by Noreen Ayres
Joe interrupted, gave a recounting; same facts, calmer tone.
“The same wire as on the victim?”
“Not the same exactly,” I said.
“Then why are we talking about this?”
“I guess I don’t know now myself, sir.”
He looked at me blankly.
Joe said, “She’s been through a lot.”
Then the captain hit me with the questions I wasn’t quite prepared for. “Why is it you were with this crowd to begin with, Smokey?” No one had clued him in.
He was a man in his mid-forties, brown over hazel, a packed one-eighty pounds on a six-foot frame, with a lean and canny hardness in his face that looked like he should be arguing cases before a court. I’d seen him around before but never wanted to get to know him. He was too physically perfect for my taste, too sure of himself, bound to have too many ambitions for my comfort. In other words, out of my league but without my regrets.
Cautiously, I began to tell him about the Carbon Canyon case, the charred car there and the remnant of human being within who might be my brother’s ex-wife.
At some merciful point, he stopped me and said, “I’m aware of some of this case, Smokey. And I’m aware that you’re working as a model at a lingerie bar in Garden Grove.”
Surprised, I said, “You are?”
He nodded like a tolerant principal. Folding his hands, he asked, “Are you accepting money for this activity?”
“It’s not a real job, sir.”
“Have you accepted money for this at all?”
“I’m aware that an employee of the sheriff-coroner’s department shall not engage in any conduct that would bring discredit to the dignity of law enforcement, sir. This is not a second job. This is a personal concern in which I felt I could—”
“Be an investigator,” he said, completing my sentence.
“This is an assignment, sir. Stu Hollings. My supervisor,” I said, explaining further. “The fact is, I saw a murder. Whether I was dancing my way halfway to Bakersfield in a tutu collecting quarters on the way, what matters is a man was murdered today, and I saw him murdered. Why aren’t we talking about that?” I looked at him, and then at Joe, and back at him.
He seemed amused. “Consider your extra earnings hazardous duty pay. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Now tell me about Blackman.”
Joe’s expression now was one I’d become accustomed to, the one that said you may be a silly lump of foolishness but you’re my own.
I said, “Blackman does metal and paint work on motorcycles when he’s not operating a bar where men take their new secretaries to test how far they can slide their hands up their dresses before they holler. He’s got felony priors for assault and firearms. Off parole, but he’s probably had his hands in criminal activity since he could toddle over to his daddy’s pants and pick out the wallet. He was a starting place for us,” I said, “and after today it seems like it was the right one to start from. It was his two crappy friends who did it.”
In the background guns were going off in rounds of threes, cops practicing one to the head, two to the heart. The classroom door opened and a deputy came in, excused himself, and gathered some booklets from a table. As he swung the door open to leave, we watched a formation of National Guardsmen in camouflage greens and carrying rifles cut squarely around the yard.
When I looked back, the captain asked, “What else?”
“Blackman’s slick,” I said. “In his own way, charming. He could be a preacher or a carny. He’s quiet and he’s talkative, you never know which you’ll get. He’ll put you down one minute and build you up the next. He’s . . . handsome, like an actor.” I glanced at Joe, who was studying the floor. “Armand Assante with a beard,” I said. “No tattoos that I could see, no metal studs in his tongue.”
“Thank God for small pleasures,” Joe said.
“One of the other models says he has a lot of girlfriends, but I haven’t seen any.”
“What else?” the captain asked.
“Am I missing something? What else do you want?”
“Just keep talking. What else did you learn about Monty Blackman?”
“Downey High School. Sounds like he was raised by his mother. Seems to treat his employees all right. Came on to me, but that was part of the plan, right?”
“That was part of your plan,” the captain corrected.
I ignored that and plunged on, almost trancelike. “He drives a dark Volvo, older, but I’ve seen him in a white pickup too. Likes cowboy music. Made me go dancing with him one night after work.”
“Uh-huh. And what else?”
“He races bikes and raises pigs. That’s about it. Oh—except for one thing: He knows people who slit other people’s throats.”
“Let’s talk about that.”
“Again?”
“A last name for this Switchie?” the captain asked.
“D’Antonio,” I said.
“D’Antonio. And he’s blond.”
“He probably doesn’t like pasta, either.”
Loud volleys of high-caliber semiautomatics reverberated in rapid succession, so surprising in their fury the three of us turned our faces to the window. In the hollow silence afterward, the training officer’s voice ground through. “Shoot to stop,” he said, “not to kill. Shoot to stop. Keep that in your mind and vocabulary and you come out clean in an OI review.” By OI, he meant officer-involveds, shootings requiring high scrutiny by the department before they undergo the same by the public.
Captain Exner got up and slid both windows closed. The suit he wore grabbed a glow from the outside lights. His shoes gleamed as though wet. He came around to the front of the desk and sat down on its edge, dropping his hands between his knees. His voice was softer, and at the same time, grave. “Now I’m going to let you two in on a little something. You tripped over an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Customs Service. They’re looking at Morris Blackman.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I’m not kidding, and we can hold the congratulations.”
“I trashed it, you’re trying to tell me?” I asked, scared for the worst.
“Customs? What kind of operation?” Joe said.
“All I know myself,” the captain said, “is that it has something to do with smuggling contraband. FBI’s in on it too. FBI’s everywhere these days.” He looked at me and said, “Did you see anything smacked of a meth lab?”
“Nothing like that. Small-time drugs, that’s it.”
Joe said, “I heard meth’s going crazy out in Riverside.”
“They set up clandestine labs in house trailers. That county’s so full of trailer trash,” the captain said, “they’re imposing special taxes and adding all sorts of get-out-of-town ordinances for trailer owners. You said Blackman has a farm out there?”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t take me out there because his pigs were breeding, and strangers disturb them.”
“That may be it then,” Joe said. “He’s got himself a good little lab out there.”
“Maybe.” Captain Exner went around to sit in the desk chair again, then turned to me. He waited a long moment as if he were determining my sentence on the spot. Then he said, “We’re thinking of letting you stay on as you were. As long as you are sure you haven’t been compromised.” He pulled out a charcoal-colored box of Indiana Slims and flipped up the top.
“I don’t think I have. I’m going to have a problem explaining my absence, though.”
He tapped out a cigar and said, “You’ll think of something. You’re in, you should stay in.”
“But we should have evidence people out there now,” I said.
“You just find out what they did with the body. That’s your evidence.” He offered the box to Joe. “Rum-dipped,” he said. “Top blend.”
“I gave up smoking two years ago,” Joe said. “I’ve got arthritis, glaucoma, flea bites, and a bum finger where I dropped my weights on it. That’s what happens when you give up your v
ices.”
Captain Exner smiled, and before he closed the box, thought twice about it and offered it in my direction. When I shook my head no, he said, “I thought maybe that’s why they call you Smokey.”
“No such luck,” I said, but didn’t elaborate.
He lit up with an ornately engraved silver lighter, and I thought of the fancy work on Monty Blackman’s tanks. The scent was pleasant and curiously relaxing.
“I’ll have customs by in the morning. We’ll find out what’s what, if I have to get the undersheriff himself down here. If this clears okay, we’ll three come up with a story about why you left the party. You suddenly remembered a date with your mother. You forgot and left the iron on. Now, you can say no. Nobody’s going to commit you to something you think you can’t deal with.”
“I can handle it.”
He picked a folder off the desk that I had noticed before but thought nothing of. Glancing at the top paper, he said, “You were an officer. You saw both jail and patrol in Oakland, is that right?”
“Correct.”
“You’ve been in investigations here for—”
“Almost six years,” I said.
“I also see you were involved in a shooting last year in Nevada.”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
He looked at me a long time, studying me, figuring me. “How’d that all come down?”
“Briefly, I had a situation and I shot to stop. The offender came after me with a pipe. A full report is in my file.”
The captain moved the corners of the papers with one finger. “You’re okay with all that?”
“I’ve been to work every day the department would let me since the incident, except for a few days’ vacation. I say ‘every day the department would let me’ because they did require some time off while I participated in psychological evaluations.”
“You terminated the counseling, didn’t you?” The captain had read more of my file than I realized.
I said, “I did.”
“You felt you didn’t need it?”
“I felt the sessions were a waste of time, to tell the truth. The psychologist was a woman who was convinced no woman could take a life without extreme damage to her psyche. I’m sorry, but I’m impatient with that.”
The slightest smile appeared on the captain’s face. He fished out the lighter again, put his thumb on the lid, and paused as if about to say something, but didn’t.
“Seeing a man get his throat cut is not an everyday occurrence for me, Captain. I’m tired and I’m upset. But tomorrow’s another day. I’ll do what I have to. Wouldn’t you?”
“If we get you killed,” he said, “it’s bad for our morale. But if you wind up shooting somebody, it’s bad for our reputation and you, my dear, are looking at a very early retirement. Think you can keep your pistol in your pocket?”
“How do you manage yours?” I said.
He turned his profile to us, flipped the flame on, and drew on the cigarillo, his eyes squinting or smiling, I wasn’t sure which.
22
Joe slipped his arm around me as we walked to the parking lot leaving the training center and Captain Exner. The air had turned warm, and now my jacket seemed heavy.
“You did fine in there,” Joe said.
We passed the trash bin with the large white sign announcing DO DRUGS, DO TIME.
“I babbled,” I said.
“You did fine.”
Between the blasts of gunfire could be heard the purring song of the lesser nighthawk, its vocals ending in chuck-chuck-chuck. Major events can be taking place in your life, and you will still hear the sounds of a bird and mentally say its name, or catch the scent of peanut butter and recall the decal on your third grade lunch box.
And when I heard the bird, I thought of the bay and its carnival of life, and home, and felt overwhelmingly tired. “Joe,” I said, “maybe I can’t do this thing with Monty. Maybe I’ll fuck it up. Say something to blow the whole thing. The whole thing—I don’t even know what it is. What am I supposed to be doing out there? I can tell you this and not worry you’re going to panic, right? I’m just having some self-doubts.”
By his car now, I stood waiting for him to unlock his door. Under the yellow parking lot lights, the cars burned with a brilliant wet sand. Joe stopped what he was doing and came around to my side.
A car pulled in with its windows down, Del Shannon on the radio, singing about his run-run-run-run runaway.
Joe held me, saying, “Asking me not to worry is like asking me not to breathe.”
The oldies lover parked two spaces down, and got his bag of weaponry out of the trunk and strolled to the center, white sneakers flashing.
Weapon fire began again, but now cushioned by the roof-high earth berm striped on our side with newly planted groundcover. As Joe held me there, the rumbled percussion of simultaneous rapid-fires was oddly comforting, like a big man softly snoring.
When we got to my place, Joe said he’d fix me a drink if I told him where it was. “Nothing,” I said. “Oh well, maybe tea. Is that okay?”
“You’re the one whose reality needs changing,” he said. “But it is.”
“I want a shower.”
“Do it. I’ll be here.”
In the shower I let the water wash away the day, hearing the TV in the living room, and I stayed what seemed a long while. At the last moments I stood directly under the flow with my eyes closed and face upturned, until pictures flashed in my mind and the warm drench seemed to turn to blood. I shut off the water, toweled, ran a wide comb through my hair, then put on a gray knit T-shirt that comes to my knees, and walked into the living room.
Joe was still there, as he promised. He’d taken off his jacket but not the tie, and was in the midst of setting down two mugs with tea tags trailing down the sides. He’d turned off the TV and put on music, the soft kind. Curling onto the couch, I stretched to kiss his cheek, liking the grit of it.
“Toast? Crumpets?” he asked.
“Anyone ever tell you,” I said, “you’re wonderful?”
“Not lately.”
“Well don’t believe them if they do.”
He reached down and gently brought both my ankles up and placed them on his lap, pivoting me as I held the cup. At the side of his face near the eyes, soft creases formed and released. That simple sight made my eyes fill. I drank the hot tea and said nothing.
“Hey, buckaroo,” he said, imitating John Wayne. “How about when this is over us gettin’ out of town for a while?” When I nodded without comment, he said, his tone changed, “What can I do to get you to stop thinking about it?”
“Joe, do you figure everybody’s ghost hangs around for a while, or just some people’s?”
“What’s going on in there?” he asked, looking at my forehead.
“Haven’t you ever lost someone and you just feel they’re still around afterward?”
“You know what that is,” he said solemnly.
“Wishful thinking,” I admitted. “You’ve seen people die, Joe?”
“A few.”
“Where?”
“Hospitals. Emergency rooms. One guy in a race car. We were talking to him, normal-like, got him out and everything. Then he just died.”
“These people, were they looking at you, do you think, when they died? Were they looking at you, or just off in the distance?”
His hand fit across my ankles, as if they were two rolling pins trying to get away. He said, “Maybe it was the light.” He checked for reaction. “You know, they were looking at the bright light.”
“Take it another way,” I said, swinging free of his lap and walking to where I could look out over the black bluffs of the bay against a royal sky. “Be the murderer,” I said.
I turned to see him now sunk into the pillow in the corner of the couch as a man might who’s ready to watch the news, only tireder than most; a man with hard things on his mind.
“You’re a killer,” I said. “You get up in the morning, bat
he, eat, call a girlfriend. Joe, do you figure once you’ve murdered someone, anything else matters? Do you figure anything could ever break your heart? You could get mad, sure. Be disappointed. Ah, but . . . could you ever cry? Would anything ever delight you? Once you’ve found you can deliberately, methodically kill someone, are you a human being?”
He got up and came to me, taking the cup from my hand and putting it on the lamp table. “What can I do, baby?” He put both hands on my shoulders. “Let me stay with you.”
I didn’t mean to be cruel. I said, “You can if you want. Either way,” then went to the couch and sat again, the shirt over my knees so I became a big gray boulder.
He came to sit beside me and ran his finger along the back of my neck. The CD stopped at the end of the last track. The first song played again, a song so slow in its tenderness that I took Joe’s hand and held it to my chest. In a second tears fled down my face. I said a thing I seldom do: I love you.
Joe tipped my head to his shoulder. We were two people in a darkened theater, looking out at a slice of moonlit bay. On the bluffs to the north were the homes of the wealthy strung along streets named Galaxy, Constellation, Northern Star, and Evening Star. Their lights bleached the bulrushes, swept over the sleepless nightjars and the brown-headed cow-birds, the small-time burglars now busy in the shadows rustling nests from other birds. And I wondered which of those homes on the bluffs this night harbored distracted hearts, and which would, in the early hours, summon the lonely wail of sirens, and which of their inhabitants would prove the best and worst of human impulse.
She was slapping me with the flat of the big knife. My legs stung like a family of bees.
When I’d come in, her back was to me at the sink. Where have you been, young lady?
I’d left the curtain next to the lamp, and the shade off the lamp because I needed a lot of light to trace something before I went to school, and the wallpaper was all burned now, and just how are you going to pay for it, sister?
