A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  This evening it was colder than I liked, a wind cutting in off the farther waters, though it had been hot all day. My ears began to ache soon after we went out. I wouldn’t let Farmer go far. I felt grouchy, and sorry I took him out in the first place, and, after about fifteen minutes, took him home. Climbing the stairs, I thought about the silence in my apartment, and that there was nothing on TV Friday nights anymore since Miami Vice went off. My favorite had been Crime Story, its endings bitter or unresolved as in real life. They moved America’s Most Wanted to this night, but I got tired of watching it and always felt a little prurient doing so anyway, I wasn’t sure why. So I went out for roasted chicken and a salad from Albertson’s before I picked up my groceries.

  When I got home, I wondered who might still be at the lab. Before I unloaded the groceries, I dialed. Billy answered.

  “You’re always there,” I said. “Or somewhere.”

  “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere. Actually, I was waiting for you to call,” he said.

  “Listen, Billy? Hearken back to the Kwik Stop murder in Costa Mesa. Did you see anybody collect any magazines?”

  “Wouldn’t Joe be able to tell you that?”

  “He’s on a trip somewhere.”

  “You call Prints?”

  “Yes. I get conflicting stories.”

  “Check with Property.”

  “I’m asking you, Billy.”

  “I have no idea. My job is taking pictures. You figure the killers thought they were in the library?”

  “I think the assailants were in that store a long time before commission, and they might’ve been looking at magazines, you know, to eyeball the place awhile.”

  “Can’t help ya, doll.”

  “What could we have missed? Think, Billy. I know you just do photos, but brainstorm with me here.”

  “You make it sound like I just do photos. I’ll have you know some people value me for other expertise.”

  I was silent, thinking about what other avenue I could push somebody to pursue. Billy was trying to be funny, and I wasn’t cooperating.

  He said, “Hey, it’s Friday night.”

  “I know it’s Friday night.”

  “You got a date?”

  I was quiet again.

  “Obviously not, or you wouldn’t be on the phone to me. How about it? Let’s you and me go out. Maybe to Dove Street. Been there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, maybe to . . . I know: Crackers. It’s a great place. They got singers, dancers, a guy in a gorilla suit who’ll dance with you better than me. Well, I take that back. But you can eat good ribs and sing along to the dirty lyrics.”

  “No, Billy.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not going out with you. I told you that.”

  “All work and no play . . .”

  “Stop wooing me with clichés. Stop wooing me.”

  He cooed and whined a little bit, but he knew it was a losing game. I couldn’t get mad at him. I finally even had to laugh when he asked me, “You don’t like people of Armenian descent, do you?”

  “Who was the patrol cop on that case, Billy? You remember?”

  “Senior Patrol Collis Banks.”

  “Hm. You’re good, Katch.”

  “That means you’ve changed your mind? No. Sigh. But talking to Banks won’t do you any good. Why don’tcha just read the file?”

  “Why won’t it do me any good?”

  “He’s done gawn, my purty little thang.”

  “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “Moved on to LAPD. The Big Time. He was telling me that the day of the crime. He lateralized over there, after waiting three years.”

  “Oh, no. I could still call him. Maybe there’s something that’s not in the case file.”

  “You could. If his tongue’s not up the chief’s ass so he can make it to the phone.”

  “Take care, Billy.”

  “I always do.”

  When I hung up, I remembered the round cloud of cat at Billy’s place, whose head turned only once in a while to check on some sound perhaps, and that part I liked.

  Saturday was the funeral. Maybe I should have gone, but I felt somehow it would be an intrusion.

  It had been hot for a week, and Christmas was around the corner, and the whole thing made me grouchy. At ten-thirty, about the last moment I had to make up my mind about going to the service, I walked down to the bay, and soon I was sizzling. Someone I passed there said he heard it was supposed to be 98, 99 degrees today. I continued on to my three-mile marker, almost the complete circuit of the bay, and back again, and began to feel sick to my stomach. Once I meant to duck into the shade of a mule-fat tree, not careful to look first, and just about got plowed under by a group of about twelve bicyclists in helmets and neons, the noise as they whizzed past like strong wind in a tunnel. I jumped back into some low-growing red leaves and thought what we need is a Chippie, a CHP guy, down here for the bikers. Then I thought, looking at the leaves sweeping my ankles, Oh, great: “Leaves of three, let it be,” thinking poison oak or ivy.

  Sunday morning I went down to the Winchells’ where I knew Raymond sometimes grabbed coffee. It’s true what the comics say, about cops and doughnuts. Coppers don’t get those guts for nothing, though Orange County cops are pretty fit, I’d say. Ray’s mogambo wheels were out front. I caught him coming out.

  “Can you spare an old bud some time?” I said.

  “Sure. Come along with me down to the substation. I’ve got something I need to drop off.” He works South County, out of San Juan Capistrano, home of the swallows. A friend took me horseback riding at the San Juan stables one day, pointing out that our sheriff’s wife is the owner. There was a stew about that once, her business somehow mixed up with his, and more stew about how the sheriff acquired the building supplies for the house he built up on the side of a hill overlooking the 405 freeway, but I never got into that sort of gossip—it’s easy to accuse, hard to defend. That’s why we have The System. Joe keeps reminding me of that, even as we do the lowly evidence analyzing: Don’t push, don’t prove something that’s not there—that’s not your job. Use care, common sense, good judgment, once in a while gut feel. Keep current in the profession, which was what he was off doing now, I learned—taking a seminar—and keep an open mind, but don’t judge. Every one of us does, even he. But he won’t say a word about the sheriff.

  “Raymond,” I said while we were in the car, “putting your and my feelings aside concerning a certain pair of criminal-type no-goodniks, do you think I’m obsessing?”

  His intelligent face showed a little tautness at the jaw, but he said, “All you got is a collet and an opinion, babe. Am I right? Could be a collet like that is used in a bunch of different trades.”

  “I told you. The man in San Pedro said they don’t fuse like that in any other profession. Usually.”

  “That could be something, that usually. When you let your mind run away with you, you can start to see things in the shadows, friend.” He tilted an eyebrow at me.

  “God, it’s hot,” I said. “How hot do you think it is today?”

  “Upper eighties.”

  “Shit, don’t they know it’s December around here? Why do we live here, Raymond?”

  We drove for a while, me frowning a lot, I guess, because he said then, “I don’t like it either, Smokey, Roland Dugdale up next to your friend so convenient like that. The Kwik Stop thing and everything. But it’s so bizarre, how could it be anything but coincidence? I mean, can you feature the guy committing a crime and then hanging out near anyone who has anything to do with the Po-lice?”

  “He does have a record of these things, stop-and-robs.”

  “I know.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “Nothing that I know of.”

  “Fuck this, Raymond.”

  He drove a long time without saying anything, throwing on his yellows just to get people out of the way. I felt bad that I was so grumpy, so I
rode the rest of the way with my mouth shut.

  Monday came, and Tuesday slipped by, because I got involved in matching duct tape found in some bushes and on the mouth of a floater in a bad state of decomp, discovered in the Peters Canyon Reservoir.

  It wasn’t that I forgot about Jerry, It’s just that there’re only so many hours in a day—exactly what I was worried would happen. His face was getting dimmer and dimmer to me.

  And then on Thursday a lot of us were out in the scrub brush near Rattlesnake Reservoir and Hicks Canyon in the eastern part of the county, searching for body parts.

  CHAPTER

  18

  I found a foot, and bagged it. It was a man’s. I found a torso under a sheet of drywall, and was able to heave the wall over because I was standing on a coffee table. Even with the stomach down and the head gone and the legs under the L of an upside-down couch, I knew it was a woman’s because of the crease of bra strap across the back, under the navy blue knit shirt.

  We were fifteen miles out in the Loma Ridge area near the edge of a new housing development. The pattern of houses funneled out through sparse stands of black oak, chaparral, and coastal sage scrub. We were there probing one small pocket of red-roofed stucco houses that should’ve been impervious to any disaster save a random coyote snatching small white dogs in the misty A.M. But early this morning, at the right-most end of the funnel’s triangle, it was as if a bored, bony witch decided to poke a knobby hand down on a map one day and say, “Here, right . . . here,” and a four-seater Cessna took a plunge. Now a bunch of normal-looking people were deep in the wild purple artichokes and dried deer grass, matching parts. The torso I found was the third so far dead on the ground.

  I looked around for help and saw the rookie Simmons near one of the refrigerated moving vans we’d had to rent to supplement our own Coroner’s Disaster Team vehicles. He wasn’t just standing around messing up dust this time. He’d been working with the forensic anthropologist we rely on so much in cases like this, helping her bag and filling out tags as she reeled off the info. Now he was drinking from a cup out of one of the big insulated water jugs we use for remote locations. I couldn’t recall the rookie’s first name, so I waved him over by calling his last, asking could he bring a stretcher and a few more brown plastic bags. He yelled, “Right,” and slipped his mask back on, while I peeled off my gloves and dug for another pair in my hip pocket; the rubber had sheared off somehow on the little finger of one of the ones I threw down. The anthropologist was off to the right and up ahead of him, unspringing a wide-brimmed hat I’d seen her wear before—a funny pink, purple, and yellow Southern-belle thing with a chin strap and bead to pinch it in place; with a flick of her hand, she would twist it into a figure eight to fit into a front pocket of her army-type vest. All morning the sky had been bright white with overcast, and now there was a disconcerting yellow cast caused by the earth’s present tilt on its axis, a winter light that always depressed me more than a cloudy day. The anthropologist slipped sunglasses on, the kind with an iridescent patina on the lenses, saying “beach scene” more than “crash site.” She’d had to have a little skin cancer removed from her nose. Normally she would’ve had the hat on before this.

  This woman does most of our reconstruction work, building clay faces out of skulls, identifying and dating bones. Her name is Jeri Landsforth, a Ph.D. and a real soul. I thought if I ever got tired of working for Joe—or around Joe—maybe I’d quit and go see what I could do for her. Simmons was at my side when I heard Jeri’s hollow voice sound out, “Aw, no.”

  We stepped over the debris to where she stood, her hands hanging down by her sides, eyes fixed on a pink puff of something. Coming closer, we saw it was a little brown baby in a pink bunting suit—just there, eyes closed, fist to its tiny pug nose, no visible damage, as if it had dropped off a stork’s wing. But not breathing.

  I heard myself say an “Oh, no” too, and Simmons utter a quiet “Shit” inside his mask. He poked a finger up inside his glasses and touched the bridge of his nose.

  Jeri reached down with both hands and plucked the little thing up, turned, and headed back toward the van, a gasp of wind flipping up the front brim of her hat and pasting it there, forehead bald to the sun.

  Simmons and I walked back to the spot I’d left. I told him we were looking for a woman’s head, and a right arm.

  On block-wall fences and the unfinished hills beyond the housing tract were people, not many, watching, figuring out what happened and whose house it would’ve hit had it been a little to the east or a tad to the west.

  We worked all night, the fire trucks bringing in special illumination setups. We had to, to secure the area from all sorts of raiders, furry, feathery, or otherwise. Once or twice I looked up to see a string of colored Christmas lights along the eaves of a house, and I wondered if the people inside felt terror, or gratitude, or sadness, or calm, and pondered what part religion played in most of their lives, and if any of them could adequately explain away this.

  My new boss, Stu Hollings, was there the whole time, I’ll give him that. He works. What he lacks in personnel skills, he makes up for in dedication. He said, when we were all gathered at the Irvine P.D. Communications Vehicle on the second afternoon, “You’ve done a good job here, people.” I was pleased to hear it from him, for a lot of people who don’t often work overtime worked for this one when they could have been out crawling malls for Christmas. “I want you to go home and relax, try to do some things that’ll clear your minds. Go see a movie, or . . .”

  And someone interrupted and said, “They’re more bloody than this,” and everybody laughed.

  The night before the air disaster, I’d called Patricia after work and got her answering machine. Three days later, on a Saturday, she called me. I was lying on the couch with my binos, looking at a pair of ruby-throated hummingbirds that regularly come to feed on the four-feet-high purple Ladies of the Nile in three pots on the patio, and on the tubular pink blossoms of my hanging Christmas cactus. “He’s been in here again,” she said.

  I sat up. My arms felt heavy.

  She said, “Someone’s been in my apartment. You know how your milk carton tents in when you close it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, mine was tented out. Out, instead of in.”

  I could picture it, but I said, “That’s all?” The hummingbirds zinged over in front of my picture window and hovered there, staring, as if to ask, Who is that on the phone, and, Can we come in?

  Patricia said, “Like somebody drank from it, is what I mean.” She sounded annoyed with me. “You know how boys drink from a carton and put it back in? That’s what it looked like. My brother used to do it all the time. Someone drank from my milk and put it back like that.” Patricia had lost her brother to cocaine long before it was the drug of America’s choice, way back in the mid-seventies, when she was fourteen. She sounded pitiful, really. I said, “Are you missing anything? Jewelry . . . ?”

  “No. Well—my blue leather belt. But that’s been missing awhile.” She let up a little then, and laughed and said, “You steal my blue leather belt, Samantha?” That was the first time she’d called me Samantha in a while. I took it as a sort of apology, for making too much of my youthful past. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But you just know, you just somehow know, when somebody’s been in your house. Like what I told you about before, in the toilet. And before you say anything, let me say there was something else, too. My curtains in front? They were pulled off to the left about three inches, like someone was standing there to look out.”

  “Patricia, I know you’re worried, but who could go in there? Think about it. If I sweated every time I put my keys in the refrigerator, I’d be looking up shrinks’ phone numbers.” I said this, after Ray’s little lecture to me in the car, but I felt my stomach muscles go tight, and the picture of the rolled newspaper with the lemonade berry branch squashed in it came to mind, and while we talked I thought of the several other times weird gu
ys have done weird things to me, but I didn’t mention it.

  She said, “Maybe you’re right. Listen—change of subject. I want you to meet Roland. In fact, I have a great idea: We’re going out on the Seal Beach pier tonight, have dinner out there. Watch the sun go down. Why don’t you come?”

  “No, thanks, Patricia.”

  “You’ll see Roland is only trying to get along in this world. He’s really major sweet, Samantha. His brother Phillip also. The whole family—well, the father’s dead, but the mother had an addiction problem and is now drug-free and Phillip is in Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “A regular all-American family,” I said.

  “You’re not even willing to give him one ounce of a chance, are you?”

  I closed my eyes and didn’t say anything.

  “Think it over. You might learn something,” she said. “Not all people are bad. Even ones who maybe did bad things for a while. Well? You coming?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Coward.”

  Here was an opportunity to interview my main suspect. And I was passing on it? “You have such a way with words.”

  “We’ll pick you up.”

  “No. I’ll drive. I like my own car.”

  “Be that way.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I will.”

  At the restaurant, I spotted Patricia’s orange Peugeot right away because the lot wasn’t that crowded yet. I thought, The guy uses her car, her gas too, all the time?

  She and Roland were at a back table, up against a window. The sky behind them was white and stark, and the sun’s brightness pitched a solid glare off the green water whenever it broke through the clouds. They weren’t going to get a good sunset after all, it looked like.

  Patricia was wearing a tangerine East Indian–type dress, flowy. A pearl comb pulled her auburn hair back over one ear, and she had gotten a bit of a tan since I last saw her, so that when she smiled, she was a definite show-stopper. “Hi, c’mere and sit down,” she said, all in one breath. Roland half-stood when I approached; the gesture surprised me. I took the chair beside Patricia as she said, “Roland, this is Samantha Brandon; Samantha, Roland.” As he forked over a hand and shook mine, Patricia added, “She goes by Smokey.” A grin crawled to one side of his mouth. I held on his eyes, the duplicate color of the ocean behind him, long enough to say, I’m ready to read you, baby, make no mistake about it. His hair was clean and, with the bleached tips, looked polished, and I wondered if he didn’t do a dip with Miss Clairol himself, though that’s okay if he did; lots of SoCal men do. He had on tight rock-washed jeans and a black short-sleeved shirt with a vertical light green stripe in it, a tight, strong package, and if I shut my mind off, I could see the appeal.