Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  The connection severed after a one-word reply, and that word was not polite. The voice had been male, and angry. I stored the call in memory. Funny time to get a wrong number.

  The Rott barked a dozen yards down the hill, and from the anxious edge to the bark I knew he’d found something. The night was lit by the glimmer of a low moon, just bright enough to see a man’s shape crumpled in the shadow beneath the dog’s chest. A dim circle of light skittered, birdlike, along the scrub brush beside the dog. A voice called out for survivors. I traced the circle of light to a flashlight near the crest of the hill.

  I stood and waved.

  The medevac arrived like an angel in blinding light and fierce winds. Ben was unconscious when the Rott found him, his left arm splayed at an unnatural angle. I felt lucky that the landing had done little more than knock the wits from me, but other reasons than luck figured into the difference between our injuries. I was young and flexible. Ben was thirty-some years older and sixty pounds heavier. He hit the hill with considerably more force than I. His bones, brittled by age, had snapped on impact. The paramedics who prepared him for the flight had wrapped an inflatable cervical collar around his neck before sliding the stretcher under his body. In the portable work light they’d brought down the hill I could see the jagged edge of bone sticking from the bloody sleeve of his upper arm.

  I cowered beneath the blades, eyes squinted against the wind and dust, and watched the paramedics secure the cables to the stretcher. The hoist cranked Ben’s body off the ground, and the cockpit glowed in the reflected arc lights as the copter hovered, waiting for the stretcher to clear. Then it banked gently and soared to sea, where it banked again on a course that would take it to the roof of Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The injured man was a cop, I’d told the paramedics. I have no doubt they do their best for everyone, but the best they can do for an injured cop is considerably better than the best they can do for most anyone else.

  “Never seen anything like it in my life,” one of the paramedics said, surveying the ruins of the trailer below. His hair was red as blood and danced in the wind. I’ll say one thing, if you were in that thing when it went down, you’re both lucky to be alive.”

  “If we stayed inside the trailer, we wouldn’t be.”

  He pointed at my jacket. His large and freckled hand circled the air. “Guess I’d better give you a quick look before we go up. Hurt anywhere particular?” He smiled. “Or just all over?”

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “Won’t hurt to take a look.”

  I stood there, watching him, thinking, I could go for a guy like this, somebody who likes patching people up more than taking them apart.

  “You want to remove your jacket?”

  I shrugged the leather from my shoulders. My skin cracked, the shirt wet on my back. I glanced over my shoulder. His eyes were cat green. Freckles swarmed across his cheeks, too, like a constellation of stars. A look came into his eyes, of seeing something that shouldn’t be. He circled to my downhill side, asked me to put first one hand out, then the other, gently feeling the bones for breaks and asking if I felt any pain.

  “Why don’t you come in the wagon with us?” He said. “How are your legs? Think you can walk up the hill?”

  I rolled my shoulders and hurt down to my tailbone. But everything moved, more or less in the same order it always had. “I think I broke some scabs,” I said. “I slid down a mountainside last week. Am I bleeding bad?”

  “You’re bleeding. You’ll need to have the wounds cleaned and bandaged. A full exam wouldn’t hurt either.”

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t have health insurance and my bank account is a little low this month. Can you examine me here?”

  I liked the look in his eyes. He didn’t feel sorry for me because I was poor. He wanted to solve the problem. “Let’s do it this way,” he said. “We’ll do a quick prelim in the back of the van, and unless I find something serious you won’t have to go anywhere but home. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I said. “As long as we define serious the same way.”

  “How do you define it?”

  “I don’t have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the night.”

  “Pretty tough, aren’t you?” He smiled when he said it, as though he liked that.

  “Not tough, just broke,” I said.

  I didn’t feel so tough after a couple of steps up the hill. My body has always been slow to respond to pain. My father trained me well in that respect. If I cried or flinched when he hit me, he hit me again, and harder. I learned to isolate pain. If my ankle hurt, the pain stayed in my ankle and didn’t show in my face or voice. This pain was a little harder to isolate because it affected just about every bone, joint, and muscle in my body. Halfway up the hill the paramedic extended his arm. I took it.

  Emergency lights strobed ambulance blue and police cruiser red at the top of the hill. A few trailer park residents huddled behind the flashing lights, but the helicopter had been the high point of the show, and now that it had flown away, most of the spectators were wandering away as well. The paramedic guided me into the back of the van and shut the door. He asked, “Are you the modest type?”

  “As modest as I need to be,” I said and bit my teeth against the pain while I peeled the shirt to expose my back.

  He positioned me to take advantage of the light. “Looks clean enough. I’m going to abrade, disinfect, and bandage in that order.” He dipped into his med kit for a squeeze bottle. Liquid stung the stretched skin between my shoulders and trickled down my back. He asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Nina. What’s yours?”

  “Michael.”

  “Like the angel.”

  “That’s not what my ex-wife says.”

  “You look like an angel to me.”

  He sprayed the wounds with disinfectant and they stung so much I almost swore. Almost.

  “You hurt like the devil, though,” I said.

  “Two sides to every person, isn’t there?”

  He pulled a roll of gauze from his med kit and played it out across my upper back, his hands gentle but firm. “You’re a gutsy lady. Maybe too gutsy for your own good. I’m gonna give you my phone number, okay? You should be fine, but if you feel any pain, more or different than you feel now, call me.”

  Pain covered a lot more territory than just nerve endings. His job was to patch broken bodies, but lives often break before bodies and he’d seen his share of that kind of pain, too. In his line of work, he had to. As I pulled down my shirt it occurred to me he might be flirting.

  “How about if I’m just lonely?” I asked.

  He laughed, said, “Even better.”

  The busiest hours in an emergency room begin with rush hour and end after the bars close. These are the peak times of sickness and accident, when those who have suffered feverishly through the workday seek medical respite, when cars crash into things, when people bicker and fight, and above all it’s the time when people fall off ladders, scald themselves with boiling water, stick their fingers in light sockets, and fall victim to multiple other domestic mishaps. Most accidents occur in the home, they say, though I don’t believe having your home pushed off a cliff by a bulldozer figures high in the statistics.

  I waited until Ben made it out of surgery before I called Arlanda. He’d broken two ribs, his collarbone, and humerus, the long bone in the upper arm. He hadn’t yet regained consciousness. Most comas don’t last more than twenty-four hours, the doctor said, two or three days at the most. I didn’t tell her that as a precaution he was breathing by respirator.

  “What’s his condition?”

  “Critical but stable. He’s resting peacefully right now. He might awaken during the night, but the doc said we shouldn’t expect any change until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

  “How about you?”

  “Fine.”

  “And Baby?”

  “Not a scratch.”

  The operator asked for mor
e money. I fed another ten quarters into the slot and told her about what happened to Lupe. She asked how Maria and Yolanda were taking his death.

  “With courage,” I said.

  “Do you think I should fly out?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what to tell her. Whether she flew out or not was her business; not mine.

  “Did you check out the gallery, the one I asked you to?”

  “Harry Winston isn’t an art gallery,” I said. “They sell some of the most expensive jewelry in the world. Your aunt bought up to two million dollars of their merchandise over the past five years.”

  “Two million?” Her voice thinned and on the second syllable of the sum it nearly cracked in half. “She didn’t declare any of it to the insurance company, just two pieces she’d bought years ago.”

  “Your aunt barely insured the house, so why should she insure her jewelry?”

  “I’ll put the kids with the neighbors again, try to catch a flight tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You need me to pick you up?”

  “The accountant released some funds from the estate. You know, to take care of expenses. I’ll use that to rent a car. When I get to the hospital, I’ll give you a call.”

  We both hung up, and as I walked to the hospital parking lot I badly wanted to believe that she was flying out to take care of Ben but suspected her aunt’s diamonds provided the greater motivation. Just as Ben didn’t believe that someone had chased me to Arizona with the intent of assaulting me in a hotel room, I thought it improbable that someone had followed Ben from Douglas to push his trailer off a cliff. The attack had been launched in darkness, but I hoped with some reason that a neighbor had witnessed who operated the controls of the bulldozer. I hoped again that the description would match one of the two men I’d seen at Angela Doubleday’s estate the day it burned. Hope may spring eternal, but the higher it springs, the harder it falls. Eyewitness accounts are rarely detailed enough to identify a suspect. I’d done some things myself that people should have seen and didn’t. Even the most specific forms of evidence—fingerprints and DNA—require a suspect to match against, and the only suspect I’d been able to identify went down with the mug book in Ben’s trailer. But I knew a mug shot existed, and I also knew a tabloid journalist who might be able to reconstruct how Ben had found it.

  Frank answered the door to his apartment tented in a red and black Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirt worn extralarge over baggy jeans. I carried a sack of takeout coffee in one hand and my duffel bag in the other. He didn’t step aside to let me in. He asked, “You get any photographs when the trailer went down the hill?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

  He grinned. It was a joke.

  Then he saw the dog.

  “Can’t he stay in the car?”

  The request so deflated me I couldn’t even come up with a smart reply. I turned back down the steps, didn’t stop until he called my name.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You look like shit. I shouldn’t be giving you a hard time.” He swung the door open and ushered both of us in. “But if we order pizza, he takes his share out of your end, understood?”

  I tried to be amused. He meant well, in his own cynical, smart-ass way, but nobody likes to hear they look terrible, not when they feel worse than they look. “I could use some bathroom time and a washing machine. And maybe something to wear while my clothes dry.” I looked at the size of his jeans. I could have fit my entire body into one of the legs. “A fresh shirt, anyway.”

  “Sure, but maybe you want to sit down a minute, tell me a little more about what happened.”

  While I briefed Frank at the kitchen table, the Rott checked out the furniture, intent on mapping the terrain and cataloging the smells. Frank’s attention strayed, as though he feared the dog would either eat the sofa or lift his leg to it. The Rott found momentary distraction in a pair of dirty socks left beneath the coffee table, but the apartment had never seen another dog or cat, and he soon lost interest, settling at my feet. Frank relaxed. “Tell me about the mug shot,” he said.

  “It was the guy in the house, I’m sure of it. Early thirties, prematurely gray hair.”

  “What else? What did the tag say?”

  “The tag?”

  “City, date, arrest number?” He looked at me like I was an idiot. “The stuff tagged to the bottom of the mug shot.”

  I tried to remember, couldn’t. “Florida. Any more than that, I’d be inventing.”

  “Go take your bath,” he said. “Maybe that’s all I’ll need.”

  Baby followed me into the bathroom. He dipped his nose into the toilet and backed away, drinking instead from the spigot while the bath filled. Frank wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and I couldn’t blame the Rott for seeking a fresher source of water. I filled the tub to six inches and sponged carefully around the bandages. Fear leaves an acrid scent on the body, and I washed it gladly from my skin. Frank tossed an extralarge Chicago Bulls T-shirt through a crack in the door, asked if the clothes I needed washed were in the duffel. I pulled the shirt over my head. It fit me like a granny dress.

  “Nothing sexier than a girl in a Bulls T-shirt,” Frank said when I walked from the bathroom. “Except maybe a girl in a Cubs uniform. I’ve got one in the closet, if you’d feel more comfortable.”

  I peeled back the lip of a cup of takeout coffee and blew the liquid cool enough to drink. In my youth, a calendar of women half dressed in men’s sporting apparel hung from a wall in ray dad’s garage, the same calendar, year after year. The photographs confused me, as photographs of naked women confuse most children, and I wondered then why the models dressed like men yet looked so much like women. My dad always preferred the company of men to women. Maybe the calendar allowed him to pretend women were men, without doubting his heterosexuality. My own style of dress was distinctly masculine. The thought that my sexuality was linked to my dad was not one I wished to consider, not then and maybe not ever. I asked, “Why do you live in L.A. if you think Chicago is so great?”

  “What would I write about in Chicago? How wonderful the people are? How deep and profound the culture? I’m an anarchist, a bomb thrower by nature. I love Chicago. No way I can write about it.”

  “And L.A.?”

  “It’s much more interesting to write about something you despise and love in equal measure. Take celebrities, for example. There probably isn’t a single one I wouldn’t want to fuck or befriend, given the chance. But I’m not given the chance and never will. They’re the golden gods and goddesses of show biz, and I’m a creep. They could care less about me and I hate them for it, in the same way I hated the most popular kids in junior high school, the ones who passed through adolescence without a blemish or doubt about their superiority.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it pretty well worked out. How many years you been in therapy?”

  Frank held up his ballpoint pen like a middle finger. “See this? It’s all the therapy I’ve ever needed.” He turned his PowerBook so I could see the screen. “Is this the guy?”

  The screen displayed the Web page of the West Palm Beach Police Department. “Wanted by WPBPD,” it read. The man I’d seen at Angela Doubleday’s estate on the day of the fire was pictured in the upper right half of the screen. Even reduced to a photo on a police website he was a handsome man. Biographical data ran in a column to the left of the photograph. His name was Ray Belgard. He was born on September 22, 1967. He was a Caucasian male six feet in height and weighing 180 pounds, possessing gray hair and brown eyes, a medium build, and no known tattoos or scars. The state of Florida wanted him for fraud and abduction.

  “Same guy Ben showed me, the one I saw at Doubleday’s.” I ran my finger below his photograph. “No tag, as you call it. This looks like one of the pictures they take for your driver’s license.”

  “Probably is. He’s never been arrested.”

  Frank swung the PowerBook around again and stroked the keys. I pulled my chair behind his and held the coff
ee under my nose like smelling salts. I knew he was on the Internet but that was about it.

  “You’ve heard of LexisNexis?” he asked.

  “It’s a brand of car, right?”

  His fingers paused above the keyboard, a gesture meant to convey incredulousness, and his glance slunk sideways to judge whether or not I was teasing. I wasn’t.

  “It’s an on-line information archive. Most major newspapers and magazines feed into its database.”

  “Including Scandal Times?”

  “I never claimed it was encyclopedic. But if you’re not looking for information about two-headed babies, it’s a good place to start. I should alert you that I’m cheating a bit here; I looked up Ray Belgard while you were in the bath.”

  Pages flashed across the screen like a slow-moving slide show and stilled on a headline, “Wine-Cooler Heiress Missing,” from The Palm Beach Post. The story was common enough. A woman had gone for a stroll on the beach one sunset and never returned. The doorman of her apartment building had seen her leave. Sunset walks were part of her routine. His shift changed an hour later, so he wasn’t around to notice that she never returned. Her bridge club reported her missing two days later. Ray Belgard’s name wasn’t mentioned until the next to the last paragraph. The police thought he might have information about her last known whereabouts.

  Frank hit a couple of keys. The screen flashed and morphed to a piece of investigative journalism entitled “The Gigolo and the Heiress: Strange Bedfellows End in Tragedy.” Frank read the opening in a terse baritone: “‘You see them all over Palm Beach during the high season, handsome young men with no visible means of support other than brand-name clothing and a ready smile …’ Hey, that’s not bad, maybe I can get her to write for us.”

  “I don’t know, Frank, more competition for the Pulitzer.”

  “You noticed the heiress was forty-eight years old?”

  “So what?”

  “Almost twenty years older than Belgard.”

  “You think there’s something wrong with a woman using her wealth and prestige to hook a younger man?”