A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  When Ray came to get me, I said, “Bless you, Raymond,” and when I held up my hand for him to pull me up, I said, “Bless you, and as my grandma said, who was from Missouri, good on your ol’ head.” Then, “I’m drunk, Raymond,” and I began to cry.

  “I know you are, Smokey.”

  Then I saw Patricia. She looked like a Barbie doll. I felt very sad. I said, “Hi, Patricia. Can we go home?”

  Billy tried to argue with Ray, then gave up and was saying something to me, the words like oatmeal on the airwaves. I kept telling Patricia she was so pretty, and how glad I was she became my friend. It was the first time I saw a worried look on her face. The first time she didn’t end a sentence with a giggle.

  She said, “We’re taking you home, Samantha,” and glared at Billy K.

  CHAPTER

  10

  So much for Fridays. The whole weekend was mine to worry about how I was going to deal with things post–Billy Katchaturian: rumor control, Billy himself, and the coursing fear of contamination. Casual anything doesn’t mean what it used to. In any case, it was an utterly stupid thing to do.

  I thought about going back to bed and awaking with a new nightmare. Instead, I got in the shower and stayed long past the limit imposed by my raised awareness about water shortages. The steam made my brain feel like a pea in weak Jell-O. I turned off the water and forced my legs to work. Center tilted off for me though; the edge of a hangover dizzied me whenever I made a move, and I wondered if I’d better stay near the utilitarian ceramic. I toweled myself off and sat down on the bed for a moment. Maybe I’d just go into the office. Trudy might’ve left a message on my desk. What could she have wanted to tell me? If Firearms or Fibers or Prints came up with something, they’d report it to Joe first, who’d report it to Svoboda, which would mean I could call him, but I didn’t think results would be in yet. Unless it’s an officer-involved shooting, God forbid, the cases get in line. It can take weeks to get anything back.

  I downed aspirin and microwaved coffee while I fumbled through the last two days’ mail. There was the hospital bill in a piss-yellow envelope. I couldn’t deal with that. There was a magazine renewal, two freebie newspapers, junk, junk, junk, and my brother’s peculiar loops on a cheap envelope whose glue didn’t stick. I didn’t want to read his letter, but I opened it to the first fold. My brother is a nag: I don’t keep in contact with our parents enough. They worry. A phone call once a month wouldn’t hurt. But he’s eleven years older and had a different relationship with them than I did. We could easily have had different parents altogether, and one day Nathan could have just come up to my restaurant table and said, Hi, I’m Nathan Montiel and I think for the hell of it I’ll be your brother.

  For a living he does some invisible thing with play money in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He supports more ex-wives than I can keep track of, along with this year’s future ex, who reminds me of an unfunny Lily Tomlin. Her charm is that she brings to the union an inherited and lucrative construction business. You’d think with all his money he wouldn’t hand-write me letters, but I guess he assumes I’ll be more likely to read them if they are in his own inimitable hand. “Sammi,” this one started out—no Dear—“I’ll be in California December 23. We can get together.” No “Would you like to get together?” or “Do you have time to get together, and, by the way, how are you doing?” I turned it over, telling myself I’d read it later.

  I didn’t really want to go into the office, but I couldn’t settle down. Get a grip, I told myself, and just then my head decided it definitely needed to be on a pillow. The pale green one on the couch looked good. Lying there, I decided I’d think about something else for a moment, no bad stuff. That lasted about two seconds.

  I got back up and opened the drapes and slid the glass door open too. As I looked across the bay, I tried to remember there’s another whole world out there, one not independent of human conflicts certainly, but at least placidly unaware, though there are frauds and thieves among the birdlife too—the starlings, or the brown-headed cowbird that lays its eggs in the nests of others and forces surrogate parenting.

  The sun was casting an all-over yellow light that took the edge off objects. Already the temperature was eighty on the small thermometer tacked to the window frame. I reached behind an easy chair for my field glasses, which rested on the floor, then stepped out on the balcony, my big red towel still wrapped around me.

  I sat on the painted stool I keep out there, and looked over the bay. Some days seven-foot tides cut in from the Pacific, and in a few hours they can drop to almost nothing, exposing hundreds of acres of mud and marsh. Through the lenses, I watched the shore birds probing the glaze with their scythe-shaped bills.

  Every few minutes, a gashawk noses across the blue—that’s environmentalist talk for airplane. Because of noise-abatement requirements, pilots must lift off from the airport “high-nose,” cut the engines to the minimum to stay aloft, and then make a complicated turn to cross over Back Bay so they won’t wake the sleeping rich in Newport or disturb the honkers. It’s a disaster waiting to happen; but, for me at least, the eerie floating planes in that vacuum are just as pretty as birds, in a way.

  I’ve come to know more about birds and ducks than I ever thought I would, living by the bay. Waterfowl are drawn from their flyways by the freshwater runoff from Santiago Peak and Modjeska, which form the nearly six-thousand-foot Saddleback Mountains. Within the mix of fresh and saltwater, sea creatures gather. Grebes and gulls. Surf scoters—also called “skunk heads” because of their black-and-white coloring; they feed off shellfish and grunt while they do it. Pintail ducks, their hind ends struck upright out of the water for as long as thirty seconds while shopping in the dregs. I’ve seen canvasbacks, shovelheads, mallards, ruddies, teals, widgeons, and buffleheads all in the same inlet, and a black-and-white duck with a red eyepatch I haven’t identified yet. I can tell a snowy egret from a cattle by its yellow slippers, and an adolescent gull from a grown one, I think. Well, maybe not. And there are godwits and willets and the beautiful white avocet with black-tipped wings and an upward-curving bill; and underneath the water there are dozens of mollusks and creepy-crawlies in this wondrous living laboratory.

  In the late afternoons, there’s a pink-and-golden sheen on the stands of willow and mule-fat and across the bright-orange stringy parasite called dodder that laces itself in patches upon the pickleweed along the water’s edge, a tiny succulent that stores the salt in its picklelike sections, then sheds them to get rid of it. There’s sea fig and saltbush and tree tobacco, and, on the cliff sides, yellow bush sunflower all year round. Often, out on the gleaming mud, or in a patch of saltgrass, I’ll see the great blue heron, motionless as a piece of driftwood, waiting, waiting, for the slightest movement underfoot that would furnish a meal. Looking out from my balcony restoreth my soul.

  I must have been out there a good fifteen minutes, and then, for whatever reason, the visage of Jerry Dwyer dead on the Kwik Stop back-room floor came back to me. I thought that maybe I should put on my sweats and go jog around Back Bay, or go down to Balboa Island, a couple of miles straight down Jamboree to the Pacific, and have a croissant and egg.

  Maybe I’d ask Trudy Kunitz to come with me. I went rummaging in the piles of paper and envelopes along the kitchen counter under the wall phone, and found the booklet with the crime-lab personnel phone numbers. I’d never called Trudy at home before. We were friendly on the job, but not friends as such. She has a hard time looking me in the eye. I don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t like me or she’s that way with everybody. But I liked Trudy right off. A definite non-complainer. One slow afternoon both of us reorganized the stockroom; when I suggested it, she looked at me over her round metal glasses and said, “Sure, it all pays the same.” She has shapeless dark hair and pale skin afflicted with breakouts along the jawline. I’ve never seen her in anything but stovepipe jeans and dark colors to hide what I think might be big legs. Her job as an artist is to do the sketches of
corpses when they need to be ID-ed, for release to the papers, or she refines the scene sketches of others for use in court.

  There were only three other names between Katchaturian and Kunitz. I dialed her number, thinking that even if she didn’t have information on the Dwyer case, maybe I could figure out if she knew already how big a fool I’d been last night, figure out how much damage was done. I wondered if Joe knew already.

  “Trudy, this is Smokey.”

  “Hi, Smokey,” she said, as if she’d been up for hours and was used to me calling her every Saturday morning. Friendlier on the phone, almost happy, “What’s up? We got a hot one?”

  “No, nothing really. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I heard you had something to tell me, and I didn’t get to see you last night.”

  “Oh, yes. I told Billy. He didn’t say?”

  “Just you had something.” Did she know about Billy and me or didn’t she? God, how embarrassing.

  “Oh. It’s that thing you brought into Property. I understand you’re kind of hot to see that case solved.”

  “Yeah, I am. Did someone ID it already?”

  “Well, not exactly. But sort of. Julio Hernandez says it’s a collet.”

  I knew what a collet was, though it was one of those objects you learn the word for once and think you’ll never need again. “It goes on the end of a drill, I think, for holding the bit in. Right?”

  “I think that’s it.”

  “It didn’t strike me as a collet because it was too big. I’ve seen small ones on my father’s drill, I guess. So you think we have something worthwhile here, Trudy?”

  “May be. Julio, see, knows about welding. He makes these little airplanes out of sheet metal and stuff and hangs them up for mobiles, sells them even. There’s one over his desk. Go take a look. He says he solders, not welds. For some reason that’s an issue. But, hey, I’m impressed. Looks cool to me. That thing you brought in—it’s fused, he says. I guess it got too hot or something.”

  “Could he hazard a guess as to what it might belong to?”

  “Nope. He couldn’t figure it.”

  “Okay. Well, thanks, Trudy. We know any welders?”

  “No, but Tools found something else about it.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “No prints.”

  “That’s correct. It’s crosshatched, like gun grips. But that’s not all.”

  “Then, what?”

  “Those guys in Tools are great, you know?”

  “Trude, for God’s sake,” I laughed, “you want me to play twenty questions?”

  “Sorry. But it’s fun, isn’t it, like a big puzzle? That’s what I like about this work. It is definitely intellectual. Definitely better than crosswords, huh? Okay,” she said, “here’s the deal. Another guy in Tools put his tongue on it, the collet thing? He does that a lot, he says; tastes stuff, smells stuff. He can tell all sorts of things that way. I told him he better not be sampling any cyanide capsules, and he says, no, he uses them for party favors. That’s the new guy from Boston. You meet him yet?”

  “What sort of things did he find out about here?”

  “That your collet had been in saltwater. As in ocean.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “So he calls around yesterday afternoon, describes the thing to somebody. They think it might be a diver’s tool, goes on an underwater cutting torch. Hey, Smoke?”

  “Yes?”

  “Julio says the guy’s got the busiest pearl-tongue he’d ever seen, and he was laughing. You know what that means?”

  “I think so.” I had to smile at her voice; I wondered if I should tell her. I sat down on the floor, resting my head on the wall. “It means he’s good at oral sex.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  I said, “Trudy, did Joe Sanders tell you I was particularly interested in this case?”

  “He told me he was particularly interested in this case. He told me you may have found something important.”

  “He didn’t act . . . funny?”

  “No. Not at all. What do you mean?”

  So Joe wasn’t spreading it around that I was a borderline incompetent. I said, “I’m surprised he mentioned it, really. We don’t know if it’s even remotely connected to the crime. I found the thing way off in some grass at the edge of the driveway, far from the taped area. Is Joe, do you know, following up with Mr. Dwyer on whether he had any workmen around, welding?”

  “Well, here’s the good part, Smokey.” Trudy must have been pleased to have someone to talk to on a Saturday morning, the only reason I could figure she was drawing this out. Then she dropped the bomb. She said, “One of the men your friend Ray told me you saw at the jail last night? Brothers, both felons?”

  “Yes?”

  “One of them’s a diver. A deep-sea diver up in L.A.”

  It took a second for it to sink in. I thought the Dugdales were dead gone. Irrelevant. Not apropos. The little one, Phillip, was a housepainter. But the other one, what was he? Did he say, in there? Did I miss it? We’d come in late. The two brothers had been detained for some time before we got there, and we were there only about half an hour. So I didn’t hear how the tall good-looking one earned his money when he wasn’t doing convenience-store robberies. If it’s too good to be true, it isn’t; and yet I wondered if Gary, because of his grudge, might take a photo lineup over to Emilio at the taco stand with the Dugdales’ mugs mixed in. You take half a dozen mug shots of people who look like the described perpetrators to the witnesses, instead of them coming to the station and going through hundreds in books. The photo lineup is not very reliable, but it still seems to convince juries. Even so, but I wanted Gary or the detectives to have tried it anyway with Emilio, except that the whole process would probably have made him poop his pants, poor little guy.

  “Trudy,” I said. “Want to join me for breakfast? There’s a nice little place on Balboa. Where do you live? My head needs coffee, my stomach needs gruel.” It’d be a chance to know her better, and we could discuss the case.

  Her voice dropped, and she told me that she lived in Tustin, and that she’d like to, but by the time she got down to Newport after baby-sitting her wash in her apartment-house laundry room, it’d be real late. I didn’t know if she made up the details or not, but it seemed like a legitimate excuse so I let her off the hook. “Another time, then,” I said, and she said, “Sure.” But I wanted to do something. Get out of the house. Get some fresh air. If only Joe L. Sanders weren’t married, I could call him up and we could go figure this new piece of information. We could go talk to Mr. Dwyer. We could see what Gary Svoboda had to say about the collet. We could even drive out to L.A. harbor, where the ships come in. Where deep-sea divers hang out.

  Have a look around.

  CHAPTER

  11

  No, I didn’t go. Then. By the time I ate, gassed the car, did bills, wrote a reluctant note to my parents telling them I was fine, nothing new, I’d had time to regain my balance. Trudy doing her wash reminded me I needed to do mine. Chores help. I was folding clothes on the bed when the phone rang at two. It was Patricia. I scooched the clothes over and lay down.

  “You sleep all right?” she asked me. “I was afraid to call earlier.” Her tone was hesitant, as if she thought I was going to be mad at her.

  I said, “I made a fool of myself last night. A total dopeette.”

  She kindly said, “You weren’t the only one.”

  “Oh, really? That naughty boy Raymond. What have I done? You and my buddy?”

  “We didn’t get to the stage you’re thinking, but serious enough. I think he’ll be calling.”

  “You remember—”

  She said, “He’s got a girlfriend, yes. He told me. They’re not getting along all that well. But listen, there are two things I want to talk to you about, Samantha. One, I’m insulted.”

  “I’m sorry. What’d I do?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were a . . . a . . . dancer once? Did you think I�
��d think less of you?”

  “Oh, that. It was a long time ago. It was nothing really. I was living in Nevada. It seemed an okay thing to do at the time.”

  “You’re embarrassed about it.”

  “If I were embarrassed about it, would I let people call me by my stage name?”

  “You’re not embarrassed but you couldn’t tell me.”

  “I don’t mind it—I just don’t announce it to people who don’t already know. The people at the lab know because I let it slip out one night when I had too much too drink, okay? You can understand that, can’t you? Didn’t you have a wild period when you were younger? That was mine. That was it. Not very exciting. It was just a job. You want to know what I did after that? I became a grocery checker. Now, that’s exciting.”

  I rolled onto my shoulders and pointed my toes at the ceiling, trying to stretch, as long as we were going to be here awhile. I said, “Then I met Bill and went off to the academy and got married, the whole thing. No big deal. I wasn’t a prossie, Patricia. You didn’t think that?”

  “Well, no. Not that. Anyway, I couldn’t figure how they’d let you be a cop if . . .” She was silent again.

  I pulled my legs in then, rolled down, and did a few leg extensions, keeping my abdomen tight. “Like I said, it was a long time ago. I was seventeen. Believe it or not, I never lied on my application to the academy, and if anybody investigated, it never came back to me.”

  When it was just quiet on the other end, I said, “Hey, you want to come over? It needs a dark, quiet bar to tell about it. Come on over, we’ll go someplace.”

  “I have errands to run.”

  “Patricia, it’s my life. What does it have to do with you?” I didn’t know how I was going to get around this. I sat up and my head hurt. “What’s two, you got to tell me?” Two things she wanted to talk to me about.