A strange thing happens when the mind is under stress. There’s fog, and clumsy thinking. And then, for no reason I can put a name to, sometimes there’s heightened clarity.

  I went to Property and checked out the belt I bagged from the Nita Estevez case. I remembered it had laced edges. Again I processed it for prints. I got nothing I could use. I examined the photos Mona had made of the Nellie Gail Doe and tried to compare the ripples across his face with what I saw on the belt before me. It couldn’t be a match. The case circumstances were too different. But it was interesting: a laced belt as a binding or ligature in both these cases.

  I went through my three Doe folders again to be sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. At ten o’clock Dr. Schaeffer called. “I know he’s not yours but I thought you might like to know the Capistrano victim got identified,” she said.

  “You bet.”

  “His relatives came looking, from the sketch in the paper. So it’s a small victory anyway. His name was Victor Minor Montalvo. His family are field workers. One brother works in an auto-body shop, I recall. A girlfriend did the fancy haircut for him,” she said.

  On a yellow pad I wrote down Victor Minor Montalvo, set a dash, wrote Capistrano, then Doe 4.

  “We gave him the name ‘Alligator’ for a while. Isn’t that awful? A watch came with him with an alligator in the center. The jaws were clock hands.”

  I wrote “Alligator” on the pad. “How’s Doe Three, the Turtle Rock?” I asked, and wrote on the next line Froylan Marcos Cordillo—Turtle Rock—Doe 3.

  “Nothing new that I know of,” she said. “Same for Doe Two. Same nothing. We had a group out front before the Montalvo family came in, demanding action. Chief Yaroshak is fit to be tied.”

  She asked about Joe then, and I told her. Then she told me about her nephew, whose autopsy she had had to perform. He asphyxiated on a bit of a carrot his mother left in a dish on the coffee table. “She’s a basket case. He had just learned to pull himself up. My brother took her to be near her family in Illinois.”

  “How terrible, Lenore.”

  “Terrible doesn’t really cover it,” she said. “But what can you do? You go on. Now my ex is agonized about our kids. He gives me the third-degree on the phone every night, drives me crazy. I tell him, Well, you come over and watch them if you don’t trust the nanny that you and I both interviewed and hired. It’s tough.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Yikes! I’ve got to get going. I have to get to the preschool early today. My nanny doesn’t drive.”

  FIFTEEN

  Joe was still out of my reach. Not being a relative, I could only get so far. “Tomorrow,” the nurse said. “He could be out by then and moved to critical. Call then.”

  I felt helpless and anxious. Yet, it was not like with Bill. I was too young then. As many crimes and vagaries as I’ve seen since then, I have still also experienced reasons to hope, and so I did.

  On my way home I counted fifteen helicopters flying formations of staggered threes in a perfect blue sky, their speed so slow the blades seemed distinct at the ends of a center fuzz. It struck me that these lumbering birds were no less beautiful than those with feathers.

  And on the banks of the bay when I took a walk late that afternoon, I saw a bird resembling a sandpiper bobbing along, except he was clunkier and all-over gray on top, not tan, though mottled like a piper. I couldn’t place it and vowed to look it up.

  I watched a covey of coots zero between mallards and snatch food directly from the ducks’ mouths. How greedy, how unsatisfied, we all are.

  Back home I took out a leftover sandwich and radishes trimmed but pale as corpses, and milk. I set out a bowl for Motorboat, who planted his forefeet on the rim and waited for me to get the bag of feed, his nose high in the air and twitching. The two of us chewed while I stood at the sink and looked out the window at the bay. Below an intense orange sky the mud flats gleamed. I could see a group of plovers and godwits and the gray bird I’d seen earlier and couldn’t name.

  My Peterson’s Guide was on the end of the counter. I paged through it to check the outline of the bird I couldn’t identify. I went to get my field glasses from the other room and returned to spy on the bird. Smaller than a whimbrel, fatter than a lesser yellowlegs. Finally I came upon it: a wandering tattler. Strictly speaking, out of his territory. I rolled the name over in my mind, its sound reminding me of Dave Sanders, his concern about betraying his roommate, about tattling. I wondered how he was holding up, this new thing with his father.

  I set the book down and reached to stroke Motorboat’s head. He stopped eating, just raised his head to my hand and let his little buck teeth hang down as his mouth fell open. I couldn’t solve the Does and I couldn’t fix Joe, but maybe I was good for something.

  A little while later I was in the living room finishing off a celery stick and watching TV. I saw Gil Vanderman’s business card on the end table and picked it up. Muted the TV. And I don’t know why, but I pulled the phone toward me and punched in his number. I would just let it ring twice. But he picked up.

  “Hi. This is Smokey Brandon.”

  “Hey!”

  “I thought I’d call.”

  “Great to hear from you,” Gil said.

  “Well, I don’t have anything to say, I just—”

  “I would’ve called you but I don’t have your number. I guess you didn’t throw away my card. How’ve you been? Want to go grab a coffee?” His voice was rich but quick and vibrant.

  I said, “Probably not tonight.”

  “When’s a good night? Oh, wow! You know what I just saw fly by here?”

  “What?”

  “An owl with a rat in his talons. He flew right by my patio.”

  “Neat,” I said.

  “Say, you know how I said I’d seen you before? Well, you’ve probably seen me, only you didn’t know it. I give classes for kids down at the bay. Ever see us, spread out on blue tarps down there? Sure you have.”

  “Maybe so.” I had, as a matter of fact.

  “So when’s a good night for dinner?”

  “Actually, I don’t know if—”

  “How’s tomorrow night?”

  “Weekdays are not usually good.”

  “What kind of work do you do? I mean, where’s your office? I could meet you.”

  “I work for the county. Santa Ana.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The whole city’s a Nine-One-One,” he said.

  “Come now. It’s not that bad.”

  I took the phone with me to check on Motorboat. Guinea pigs don’t jump, so I could have left him on the counter, but I picked him up and took him to be with me on the couch. Soon he’d try to take a chomp of the fabric, and I’d have to put him back.

  “What do you do there for the county?” Gil said.

  “Check on people.”

  “Social worker? Parole officer, like that?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Any rate,” Gil said, “maybe I could meet you wherever.”

  “Gil, you know what? I probably shouldn’t have called, really.”

  “What, you don’t eat lunch?”

  “I eat lunch. It’s just—”

  “Good. I hate those women always worried about eating/not-eating. They can’t just relax and enjoy life. Like, what’d you have tonight? It’ll tell me something about you.”

  “I don’t really think you care what I ate tonight, Gil, and if you did I’d worry about you.”

  “So what about tomorrow night? Is that good?”

  “You know what? I really didn’t…The thing is, I’m going with someone.”

  “So? Two bird-nerds doing lunch, what’s the harm. But if you want to just yak on the ph
one, I’m okay with that.”

  “Thanks, Gil.” But in a little while he invited me to Harbor Island to see great blue herons in their huge nests at the top of pine trees. He said his folks lived there. We could have dinner.

  “That’s terrific, Gil, but I don’t think so.”

  “Mom’s a great cook. We’ll go down to Balboa. A friend of mine lets me use his boat. We’re across the water in ten minutes. How’s Sunday?”

  He was so persistent I couldn’t help but laugh. “Gil? Don’t count on it, really. A lot is going on in my life.”

  “Oh. No problem. But you’ll like the herons. Of course, we have the garden-variety pelicans out there too, and—”

  “That’s okay, Gil.”

  “Remember, it wouldn’t be a date or like that.”

  “Herons,” I said.

  “Exactly. Will you consider it and let me know later?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You know, that first day? I said to myself, ‘Anybody named Smokey’s got be all right’.”

  “You’re a little over the top, Gil.”

  “Yeah, but to know me is to love me.”

  Pig was asleep on my stomach, warm as a new pancake. Such trust. I flicked a wrist and un-muted the TV and put it on to a VHF station. I closed my eyes. Images came but this time not the brutal images of death, but of birds, their forms, behavior, and beauty.

  Soon a song came on: “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’.”

  I remembered a night that followed a day so steamy the bushes were chasing the dogs around. All the coolers seemed to be gasping. There was a club in North Vegas this side of seedy. That night…

  My costume was colored the kind of pink you find in the well of a rose or the back of a baby’s mouth. A reckless pink, an Indian pink: the costume—what there was of it. Heels, rose-colored and very high, with thin straps crossed way up the ankle.

  I’d been drinking whisky backstage with the other girls. I took right to whisky the first time I tried it: loved the scent, taste, the effects. No reason to be surprised. That’s what it’s designed for.