A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  15

  “Fucking culo.”

  “I’m with you there,” I said, “whatever that means.”

  “Why is it women think criminals are glamorous?” Ray and I were sitting in Baxter’s Restaurant. He’d ordered a grapefruit and oatmeal and I had toast, that’s all, because neither of us are really that interested in breakfast.

  “Because a certain percentage of them have charisma.”

  “Charisma my ass.” I made a movement with my head as though that could be considered. He grinned and said, “She’s nuts,” beaching his arm on the table. He slid his scoured grapefruit ahead of him and gazed at me with hurt eyes. “Women are nuts.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I smeared more strawberry jam on my toast.

  “I don’t mean you.”

  “People are nuts,” I said, and continued eating.

  “You know what Yolanda tells me? She says she wants to be married to a rodeo rider—she’s watching that yippy-ki-yo stuff on TV. I tell her fine: Happy trails to you. Jeez, I wish I could get some hot coffee around here.” He twisted around, hunting for the waitress.

  “I’ll call Patricia tonight, Raymond. I’ll get her talked down. Last night wasn’t the night.”

  “You better. Those guys, even if they’re not responsible for that murder, they’re responsible. Get my drift?”

  “Just by being in the world, you mean.”

  “You got it.”

  I said, “She’s got a playful streak is all. Flirty, like me, only I know who to flirt with.”

  He looked at me awhile, then said: “Something’s bothering you though, big time.”

  “Is it too weird, or what, Roland Dugdale checking out a new apartment in the very apartment complex Patricia lives in? Freak of time, as Joe says, or no. Give me a break.”

  “I’ll bust his cojónes if you want me to.”

  I waved a hand to dismiss him, but I said, “She told me a few days ago that strange stuff has been going on at her apartment, like maybe somebody’s been in there.”

  “Shit.”

  “My sentiments exactly. In fact, that was one of the particular substances involved. One day there’s an egg smashed on her windshield, another day there’s a turd in her toilet she says is gratuitous, and her door is unlocked. I don’t know, Ray—there are a lot of fuckin’ creeps in the world who do things like that for their jollies.” He shook his head, leaned back, and looked out the window, as if to say such things are simply incomprehensible. “Guys can get your number easy. It’s spooky. When I was a grocery-store checker, this man I see in the store every day shows up at my house one night at midnight. Don’t ask me how he knew where I lived.”

  “He do anything?”

  “He was drunk, wanted to come in. I said I had a gun when I didn’t have a gun. Begged me anyway. Cried a little.”

  “You let him in?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, you ever notice that, Raymond?”

  He flagged down Tamara for coffee, looked at me in that knowing, brotherly way, and then said, “What’s this character look like anyway? This Roland asshole.”

  “Actually, he’s good-looking.”

  “Oh, great.” He rolled his head.

  “I mean, hard features, tight. Not as good-looking as—I don’t know—who’s popular now?” I said, and couldn’t think of anyone. The actors I like nobody ever heard of. “You’re handsome too, Raymond,” I crooned, then ate my toast.

  “It could be coincidence.”

  “You know what bothers me, Raymond, besides all that? When she knows me, when she knows what I do all day, how could she be so bare-ass stupid as to date a convicted felon? That’s pretty self-centered, huh, of me?” He cocked an eyebrow in assent. “I can’t help it. If she were really my friend she wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “You said he had charisma. Hey,” he said, shrugging.

  “The guy’s kind of like a good ol’ boy,” I said. “A Texan.”

  “A rodeo rider, I suppose.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, and we both laughed.

  “Brownish hair, blond at the sideburns. Real green eyes. Medium build. Kind of like yours but not as nice. Tan—which is funny, ‘cause he’s a diver. Where do you think he gets a tan?”

  “All over his body.”

  “I mean where. What does he do for recreation, for fun? Where could we go spy on him?”

  “Maybe he sits on the beach for his breaks.” He tipped his head back, winged out his arms, and said, “Shoot me some rays, dude.”

  “You’re right. I got thrown by the overtime, thinking he’s underwater all that time, morning to night. Maybe he gets whole chunks of time off in between.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirty-one I think his sheet said, didn’t it? You’re the one read it off your MDT.”

  He nodded, lifted my last triangle of toast off my plate, the one I was poking at with my knife, and took a big munch out of it. An arm went up on the booth back near me, Ray’s Highway Patrol shoulder patch taking a beam of sun, the grizzly bear by the goddess Minerva’s knees, looking for all the world like a pet dog sniffing the bushes to see who’d stopped by lately. The leaves were supposed to be grape leaves, not bushes, a nod toward California’s agriculture. Minerva had something to do with arts, science, peace, and war.

  “Not to change the subject or anything, but I’m thinking about going through LAPD academy.”

  “That’s wonderful, Raymond. But why?”

  “I get tired of being the Rodney Dangerfield of the freeways. I got a pal in L.A. could put a word in for me.”

  “You wouldn’t need anyone to put a word in for you, Raymond. You’re good enough.”

  “You know how long it would take me to get anywhere, me being a Moe?” He was using a code word for Mexican, the nonthreatening kind, as in, We got several Moes on that four-fifteen—meaning several bystander Hispanics on a disturbance call. Cops use racial code words, not always respectful but not always disrespectful either—more in the way of club talk, inner-circle stuff, evolving for any number of reasons, clever, not-so-clever, but a lexicon that has behind it different impulses at different times. Some cops do it for fun, tough talk for tough trade; yet I’ve heard racial epithets from people who were the first to defend minority rights and human dignity. All is not what you see on the surface, or, in this case, hear. When it’s women being referenced, sure, I feel the sting, but I try to consider not only the source but the context. A cop last month stood outside with me by a hot dog vendor, telling me about two splibs, blacks, who put a hole in the thigh of his partner, and now he’s got to put up with a gash—meaning female—partnered to him. Looking this Smokey Brandon female right in the eye as he was saying it, so that I stood there trying to figure out if this was one more test, and just who the hostility was directed toward—me, the partner, or the culprits—deciding it was a little bit of all three, and winding up thinking, You’re never going to change the world, Smokes, just your tiny piece of it—maybe.

  Ray himself saying, “Because I’m a, quote, Hispanic? A born-and-bred East L.A. Moe?” And me feeling one with him then, and yet apart, because I can’t quite feel his difference, nor he mine.

  I said, “Captain Riley in the sheriff’s is black.”

  “Jewish too I suppose.”

  “Could be, Raymond. Listen, I hear LAPD’s over half minorities now. The whites are hollering. That’s good, huh?” I said, probing for what was really bothering him, not sure yet I had it right. He changed the subject then, back to the Dwyer case, and it took me by surprise. “Any more suspects developed in that case of yours besides this minga and his shithead brother?”

  There it was. Cute Patricia and her selection. I said, “Hey, if you’re going to start talking Mexican, you better start teaching me.”

  “You want to learn Spanish?”

  “Just the dirty words.”

  That smile of his, the even white teeth showing, creasing across his face, and then
, “Oh, just the dirty words. Nice señorita linda like you? Nah, you don’t want to do that. You want to take a course in college, eh?”

  “Fuck you and your burro, Raymond. They’re not gonna teach me street language in junior college. What’s a minga? Tell me.”

  “You get it from the context.”

  I gave him a disgusted look, and then he told me: the single most significant part of the male anatomy, if you had a male anatomy. “A prick,” I said, and then instinctively turned to see if the waitress was approaching with a refill or something—wouldn’t want to offend the citizenry. “A prick by any other name is still a prick. By the way, I did see a report on the round recovered from Jerry Dwyer.” I’d forgotten to tell Joe that. I’d forgotten it myself—that was Tuesday, the day I went to San Pedro. “They were using Glasers. Who has Glasers except law enforcement?”

  “I didn’t shoot him.” He looked like a little boy then, and I had to laugh.

  “Think with me,” I said. “Who would have Glaser ammo?”

  “Your boys into guns? The Dugdales?”

  “I don’t know. Svoboda said one of them used a knife to threaten a storekeeper once. Gun freaks don’t usually dig knives. I’ve seen Glasers demo-ed, but I haven’t fired any myself—they came out after I left the force. Those and a thing called Thunderzap, twice the speed of sound. They shatter, it’s like a frag-bomb.”

  He smiled. Pretty, brief, and troubled.

  “That’s what killed Jerry Dwyer,” I said, the picture of Jerry, not the one in Billy’s photographs but the one in my full-color memory, flashing into my vision and out again as fast as I could make it.

  Raymond said, “It’s like Gucci handbags and what do you call those watches?”

  “Rolex?”

  He nodded. “Everybody’s gotta have one, even if they have to rip it off your G-D wrist. Rich guys are wearing cheapies now so they don’t get robbed, can you beat it?”

  “Breaks my heart.”

  He finished off the last crumb on my toast plate with a finger swipe, then scraped his grapefruit shell one more time. I asked him, Raymond, do you want to order something else? But he said no, he was on a diet. I said, “Think of this a minute, Ray. This is what’s mysterious to me—back to the Dwyer case. If the witness—let’s call it semiwitness—next door at the taco stand says the bad guys were hanging around awhile, why? You rob somebody, you do it quick, right?”

  “Could be an argument over something. His friends come in to see him. He says, ‘Hey, jerkoff, I saw you out with my girl last night.’ His friend gets mad, draws the—what’d you say it was? A twenty-two? Draws the twenty-two out from under his shirt where he keeps it to be cool, but it goes off. Didn’t mean to shoot his buddy there, just meant to lay into him. Buddy Number Two panics. They’re in deep-shit doo-doo now, going to prison till the end of Star Trek reruns. They say, ‘Hey, grab the cash, make it look like a robbery.’”

  I sighed. “It could be anything. But not that. His friends wouldn’t shoot him again, if it was an accident. He was just a big goony kid and all his friends are big goony kids. I know. I’ve met some of them. They’d come by the store Saturdays. I even partied with them one time by accident, in Bobby McGee’s. I was supposed to meet a date there, but I got stood up.”

  Raymond was looking at me with amazement, grinning, starting to ask me something.

  “So?” I said. “It happens. I ran into Jerry, he introduced me to a bunch of his friends, we danced a little. They even invited this old lady to a party afterwards, but I didn’t go. This was not a kid who ran with punks.”

  “Everybody’s got enemies.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay. Then these are pros. Sort of. They been checking out the place for an hour. They been watching how he does things, how much money he salts away.”

  I was shaking my head, because robbers don’t want to hang around. “In and out, in and out, that’s what a robbery’s all about.”

  This conversation was not going anywhere. I wanted to go follow Mr. Roland around, do something. I glanced at my watch: fifteen minutes before I’d have to go.

  “Raymond?”

  “What?”

  “We gotta go.”

  “What’s the matter,” Ray said.

  “Oh, nothing, something I just have to do today, make sure of today.”

  And then, as if he could read my mind, “Nothing back from Prints yet?”

  I said, “Nothing substantive.” But what had hit me was, did anybody get the magazines? “I wonder, Ray—if the killers were in there awhile, wouldn’t they be thumbing through the magazines, maybe, checking out the bubble-breasted women in bikinis and the jazzy Mack trucks?”

  He nodded as to the possibility.

  “We can laser them.”

  “How does that work, anyway?”

  “Vitamins and other natural substances found in perspiration glow under the light. Normally, with paper, you lose the ridge detail, especially if it’s humid, but it wasn’t humid that day.”

  Ray was looking at a different waitress across the room serving other people, her short skirt tipping up high in back. He said, “How could she go out with that guy?”

  I thought he meant the waitress at first, and I looked. Down the back of the woman’s right thigh were four small, round, greenish bruises. I wondered if they were finger marks, somebody eager last night.

  He said, “I just don’t understand it.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  I called Patricia at her work that afternoon and talked to her for about ten minutes. She kept telling me that she wasn’t losing her head, she’d go slowly; that I—and Raymond, whose business it wasn’t anyway—were overreacting. Give the guy a break, she said; not everyone makes all the right choices at first. She’s telling me this, after she saw me with Billy K.

  “He makes me laugh. He’s sexy.”

  “Oh, puh-leeze.”

  “Remember Jerry Reed?” she said. “Used to play in those pictures with what’s-his-name, the guy in, oh, you know . . . they played in those movies where they smash up all those police cars? I know—that guy in the wet suit in Deliverance?”

  “Burt Reynolds.”

  “Yeah, well, he reminds me of him. You know, a fun guy, little ornery around the edges?”

  So now Roland was either Jerry Reed or The Rifleman. I said, “Oh, he’s fun all right.”

  “I’ve dated someone with a record before,” she said, or rather whispered, because she was at work.

  That took me by surprise. In fact, I was shocked. “You never told me that.”

  “Well, you never told me you were a stripper before, now, did you?”

  I shut my eyes, didn’t say anything.

  “Roland let me know his whole history. He even told me he’d been picked up and questioned last week. Now, that is honest. God, can you believe?”

  “The coincidence of him moving in practically next door?”

  “Yes. That you and I were right there, right looking at him through that mirror, and six days later . . .”

  Yes, I could believe the coincidence. Coincidence kills. That’s what it’s all about. You, here, in your parents’ house when they’re on vacation and a plane drops out of the sky on their house and no other; you, there, when one mad Iranian decides to drive his truck into a barracks, and you supposed to leave yesterday. Or even simple things, like you in a strange part of town, crossing the street, seeing your boyfriend eating corn dogs with a girl who makes it clear she knows how to use her lips, him practically falling down her blouse. Or you asking for a job at the very same moment one comes available. Coincidence. It’s not all bad. I could believe it. Most of the time. But I also couldn’t help wondering whether the Dugdales had seen Patricia’s license-plate number down at the station, sure that this whole mess was somehow my fault.

  “I told him all about you. He wants to meet you. See, he’s trying. Give him the benefit.”

  “You told him what about me?�
��

  “That you do police stuff. I didn’t tell him about the other, the stripper business, ’cause I figured—”

  “Patricia?”

  “What?”

  “Enough, okay? I’ve got to go.”

  When she said good-bye, she sounded hurt, but I couldn’t help that.

  I felt a knot in my stomach that a trip to the water cooler couldn’t settle. Back at my desk, I dialed the Cozy Inn. I could listen to Rowena Dwyer, and maybe that would be a good thing, not a sufficient thing, but a good thing, to do.

  It was three o’clock. Mrs. Dwyer answered. I told her who I was and that I’d gotten her message—and that I was very, very sorry about her son. The voice I heard was not what I expected. The only piece of information I’d had about her was that Jerry had said his mother was a good businessperson. Maybe I expected some corporate heavy, though in the Midwest, where? Chicago, but he didn’t say Chicago, and I didn’t think it was. The voice was so soft I thought I’d awakened her. She said yes, she wanted to talk to me because her husband—her husband, not her ex-husband, she said—mentioned me. “You’re not on the police force, but you’re somehow . . . ?”

  “I’m a forensics specialist,” I said. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I collect evidence from a crime scene. We process it at the crime lab and try to figure out what happened.”

  She thought immediately only of fingerprints. I told her we didn’t have much. What I didn’t tell her was that even if we collected latents—the fingerprints not in blood, but the hidden ones, like off the magazines—matching up is not a certainty; neither is the process fast. If a print isn’t nice and neat, as on a fingerprint card, with each little pinky rolled by a cop and pressed in a square so you know where the top is and where the bottom is, matching them up is hell on wheels. After working six months in Prints, you need glasses, even with the aid of a computer, though the computer is such an improvement it’s hard to complain. I’d tried reaching Betty Brankoff in Prints earlier, but she wasn’t there and whoever answered her phone sounded like he’d been on codeine too long. I left a message.