A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

Throughout our talk, Mrs. Dwyer would stop, gather herself, and press on, but I got the idea that she was a strong person from what she said soon after our conversation began: “Jerry died seven days ago,” she said. She didn’t say, “It happened seven days ago,” or talk about a better place, or ask why it happened to him. She said, “Jerry died seven days ago. That’s seven days his killers have been alive that Jerry hasn’t.”

  I asked her what it was she thought I could do for her, why she wanted to talk to me. She said, “I’m not sure what at the moment. But I want you to know I’m here and I’m going to be here for a while. I may need to get in touch with someone.”

  I said that I understood, but that if she wanted a counselor, I could refer her to the Social Services Department. It sounded cold to me even then.

  She said, rather brittlely, “That’s not what I meant. If I find out anything, I’d like to talk it over with someone close to the case.”

  “I’m not really the one—” I began, but she interrupted me with this: “Could we meet, Miss Brandon? I’d really like to talk to another woman.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d like to, but you really should be talking to sheriff’s investigators. Have you met Sergeant Gary Svoboda or talked to a Detective Felton?”

  “I met Detective Felton. I expect to meet Sergeant Svoboda tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the memorial service. In the afternoon I talk to your sergeant.” Tough cookie, she’d talk to the sergeant the afternoon of a morning funeral for her son. Once more I said I was sorry; that Jerry was a wonderful boy. I started to say: Because I really do understand. But why bring in someone else’s grief? “Sorry” is what people said to me when I lost Bill. Other cops, their white dress gloves covering my hands, their eyes red with the emotion they couldn’t bring to their lips but for that one inadequate word, said it. Their wives, hugging me with terror in their eyes, said it. You have to go through it in your own way, your own time.

  I said, “I could maybe meet with you next week.” I’d give her time to get the service over with.

  She said, “I’d like to do it tonight, if possible.”

  It was a peculiar place to meet, Gianni’s in Crystal Court, beneath the escalator. I never liked the idea of the place. You’re dining at formal tables, served by waiters in tuxlike uniforms, while shoppers glide up and down the escalators next to you with their bags from fancy Italian dress shops, observing, if they wish, which fork you choose. Crystal Court’s on the fahncy side of South Coast Plaza. Mannequins wear world globes for heads and sequined swimsuits with sequined beach capes. Women with red-red lipstick and white-white skin take their time strolling between shops, and men with silk hankies peeking out of their breast pockets glide by with them. The floors are pink marble, the elevators gleaming brass. On weekends someone’s playing classical music on a black baby grand at the throat of the escalators, and now that Christmas was nearing, carols were being played. A gigantic fir tree with toy trains humming around it stood in the center.

  We were to meet at five-thirty, and I told Mrs. Dwyer I’d be wearing a tan safari shirt, a black skirt, and black stockings. It still hadn’t rained, and the temperature had shot up to the eighties, so I was without a jacket. She said she had blonde hair and would be wearing a turquoise dress.

  I sat dragging my fork over the white tablecloth at one of the little tables, making corn-row patterns. The waiter had brought me coffee and now wine, but he was still glaring though there was hardly anyone in the place. Six-ten, and no Mrs. Dwyer. When she was forty minutes late, I decided to leave. Maybe she’d changed her mind. I couldn’t see the waiter, of course. A couple of women who came in after I did were looking around too, so I dug in my purse for money, preparing to leave, when I heard an “Excuse me.” A slender blonde woman stood over me. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I just didn’t understand the traffic.” She extended her hand and said, “Rowena Dwyer.”

  She was younger than I’d expected. Under her eyes was shiny white stuff to hide circles. Her face was square, pretty. She wore a necklace of tiny white ceramic roses.

  As if on cue, the waiter came out. We ordered salads and more wine and wound up mostly not eating them, me getting afraid that one of us, after the wine hit bottom, would get sloppy. I suggested bread, and called the waiter over again. Okay, a side of pasta too.

  What Mrs. Dwyer wanted was something I couldn’t give: assurance that the hideous thing that happened to her would not happen to some other mother’s son. Verification that people did indeed spend the rest of their lives in jail for crimes like these. I couldn’t tell her that, either. Sixty percent of all violent crimes are committed by 10 percent of the people that get put in prison, so what does that tell you? It tells you the creeps get out to do more crime, and, in fact, a fifteen-year sentence for murder one is usually completed in seven.

  “I left Jerry with his father when he was fifteen,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “You can see his father is a lot older than I am. I needed to get my head straight, and he was a good father, so why not?” She was blaming herself for not having had more time with her son. She asked me if she could smoke in here, and though I didn’t think so and didn’t care for it myself, I nodded. As she lit up, she tossed her shoulder-length hair back. I could imagine what she’d look like at a bar, this single lady, making no-nonsense talk with someone eager to take her home.

  “What do you do in Wichita, Mrs. Dwyer?”

  “Call me Rowena.” I thought she’d be about forty, forty-two. “I’m a creative facilitator,” she said, and smiled for the first time.

  “What’s that? Art shows or something?”

  “No. I put inventors and buyers together. A matchmaker. Only it’s business, not love.”

  “That sounds very interesting.”

  “It can be.”

  “Mrs. Dwyer, what kind of friends do you think your son hung out with here?”

  “I’ve talked to my son’s friends. That’s all I did the first two days. Police talked to them too.”

  “You’re pretty sure, then, that nothing funny was going on? I mean, even peripherally, with Jerry an innocent bystander?”

  She looked at me dead-on. “Kids don’t bullshit me.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette and then said rapidly, “Jerry was a handful, yes, when he was younger. But it was because he was big as much as anything, didn’t know what to do with all that motor energy. But he never lied to me. He’d come right out and tell me what he did if I asked him. I know the kind of boys he hangs out with. They’re all right. I don’t think there were drugs. I don’t think there was that kind of trouble. But, then, no mother wants to think her kid was into drugs, do they?” She looked at me with an expression of instantaneous doubt and disgust, that maybe she’d been taken in, like thousands, maybe millions, of other mothers.

  I said, “I just wanted your opinion. I’ve met some of his friends too, and they seemed all right.”

  “It was a robbery, pure and simple,” she said. “They brought in that one set of suspects, didn’t they, people who do this sort of thing? Then they let them go. I’d like to know why. Nobody will tell me anything.”

  I told her the Dugdales weren’t suspects—officially.

  “So they have no leads is what you’re saying.”

  “The police don’t tell us lab people everything either.”

  “So they have nothing.”

  I couldn’t say they did. But what I could give her were the histories and personalities of people I worked with, their dedication, their cleverness. I told her what I’d said before, what I’d heard others say along the way, in the academy, on the force, and here now, in the lab. That murder is unacceptable. That homicide cases stand open until they’re solved. “This one won’t get lost,” I said, echoing Joe Sanders. “It may not be today, it may not be next week, but it’ll get solved.”

  “That’s not good enough,” she said.

  I said nothing. Waited for her to make the next move.

  “Listen,” she said, removing th
e motel’s card from her handbag and writing “Rowena Dwyer—Jan. 2” on it. “I’m staying here a few weeks. Other times I’ll be at George’s.” She said she tried staying with her ex-husband when she got out here. They’d hold each other and cry. It got too much for her. She had to leave, and took the motel room then.

  “I don’t mean to be impertinent, Mrs. Dwyer . . .”

  “You’re not. Say it. What?”

  “Why are you staying?”

  She took a sudden drag on her cigarette, blew it out, and said, “I don’t know. Let’s say it’s to keep on somebody’s ass. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  Climbing the stairs when I got home, I felt jittery, maybe from too much coffee, and when I saw my screen door propped open with something, a wash of dread coursed over me, and almost satisfaction, as if I’d been expecting something to be amiss, and now it was. In the door was a rolled, throwaway newspaper; that’s all. But mine had come already this morning, and I had tossed it in as I was leaving for work. The paper was tilted up on its end in definite purpose. I picked it up and went in, and when I threw it on the counter above the garbage can, I noticed a long weed fall from it; and when I went to pick them both up to chuck them, I had a strange feeling, and unrolled the paper, and saw a handful of buckwheat, its clusters of pink flowers mashed, and a torn branch of lemonade berry, the red berries from it bled onto the newsprint. Fuck this! Was this funny? Somebody’s idea of a gift? I wondered if some new cowboy had moved in downstairs—I recognized the flowers from the marsh below the bluff west of my house.

  The next morning I tried to see Joe. “Gone on a trip,” somebody said. Gone. I should have made a point to see him more during the week, learn what the progress was on the case. The kiss threw me off. As much as I cared for him, that strange kiss made me wonder if I’d estimated him correctly. I’d tried hard not to give the incident more than fleeting moments of thought, and didn’t drop by as often as I might have had it not happened. It was just too overwhelming, trying to figure what a sudden, aggressive, even desperate kiss meant. I didn’t have time to think of what I was going to do about it, or frame whatever it was I should say when the subject came up. Maybe, I thought, it would never come up. We’d just go on like nothing happened, two people who enjoyed working together. But it had also occurred to me that he was from the old school, a generation away from mine, in which if a woman fell victim to her own bad judgment and to unforgiving office gossip, she became, in some people’s minds, open prey. After all, I’d misjudged Patricia. Why not Joe?

  I went to talk to Trudy. “Who’s in charge of the Dwyer case while Joe S. is gone?” I asked her. She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me blankly, a pencil still in her hand.

  “Talk to Stu, I guess.” The distance seemed to be there again. She returned to her drawing. Under Trudy’s wrist a woman’s face was taking shape.

  “A Doe?” I asked. She said yes.

  In the course of a year, the coroner’s office would see approximately 2,500 bodies, maybe 150 of them murder victims. Of those 2,500, maybe 100 will have no ID for a while. Then the coroner’s people go to work trying to identify them, bringing in specialists who reconstruct faces—by sticking match sticks in the bones at certain heights and then blanketing over the whole thing with clay—and running restored fingerprints through the sheriff’s computer system, and then the state’s, and the FBI’s. People want to know when their loved ones die.

  I told Trudy about my concern, the magazines. She didn’t know. I went back to my desk and phoned Gary, left a message, then called Bud Peterson. He told me the magazines had been sprayed with ninhydrin to bring up the latents.

  Joe Sanders came through the doorway of my office and stopped as soon as he saw me on the phone, turning as if to go back out, but waiting. So he was here. He hadn’t left.

  Maybe he’d thought it through and decided I deserved an apology. I held his look but had to talk to Peterson.

  “All of them?” I said.

  “We can’t do every magazine, every page.”

  “Well, then, you didn’t dust them.”

  “I said we did.”

  Joe waved a hand at me and left.

  Peterson was going on: “We do our job in a conscientious manner. Just like you. We got lifts off plenty other places.”

  “But none turned out a positive.”

  “Yet,” he said.

  I was getting nowhere. I had a lot of work to do. After I hung up, I started in on just getting paper off my desk again. It piles up like you wouldn’t believe. Somebody wanted to start a softball team—the first and the third sheets in my “In” bin. A missive misdirected to me: a report on an infant SID case that turned out to be botulism. Then a reminder from Joe, in memo form, that we shouldn’t use the term perimortem to convey the approximate time of death; it won’t hold up in court.

  I got a call from Joe one minute before lunch. Still here. “Smokey, I have to tell you: I’m sorry.”

  It took me by surprise he’d bring it up first. “What’s going on, Joe? You’ve been different lately.”

  “Smokey, I can’t talk now. I just want to apologize and tell you it won’t happen again.”

  What came out was, “That’s cool.” Put some distance between us, even generational. It brought silence on the other end, and then I felt pity. He really shouldn’t be in such a spot.

  “We’ll talk, Smokey.”

  “It’s okay, Joe—I said. Really.”

  “No. We’ll talk.”

  “Wait, Joe. I’m a little bugged right now. I found something on my doorstep that kind of unnerved me. Just flowers rolled up in a newspaper, but it kind of bothers me.”

  “You’ve got an admirer.”

  “They were crushed. Wrung, is a better word for it.”

  ‘I’ve really got to run, Smoke.”

  “Have a good trip.”

  I put the phone down, realized I was tired. No, I was hungry, the smell of popcorn wafting my way from the direction of the microwave. Trudy Kunitz came walking down the hallway with a paper bag of popcorn. “Trudy,” I called. “Spare some of that?”

  “Sure.”

  As she marched in, I opened my drawer and took out a folded paper towel from the ladies’ room. She spilled out about two handfuls onto it. “You’re a lifesaver,” I said.

  “The old stomach complaining, huh?”

  “Say, you want to go to lunch?”

  “I’ve got a big backlog. The DA’s office is on my back for some stuff too. That biker case? The third victim in the biker case died this morning, so we got a triple.” She was referring to two, now three, execution-type murders that occurred in Anaheim, the place where kiddie kitsch meets violent crime.

  She said, “Do you know there’s a word for stomach rumbling?” She was going to tell me. “Borborygmus,” she said.

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “I could hear you out in the hall.” She was being positively friendly. She looked me directly in the eye and leaned one haunch against the end of the desk while she munched her popcorn. Maybe all she needs is a prop like popcorn.

  I said, “I like your blouse.”

  “Oh, yeah, I bought it off my brother.” It was black and had lightning strikes across it in rainbow colors. “My brother’s eleven. I can wear his clothes. The shirts, anyway.”

  “Whatever works,” I said, smiling at her.

  “Hey,” she said casually, shoving three fingers’ worth of popcorn in her mouth, “you hear Sanders left his wife?”

  CHAPTER

  17

  So Joe L. Sanders left his wife, huh? That really pissed me off. How could he leave Jennifer and move, apparently, to my neck of the woods, and not tell me? Feel so sorry for himself he grabs me as if I’m his property and plants one on me that even hurt my lip? At the same time I wanted to tell him I’m sorry, that I know it hurts to lose someone, even when it’s long overdue. I’d loved before and I’d love again, and one thing I know is that love don’t co
me without price, pardon the lack of grammar. And then I’d tell him not to come within fifty feet of me till he gets over his divorce-dotty-blues, wherein everybody’s nuts for at least a year and a half.

  Friday afternoon I got in touch with the woman in CAL-ID about the magazines. She said on magazines in store racks there could be billions of fingerprints. Billions and billions. And then she said she never saw any magazines from the Dwyer case.

  I called Gary’s number. A deputy I didn’t know answered and took my message asking about the photo array.

  An hour and a half later I stepped away from my desk for five minutes, and, wouldn’t you know, Gary called back. Kathleen answered it at the front desk. She left a pink slip that said, “Gary Boda. No luck on mugs,” and then “K.K.,” her initials, and the eyes and mouth of a happy face. She was lousy about taking messages; I was glad she got that much. But she was definitely cheery. The lab director liked cheery.

  The “No luck on mugs” disheartened me. Gary wasn’t supposed to take the six-pack to Emilio until tomorrow, but he must’ve squeezed out an hour.

  That night I got home and walked my old-lady neighbor’s dog, even though it was really too dark to take him safely down to the bay. Mrs. Lambert gets along fine most of the time, but sometimes arthritis prevents her from letting that beautiful thing out, and I feel sorry for him. She named the setter after the redheaded boyfriend who gave the pup to her for her sixty-third birthday. The dog stayed longer than the man. Farmer whimpers and slobbers when he sees me, knowing what I’m there for. Down on the path, he strains to investigate. If I think a park ranger isn’t bound to come by, I let him off leash and he plays games with whatever croaks or whistles under the brush, then comes running back, tongue dangling out one side and a smile on his face. He gets locked in the mud sometimes, comes clogging out with black rubber balls glued to his feet. More than once I’ve nearly landed on my fanny in that mud-and-plankton biomass. Back at the condo, out on the front lawn, I have to hose him off. I keep a small bottle of dishwashing detergent in the bushes near the faucet. He whimpers, but he loves it, I know he does.