by Noreen Ayres
“This is Annabel Diehl, she works with me, and, of course, you know—”
I didn’t even look at Annabel. My attention was focused on Patricia, the way she looked at Roland then as if he were a football star, only with a dash of reserve, maybe fear, as if at any moment, at the wrong word, he’d turn on his heels and leave three women standing there alone.
“I think we better talk.”
Roland opened his jacket and pulled from it three stems of blue lantana he must have grabbed by the fountain. “A pretty gal like you should get flowers every night.” He thrust them forward at me, and I looked at Patricia.
“Roland!” Patricia said. “Where’s mine?” When she saw I wasn’t taking them, she did. And then Roland turned, taking Annabel with him, to lean over the balcony and watch, I guess, the fountain. The son of a bitch. It had to be him, with the paper and the lemonade berry.
“What is going on here, Patricia?”
Roland and Annabel stayed put, Roland cocking an arm out to rest on the balcony railing, but definitely around Annabel. As I would peer out around Patricia in the next few minutes, I’d see Annabel’s face turned up to him, smiling, and then it would reflect uncertainty and in another instant reverse itself to become self-conscious, aloof, a photographer’s model trying to look alone and worldly as she stood on a balcony with wind blowing her hair and skirt, hands jammed tight in the pockets. She wore a doe-skin jacket, cream-colored skirt, cream stockings with little knobs all over them like I never had the nerve to wear, cream high heels.
I took Patricia by an elbow and pulled her even farther away from the two. I laid into her, asking what the hell did she think she was doing, where the hell had she been, and what frigging idea had planted itself in her brain that she thought she could come breezing in here, my place, with a man suspected of murder.
She said, “God, what happened to you? You met him. He’s fine, just fine.”
And when I held my rigid glare too long, she turned around to Roland and her friend and said, “I think we made a mistake.”
Roland shrugged. “You got it. Guess we better be movin’ along,” but he didn’t look like he wanted to be movin’ along.
A sharp breeze cut in through the balcony and under my unzipped jacket, and I could smell the gasoline still on my hands from the last errand. At our head level just outside the walkway a white gull flew by.
Patricia had her hand all this time in the yaw of her purse. She’d put the wad of money back in, and now she pulled it out again. “You shouldn’t worry about me,” she said as she handed it to me. “I’m twenty-nine years old. I can take care of myself.”
“It looks like it. What’s with Miss Nordstrom over there? She taking care of herself too? I don’t appreciate it you go away and nobody knows where you are. I’m sure your boss doesn’t appreciate it either. You’re hanging out with a criminal. You think of that? Are you in love or just shootin’ in both arms?” I stepped out so I could see Roland, what he was doing, and to break the moment. He caught my eye and moved toward Annabel and put his hand on her upper arm, said something to her. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew whatever he was saying to her was for my benefit, for me to watch and wonder about.
“You don’t know it all,” Patricia said, low, dark. “You’re smarter than me, I know that. But you don’t know it all. I’m just sorry. I thought we were friends.”
I never knew she thought I was smarter than she was. I said, maybe softer now, “We are friends, Patricia. What friends do is look after one another. Confide in one another. You didn’t confide in me. You didn’t tell me you were going to take up with him until after you already had. Because you knew what I’d have to say. And you lacked the courage and the respect to tell me. You’re not dumber. You’re just not honest.” That sounded so cruel, and I could see the hurt in her eyes. “Where were you all this time? Did you give one thought to me, or your parents, or your job, for Christ sakes, even one thought?”
“Nobody can talk to you.” Her mouth drooped, and then the lips parted, as if she wanted to say something else but didn’t know what.
Whispering, I said, “You knew what I felt about that murder in Dwyer’s. You knew police suspected Roland and his brother—God, you were there with me in the observation room. And still, you took up with him anyway.”
“If you were so against him, why’d you come to the pier?”
I heard an apartment door close, and felt the floor of the walkway begin to shake with someone’s steps. The clip of high heels pocked behind me, and Patricia and I stood looking at each other as the woman approached and headed for the stairs.
“You think I’m a hard-ass, but I know these kind of people better than you do. What about all the talking we’ve done? What about all the stuff I’ve told you I’ve seen? Your brains are between your legs, Patricia.”
And that was all she wrote.
She started away, turned back to say, “You’re hopeless.”
Roland then was moving toward us, Annabel thrust ahead like a figure on a ship’s prow, his hand on her elbow. “You girls ready? We goin’ to roast wienies on the beach or what?” He rubbed his palms together like making fire the Indian way, then settled on his feet and hooked both thumbs in his pockets, smiling his lady-killer smile first at Patricia and then at me. His eyes searched mine, and the white teeth showed themselves, See, I’m harmless. And for just one half of one second I forgot who he was, saw the intimacy between him and Patricia, and felt left out.
I looked at Annabel and said, “Hi.”
“Hi. I’m supposed to be at work. I’m supposed to work overtime,” she said, and laughed faintly.
“I know how that is.” I was trying to figure out what it was about her that was off.
“We’re playing hooky,” she said.
I saw it then, behind her dark eyelashes. “You’re higher than helium,” I said.
One side of her mouth crept upward. She leaned back against the railing, raised her head as if to catch the sun, but there was no sun there, we were all in shadow.
A knowing and seductive expression moved into Roland’s face. I’d seen it a thousand-thousand times, from men at the bar after I’d finished my set of dances and needed a drink to cool off, at the table near the door when the bar was closing, or in the parking lot. I’d seen it from my father’s friends in the backyard at our barbecues when I was only thirteen, and still once in a while with new cops, cops I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, who I was. So it was staring/glaring time again.
I said, “Your parole officer know you’re associating with a user?”
His face went slack. He said to Patricia, “What is this? What you doing to me?”
She said, “Nothing. I’m sor—”
He pitched around, taking Annabel’s arm again, and said, “We’re bookin’, baby.”
Patricia went after him, her ankle-length, blue-and-white Australian dress with the ruffles on the bottom kicking up with each step. Then she stopped and looked back and said, “Thanks a lot, Samantha, for your understanding.”
I was Samantha again. This time I didn’t say anything. The smart one with nothing to say.
That night I thought the wind had kicked up, sending leaves ticking against my window. I wandered into the living room, thinking how I regretted the leaves this year, mostly brown, from a summer so hot and dry. The two liquidambars in front of my condo, resembling sycamores but from the witch-hazel family, halfheartedly got to the yellow stage about a month ago. While my back was turned, a pop issued from the window, and I looked and saw, because of my neighbor’s balcony light, a crystaled spot in the glass, and saw that the wind was not blowing, for the Christmas lights on her tree did not sway. As I slid open the door, another pick sounded to the left of me, and then I saw the pebble bounce onto the patio floor and out through the railing. What the hell, I thought, and knew it was Roland, knew it, and knew I could not prove it, would not see him as I stepped to the railing and looked down. For a moment I thought I
saw something move among the black clumps of bushes fifty yards from my place, leading down the bluff, and thought, Well, I guess the guy’s at least got a good arm.
I went in and closed the door and slipped my sawed-off broom handle in the channel of the slider, checked the front-door lock again, and waited two hours in the darkness to go to sleep.
In the morning when I left for work, not across from my door, but the next, was a brown female pintail lodged between the iron bars of the railing, bent to a U, butt out, legs and neck in. I went back in and got a plastic trash bag and a trail of paper towels and stuck it in. Tell me it flew through the railing and bucked back out.
CHAPTER
21
Stu Hollings decided to send me to Westminster first thing Monday. Little Saigon. A very fast station there, as cops say, lots of new violence among the immigrants. So many criminals, so little time. Same as in Long Beach, in L.A. County. In both those cities the contrasts are newer, the abrasions fresher. In Westminster, though the street signs are still lettered in Olde English, the town now plays host to fourteen-year-old Asian thugs with mag pistols and assault rifles. They burst into homes and murder praying women or anyone else who won’t satisfy demands for hidden stash; and these crimes often go unreported because the populace is afraid. Watch the news; study history—it’s the young. They refuse heart.
My boss and I were walking up the front steps of the lab, fresh asphalt in the back requiring us to park across the street, when he told me about the shooting in Westminster. Stu had come from getting doughnuts, a white box in his hands, which meant he’d already been at the lab and went out again. Like the little piggy who gets up earlier and earlier to beat the big bad wolf, you can’t arrive before Stu Hollings. Joe used to be like that, first in, last out, before his heart attack, and I used to try to beat him. No more. Not only does Joe not arrive early, it just isn’t fun anymore.
He held the door for me. “This is a homicide, a forty-year-old owner of a doughnut store.” For one flash of a second, I thought, Surely he didn’t get the doughnuts he’s holding there.
We stepped in and paused in front of Kathleen Kennedy’s reception area. She’d put a small Christmas tree on the counter near the wall, no decorations yet; and no Kathleen, until she whisked around the corner carrying a stuffed elf in a sleigh with a Santa cap on. She smiled when she saw us, asking, “Isn’t he cute?” and turning Santa-elf this way and that.
I nodded and proceeded down the hall, Stu behind me. When he caught up to me he said, “She’s nice, isn’t she?” waiting for my confirmation with a special light in his eye. Sometimes I think I’m not a woman—neither a woman nor a man. I look at Kathleen Kennedy, I look at the director’s secretary, who bounces and twitches and makes guys happy with her high tinkly laugh, at others I could name, and I think, I am not like them. So who am I? I’m fond of men; more than I should be. But I don’t want to be one. The Kathleens of the world are a mystery to me, and I don’t know why exactly. Even Janetta, in the coroner’s office. The saving grace for me is people like Jeri Landsforth, the anthropologist; and Dr. Schafer-White, the pathologist, a mommy who probably dresses her little girl in velvet dresses the same day she’ll be stabbing livers with a scalpel, just below the rib cage, and slipping in a thermometer to read the time of death. When I think of those two, I think, Okay, I’m not alone; and besides, Raymond likes me, and Joe.
“Killed her with one shot,” Stu said, bringing his right thumb up exactly between his eyebrows. “Westminster requested our involvement. They want someone knows what he’s doing. You’re him. Joe Sanders is actually the one who called back and would like to have you out there.”
We’d reached his office, and went in.
I said, “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to talk to you in the future about my next step here. I mean, I’ve done just about everything except DNA, and Johnson’s hogging that all right now. I’d really like to do something else; you know, take some training. Carnivorous insects, for instance. There’s a course at Fullerton—”
He’d set the box of doughnuts on the desk and was hanging his jacket on the back of the door, glancing out the doorway as he came around, as if to see who else was or wasn’t at their desks. “You have a problem, Smokey? Working scenes since you’ve been back?”
Stu was about the same age as Joe. Transferred in from Indianapolis a year ago. He was a big, plain-looking man who looked like he’d sell tires or teach history or be the guy who tries to sell you refrigerators as you get off the escalator at Sears. Egg-shaped face with a shiny forehead, round bifocals. He was okay but I couldn’t get a fix on him, couldn’t figure out who he was yet besides being good at following procedure. Definitely a company man, which I both liked and didn’t like; I like them honest enough to go by the rules yet imaginative enough to break them, so there you go, hard to please.
“If you mean am I queasy, no. Nothing like that.”
“You have a problem with any personnel?”
“No.”
As he was asking me these questions, his eyes shivered in that weird paroxysm some people’s do when concentrating, as if reading a page right-to-left and not ever catching up. He moved over behind his desk and said, “That case from Mission Viejo, the one with the boy in the hills? The cop dries the shirt in the sun,” Stu shaking his head. “Can you believe it? On a tree branch, out in the sun.” He unlocked his desk, fidgeted around with the stuff on top, and tore off yesterday’s calendar page. “Then the idiot folds the shirt right over the wound holes. Who trains these guys anyway?” looking at me for an answer.
“As a matter of fact, the lab gives tr—”
“We have plenty of technicians on bench work. The spec is well covered. Blood alcohol’s getting busy, but that’s not where I need you.”
“With all due respect, Stu, I can’t be everywhere.”
He looked at me with a new evaluation. “Have I forgotten a case you’re on?”
“I’m helping out wherever. And that’s fine. I like the variety.”
Still standing, he was reading a paper on his desk. Then raising his head, he said, “I thought everybody liked field work best.”
“I like field work.”
“Don’t like the hours? More predictable hours here? Your boyfriend . . . ?”
“Stu, I said I like field work.” What I hated was somebody insinuating that personal interests interfere with professional ones, or that because I’m a woman I don’t have the level of interest a man would. This conversation was pinning me to the wall, though. The fact of the matter was that my resistance was up to going to Westminster precisely because I was a woman and Joe-baby a man, and that galled me more than I wanted to think, for without that tension, I wouldn’t be having this inane conversation with Stu Hollings in his office. I said, “This time of morning I should make it in what? Thirty minutes?”
“Good,” Stu said, cutting open the tape on the doughnut box with his fingernail and lifting the lid. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Got to watch calories, huh?” He smiled at me, returning his gaze to the pink-and-chocolate mounds. His shirt pulled tightly across his stomach, his sleeves rolled because his wrists were so thick.
I said, “I’ll present more information regarding that course in carnivorous insects I mentioned later, okay? We can talk about it then?”
“You do that,” he said, neatly laying out a folded paper towel for his doughnut to rest on.
At my desk, I grabbed my kit containing the things needed for collecting and preserving samples, and put it on top, flipping the latch open so I could check my supplies. Joe would’ve already done most of the work. The blood would’ve clotted and unclotted by now, he could get good samples, and he knew what he was doing. I couldn’t see why he needed me. I checked my supply of filter paper. I needed more gloves. The elasticized strap on my eye protection was getting unelasticized; I’d have to replace it sometime. Swabs, syringes, Luminal. Razor blades. Tweezers. Sal
ine solution. Mason jar. Small tubes. Joe would have dry ice. Thermometer/barometer. Evidence envelopes—plenty of those. Tape for lifting prints.
Billy K. would be there, probably, but I thought I’d better bring film for my own camera, the one I kept in the trunk and hoped all summer wouldn’t fry. I rummaged in the back of my top drawer, didn’t find any. Then opened the same big left-hand drawer where I’d temporarily stored the brass collet from the Dwyer case before I had the good sense to take it to Property, and maybe not the good sense, since I hadn’t handled it correctly in the first place and it seemed to mean nothing to anyone after all, and looked in there. Thinking how much time had already passed on the Dwyer case. Thinking of the Dugdales, and what was happening to my frilly friend Patricia, losing her bearings. Mad at myself that I’d been dwelling too much on my own puny emotional problems with one Joe-London-Cutie-Pie-Sanders while all this was going on.
CHAPTER
22
“It’s fly specks, I’m telling you.”
“It’s paint.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I said, “What’s it painting here? What’s it depicting? Not holly berries.” Using the eraser end of a pencil in the corner where the window met the frame, I shoved open the metal door that led from the kitchen into the customer area of the shop. We’d been checking stain on the door’s window.
“It’s flies,” I said.
“What makes you think so?” Joe said.
“Because, the way they’re grouped.”
“We don’t have flies in December.”
I stopped, saw he was sort of smiling. He used to do that to me when I was a lab rook—test me, see how much I believed my guesses.
I said, “I don’t care what time of year it is, certain conditions, you get flies. Here . . .” I started back. He wasn’t following. I said, “The edges. Come back and look.”
