Good Morning, Killer

by April Smith

  “I just spoke to him, two minutes ago.” Panicked. “Is it about Andrew?”

  She sat down close and put her arm around me.

  “Barry?” I whispered.

  “Since you asked about the weapon, I thought you’d want to know. Just got word. We think we found it.”

  “You found it? Where?”

  “In Andy’s car.”

  “In Andy’s car? How could that be?”

  “I don’t know, he sure as hell didn’t shoot himself, but it’s a thirty-two, same size as the slugs.”

  “Well, that’s good news.” I turned to Barbara with a madcap grin. “They recovered the gun!”

  Sixteen.

  The automatic doors swung open, I walked into the deserted lobby, and my knees went out like rubber bands. Eight-fifteen at night is not the time to be visiting a hospital. Not when the rest of the world is washing its dishes and doing homework, families coming together after the day. Night shift in a hospital is the time for separation and good-byes, for facing the hours of darkness, in whatever bed, alone.

  Bad things happen in a hospital at night. Knife wounds, sick patients taking turns for the worse, walleyed weirdos on the graveyard shift of the nursing staff. What you did not care to know during the day, you definitely do not want to know now, lost in a maze of empty corridors smelling of institutional mashed potatoes and gravy, buildings and parking structures cloaked in shadow; no escape. To run out of here screaming would put you right into the arms of the dark.

  Eight-twenty-three p.m. Visiting time at the ICU would be over in seven minutes. I picked up the pace, although I did not want to see him. I did, and I didn’t. I had come late hoping at least the family members would be gone.

  Two Santa Monica uniforms, obese Detective Jaeger from the Boatyard bar and a couple of other brown-suited old-timers, were standing around the nursing station with their hands in their pockets, chewing the fat in low, irreverent tones:

  “—Because he was stupid enough to get into a hot tub and make sexual remarks to subordinates.”

  “The picture will come clear.”

  “No it won’t. Not with this guy. He’s the fair-haired prince.”

  “Princes don’t pick up their own droppings.”

  We eyed each other until slowly my identity came into focus somewhere in Jaeger’s dog skull. An upward nod of the jowls signaled it was okay to approach the group.

  “Has Andrew said anything more about the assailants?”

  Jaeger shrugged. “Couple of guys in a parking lot.”

  “He’s in a coma,” one of them said.

  “I know.”

  There was a moment of shared heartache.

  “What do the docs say?”

  “Not much.”

  “They haven’t ruled out brain damage. He was without oxygen for some time.”

  “Hopefully,” said another, “he hasn’t lost too many IQ points.”

  I hesitated, looking at the door. You couldn’t see much through the glass.

  “Go on in. They know when you’re there.”

  I nodded but did not move.

  Jaeger made eye contact and said purposely, “We appreciate you coming, Agent Grey.”

  A nurse gave me a gown, and I pushed into a bright room of half humans, half machines. It was not a bad thing to have been seen here tonight by four cops, said my shadow self.

  There was a curtain surrounding the bed. I parted it and looked.

  He was terribly bruised, as if he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I hadn’t been prepared for that, picturing him somehow white and still as marble. But he was bruised where they had shoved an eighteen-gauge needle into his arm, where they’d pounded his chest, in the areas around the wounds, where he’d hit the floor when he fainted. Plastic tubing formed aerobatic curves above the sheet, rising from arterial lines, draining the bladder and the chest; you could see the expelled blood as it bubbled in an enclosed container.

  His eyes were covered with gauze and his skin looked pasty. I touched his fingers, puffy and loosely curled. They were neither hot nor cold. The monitors that stood guard over his vital processes clicked along. Three balloons were tied to the end of the bed.

  The sorrow that I felt was ferocious. It fueled the searing pain in my own abdomen. Bending over him, half in spasm, I whispered, “Oh, baby, what did we do to each other?”

  I wanted to lie down beside him, kiss him, but there was no place to lie down or kiss. A respirator tube was taped over his mouth and the steel rail was up on the side of the bed.

  The curtain opened. It was Margaret Forrester, dressed in black.

  “He’s not going to make it,” she said.

  A chill passed through me, one of those supernatural moments where you shudder at something you can’t explain.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I could ask the same question.”

  “Obviously because he’s one of our own.”

  “In that case, I came on behalf of the Bureau,” I replied evenly. “To show our concern.”

  At least we were not going to reenact the scuffle in the parking lot over the man’s hospital bed. Still, I did not like her deep eyes on me. She was clutching a circle of twigs with rawhide strings and feathers hanging down.

  “What do you have there?” I had noticed things went better when they had to do with her.

  “A Native American dream catcher.” Her chest heaved in two big gulps. “So he doesn’t have … bad dreams.”

  “He doesn’t know a thing,” I said darkly.

  “NO!” she barked, so loudly that I flinched. Then, “Don’t you leave me!” shaking a finger at Andrew. She could cycle up and down faster than a slide whistle. Now she hung the dream catcher on a cardiac monitor, where it would no doubt be removed.

  “That looks really nice there, Margaret.”

  She squinted at her reflection in a metal band around the machine.

  “Look at me,” grabbing her hair and parting it to the roots. “I’m getting old. Did you know Andrew and my husband were best friends? They were in a Friday night poker game together.”

  “I heard.”

  “Wes and I went to Victoria Island up in Vancouver together on our honeymoon and stayed in the most elegant hotel. We had afternoon tea, and went out on those pedal boats? Wes wore somebody’s white suit. Not that I thought life would always be like that … But I’ve got two young children.” She shrugged as if having two young children were suddenly a big surprise. “Wes should be standing here beside me, right now, today,” pounding the bed rail. “Today. Instead of me being a widow.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  She was shaking the tubing, the bed.

  The curtains swept open all the way and a male nurse came barging through. He was a big soft gay fellow wearing maroon scrubs, a long ponytail and three or four silver bracelets, looking somehow miscast, and peckish about having to play the role.

  “Visiting hours in the ICU are now over. You’re not supposed to be in here, not with two people and not without a gown.”

  Squirt bottle at the ready, he was about to do something to Andrew’s eyes.

  “What’s that?” murmured Margaret.

  “What’s that?” echoed the nurse, with a disdainful glance at the dream catcher.

  He lifted the gauze, revealing dark purple bruises on Andrew’s lids.

  “Don’t touch him!” Margaret shrieked.

  “Drops,” said the nurse, showing her the bottle. “To keep his eyes from drying out?”

  “Don’t hurt him!”

  “I think we should go,” I said.

  “Are you a relative?” he asked Margaret, over his shoulder, but she had retreated through the curtains to a chair and was drawing up her knees.

  The nurse slapped the bottle down on a tray and went out of the cubicle and grabbed her wrist.

  “No, dear, we are not getting comfortable, we are leaving.”

  “Help him!” moaned Margaret, rocking ba
ck and forth.

  “I don’t have to deal with this,” he sighed.

  “Hang on,” I said and hustled outside, where Jaeger and one of the other detectives were still standing around, having snitched free coffee from the nurses’ lounge.

  “We’ve got a situation.”

  They looked up with alarm.

  “Margaret Forrester,” I told them. “Flipping out.”

  They caught the scene through the window: Margaret huddled on the chair. The nurse on the phone to security.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Jaeger said, ditching the cup. “Thanks.”

  As they headed into the ICU, I fled, through the warren of hallways and down three flights of stairs. I was impressed by their patience—how they had shouldered the thing without question, the way you would an offbeat family member with recurring difficulties, the causes of which you had long stopped trying to guess.

  It was the third day, unbearable in its mind-numbing similarity to the last two. I had barely slept, worried about the gun. How would it fit into the robbery scenario? Where did my grandfather get it? Who’d he steal it from? Was it traceable? What about fingerprints?

  Nothing happened. No second shoe dropped. Andrew’s condition remained unchanged. I was back in my pod looking a shade paler and more withdrawn, less able to imagine a successful resolution: I would get off but he would be a vegetable. He would be a vegetable and I would be convicted. He would recover but remain an invalid. He would recover and point the finger.

  Jason, however, was all keyed up.

  “Look at this! Look at this!” he kept saying, shaking a piece of paper in my face.

  “I can’t see if it’s up my nose,” I snapped.

  Jason had done his homework and discovered that Carl Vincent, the unemployed lab technician accused by the teenager, Roxy Santos, of beating her mom, owned a green 1989 Dodge van. The van was registered to the same Mar Vista address. Whether Carl Vincent could be Ray Brennan was an urgent question; even more pressing was the escalating anxiety to get out of the office.

  I told Jason, “You passed,” and we left without telling Rick or giving a heads-up to Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch’s office, as Mike Donnato had advised. I did not want obstacles.

  It was a quick drive to the Palms District, originally a grain-shipping center that had followed the Santa Monica railroad across flat agricultural fields. After World War II, those flatlands were developed into tracts of cheap single-family houses built for returning soldiers. Those were boom years, when the new lawns matched the crew cuts of the new dads who mowed them: young working-class vets could afford to raise a family, and every maple-lined avenue seemed to end at the utopian gates of MGM Studios.

  The Santos girl and her mother lived in what used to be one of those tracts. It was still working class, but most of the 1940s standard-issue single-family cottages had been torched to make way for sixties apartment buildings on aqua stilts with carports. A Montessori school caught my eye, an oasis surrounded by tall pines. Bright plastic tugboats and picnic tables were placed around the courtyard of a graceful old Mission-style lodge. Across from the school stood one of those forties-era specimen cottages with a spindly porch and metal awnings, trash on the lawn and pigeons on the roof. It looked abandoned, and I wondered why the corner property had not sold. Something was not right: the windows had been boarded up but there was a new green AstroTurf doormat. That’s why. A recluse probably lived there, lost in dreams of dancing in the Technicolor musicals that were made just forty years ago and blocks away.

  “What kind of soil do you think these houses were built on?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “You grew up on a farm.”

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  I laughed. Jason reddened at his own joke.

  “Dr. Arnie says a paint chip found in Juliana’s clothing indicates she was taken to an older house on loamy soil. It had floral wallpaper.”

  We were sitting in the Crown Vic across from the Santos residence, a vintage stucco apartment building with green fiberglass balconies and giant birds-of-paradise. It was about six inches away from the adjoining structure, a shoe box on legs.

  “No old flowered wallpaper in there,” said Jason restlessly.

  “Mylar,” I suggested, but I don’t think he knew what that was. I observed his squirming. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  A neighbor had told us the Santos family was on a church retreat up in Lake Arrowhead and would be back that night. We had been on surveillance more than four hours by then, endlessly circling the sights: a mustard-colored strip mall, junk shops, plumbing outfits and used car lots, up Overland and down Pico. We must have passed that pile of lime green and zebra-striped beanbag chairs in front of a futon store twenty-five times.

  But we had located a Jack in the Box, with a Plexiglas security window through which you inserted your money and received your grub like a hamburger bank. It put another attitude on the ’hood.

  “Is this where you want to be?” Jason asked.

  “Jack in the Box?”

  He grinned and crunched some fries. “The C-1 squad.”

  “I worked my butt off to make C-1.”

  “Really?”

  He sounded surprised, like those broad-shouldered college kids in the fast lane who swim the fifty in less than thirty seconds. What’s the big deal?

  “When I was coming up, the hottest assignment in the country was the Los Angeles bank robbery squad. I was lucky enough to start from there, but it was still a long haul.”

  “I really admire the way you do your job.”

  He said it forthrightly.

  “Thank you.”

  “I mean, you know how to negotiate the bullshit.”

  “Bullshit makes the world go round.”

  “When you started out, how did you prove yourself?”

  “Well.” I had never considered it quite like this. “Made sure I was first through the door.”

  He nodded.

  “You can’t show weakness.”

  “I got that.”

  “Never once, or it will come back to haunt you for your whole career.”

  “That’s not what they say when they talk about the Bureau family.”

  “We are a Bureau family, but let it come out one time that you’re weak and see what happens. Male or female, doesn’t matter. Once it’s out there, they start looking for a pattern. Do you volunteer to go to the back door, or the front? Do you put yourself in a situation where you’re less responsible than the others? If your assignment is to be in charge of putting stuff in the evidence log—and if you say, I don’t know if I could do that—you’re finished.”

  I did not tell Jason, but that is what happened to Barbara Sullivan. Why they took her off the street.

  His eyes were narrow behind the mirrored sunglasses.

  “You spend your life in an office,” he said bitterly. “When do you get the chance?”

  “Looking for a chance?”

  “Looking for something,” he sighed.

  I smiled empathetically and glanced at my watch. This was working out well. I had not thought about Andrew in twenty minutes.

  “What do you think that thing you are looking for might be, Jason?”

  At 10:48 p.m. an older green Dodge van pulled up to the apartment building. It had a dent on the left side.

  “Did Juliana say the van was damaged?”

  “Don’t know,” said Jason.

  I was sitting up straight now, trying to get comfortable as the last of the codeine pills wore off. My eyes hurt and my back was sore, as if I had the flu.

  The van sat there a minute and then a dark-complected woman got out the driver’s side. She had a skinny black ponytail and was wearing running pants and a sweatshirt. She looked like a cannonball, big in the bust with a round stomach, and she carried an oversized cup with a straw. She put her head down and worked with determination, sipping the drink as she went around and opened the
rear doors.

  “Call for backup!” Jason hissed, fingers twitching toward the radio.

  “Not yet.” I wanted this takedown all for myself.

  “Right, right. We don’t want to look like idiots.”

  “Move your butts,” the woman was saying.

  Two young boys and a teenage girl climbed out. One of the boys started for the apartments.

  “Stay here,” called the mother.

  “I’m tired.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  “I want to go to bed.”

  “Get your sleeping bag. Help out.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Get your sleeping bag. I don’t want to say it again!”

  The boy kept going toward the building.

  “If you don’t get your sleeping bag right now,” said the mother, “you can sleep on the floor.”

  She tossed the cup into the street and started pulling stuff out of the van.

  The teenage girl was saying nothing. She had an oval face, ordinary, wore low-riding jeans and was emaciated-thin, tiny breast buds pointing through a tank top too slight for this fifty-degree night. She was holding a plastic laundry basket filled with toys and clothes, a cigarette between two fingers. She had no affect. She just waited.

  “Is that someone else in the van?” I said. “On the passenger side?”

  We strained to see in the greasy lamplight.

  “If Brennan comes out,” I said, “I will approach him and you back me up.”

  Jason waggled in the seat.

  We had shifted into high alert. I was aware of the pounding of my heart. I wondered if the camouflage cave was still intact in the back of the van, if the woman was complicit, kept the kids in handcuffs on the long drive to the religious retreat.

  “Roxy,” she called, sliding the doors shut, “go get your brother.”

  The girl pivoted obediently on one hip.

  “Come back here, cootie head,” she said lazily, “or I’ll beat your brains in.”

  The little brother taunted back. “You’re ugly. You wear stupid shoes.”

  “Mom,” she repeated with the same lackadaisical scorn, “he called me ugly.”

  I tried to see in the shadows. Were those bruises around the girl’s neck?