I shrugged and said, 'I don't get it.'
'Simple. He didn't only hit one house, he hit two. Only for this one he got past a wall and private guards and dog patrols without being seen, and he got out again the same way. Kind of determined for an opportunist, wouldn't you say?'
Winter had been here? 'Jesus,' I said. 'Who'd he hit?'
But Michaels carried on.
I suppose it was cleverly laid out, if you go for that kind of thing. From each rambling white villa all that you could see was the roof of any other, and then not too close. The greenery was dense and well-planned, and keeping it in condition must have been a full-time job for a squad of gardeners. I could imagine it at night; they'd probably floodlight it in reds and greens, and the transplanted palms would move gently in the evening air. That's how they did it around the Camelback Inn, anyway. I didn't care for it much myself, but it had always impressed my dates.
I could hear the buzz before we even came up out of the bushes. Then we came up level with the terrace, and there we were.
There must have been at least four separate incident teams in and around the house, all climbing over one another and all of them arguing. There were some of our own people that I recognised, and others that I didn't know at all. We stood out on the terrace and waited as Michaels sent a message inside. I tried to see in through the full-length windows, but it was smoky glass and all that I could make out were moving shapes. I could only think of one reason why I should be here, which was that Winter might have left some deliberate clue or pointer involving me. If he had, it couldn't be anything too definite or they'd have done rather more than send Michaels alone to collect me. I wondered what I'd say, when faced with it.
We were there for about ten minutes before Berman came out; he was Chief of Detectives, young in the job but fairly well-respected by those who reckoned they knew what they were talking about. He looked from Michaels to me, and said, 'Alex Volchak?'
'That's me,' I said.
'Come inside, there's something I want you to take a look at. Don't worry, we already moved the bodies out.'
I suppose it wouldn't have looked quite as bad if the big lounge hadn't been so all-over white; the plaster walls, the wool carpet, even the furniture was white leather. It looked as if somebody had dynamited a live pig in the middle of it all. We walked through across rubber sheets, a makeshift path that kinked in the middle to avoid a particularly nasty stain with a body-shape taped out around it. The shape, which was sexless like they always are, wasn't too big.
Three steps led us into a tiled passage running all the way down the side of the house, and the walls here were unmarked except for a single fading line that looked as if it might have been painted on by a sputtering aerosol. It was like a signpost, pointing us towards the room at the end of the passage.
This turned out to be part-office, part-den, with a big desk and a couple of filing cabinets and a bookcase full of Readers' Digest Condensed Books that didn't even look as if they'd been opened. There was more mess on the desktop, spread all over the papers and ledgers there, and this time the tape showed an outline of someone slumped forward with his arms outstretched. It reminded me of those blast-shadows they found on a wall at Hiroshima. There were a lot of people standing around in here, most of them apparently with nothing to do, and all of them talking and pointing here and there.
Berman eased around behind the desk. 'You can thank the air conditioning that the smell isn't worse,' he said, addressing me and Michaels equally. 'They might have been lying around here for even longer if it wasn't for sightseers up on the mountain getting a glimpse of the body in the pool.'
I was looking at the wall behind him; the big hanging map there told me in an instant why I'd been brought over. Apart from the colored pins which clustered in the part of
the map corresponding to the downtown area of the city, its most eye-catching feature was the runny, handwritten legend DYING OF PARADISE? ASK ALEX
and just below this in the desert, a large, bloody cross. The cross was an approximation of the place where I'd scooped out a shallow grave for the body of Woods and then covered it over with stones.
Berman said, 'Any comments?'
'No,' I said cagily. 'What can I say? I don't even know whose place this is.'
'Jeff Miransky,' he said, looking at the spot where the body had been as if there was still some after-trace of the physical presence lingering there. 'Small-time thief turned big-time businessman, among other things the part-owner of the Paradise Motel. I'm looking for connections, Alex, and I'll grab a straw until something better comes along. The Paradise made news and you were there. Start thinking for me, will you?'
And it was as simple as that.
We were led out through the kitchen, being told to step carefully over a single female's shoe that lay with a chalk circle drawn around it. We came out by the surprisingly small pool, which was in the process of being drained so that its filters could be checked, and were pointed toward a spot on the other side of the outdoor furniture where the bushes had been pulled back. A section of the fence behind had been lifted away to give access over onto the patio of the next house along. This, it seemed, had become some kind of overspill and marshalling area in response to the awkwardness of the site and the widespread nature of the murder scene.
Seated at a white aluminum table at the end of the patio, with a kingsized piece of ham and a couple of tubs of coleslaw between them, were Morrell and McKay, the two Drug Squad detectives.
'Hey,' Morrell said as they saw us, 'the team's complete.'
'It's the Paradise reunion,' McKay added. 'Grab a seat and eat.'
Michaels stared at the food as if he couldn't quite believe that what he was seeing was real, and said, 'How'd you get hold of that?'
'We raided the fridge,' McKay said, gesturing shamelessly towards the villa behind him. 'Just about everybody in the estate got up and ran when they heard the bad news, so nobody's home.'
'And mayhem always gives me an appetite,' Morrell added. 'Join us?'
I hesitated for a moment. Then I said, 'Yeah, I think I will.'
'Oh, shit,' Michaels said dully, and wandered away.
I pulled over a chair. I hadn't eaten at all since the previous night, and hadn't even given it a thought until this moment; now it all seemed to have caught up with me, oddly sharpened and intensified by what I'd just seen. I could see what Morrell meant about mayhem, just as surely as Michaels couldn't; he wandered over to the house and stood looking in, deliberately doing his best not to see us.
I said, 'So how come you're both here?'
'Same reason as you,' Morrell said. 'We're supposed to be sitting here in earnest discussion to see if we can come up with any connection between Apocalypse Now over there and what we saw at the Paradise Motel.'
'You know of one?'
'No, 'cept that there's two people sitting at this table called Alex,' (at this, McKay meekly raised a hand) 'which is probably what made it worth a shot.'
I said, 'How long do you think they'll make us stick around? I've got things I have to do.'
'Yeah,' McKay agreed. 'The whole point about being a cop is that you don't sit around like Joe Citizen waiting to be told what happens next.'
Morrell handed me a Diet Pepsi. 'What did you make of it in there?' he said.
I could sense a change in their attitude then, a shift to a more watchful mode; they might look like burned-out hippies, but they were still detectives, after all.
So I simply said, 'It was bad.'
'They say that the house on the park was worse,' McKay said.
'No kidding?'
'And Michaels was the first one in.' He glanced over at Michaels, who had wandered down to the far end of the pool and was well out of earshot. 'You heard the story?'
'Only what they wrote in the newspaper.'
'That was only half of it. Word is that he heard a kid screaming, so he went in without waiting for backup. Got the full effect in Technicolor.'
Morrell said, 'Did he say what he saw?'
'No, but look at him. Half his mind's been somewhere else ever since. And I know Michaels, he isn't soft – whatever he saw, it must have been something that could frighten the crap out of a commode.'
We sat around for a while longer, until it was clear that we'd been forgotten, and then Morrell went through the fence to see if he could get a ruling on whether or not we should still hang around. We'd all agreed – Michaels excepted, because he hadn't even participated – that we couldn't come up with anything to throw light onto the mystery here.
Returning, Morrell said, 'Somebody's out looking at the desert from a helicopter. See if they can't spot what the X is supposed to be marking.'
'What about us?' McKay wanted to know.
'We're no use to anybody, we can go. They'll send for us if they need any more of our advice.'
McKay looked at what was left on the table, which wasn't much apart from a hambone and. some empty cola cans.
'I'll advise them all they like,' he said. 'It beats working any day.'
I finally got home about eight, to find a rental car with its trunk open in the spot where Loretta usually parked her jeep. I went inside and, as I looked through my mail – the letter from the department about the lifting of my suspension and the probability of a written reprimand going into my file, and a second letter from Doctor Mulholland – I could hear the goings-on next door. I heard an older woman's voice saying, plaintively, Well if she isn't here, where is she? and a man's voice replying, I don't know. Clara. I just don't know. It should have occurred to me earlier that the Mister Heilbron mentioned by the receptionist wouldn't be Loretta's husband, but her father-in-law and Georgie's grandfather. I went through and dropped wearily onto the bed, and wondered what the hell I was going to do next.
And that was my day.
NINETEEN
It was strange to put on the uniform again and go out to work; it felt like an unreal existence, a masquerade. Most people on the station seemed pleased to see me back, and the union representative took me aside and tried to sell me on the idea of making a claim for wrongful suspension, which I said I'd think about just so that I could get rid of him. I sat well to the back of the room at the start-of-shift meeting, where I learned that I was to lose four men from my squad to assist the murder team while the rest of us would have to spread a little more thinly to cover the normal patrols. Michaels was also being attached to the murder investigation, as a kind of go-between to carry out essential liaison between the two areas' forces. Because he's been fucking useless for anything else ever since, I heard someone close by me mutter, and I looked across at Michaels. His uniform looked as if it had been slept in, although from his eyes it didn't look as if he'd slept at all. He also seemed oblivious to the unease that he was creating around himself.
For a moment I began to wonder whether… but no, it was too much to hope. He'd seen a bad sight to end all bad sights, but I was the only one who'd nosed out the truth about Woods/Winter. As we all rolled out, the KOOL-TV copter passed low overhead to pick up some footage of the patrol cars rolling out in force, regardless of the fact that most of us were going to be out covering ordinary duties. The press had been given a detailed release on the second murder in time for the late news the previous evening, and now they were all preparing their specials. They love anything like this, it's only natural. I sometimes wonder if they don't sit at home and pray for disasters when things get quiet.
I was hoping that I'd be able to get through it all somehow on a mechanical level, but it was the frustrating little things that got to me in the end. About two hours in, I was taking details of some minor traffic collision and I looked into one driver's car and I saw this cesspit, dirty ripped seats and a floor full of junk, the only clean thing in there a brand-new Mr Submarine sandwich box that he'd emptied and tossed into the back, and then the next thing I knew I was chasing this little fat guy down the road and he was running so hard that he obviously thought he was going to die if he stopped. That's exactly what he did, though, when a patrol car suddenly erupted out of a side-street before him and slammed to a halt blocking the way, and Travis and Leonard were out of the car and holding him by the arms before I got there.
And then, when I got my breath back, I had to say, 'It's okay, let him go.'
'What did he do?' Travis said; and the answer was that he hadn't actually done anything. He wasn't even the culpable driver in the collision. Travis took him back to wait by his car, talking to him in a low voice, and Leonard said, 'Everything all right, Alex?'
'As good as it's going to get,' I said, and left them to take over.
Three blocks away I unhooked the portable radio from my dash so that I could keep in touch and went for my usual donut break, alone. This wasn't working out; Winter, and what he might have done to Georgie, were preying on my mind, but I still didn't see any way that I could act on what I'd learned. The waitress in the place knew my name, but I didn't know hers and we'd become familiar beyond the point at which I could admit it and ask; and as I was sitting by the window, she said, 'Alex, can you get me some more of those Operation Identification stickers?'
These were little yellow stickers which announced that anything of value on the premises had been marked and would be traceable. I said, 'What happened to the others?'
'Somebody stole them before I could put them up.'
'I'll bring some more next time.'
The shop was almost empty, so she came over. She said, 'You're looking tired. Did you get a vacation this year?'
'I took a trip upstate,' I said. 'It didn't work out.'
Five minutes later, I was back in my car and heading back to base. I'd had a radio call to say that someone was waiting to see me in the station yard. Considering the goings-on of the last couple of weeks, it could have been anything; I wouldn't have been surprised to find Doctor Elaine Mulholland, demanding to know why I wouldn't even phone her to explain the appointments that I kept missing. But what I found instead was an ordinary patrolman in an ordinary patrol car from the north-eastern district, sent to collect me and take me out into the desert to the marked spot found that morning by one of our helicopters.
It was the grave. It had to be. Not enough time had passed for the traces to be covered over completely, and the disturbance of the ground would be even more apparent from the air. I now had the length of one car ride to come up with the explanation that I'd so far avoided even considering.
Nothing promising seemed to be offering itself.
But as we came out of the yard and along by the airport, the patrolman was saying, 'It looked like a grave, but the lab people spent the last three hours taking the dirt out with little spoons and they didn't find a thing.'
'It was empty?' I said.
'It had been dug over, but nothing was there. The reason you haven't heard is that they've been keeping it off the radio so that the press people won't get to hear about it and come trampling around. Listen, can you read the map for me when we get closer? I'm not a hundred per cent sure of the turnoff.'
'Of course,' I said, and found the folded city map in the door pocket beside me. I left it open on my knees, even though I wouldn't need it when we got there. I knew the turnoff only too well.
So the grave was empty. Only Winter could have done it, because only Winter and I had known where it was; and of the two of us, probably only Winter had the long-time familiarity with the desert to be able to find the exact spot again. What was the point? I wondered. There had to be one, and I somehow didn't think that it would turn out to be anything that I'd like.
We headed out into the desert by the old broken stake. The dirt road didn't look any more heavily-used than it had last time, but then the earth was probably baked as hard as concrete. The patrolman said, 'Your liaison guy, Michaels. Is he all right?'
'Most of the time,' I said, thinking that most of the time didn't include the hours since he'd walked out of the so-called 'massacre house'. T
he patrolman nervously changed his grip on the wheel, and I could see that he had a delicate point to make.
He said, 'Well, maybe you could have a word with him. He's wandering around like he hardly knows what he's doing. He walked off into the desert this morning and didn't reappear for almost an hour.' And then he glanced over at me with a brief, apologetic smile, and I realised then that this was the real, if unofficial, reason for me being summoned along, not because there was some new dimension to the Paradise connection but because Michaels was on the slide and needed someone to quietly take him home. Business had to continue, and the massacre house hero was becoming an embarrassment.
There were only a couple of cars and a van remaining when we got there, first glimpsed through the heat haze but firming-up as we got closer. The lab people had taken their samples and covered the grave site with polythene sheet, staking it down against the possibility of wind and adding stones for extra certainty. Now they were stowing their gear away, their hair in sweat-spikes and their shirts patched dark.
Twenty minutes later, they and the patrolman had gone. They left me, and Michaels, and Michaels' car.
He hadn't said more than two words to me in all of that time, one of which had been Hi and the other of which had been Alex. He'd spent most of it carefully treading the dust around the edge of the site, arms folded and his eyes on the ground in front of him as if looking for lost money. I'd seen the lab people exchanging glances about him as if having him around made them uncomfortable – which is pretty rich, if you know lab people at all. But in this case, I couldn't blame them.
Watching as the dirt-clouds raised by the departing vehicles slowly dispersed towards the horizon, I wondered how I was going to open this conversation. Time seemed to take a beat.
But then, Michaels was the one who spoke first.
He said, 'Let's not kid each other, Alex, okay?'
I turned to him. The peak of his uniform cap shaded his eyes, somehow making his gaze seem all the more intense. It was like talking to somebody wearing mirror sunglasses, which I've never liked to do.
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