Carcass Trade

by Noreen Ayres

  “That was her car in the canyon,” Joe said. “She still has some explaining to do, if she’s alive to do it. But that does seem a whole different horse, doesn’t it?”

  “Jolene told me one of Monty’s girlfriends was named Miranda. She didn’t know any more than that and I didn’t have time to ask.”

  “Back to square one, then, aren’t we? Listen, hon,” he said, stepping nearer, “are you going to be all right today?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t go anywhere, now, without backup. Wait till Captain Exner—”

  “Right now I’m going to go hide under my desk,” I said, “and not come out.”

  “I’ll come too.”

  “Get to work, you slouch,” I said.

  I didn’t have to go to my desk, but I did. I was relieved to find nothing urgent needing to be worked on, but for a moment wondered how much effect I had in the lab’s scheme of things, since there wasn’t work piled on my desk.

  Pulling out my sketch pad I began mapping what I remembered of the Avalos farm, the stables, and the shed. But I couldn’t concentrate, and I kept going over and over the images from yesterday, kept going back to the pigs huffing and chattering in their pens; the murkiness in the shed and then the horror; thistle weaving against clouds; and barbed wire shish-kebobbed with dead things.

  I got up and walked downstairs to Property and asked the clerk for evidence sent over from Dr. Schaffer-White on the Blue Jay case. He brought out a sack, and I opened it and dumped the section of wire on a piece of white paper on his desk. A metal strip of shark’s teeth. A broken wire hooked through a drilled hole in the end, somebody’s dream of a choker. It was like one of the pieces Joe and I found in the trash barrel. I asked the clerk, “Ever see anything like that before?”

  “Nope,” he said, brushing his chin with a thumb. “What is it?”

  “A not-very-successful weapon of destruction. We found it on somebody’s neck.”

  “Yuck.”

  I asked if he had a Polaroid, and he opened a drawer and took out a camera and let me take a picture of the piece with a ruler next to it for reference. I thanked him, left, and walked the half block over to the library and looked up “wire” on the computer index.

  The screen was black with orange letters, and my eyes weren’t focusing well. Only sixteen hours ago I’d been witness to a gruesome murder, and here I was in the sanctuary of a library, civilization all around.

  I printed out the first level of book titles, thinking I’d file it and come back when I wasn’t so tired and when I didn’t have Monty on my mind, knowing I’d have to call him, and then I hit the wrong key to exit and got another level of menu, and a book title jumped out at me as if it read my mind: The “Bobbed Wire” Bible.

  Quickly, I wrote down the call number and went in search. Positive that it would be just my luck that this branch wouldn’t have the book, I searched the shelves anyway, and there it was. Tan, softcover, printed by Cow Puddle Press, Sunset, Texas. I went to a table in the corner and started turning pages. Hundreds of drawings of wire, in brown ink, with names and patent dates under them, filled the pages.

  I found Les in a room at the lab with a tech at a comparison microscope. The tech was a young man who never said much, and out of his lab coat looked like he spent all his spare time trying out for powerlifting championships.

  “Smokey,” Les said, “how’s it going? You lightened your hair. It was redder.”

  “Red doesn’t hold very well.”

  “Go natural, like me.”

  “What do we have new on the Carbon Canyon?”

  “Records on the mammo-whammy.”

  “The what?”

  “The mammogrammy. Boob-tube prints on your very-ex-sister-in-law. Now don’t take offense. You’re a pretty good egg, you know that? She’s a good egg,” he said to the tech, who looked embarrassed as he set aside a broken screwdriver he’d been examining. “Dr. Robertson was good enough to get me a report in no time at all.”

  “You mean Miranda did have implants?”

  “That’s right,” Les said with a gleam in his eye.

  I couldn’t believe it. That meant Nathan knew when I asked him, and he didn’t tell. Maybe he encouraged her; maybe he liked her big knockers. And it meant the body in the horrible fire was Miranda for sure. I didn’t let Les Fedders know what I was feeling. I just said, “Can I see the report?”

  “Come on down to my digs.”

  In an empty office the investigators use when they’re in the lab, Lester lifted the briefcase he’d stashed between a desk and the wall and extracted a clasp envelope. He slid out several stapled pages. “Pictures from Penthouse,” Les said. “Here we are.”

  There were no pictures. Only a written statement by a plastic surgeon. I barely had the pages in my hand before Les was around behind me, leaning over my shoulder and tapping with one long, knobby finger on the word “silicone.” “She had silicone. It makes a mess in the crematoriums. Remember, the woman in the car had only a little melted plastic. The woman in the car is not Miranda Robertson. Oingo-boingo.”

  “Les, this is wonderful!”

  “Not for Miss Crispy Critter, it isn’t.” He moved back a decent distance and when I turned, he was standing with one knuckle on the edge of the desk, looking like a thin and haggard Kewpie doll.

  “Thanks for this, Les.”

  He came forward and took the papers back from me. “Hey,” he said, “I missed you at the pigout we had for Turrell’s b-day Friday.”

  “Have you ever seen me at one of those things?”

  “I will, someday.”

  “You’re a real missionary, Les.”

  “I try.”

  “What about the dentals again?”

  “Oh,” he said, unflapping another envelope and slipping out a paper with a map of teeth predrawn in red ink, on which a dentist would notate wherever cavities were filled, crowns awarded, roots tunneled, or appliances screwed. The open red mouth for Miranda’s chart was free of marks. “Like I said, this woman has her teeth cleaned, nothing more,” he said. “One of those God-given mouths that can gnaw billiard balls.”

  “How close is Meyer Singer to coming up with anything, do you know?”

  “Meyer takes his own good time. By the way, he goes to my church. I didn’t even know that. Our church is so big. You been there? Crystal Cathedral?”

  I shook my head no. “Now I have something for you,” I said. I took out the book on barbed wire I had slipped in my jacket pocket and turned to item number 494: Textile Carding Wire. I put the snapshot down next to it. “Wire on the Blue Jay victim.” I slid another Polaroid down beside it that I’d taken of the wire roll found in the trash barrel and that I’d stopped back at Property to get. “Wire Joe and I brought in.”

  Skeptically, Les looked at them and at me, and said, “Okay-y?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” I said brightly, no time or inclination to tell him about yesterday. Let Joe do it. “Just thought you’d like to know. Thanks again for the good work on the med charts.”

  “Anytime,” he said, hands in both pockets, feet splayed, big ears backlit by a beam of sunlight cutting in from the window.

  My boss was around wanting to talk before noon, and I had to go over everything anyway, because he’d heard some of it from Captain Exner.

  “I need to go home,” I said. “I expect Blackman to be calling.”

  “You go do whatever is required,” Stu said. “Just be careful and observe procedure.”

  “You bet,” I said, and left knowing which caution was the more important to Stu Hollings, company man.

  When I got to the house, Motorboat was shrieking. I’d left that morning without giving him milk. Muzzle up, sniffing, his little buck teeth barely showing, he stopped pipping when I came near. He looked so darned cute. “Poor little baby! Twenty-four hours since you had milk warmed and hand-delivered. I got busy, little guy.” I reached to scratch behind his floppy ears and he let me, unblinkin
g. Then in a flash he whacked at me with his hard teeth, not so much of a bite as a warning, then fled to the hollow log. When I tried grabbing him from the front as he huddled there, he scooted back faster than I could react, and I said, “The hell with you then,” and heard behind me a voice that flung me against the dryer.

  “Who’s the guy?” Monty Blackman said.

  He stood in the doorway of the laundry room, a wild hood of black hair all around, pale blue shirt over a white one, pale blue jeans, the same cream ostrich skin boots poking out beneath, with the telephone ringing, ringing, ringing.

  25

  Caught in a lie, a basically honest person wants to come clean, beg forgiveness, trade for wholesomeness again. That’s what I wanted to do with Monty: confess. Say, a man’s been killed right before my eyes! Did you know? Did you order it? The game is up.

  What I said was: “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

  “Your phone’s ringin’,” he said. He stood aside.

  I slid through the laundry room doorway close enough to smell him, all the while hoping whoever was calling would not hang up.

  “Smokey, honey,” Mrs. Langston said, “I just passed a man asking for you, and I told him to go on up, but then I forgot: I maybe didn’t lock your door after getting grass for Motorboat. But I shouldn’t have just sent him along up there. I thought you were home, but I didn’t see you come home. Is that all right? He said he was your boss.”

  “Uh, I think so, Mrs. Langston. You might want to have Harvey check the wiring, though. You know how those things go.”

  “Oh, migod. Oh, migod. I’ll call the police.”

  “No, wait. I think you can still drive it. Just give me one minute and I’ll come down and check.”

  I was watching Monty stroll around the living room touching things. From a shelf over the fireplace he picked up a tile on which was painted a lazuli bunting, with its bright blue hood, gripping a bug in its beak. He nudged a gas bill that lay on top of the stereo. From a chair, he picked up a paperback I had with a bookmark in it. I’d been reading about a forensic anthropologist named Clyde Snow, a renegade genius who brought some measure of justice to hundreds of unearthed Argentine “disappeareds.” On the front was a photo of half of the face of Joseph Mengele, the infamous death camp doctor, merged with his recovered skull to demonstrate that skeletal remains can be identified. The title was Witnesses from the Grave. I was relieved when Monty just tucked the book between the cushion and arm without even looking at it, and sat down, putting an ankle on a knee.

  How long had he been in my house? Mrs. Langston hadn’t said. I’d decided a long time ago not to keep anything at home that related to my work—no folders, no training certificates, no mugs with clever penal code numbers on them, no group pictures. The only thing that could give me away was an old department directory; but even that I kept behind a stack of phone books in a cutout of the dark wood counter in the bar, hard to see.

  I said, “An unlocked door is not an invitation.”

  “A shut eye ain’t always sleepin’ either,” he said. “Where’d you take off to?”

  “What gives you the right to come into my house?”

  He looked around, nodding. “Pretty nice place you got here. You must be doin’ jobs on the side. What you need my money for?”

  I went to the front door and opened it fully.

  “That mean I’m thrown out?”

  “No job’s worth my privacy.” I was shaking inside. “You’re a rude sonofabitch.”

  He came toward me but then parked his butt on the arm of my sofa. “I had to have Jolene follow you home one day just to be sure I’m dealin’ with who I think I’m dealin’ with. Now it looks like I was right to do that,” he said in his soft gravel. “I ought to fire your ass.”

  “Screw you, Monty. You don’t need my life history for me to wander around your bar in nighties. I don’t give my address or correct phone number to anybody.”

  I leaned out quickly to glance down the walkway to see if Mrs. Langston was in or out of her condo. Monty was being a jerk and so far not a threat. I didn’t really want to involve her.

  “You turnin’ tricks for this kind of place?”

  “That’s none of your business. Leave.”

  “Oh yes it is. I don’t want heat of any kind. I told you when you first come to see me, none of that stuff. Now maybe I didn’t make it clear I meant on your own time same as mine, and if that’s so, it’s my fault.”

  I sighed and said, “This place is my aunt’s.”

  “You got a car phone. I seen the antenna.”

  “I got scared one time. It’s how I spend my money instead of on manicures. You want to go through all my bills, see how I spend my money? Why wouldn’t a girl have a car phone if she can manage it? And I sure as hell don’t need your sending some little snippet of a no-brain to follow me. I really resent that.”

  He got up, amused, came close and snagged a finger in my tan leather belt, giving it little tugs. “I like you. Shoot, I don’t want you to go nowhere. You want me to apologize? I apologize. Monty can do that. For somebody he likes.” He brushed a hair, I guess, off my temple. I let him do this because I needed to hang in there with him if I was going to avenge, like Dr. Clyde Snow, a couple of disappeareds. “I just wanted to see if you’re all right. It can get kind of rough around those Harley humpers. One of those sauceheads get funny with you? That why you left?”

  “I got sick of you showing off,” I said, brushing his hand off my belt, letting him know I was willing to try a truce. “After about your seventh win.”

  I pulled away and was turning again to look for Mrs. Langston when her dear and brave form appeared on the walkway, all decked out in a pastel jogging suit, her eyes fired with sixty-five-year-old resolve, her cane a lumpy hardwood that looked a whole lot like a gladiator’s mace.

  Monty offered twice to look at Mrs. Langston’s car. She said her son was coming over. Harvey, she said, the name I’d made up only minutes before. While we talked, our eyes met often, and I smiled and one time winked when I thought Monty didn’t see. I watched as she went on her way, an almost-disappointed slope to her shoulders, this time gripping the cane not by its clubby head, but by its middle.

  Monty said, “I need you workin’ this evening. You going to do that for me?”

  We looked each other over, and I thought if this man’s asking me back to work, he doesn’t know I saw Quillard Satterlee’s—Bernie Williams’—murder. I could still get out to the farm for a look. What I had to decide was whether I should tell him I was going back for my artificially missing wallet.

  I walked him down the stairs, feeling the farther away from my apartment he was, the more comfortable I’d feel. On the way, he said, “So who’s the guy? You never told me.”

  “Shit, I forgot about that! You followed me last night too, didn’t you?”

  “I was worried about you. Came by and was gonna knock, but I saw you had something goin’. You don’t have to tell me. Your business is your business.”

  “Yeah right. Like my business is Jolene’s business. I’ll come back to work for you, Monty, but if this ever happens again, that’s it. No following me. I’d think you’d have a million better things to do than that. Do you have any idea how insulting that is? How would you feel if I followed you home?”

  “Come on now, that was a onetime thing, a onetime thing. What if you didn’t show up to work some day? How would I get in touch? What if you and old Howard run off with the fortune I got stashed in my till?” He stopped and looked out over the parking lot, beyond the fountain that continuously mists its recycled load into the air, to where a man and his small son were stopped to look at a green motorcycle with a snake molded onto the rear fender. I hadn’t seen it when I drove in because of a sewer-line repair truck that had been parked at the spot next to it but that was now gone, leaving three cones strung with bright pink plastic strips in its wake. “Besides,” Monty said, “that guy’s too old for you. Mus
t be he’s a stud.”

  “Are you leaving or am I going to have to quit my job all over again?”

  A sensual smile formed within his beard, and he cocked his head at me, his thumbs in his hip pockets, and said, “Don’t come till eight. One of the new gals is workin’ split shift and I won’t need you till then. Competition, darlin’. You better behave.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work, Monty.”

  “Come on. Don’t take everything so serious. Puts creases in your forehead. Hey, you know where I’m off to? Goin’ to go pat my piggies on the head for doin’ such a good job becoming moms and dads. Why don’t you come along out there with me? What else you doin’ today? Let me make it up to you, me pissin’ you off. I’ll buy you dinner on the way back.”

  “Thanks, but—”

  “We’ll be back plenty of time.”

  “Well, I did lose something out there. My wallet.”

  “You shouldn’t bring a purse to them things.”

  “It was a wallet. I had it in my jacket.” I looked at his gleaming bike and said, “You don’t have two helmets. I’ll have to take my own car.”

  “You don’t have your driver’s license.”

  “I’ll live dangerously. Look, I’ll need a few minutes,” I said.

  “That’s okay. I need some gas. Where’s some at?”

  I told him, grateful for the few minutes to see if I could find Joe and tell him what was up. When I rang up, Joe wasn’t there. I couldn’t reach him on his car phone either. He refused to wear a beeper, saying it was too much like being owned. Fishing Christine Vogel’s card from my purse, I said the number over to myself, then tore the card to pieces and put it down the disposal. I touched the wallet in my pocket and thought I’d have to lose it somewhere so I could say I’d lost it somewhere. Christine’s voice mail came on when I called her. I left a message, telling her I was on my way out to the Avalos farm, that Monty seemed all right, seemed normal; leaving directions and telling her to coordinate with Joe. I called Joe’s number again and left the message I should have left before. I even tried Ray Vega. No deal. God help the world if you need a cop at lunchtime.