I backed away from the truck and scouted the shoulder of the highway toward the state beach, looking for bloody footprints, cigarette butts with Lupe’s brand stamped near the filter, or bread crumbs leading into the brush; I found more fast-food wrappers, plastic bags, and a condom. Based on the evidence, Lupe could have walked either up the highway or down it, crossed to the other side, or become the latest victim of an alien abduction. I skirted the truck and returned to Yolanda’s and Maria’s anxious expressions. They sat together in the front seat, Yolanda’s worrying her rosary beads and Maria’s fingers interlaced so tightly on her lap the tips had whitened to the color of bone. Even the Rott seemed disturbed, whining and panting on the rear passenger floor.
“Nothing,” I said. “He probably parked and walked down to the beach.”
I pulled onto the highway, wheels hewing close to the shoulder, and watched the side of the road, driving as slowly as I dared. “Lupe mentioned money to me, too, when I went to visit him,” I said. “He was angry, said he was going to make big money, prove to you he wasn’t a bum.”
Maria’s hands flew apart as though uncaged, her simple gold marriage band glinting when struck by the late-afternoon sunlight. “We give him food, we pay his rent, what more could we do?” Her hands fluttered above the dash, clashed, and settled again on her lap, tightly clenched.
“Lupe’s a grown man. He makes his own decisions,” I said. “You can’t stop people from hurting themselves, if that’s what they’re determined to do.”
Fewer than a half dozen cars parked in the dirt lot above El Matador State Beach, about average for a weekday afternoon in autumn. I angled the Cadillac into a corner spot and walked to the vending machine planted at the trailhead. The machine spat out a parking voucher good for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe that was the reason Lupe had parked on Pacific Coast Highway; he hadn’t wanted to spend the money for parking.
“One thing we don’t understand,” Maria said.
I slipped the ticket underneath the windshield wiper and gave the Rott an apologetic pat before locking him in the car. Further down the trailhead a graffiti-scrawled state-park sign read “No Dogs.”
Maria glanced at her sister, who nodded.
“El secreto de los árboles,” Yolanda said, repeating what El Cangurito had told us in Lupe’s room. The secret of the trees.
“The cypress trees at the back of the estate were dying,” I said. “Lupe told me he found quicklime in the soil.”
“¡Madre de Dios!” Yolanda crossed herself. “Quicklime is for the dead.”
“What could he have seen that you didn’t?”
Yolanda looked at Maria, whose gaze dropped to the ground.
“There is something,” Yolanda said.
Maria nodded, once. “Sometimes, when the weather was warm …”
“Or when he drank too much …”
“He slept in his truck.”
“The señora didn’t notice.”
“He parked his truck around the side of the garage,” Maria said. “Where no one could see him.”
I asked, “He’d stay the night at the estate, asleep in his truck?”
The sisters nodded.
“You think he saw something one night? Something that might be worth money if he threatened to expose it?”
The sisters glanced at each other, reading each other’s thoughts as though a lifted eyebrow here and a tightening of the lip there conveyed the meaning of sentences. Yolanda looked at me. Her shoulders lifted and dropped.
“We don’t know for sure,” Maria said. “But we think, yes.”
Beyond the headlands of Malibu’s Point Dume, the coast angles north to confront the relentless energy of the Pacific. The beaches have a fierce, carved look to them, the sandstone bluffs spilling into the ocean in great clumps of rock beaten by the waves and polished by the wind. A person lying on the flat, featureless beaches of Santa Monica Bay is visible for miles; El Matador State Beach is a warren of coves, rocks, and isolated stretches of beach accessible only during low tide. The Potrero sisters searched to the south, I hunted to the north, and even then, broken into teams, we didn’t cover the territory until sunset, when I returned to the meeting point to find Yolanda sitting in the sand, weeping, and Maria standing above her, staring out to sea.
“I don’t hear his voice anymore,” Yolanda said. “He’s gone.”
“He could be anywhere,” I said. “Maybe his truck broke down. Maybe he didn’t have bus fare. Maybe he met somebody. Maybe he got drunk and needs a day to sleep it off. The point is, we don’t know what happened, and when he turns up at his room tonight, you’ll feel pretty foolish at having suffered so much for no reason.”
“When our husbands were killed, all we could do was wait,” Maria said. “We couldn’t go to the police, because the police were friends of the ones who took our husbands. We don’t want to wait anymore. Nothing is worse than waiting.”
“You want to go to the police?” I asked.
She nodded; once and slowly.
“We’ll go to my apartment, then, make some calls.” I led them up the bluff to the trailhead. It’s not easy going to the police in a county as big as Los Angeles, not when you want to report a person missing less than forty-eight hours. Unless the person is a child or evidence points to a forced abduction, the law will tell you to take a number and wait. Hundreds of people go missing every day, from runaway teenagers to senior citizens who decide from one day to the next to walk out of their lives and aren’t heard from until a week later, a thin voice calling from Florida, New York, Las Vegas, wherever. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all missing persons turn up alive somewhere, sometime, and the law can’t be expected to roll out the squad cars every time someone gets too drunk to make it home or decides home isn’t home anymore. Still, a person can call the county and ask if a name has been booked into the Twin Towers or the morgue, and I was planning the calls I’d make when I saw the park ranger scuttling from windshield to windshield in the parking lot, checking for expired parking vouchers. I hailed him with a raised arm and a shout. He waited for me to approach, pen on his ticket pad. He thought I’d come to beg him not to ticket my car, and from his expression, he wasn’t going to listen.
“We’re looking for somebody, left his car parked on the road a half mile back,” I said, waving toward the highway. “He’s been missing since last night, a gardener, Hispanic, about forty years old, likes to drink every now and then. You seen him?”
The information sparked his eyes.
“Hispanic, you say?”
“About forty.” I pointed at my lip. “Wears a moustache.”
The park ranger nodded. “I didn’t see him here, no.”
I thought that might be the end of it, but he looked over my shoulder at the Potrero sisters, who waited respectfully at a distance, and then back at me, as though he might have something else to say. “Are you relatives?”
“Two of us are,” I said.
He swallowed. “I don’t want to alarm you, but they pulled someone from the water ten miles up the coast this morning who fits that description. Didn’t have any identification, so they tagged him Juan Doe.”
Since I’d first visited Ben’s trailer a backhoe had joined the bulldozer in cutting the new lot from the adjacent hillside, and by the look of the trench dug into the ground, preparations were being made to lay the water and gas pipes. The Rott jumped from the open ragtop the moment we stopped, put his nose to the backhoe’s steel tread, and then changed ends to mark it as his territory. I keyed the trunk, pulled out a sack of groceries, locked my camera bag with the spare tire. The Rott charged toward Ben’s gate and pranced as though expecting something or someone on the other side.
“You think Arlanda’s here, don’t you?”
He responded to her name by wagging his truncated tail so hard he turned two circles trying to catch up to it. I opened the gate. He nosed through ahead of me. I liked Arlanda too, and I knew it was petty to be jealous of my do
g’s obvious affection for her, but that didn’t stop me from feeling jealous anyway. The front-porch door swung open and Ben peered into the dark.
“Took your time getting here,” he said.
He’d called four hours before, impatient to show me something.
“Long drive from the morgue,” I said.
“What were you doing there?”
Ben stooped to thump the Rott’s flank and stepped aside to let him in the trailer. The dog checked one room and the next, then doubled back to the first one again.
I’said, “We better feed him something or he won’t get over his disappointment at not seeing Arlanda here.” I pulled the package of hamburger from the grocery bag and broke the plastic skin. The Rott laid his head against my side and sniffed. “You my best friend now? That the way it works?”
“A dog’s loyalty is as deep as his stomach,” Ben said.
“They say that about men, too, don’t they?”
“Sometimes.”
Ben stooped to pick a bottle of beer from the refrigerator.
“Were you on assignment?”
“When?”
“The morgue.”
I mixed a couple of eggs and some bread into the meat and set it down on the floor. The Rott promptly forgot about me and dug his nose into the bowl. The morgue is a dreadful place, even if you aren’t required to identify a body, even if you do nothing more than wait in the lobby, imagining the smell of formaldehyde leaking from beneath the door that leads to the meat, even if those you’ve accompanied do the dirty work of confirming that the cold husk slabbed out on a steel plate is someone they once loved. I told Ben about it.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Can’t say I knew him, but the three of them were nice enough to me at Angela’s funeral. Will you give my condolences to the sisters next time you see them?”
I said I would.
“Any determination of cause of death?”
“Too early,” I said. “He checked in as Juan Doe.”
“No rush on the autopsy, then.”
“They’ll get to it faster now they know who he is, particularly considering he was murdered.”
“How do you know he was murdered?”
“The body had no teeth.”
“No teeth?” Ben twisted the top from the bottle of beer and dropped it into the trash beneath the sink. “Was the man in possession of his natural teeth? Did he wear dentures?”
“He didn’t have all his teeth, no, but he didn’t wear dentures.”
“You mean somebody knocked all his teeth out?”
“Or pulled them.”
Maria Potrero had mourned too many people to seek pity or even solace, but the sight of Lupe, face sunken like an old man’s, had shaken even her to tears.
Ben said, “Maybe he was supposed to drift a little more than he did. Enough time in the water, not even his sisters-in-law would have recognized him.”
“No teeth,” I said, “no way to identify the corpse.”
“C’mon. I want to show you something.”
The something Ben wanted to show me lay inside a three-ring binder set on the coffee table. He gestured at the couch and took the end chair for himself.
“I want you to relax a moment. Clear your mind. Forget the morgue, forget the stress of the road, forget the dog, just relax.”
“You going to hypnotize me or something?”
“Forget the wise-ass jokes, too. Can I get you something to drink?”
I asked for a Coke and while he went to get it I craned low to look at the edges of the binder. Paper of some kind, probably photocopies.
When he came back with the Coke he said, “I’m going to show you some pictures. We’re going to take our time with them, but no more than ten seconds on each to start. I don’t want you to fall in love with any particular one, understand?”
“It’s a mug book,” I said.
“Homemade. I’ve been collecting mug shots for a while now, known firebugs mixed in with just plain bad guys. And those sketches we had done, I’ve been faxing those around too, worked on little else since I got back from the funeral.”
He squared the book to my eyes and turned back the cover. The face that squinted from page 1 was pulled from the landscape of nightmare.
“Not only don’t I know him, I don’t want to know him.”
“No comments. Just observe.”
Ben’s voice was gentle, and he watched my expression while I viewed the paper lineup of faces. Though unkempt and weary, most of the men in the book looked surprisingly ordinary, as though photographed after a hard night of partying, and no more dangerous than any other man waylaid at four in the morning. Evil does not show clearly in most faces, and when it does, it’s nearly always an impoverished, low-forehead kind of evil; the clever ones learn how to look benign at an early age, no matter how deadly their thoughts. My guy was midway through the book, staring from a mug shot taken somewhere in Florida. I obeyed Ben’s instructions, said nothing, and watched carefully for the second one to flash by. He didn’t. Outside the trailer, a big engine fired and revved.
“Did you recognize anyone?”
“George Clooney, a little more than halfway in.”
Even retired, Ben took his work too seriously to smile.
“Mr. Clooney is not a suspect as far as I’m aware.”
“I recognized the man I saw at Angela Doubleday’s estate, the one with prematurely gray hair.”
“Could you go through the book, page by page, and show him to me? Again, take your time.”
I didn’t need the caution, but still I directed my attention toward each face as I turned its page. I’d flipped through a quarter of the book when the earth rumbled and a jolt shook the trailer so hard I thought the big one was hitting. The Rott barked once, confused. I leaned back against the couch and held on. Ben shot to his feet, shouting. As loudly as Ben yelled I barely heard him, the outrage in his voice overwhelmed by the grinding roar of what I thought to be the earth. The trailer lurched backward in a shriek of cracking pipes and shredding aluminum. The kitchen-cabinet doors bolted open, the Rott yelping amid plates and glasses shattering to the floor. Cables snapped and the lights crashed out. Beyond the sliding-glass door the hill sloped ominously down to the Pacific Coast Highway. The walls shuddered and the tin foundations crumbled, pitching the trailer toward the lip of the hill. Since childhood I’d been told never to run outside during an earthquake, instead to seek shelter in doorframes, but the roar accelerated in pitch to an anxious mechanical whine, like the complaint of overcranked pistons, and when I stood to surf the floor I glimpsed out the street-side window the bright yellow of a bulldozer.
I shouted to get out as the trailer slid from under my feet. While falling I stretched to slap the Rott on his flank. The dog yelped in surprise and shot out the front-porch door. The trailer canted sharply toward the sea and planed over the lip of the hill. Everything not bolted down—from pots and pans to chairs and tables—flew toward the low end. I went fetal, shielding my head with my arms. A stool knocked Ben to his knees, and the collapsing bookcase laid him flat. I braced my feet to stand and failed. Beyond the front door the hillside careened past, chaparral raking the trailer but not impeding its velocity. The walls shook so violently I feared the frame would burst and strew us, dead and doll-like, among the wreckage.
I shouted at Ben, kicked his arm. He didn’t move. I twisted to latch on to the back collar of his shirt and pulled, but he was too heavy so I wrapped my arms beneath his shoulders. My heels dug into the carpet and I thrust backward, hugging him to my chest. The trailer’s leading edge bumped something that felt like a boulder and the sickening lurch in my stomach informed me the trailer was whirling around. I dug in my heels and pushed again. The walls split with a deafening crack and the trailer rolled. I kicked out a final time and for a moment touched nothing but air. Ben came loose from my arms and I was soaring, the trailer spinning from my feet. The roll broke its back. Glass, wood, and metal spray
ed the hillside. The earth crashed onto my shoulders and I broke too, all breath and fear speeding away on impact.
Consciousness and awareness are not the same thing and though I retained the former the landing was a hard one and stunned all thoughts of time and self. I didn’t feel pain. I didn’t think I’d been gravely hurt. I didn’t think or feel at all. A worried shadow hovered over me and something wet flicked my face. I didn’t think about that either, merely noticed it, as one might an image on a muted television set in the far corner of the room. The shadow seemed anxious, and the flicking wet covered my mouth and nose. I couldn’t breathe, hadn’t breathed since impact. I gasped and awareness returned with the air. I must have moaned because the shadow backed off and barked. After a moment, I sat up.
The trailer lay scattered down the hillside, parts strewn like the wreckage of an airplane. The Rott barked again and advanced to lick my face. I held on to his neck and breathed. It hurt my bones to shout Ben’s name, and when I didn’t hear him respond it hurt again, and deeper. “Find Ben,” I told the Rott. He backed away and whined, confused. “Where’s Ben? Find Ben.” I waved him down the hill and he put his nose to the ground, understanding what I’d asked him to do.
The hillside skidded beneath my boots, the desert earth hard beneath a slick layer of sand. I searched for a foothold of chaparral to help me stand. The pocket of my leather jacket vibrated. A good leather jacket won’t make you immortal, but as every motorcyclist knows it helps to have one on when sliding along the asphalt after laying down a bike, and it had saved me from more serious injury on landing. My pocket moved again, as though it held something alive. My mobile phone. I’d set it to vibrate. I looked at the number lighting up the display. I didn’t know the caller.
I said, “Hello?” like not even I knew if I was in or not.
Burning Garbo Page 17
