Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “You were carrying these around with you while you were jogging?”

  Her tone sounded snide to him, but he didn’t let it get to him. “The travel agent’s down on Acacia Street,” he said. “I stopped by just now, then I headed back downtown on the off chance I’d see you. What do you say? Wait. Don’t say anything until you know what I’m talking about. Take a look at this.”

  He opened the brochure onto the tabletop and gestured at the photos. Club Mex was a first-rate vacation spot—water sports, tennis, a four-star restaurant; the place had it all. “I’ve booked separate rooms, of course. I’m not suggesting anything out of line here.”

  “I think it’s a little bit out of line to show me any of this,” she said.

  He was baffled at first. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

  “We hardly know each other, Edmund. You honestly don’t think I’d run off to Mexico with a man I don’t know?”

  “Oh, I think we know each other better than you’re willing to admit.”

  “I don’t follow you. We’ve talked with each other a total of about four times. I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but I guess I’m not that easy.”

  “Well, let’s just say that I know something about you, then, about … the darker side of your work. You won’t deny that there is one?”

  “Deny it? What are you talking about? Why would I want to deny anything to you? You’ve made some kind of mistake, Edmund. I don’t know why you bought so many of my paintings, and I don’t know why you bought these plane tickets, but it’s all part of the same mistake. And it’s really got to stop right now.”

  “I’m asking you to think about it, Anne. How is that a mistake? Listen to what I’m saying. I’m very much attracted to you, on an intellectual and artistic level.” He gestured at the brochure. “And I can certainly vouch for the quality of the resort.” He broadened his smile, although he wasn’t smiling at all inside. She was acting like he was asking her for some kind of favor. Here she was locked up in her goddamn Mary Poppins world of pretty pictures, obstinately letting the fire in her soul burn out. All he wanted to do was fan it back into flame. He knew the way to that fire, but she wouldn’t let him take her there. What the hell did she want from him? “Listen to me,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning forward. It was time to level with her. “What do you know about the astral plane?”

  “Is that what you’re taking to Mexico?”

  He stared at her, not quite comprehending … Then he knew that she was joking. He picked up the Club Mex brochure and held it out. He would give it one more try. “I’m talking about all expenses paid,” he said.

  There was a long moment of silence. “Do I look like a prostitute to you, Edmund?” she asked finally.

  “Whoa!” He held out his hands. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Of course you did. Really, this irritates the hell out of me. You have no right to make any assumptions about me at all. You wasted your money, Edmund, and you’re wasting your time. If I’m fired, tell me right now. I suppose that’s next.”

  “Why should it be? Anne …” He shook his head helplessly. “On the surface we see this whole thing from such different points of view.”

  “I guess we do.”

  “But it’s under the surface that we’re so much alike.” He sat back and winked at her.

  “Thanks for the coffee.” She stood up, turned around, and walked away up the street toward the Earl’s.

  He watched her go. No way in hell was he going to chase her. He really wasn’t very surprised. She hadn’t rejected him—he knew that. She hadn’t understood him well enough to reject him. She was like a child rejecting some healthful food out of ignorance. She didn’t know anything about nutritional value. What surprised him about it was not that she didn’t measure up, because in his experience, people never really measured up. What surprised him was that he himself hadn’t read her better. He had overestimated her, and that was a bad mistake.

  Still, what had he offered her? A resort vacation in the sun. Maybe that was his mistake. He had wanted to appeal to something deep within her, and instead he had tried to entice her with something superficial. He had attempted to play the game by her rules, by navigating in her world, instead of inviting her into his own….

  He tore her plane ticket in two and dropped it into the trash. He had an intuitive suspicion that he might soon make good use of his own ticket, although he would have to save Club Mex for the fall. He wasn’t going there after all. Not now.

  47

  RAY MIFFLIN PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT AFTER A three-hour lunch. He bought a newspaper off the stack in the liquor store, then walked down to Right Now Notary and let himself in. He flipped the clock sign around and stood for a moment looking out at the parking lot. All day long cars pulled in and cars pulled out. Either they stopped for five minutes at the liquor store or for an hour at the Laundromat. Now and then a Mexican alien came into his office in order to wire money home. This time of year, that was about it. Today no one at all had come into the office. He might as well have stayed home. And now that he had the deal going with Dalton, working was turning into a farce, which made him nervous. Easy money always made him nervous, and it turned out that really easy money made him really nervous.

  The day’s mail lay in a pile under the slot, and he bent over to pick it up. Beneath the mail, strangely, lay his driver’s license, face up. And a couple of feet away, as if it had bounced, lay his Mastercard.

  Puzzled, he took his wallet out of his back pocket. Despite what he saw on the floor, he was vaguely surprised to find that they were missing from where he kept them in the wallet, slipped in with his Visa card in a leather slot. Had they slid out of the slot somehow? He couldn’t recall whether he’d had his wallet out of his pocket earlier in the day—perhaps when he was going out the door to lunch…. He was pretty sure he hadn’t. It was more likely that he had left them somewhere, and that some good Samaritan had run his address down, shoving the cards through the slot while he was gone to lunch. He tried to remember the last time he’d used them both, but he couldn’t. They might have been missing for a week, two weeks.

  He was too tired today for mysteries. The good news was that he had gotten them back. Apparently there were still honest people in the world.

  He opened the newspaper, leaned back in the swivel chair, and worked through the sports before he got onto the local news, where he found a quarter-column article about a murder—only the second murder in Laguna Beach this year. He read the article through without really paying much attention to it: a man’s body found on the bluffs north of Laguna Beach by two women on horseback. The victim had been decapitated after he had been shot. The police weren’t making it clear how. The corpse’s finger pointed toward an open Gideon’s Bible with an underlined passage. There was a reference in the newspaper article to a satanic cult murder a decade past, but the police insisted that there was no real reason to believe this was any such thing.

  Mifflin nearly stopped reading in disgust. He had no kind of fascination with cult murders, if that was what this was. They were evidence that the world was full of the worst kind of idiots, and that was about all. He read the last paragraph, though: the night, according to the police, had been densely foggy, and there were no reports of gunfire or suspicious activity. The victim hadn’t been identified, but given the condition of his clothes he was quite possibly a homeless man. There was a brief description of his faded yellow coat, a worn brown leisure suit….

  His hands shaking now, Mifflin set the paper down on his desk and took out another cigarette. He picked up the paper and read the entire column again. The dead man was old Mayhew. It had to be. Mifflin slowly felt a general relief, which he was only momentarily ashamed of. If he were a good citizen, he would call the Laguna Beach police and identify the body, at least anonymously. But he wasn’t a good citizen—not any longer. He was up to his neck in fraud, and he was dangerously closely connected to the victim. It was a to
ugh way for old Mayhew to check out, but all that aside, at least the man was no longer a threat.

  Had Dalton killed him? The idea paralyzed him. Of course not. It was impossible. Mayhew was a pain in the neck, but he was cheap. You didn’t kill a man if you could buy him for a carton of cigarettes and a pint of Jack Daniels. And although Dalton was squirrelly as a hollow tree, he couldn’t be as stupid as that. Not with a million easy dollars in the picture. Not even if Mayhew had threatened him with real trouble. It just wasn’t worth it. And mutilating the body …

  He tossed the newspaper down and sat smoking, watching the cars out on Beach Boulevard. He realized that he knew absolutely nothing about Edmund Dalton. Half of what Dalton had told him had turned out to be lies. Why shouldn’t he be a murderer? Why shouldn’t he be any damned thing at all, including the worst kind of crazy man?

  He dug out the white pages, found the 800 number for Mastercard and punched it into the phone, then punched in the digit for account information. A woman came on the line and asked for his name and card number. “What can I help you with?” she asked finally.

  “I recently lost my card,” he said. “I hope it’s not stolen. Can you tell me if it’s been used within the past couple of days?”

  He gave her his name, and there was the sound of a keyboard momentarily. “Day before yesterday,” the woman said. “A car rental agency in Long Beach, called … I guess it’s Cheapskate Rent-a-car.”

  “Of course!” Ray said. “Cheapskate! That’s a relief.”

  “Do you want to report the card stolen?”

  “No. I guess I was mistaken. I think I left it on the counter down there. I’ll swing past and pick it up. Goodbye.” He hung up, his head spinning. Someone had rented a car using his stolen Mastercard. Dalton. It had to be Dalton. The bastard had stolen the card and license out of his wallet when he’d been in the office day before yesterday. He had rented a car for the purpose of murdering a man, and then come back around in his own good time to dump the cards back through the mail slot. He probably thought it was funny. Dalton had killed Mayhew and then mutilated his body, and the whole thing was a joke to him.

  He found the directory for the Long Beach area and looked up Cheapskate Rent-a-car. He ripped the page out of the book, took fifty-odd dollars in petty cash out of the office drawer, locked the place up, and climbed into his car. Long Beach was thirty minutes away, and it suddenly seemed to him that time was short.

  MIFFLIN CIRCLED THE 800 BLOCK OF NORTH CHERRY, PASSING Cheapskate Rent-a-car the first time in order to look the place over. He half expected to see police cars, but there weren’t any, just a dumpy stucco building in front of a gated yard with several rentals parked in back and a tired curb tree in front. He drove carefully, signaling a hundred feet before turning, checking the rearview mirror every twenty seconds or so. It was the kind of excessive care he took in driving when he’d had too many drinks, when it was absolutely paramount that he didn’t get pulled over.

  When he approached the building for the second time, he parked on the street, well out of sight of the front window, just to play it safe. He had a couple of half-baked routines worked out, depending on whether the clerk recognized his name or not. He thought about the Jimmy Stewart-Jones character again, about his nervous, turnip-truck detective work. The poor bastard apparently didn’t have a clue about what kind of monster he was dealing with in Edmund Dalton. Whatever else happened, Mifflin decided, he at least owed the man Jones a phone call.

  He pushed in through the front door of the rental agency and smiled at the man behind the counter.

  “Need a car?” the man asked him.

  “I just brought one back.”

  The man simply nodded. “When was that?”

  “This morning.”

  “Problem of some sort?”

  “That’s right,” Mifflin said. “I bought a gift for my wife, and I think I left it in the car.”

  “Small package?” The man looked through a bin of carbon-copy receipts.

  “A pair of diamond earrings, in a small box. I’m not certain, but I think that maybe I left them in the trunk, or else maybe they got shoved under the seat.” He gestured helplessly. “I did a lot of shopping, made a few stops. I hope to hell I left them in the car. Is the gentleman here who helped me before?” He was taking a chance with this one. The last thing he wanted to do now was talk with anyone who would know he hadn’t rented a car night before last.

  The clerk found a receipt in the bin and looked it over. “No, that’s Ronnie. Ronnie went home at noon today. He doesn’t work again until …” He looked at a schedule on the wall, tracing dates with his finger. “Thursday. He’s got a couple days off.”

  “I was hoping maybe he’d found it. Would he have cleaned the car out?”

  “Not very likely. I doubt anyone cleaned the car out, since it only came back in this morning. It’s out back. That was the white Ford, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Mifflin told him.

  “Well, if you left it in the car, it’s still in the car. Take a good long look.” He picked through several rings of car keys, found a Ford set, and handed them to Mifflin.

  “Can I see the receipt for a second?” Mifflin asked.

  “Sure.” He handed that over, too. The phone rang, and he nodded toward the yard in back before picking up the receiver.

  The signature on the receipt was apparently his signature. Dalton had forged it like a pro. Mifflin laid the receipt on the counter and went out through the side door and up the asphalt drive. Four cars were parked in the back lot. Thank God the man hadn’t asked him what car he’d rented. Straight off he saw that the Ford had been washed, if not by Ronnie, then by Edmund Dalton. Why? Bloodstains? He walked around it, taking a good look. There was no dust on it at all, no flattened bugs. The windows were clean. Even the chrome was polished. The car looked as if it had been detailed. There was no indication that anyone had driven it anywhere, let alone off-road. Dalton had evidently kept it an extra day in order to clean it up.

  Mifflin opened the trunk, but it was empty—no telltale bloodstains, just an owner’s manual. He looked back toward the office. There was a rear window, but it looked out of a back room. No one could see him. As long as he was quick, the man in the office probably wouldn’t give a damn about him.

  He opened the passenger door and stuck his head in. There was a faint odor just discernible beneath the car-wash smell. He was no kind of detective, but it smelled to him like Mayhew’s crappy old sports coat—the urine and body odor smell of a longtime drunk. He opened the glove box, but there was nothing inside except a few papers. The car had been vacuumed, and the dash was slick with vinyl polish. He glanced back toward the office again, then bent over and sniffed the seat and seat back. Mayhew again. Goddamn Mayhew. That’s where the smell was. He was damned well certain of it. It occurred to him then that Edmund might have cleaned the car up in order to get rid of fingerprints, and he looked at his hands, abruptly aware that he must be smearing his own damned prints all over everything….

  Leaving the door open, he moved around to the front of the car and got down onto his hands and knees on the asphalt. He looked under the chassis. There was dust and oil, but who could say where the hell the dust had come from? The answer occurred to him immediately: a police lab.

  He saw something then—vegetation of some sort caught in the strap that held the muffler. He hurried around to the rear of the car, crouched on the asphalt again, and reached underneath, feeling around with his hand. He found it, grabbed on tight, and yanked it out. It was a piece of a bush, some kind of goddamn bush. And it was mostly green, too. Some of it had been dried brown by the muffler heat, but part of it was fresh. Someone had driven the car through shrubbery, and recently, too. No good could come from anyone else finding dried weeds tangled in the undercarriage of a murderer’s car, not when Ray Mifflin’s credit card had rented it, not when he was taking a percentage of illegal money from the murderer himself.


  “What the hell are you up to?” The man’s voice startled him, and he scuttled back out from under the car, still clutching the weeds he’d first pulled clear of the muffler.

  “I couldn’t find it,” Mifflin said lamely.

  “Under the car?” The man hunkered down by the bumper and looked underneath. Mifflin shoved the weeds into his pocket. “What were you doing under there?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Mifflin said, “last night the exhaust pipe or the muffler was banging around. I forgot to say anything to Ronnie when I brought it back in.”

  The man reached under and pushed on the muffler. “Feels tight.”

  “Yeah, to me too. I don’t know.”

  “You say it was banging around?”

  “Only for a half mile or so, when I got off the freeway.”

  “You ran over something. Probably dragged some piece of junk for a ways and then dropped it.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “No earrings?”

  “No. I guess I dropped them somewhere else.”

  “If they turn up, we’ll call you. You want to leave a number?”

  “Sure,” Mifflin said. He followed the man back into the office and gave him a bogus phone number. He left immediately, got into his car, and headed back up toward the freeway. It was three o’clock, and traffic on the 405 past Signal Hill was thickening up. It would only get worse as he got into Orange County, but he couldn’t help it. There was no use getting frustrated. He had places to go—a lot of places to go.

  THE SUN WAS LOW IN THE SKY WHEN HE PULLED OFF THE road at Scotchman’s Cove, near Laguna Beach. The parking lot was deserted, which wasn’t surprising this late on a weekday afternoon, and the empty bluffs were lonesome and foreign. Strangely, it seemed to him that it had literally been years since he had driven this far east. Unless he was going somewhere on business, he rarely got more than a few miles from home. He hardly ever got down to Mexico any more, which was the only place he was even close to being happy. The depressing picture of his life owed more to desktop ashtrays and IRS forms and worn-out commercial carpeting than to anything suggested by this empty coastline and the sea wind.