A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  We stood just a second, looking at each other, and then we went off, he to his and me to mine, as if some bridge had been crossed and we’d meet again at the apron of another one soon and have to make a decision again. And I felt better than I had in a long time, and scared, all at once.

  I climbed back onto the freeway in the wrong direction to my state of mind at the moment. That is, I headed back to the lab. I felt like heading out to San Pedro. But how would I extract a different story from Roland’s bosses anyway, one that said, Oops, we made a mistake, Roland didn’t work the day J. Dwyer was killed? No, the thing to do would be to go see Patricia when Roland was with her. Feel the jerk out, swallow my bile and get friendly. Sure, you were right, Patricia. Like, I was wrong.

  CHAPTER

  23

  “Hi, Gare. It’s me, Smokey. Can you talk?”

  “Sure thing. I’m just doing reports. What’s up?”

  “I hear we’ve got a Forrest Sinclair in the population somebody rolled over on. Is that right?”

  “He’s in the population all right, and I gotta tell you, Forrest Sinclair could do whatever scuzzy thing you put on him, but it would be a personal thing, not this. He’s got a temper. Give you an idea, he broke into his ex-wife’s house and wrote nasty stuff on her mirrors. She lives in Orange, up there by that lumberyard that does the woodcarving classes? I forget the name. Great big one.”

  “I don’t know, Gary.”

  “He’s a real beaut. Once he beat up a guy behind a disco for getting in his face. Guy spent two months in the hospital and never turned him in.”

  “For an old man hangs around the house a lot, you’re sure a window to the world.”

  I could hear paper crinkling in the background, like cellophane. He said, “He’s a zip. I worked with him a little as a junior. He likes to think he knows it all, you know what I mean?”

  I grunted a reply so he’d continue.

  “Used to like burgs nobody else could figure out. He’s smart, I’ll give you that. Too smart to do a stop-and-rob with a murder in his hind pocket.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  “Well, his first turn was for B-and-E’s. Thought he knew everything because he’d been a cop. He’d break in a place, drink the good wine, spread out the paper like he took a long time readin’ it. Then pocket some jewelry or a few syringes, and go out the front door. Joe Citizen’d replace the locks, the doors, the whole bit. Two weeks later, Forrest Sinclair would be in there again. He did it for laughs, that’s what he told his public defense who told it to me on the sly—he’s a member of my church. Oh, he could’ve graduated to person crimes, but I don’t think so, not that one. Most burglars are cowards. They don’t wanta get hurt. Take a gun into a store, you might get hurt. Besides, I got another reason for thinking so.”

  “And you’re going to keep it to yourself,” I said.

  “No. Don’t be so impatient. I’m eatin’ some peanut brickle here.” He called it brickle. “The granddaughter brought it over last night, couldn’t sell it all. You want a couple boxes of not-so-bad peanut brickle?”

  “I’ll send the money. You can keep the candy.”

  “Okay, if that’s the way you want to be.”

  “Gary, why would the inmate try to burn him?”

  “Favors. A turn out of the barrel, who knows. Let me tell you what Sinclair’s in for now. It’s a real hoot. A drug pinch was going down in Magic Kingdom territory—”

  “Off Harbor?”

  “Right. Small stuff, not a big bust or anything like that—you know, they cleaned up the hooker trade so good they can load Narc Detail. So anyway, they’re waiting for the bust signal, they got a wired guy inside the room. Car pulls up. Hey, who’s this? This john’s gonna screw up the deal. Plainclothes on a bicycle moves in, tries to get what turns out to be Sinclair off to the side. Sinclair starts acting real funny, and the girl in the car gets out, takes off the other direction. Which makes Mr. Sinclair commence to give mouth to the officer, ’cause he just lost his date.”

  Gary was thoroughly enjoying the moment of telephone break so he could eat his peanut brittle. It sounded wet in my ear, all the smacking. “The wired copper,” he said, “inside the motel, he’s doing his thing, playing it to the hilt, like, ‘Yo, you mf-ers, you brought the heat in, you clumsy mf-ers,’ and like that. The bust by now is completely watered. So the rest of the detail goes to hassle the bejesus out of this jerk in the white windbreaker who dumped it for them, who they don’t know yet is Sinclair, “and guess what? His registration’s not current and they think they smell marijuana. They search the car, think they see flake in the seats. Buddy, we got a fatal error here. Your system has done crashed. They ask Sinclair can they see in the motel room he was going into, the one, it turns out, is next to the setup. ‘No,’ he says. Puts up a lot of bull. By now they know who he is, so they are major pissed. They get a telephone warrant and search the room, find some good old Hawaiian sunshine inside and a kilo o’ Henry ain’t even been stepped on yet. Sinclair’s cussin’ like a sumabitch. That boy is going to camp for a long while and it won’t need the Kwik Stop murder case to do it.”

  “He sounds like a genuine multitalent to me.

  “Personally, I can’t see the guy dipping petty cash at a convenience store when he’s got a kilo Henry, can you? You know what that’s worth these days, coke in recession?”

  “No. What?”

  “Try three mil.”

  “Yow.”

  “You said it.

  “Hey, Gare.”

  “What?”

  “Why are we so honest and so dumb?”

  “Aw, hell, I don’t know. Dumb parents, I guess.”

  “So why does anybody want him for the Dwyer?”

  “I don’t want him for the Dwyer.”

  “I know. Who does?”

  He said, “Tired cops who see a lot of dealers walk, okay? Cops who’re mad they’re dumb like you and me.”

  “Can I see Forrest Sinclair?”

  “I can give you all the stats on him, that’s what you want. But I really don’t see why you don’t let us do our business, and you keep doin’ the fine job you’re doin’.”

  “Gary, I knew the Dwyer kid.”

  “So? Open up some evidence for us. That’s your job.”

  “Thanks a big one, Gare.”

  “I’m busy, what can I say? He’s not your man.”

  “I heard there are a couple other suspects.”

  “Nah. Wishful thinking. Give the DA a menu to choose from is all.”

  I was coming to the final question with Gary, wondering how I’d say it since it wasn’t clear to me if I disliked Roland Dugdale because he was Roland Dugdale, because he was someone with a record and was taking my friend away, or did I just not like Roland because of something working I couldn’t put my finger on, something you see in your peripheral vision but not when you turn around? I said, “What do you think of the Dugdales now that the channel’s changed?”

  There was a pause, not long, and then, “I hate to say it, but it looks like we can trash that file.”

  “Ah, Gary.”

  “You wanted it to be those two, didn’t you?”

  “I guess so. Probably just because they were the ones I actually saw. All your fault for letting us come down.”

  “Yep. That’s a danger.”

  I asked him about the photo lineup, had he taken a photo lineup to Emilio.

  “Emilio don’t work at El Cochino no more.”

  “Oh, shit. We scared him.”

  He was silent a moment, and I was wondering if he thought that was a criticism, or if he was intent on peanut brickle again, though I didn’t hear anything crinkling.

  Behind me, one of the new specialists was sliding drawers in and out of her desk. I swiveled to see her, and could hear a lone pencil rolling back and forth, back and forth in the top drawer as she opened it, bent over to peer in, closed it, opened it. She was a round-faced thing with whitewashed skin, and I�
�m sorry to say I didn’t like her the minute I took her damp, limp hand. Her eyes met mine, and she smiled, said quietly, “The lock doesn’t work.”

  Gary was talking again, saying, “I showed the shots to the family. Nothing. I even showed them to the Iranian, the guy who came in after? And the lady with the stroller. I showed them to the father. No luck.”

  “Did Ray Vega tell you about my friend Patricia?”

  “He did. Ray was sittin’ on tacks.”

  “Is that whole thing a coincidence too spooky to believe?” I was hoping, of course, he’d say yes, and be alarmed and suspicious and angry and motivated.

  What he said was, “Hey, I met my fourth-grade teacher from Moundsville, West Virginia, in Crown Books at Main-place Mall last week. It’s a small world after all.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You know what she was buying? An Orange County Firemen’s calendar, you know, with all them twenty-year-olds in red bikinis showin’ ass? Excuse me, pardon my French.”

  Stu Hollings had a meeting that took clear up till noon, talking about who’s going to get to work in the DNA building, and who’s going to be up next for training. It’s quite a coup that we have a DNA lab, to the director’s credit. There are only a few DNA labs in the country, mostly private, and police have to send stuff out to them, and wait, and wait. An expert was up front talking about the sieving properties of electrophoretic gel and the use of restriction endonuclease, and about that time my eyes glazed over and I caught myself wishing a bird would hop on a bush in the window behind Stu for me to analyze.

  When I came out, Kathleen told me Rowena Dwyer was waiting in the lobby. She was wearing a tan suit jacket with narrow black stripes, over a black skirt. Her hair seemed blonder, too blonde I think, so that she just looked tired and older. She said she’d been getting the runaround. “I feel like no one at the police department is doing anything at all on this case.” She was agitated, of course, but at the same time wanting to show me all the newspaper clippings she had in her folio from both L.A. and Orange Counties, stories having to do with armed robberies and some homicides. Some of them, I could see as she flipped through, were library microfilm copies. I pictured this lady in a branch library sitting in front of one of the big white screens turning dials, asking the librarian how do you do this and how do you find that.

  I asked her if she’d like to go talk somewhere private, and I went back to my desk and wrote a note to Stu telling him I was going to the doctor’s again, placing it on his desk while he was out—he wouldn’t want to know the truth. I was back in an hour and took my note off his desk and he didn’t even know I was gone. Mrs. Dwyer and I walked to the gazebo by the public library and, with the day warmed up now, sat just outside the gazebo in the sun. The sky was clear blue, and stacks of white clouds, a rarity in this country, moved in two columns over the tops of the buildings. Black birds with yellow eyes fluttered down from trees that were set into rounds in the concrete, and landed near us as if expecting handouts. A man in his forties, handsome behind his raggedy beard, sat not too far off from us, studying a bus schedule.

  Her ex-husband was selling the business, coming back to the Midwest with her, Rowena said. He’d suffered a mild heart attack since the murder. “I just don’t want us to go back there and we’re out of sight and out of mind.”

  I let her show me every single piece she had in the folder, and told her again that we’d do our very best to find her son’s killers, that I had a lot of faith in our law-enforcement personnel. She shook hands with me when she left. No tears, not even wet eyes, but a droop cutting sharply on either side of her lips, almost down to the chin.

  After work I drove to Patricia’s. She wasn’t there. I passed Roland’s number 210. No lights. I did this three evenings in a row, after calling her machine throughout the day. On the weekend I tried I don’t know how many times to reach her by phone, and drove by twice.

  My brother, Nathan, called. He said, “If you want to visit the folks Christmas, I’ll pay your way out.” I told him I hate Florida.

  “You’re being petulant,” he said.

  “I’m busy, Nathan.”

  “One of these days they’re going to be gone and how then will you feel?”

  “Guess I’ll deal with that later.”

  “You’re heartless, Samantha. A regular stone.”

  “Nathan, I have nothing in common with them.”

  “How about they wiped your little fanny when you were a baby? They fed you, didn’t they?”

  “Let me work this out my own way, okay, Nathan? They know I love them.”

  “In an abstract way.”

  “Yes, in an abstract way. I love the thought of them, happy in their Stratoloungers. Going clubbing, making pot roasts, whatever it is they do. Who are you to tell me how to feel about them? I’ll see them in my own time, don’t worry.”

  He doesn’t understand because he’s a miniature of them. It’s funny how it happened in our family. My parents were straight arrows when Nathan was growing up. Then, in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, they got weird with minor drugs and did sneaky shit on each other, and I guess I wasn’t old enough to handle it. I went a bit tweako myself. Straightened up before they did, but by the time they came around, they were religious, I was in Vegas, and, I’m sorry, I just don’t want to hear it.

  For one second while talking to him, though, I recalled Rowena Dwyer’s face and wondered if those puzzled, distant expressions ever crossed my parents’ countenances. And if so, I was sorry. Crum, maybe I’d have to go Christmas shopping anyway.

  “You can come Christmas shopping with me, Joe,” I said when he asked me out. We were standing by my car at the lab when he said he wanted to take me to dinner.

  We did eat, we did shop, we did fight. We argued when I said I wanted to mix it up with Roland Dugdale because I couldn’t get in touch with Patricia. Joe said I should mind my own business. Oo, the wrong thing to say to a Smokey-girl.

  Before that, though, in the darkness of the fanciest restaurant I’d been in in a long time, Joe kissed me several times and I thought I was going to slide off the cushions onto the floor. He was wearing some sweet-smelling thing on his face, and though I can’t stand being blasted by a woman’s perfume, her coming at me down an office aisle or ahead of me in a store, it’s a fact that men’s colognes do all the right, or possibly wrong, things to me.

  Joe had a smidgen too many bourbon-and-waters, and I’ll say I loved the white zin. So when the back of my hand slid down to the well-earned round of Joe’s belly and Joe said he was losing his girlish figger, I looked at him leeringly and said a thing I shouldn’t have, smiling: “More cushion for the pushin’, darlin’.”

  “Why, Smokey, you do have a mouth,” he said, and I swear he was going to attack me right there on the leather bench.

  “There was this famous actress in the forties—oh, I can’t remember her name.”

  “Yes?” he said, drawing a finger down the side of my face and across my lower lip as I talked.

  “I don’t know, I wish I could remember. She was real famous, real wholesome-looking. She had very round cheeks and robust lips, shall we say. Not someone you’d think a reporter would catch with his camera under a restaurant tablecloth performing fellatio on her date.”

  Joe looked across the room, grinning while he thought about that. “Think there’re any reporters here?” He lifted the tablecloth and peered underneath. He was about to say something very serious and lecherous to me, and I probably would’ve responded with the same, but the mussels and lobster were delivered thereafter, and that precipitated slight musings about where, exactly, various sea creatures come from, where they are farmed, in what waters, and I started talking about diving and what divers do, and one thing led to another.

  I said, “Remember, Joe, you’re the one said criminals are stupid. So, stupid Roland Gene Dugdale brings a goddamned diver’s collet to a crime and leaves it there. Nice of him, I’d say. I’m going out there
. Saturday. I am.” Ruined a dinner.

  We’d driven in separate cars. We stood in front of mine, both of us rigid enough to know the night was over.

  He said, “What are we going to do, Smokey?”

  “What do you think we should do, Joe?”

  As if I’d provided an answer instead of a question, and nodding slowly, he said, “Turn down the heat for a while.”

  “You know best,” I said, worker to boss, student to teacher, but it probably didn’t sound that way, and it sure didn’t feel that way: I was writing this scene; I knew we needed to back off awhile. Coming closer, I kissed him once again, this time tenderly, sadly, saying, “I’m sorry.”

  He answered, “Me too.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  Sunday and no Patricia.

  Two days before Christmas I shop, bring home presents. One was a telephone shaped like a black Mustang for pal Raymond. I took it out of The Sharper Image bag and put it on the coffee table. Zoom. Zoom. The thing had wheels. I raised the antenna.

  The rest—a fancy pin for Patricia and junk I know my parents don’t need—stayed in the one big department-store bag. I’d already forgotten what I bought my dad, and my head hurt. Nothing, of course, for Joe.

  On the way home from shopping, I’d stopped at a fast-food place for a chicken sandwich. I knew what I was going to wear to work the next day, the house was clean, so what would I do all night? I didn’t feel like hearing a red-faced army general talk about new developments in tank warfare on 60 Minutes, or how yet another talented and underpaid teacher was handling problems at inner-city schools. So I took an early shower, crawled into the long ruby-colored cotton T-shirt I like best to sleep in, and combed back my wet hair. It had been two months since my haircut, and I was looking not quite so scalped; maybe not quite so Sheena Easton either, if I could even dream, but if I were a tad or two prettier, maybe I could be a Theresa Russell with a murderin’ little black-leather skirt. Rebecca De Mornay—now there’s somebody. Her dirty broken fingernails in that film on the train with Jon Voight . . . the girl’s got guts. I could still picture her in Risky Business, her sleekness spinning Tom Cruise’s wheels, the boy in the priceless BVDs and white socks now all grown up and just as stupid. Long ago, though, I figured out it’s best to be average. Keep a low profile, then surprise people on special occasions puttin’ on the ritz. I used to be pretty, wasn’t I? It’s hard to tell anymore what’s pretty. Or what matters. Because once dead, none of it, none of it, does, and you think, Why in the world does anyone care what anyone looks like, anyway?