Midnight Baby

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Tell me about computer enhancements,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Are they worth anything?”

  “Depends.” Guido frowned over the shot of the driver. He was going to talk apples when I was thinking oranges. It was all right with me. Somehow, I knew, all of it would end up in the same salad.

  “Depends?” I said.

  “Depends on the data available and how good a guesser the technician who interprets it is. A lot depends on luck. There’s a techno-nerd on campus who does this sort of thing, usually from information sent back by space probes. What we’ll do is give him what we have and tell him it’s a man’s face. So he’ll use statistical averages and some voodoo and give us back a man’s face with more details defined. If we gave him the same shit and told him it was a monkey, he’d give us back a bald monkey.”

  “So they’re worthless,” I said.

  “If it’s all you’ve got, though, go for it.”

  “I told you about Amy Elizabeth Metrano,” I said. “Some computer wiz took a picture that had been made of her when she was four and projected from it what she might look like as she aged. Would you put any faith in the images he generated?”

  “Hard to say. That’s different voodoo from the other situation, but it’s still voodoo, Maggie. Again, most of it is based on statistical averages. You know, how fast the nose grows, how dark her hair might get using family history. The problem is, there are so many variables.

  “Why?” he asked. “I can hear the wheels turning, but I can’t see which way they’re headed.”

  “Right now they’re turning toward Long Beach. It’s a nice day. Want to come along?”

  “I would, but I have too much shit to do.” He began unscrewing his camera from the tripod. “You said you had dinner plans?”

  “Yes. I’d invite you to come along, but it isn’t my party. I’m meeting Mike’s son.”

  “Mike?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I told you, I’m staying at Mike’s.”

  “No, you didn’t tell me. Is everything cool between you two again?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He thought about that as he put the camera into its case. I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder.

  “You do good work, Guido. Thanks for everything.”

  “Yeah.” He was staring at me again.

  “Bye, Guido,” I said.

  “I’ll walk you out.”

  My eyes were tired after hours of close work. The sun outside dazzled them, made them sting. I shielded my face with one hand while I rummaged in my bag for sunglasses. I put them on and turned to give Guido a hug. His eyes were all squinty, but I could see that he was still looking me over.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  He seemed to shake himself. He smiled at me as we walked down his long drive toward Mike’s Blazer. “You be careful down in Long Beach, hear? I’ve been hangin’ with you for a lot of years, Maggie. I know how easy it is for you to get into trouble.”

  “I’m just going to the beach,” I said, all innocence.

  “Duck if you hear gunfire.”

  “I always do,” I laughed. “But, Guido, if I don’t make it back?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make sure Casey gets my grandma’s rubies.”

  “Will do.” He held my arm. “Be a hell of a shame if you died on us, Mag. But if you do? Can I have your cameras? You wouldn’t be needing them.”

  “Sure, Guido.”

  “And that brass iguana you picked up when we were in Honduras?”

  “Sure, Guido.”

  He continued with his wants list all the way down the hill.

  I opened the car door and leaned toward him to kiss his cheek. He started to meet me, but then he suddenly drew back, his face bright as if the flash had exploded.

  “I’ve got it.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a wet smooch full on the lips. “It started coming to me as soon as you said ‘Mike.’ I know why you seem different.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  “You got laid. After months of celibacy, Maggie MacGowen finally got laid.”

  “Jesus Christ, Guido.” I pulled away from him and climbed into the car.

  He held the door so that I couldn’t shut it. He was positively bubbly. “That’s it. I know it is. So you gotta tell me about it, Mag. This is major. I mean, I figure Mike probably joined the police sometime early sexual revolution: post-Pill, pre-herpes and pre-AIDS. We all know what those guys did. What’s it like to hop into the sack with a guy who must have fucked his way through half of the female population of L.A.?”

  I turned on the engine, slipped it into drive, and eased off the brake. The car started to roll, but Guido still clung to the open door.

  “Shit, think about it,” he said, jogging now. “L.A.‘s like the third-largest city in the country. What’s that, like the twelfth-largest city in the world or something? That’s a lot of tutors. The things he must have learned how to do. God, I hope you kids are being careful.”

  “Close the door, Guido,” I said. My toe tapped the accelerator. The car leaped forward, forcing Guido to drop back. I reached for the door and slammed it just as I turned out of his drive and onto the twisty street below. Through the rustle of eucalyptus, I heard him yell:

  “Way to go, Maggie.”

  Just for academic reasons, I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. I seemed no different. It was just me, with mussed hair. And roses in my cheeks.

  The canyon below Guido’s house was dappled with patches of deep shade and bright sun. The sky above was the hard, artificial blue of a Beverly Hills swimming pool. A day of rare beauty. To waste any part of it slogging along a grimy freeway seemed sacrilege. I thought about finding a place to pull over and go for a walk down to the narrow creek that ran along the canyon bottom, breathe some real air, scuff the dry earth, clear my mind.

  Watching Pisces over and over, hearing her voice, hearing my voice talking to her, had left me feeling haunted. Like spending the morning with a ghost. I peered again into the darkness at the bottom of the canyon and kept moving along.

  CHAPTER 9

  I took the most direct route south, skirting along the blighted eastern fringe rather than traveling down the more genteel Westside. Not that it mattered; from the freeway, all neighborhoods look more or less the same.

  When the freeway ended, I followed the signs toward Long Beach. As soon as I crossed the bridge over the cement gash labeled the San Gabriel River, the air freshened and the sky was clearer than it had been downtown. The ocean was only two or three miles farther on. I could see it on the left, a flash along the horizon.

  The first public telephone I spotted was at a bus stop in front of the large state university. Parking was by permit only. So I stopped in the bus zone and left the motor running while I got out to use the directory attached to the phone.

  The night before, Dennis, the jeweler, had told us that the Ramsdales were part of the yacht-club set. I wrote down the listed address for the yacht club, then flipped to the M’s.

  There were two listings under Metrano: George and Leslie, and Amy Elizabeth. Both gave telephone numbers only, no address.

  Out of curiosity, I called Amy’s number first.

  A recording kicked on after the first ring. A soft, woman’s voice, sounding very nervous, said, “Thank you for calling the Amy Elizabeth Metrano Search Foundation. Correspondence may be mailed to …” A post office box was given. “Messages are checked regularly. If you have any information about our Amy, please wait for the tone and speak clearly.”

  I wondered how often the message phone rang. Anytime that phone rang, I knew it must sound like a fire bell in the night to the family.

  I dialed the second listed number. The same soft voice answered. Live this time.

  “Mrs. Metrano?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Maggie MacGowen. We met at the morgue yesterday.”

  “O
h.” A response with new energy. “Are you the one that said you have videotape of Amy?”

  “I have videotape of the girl in the morgue.”

  “That’s what I meant to say. The girl in the morgue.” She seemed chagrined.

  “We made some stills from the tape. Would you like to see them?”

  “Oh! Yes. Oh, thank you,” she said in a breathy rush. “I have to go to work right now. I have to be there when the shift changes. But I could get away right after. Where do you want me to come?”

  “Maybe we could meet. I’m in Long Beach right now. At the university.”

  “My job isn’t so far from there. I need about forty-five minutes or an hour.”

  I said fine. She told me she worked at an outlet for Bingo Burgers, and gave me directions.

  “Mrs. Metrano,” I said, “would you bring along some pictures of Amy?”

  She hesitated. “All right. If you need them.”

  “Thanks.”

  I saw a bus approaching fast up the street behind Mike’s car.

  I said goodbye to Leslie, scooped up my notepad and change, and made a dash. I didn’t peel rubber when I pulled away, but almost.

  Bingo Burgers sat on a corner across from a large city park, an ideal location. As it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the place was humming. Dodging kids and minivans, I managed to get inside unscathed.

  The menu was the usual fast-serve bland-in-a-bun the several thousand Bingo Burgers restaurants sell nationwide. This particular outlet had evolved a long way from the sticky plastic-and-linoleum places Casey used to drag me to when she was little. If Ronald McDonald and Walt Disney had done it in the dark, this place would have been their offspring. I walked into a two-story fantasy of tropical birds and giant aquariums, of ten-foot palms and tables in imitation grass shacks. A long spiral slide connected the upper dining room to the lower. The racket of over stimulated children and squawking birds merged into a steady, high-decibel roar.

  My thought was that whoever owned this franchise saw life in the big picture.

  I found Leslie behind the service counter, directing a couple of dozen adolescent employees. She wore slacks and a blazer with the company’s clown logo on the breast pocket. The manager’s blazer. She was pretty, trim in her uniform, but there was a hardscrabble edge about her. Leslie was a working woman, not a mom with a weekend job.

  When Leslie saw me, she grabbed a manila envelope and two large drink cups and came around the counter.

  “Maggie?” She handed me a cup. “Get yourself a soda. It’s a little quieter in the back. We can talk there.”

  We filled the cups and I followed her into a beachless cabana with a view of the street in front. When we sat down, we did show and tell, lining up both our sets of pictures on the table.

  I gave her a minute to look them all over.

  “What do you think?” I asked when she sat back.

  “I just don’t know.” There was some country twang in her speech. “I really hate it when I get told that Amy would have changed a lot by now. Like I didn’t already know that? I look at my older girls.” She glanced up at me. “Did you know I’m a grandma now?”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Don’t congratulate me. I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was just one of those things. Or that’s what my oldest told me at the time.” She smiled, resigned.

  “What I mean to say is,” she continued, “they look so different when they start to fill out. Amy had real fair hair when she was little. I suppose it darkened up some. Like mine did. I never was as blond as she was. The last time I saw my natural color it was sort of lightish brown.”

  Her hair that day was about the color of honey. She held one of the Hillary pictures at arm’s length to study it. Hillary’s hair had been bleached white. “What color do you think her real hair was?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe the coroner can tell us.”

  She had to swallow hard, and I regretted having said that so baldly. She shook it off. “I’ve been going through this routine for a lot of years. You’d think I would get used to it by now. But I just don’t seem to.”

  “I think that’s normal,” I said.

  “I guess so.” She dropped her eyes and busied her hands unwrapping her straw. She stuck the straw into the cup.

  Some people have about them an appealing mantle of vulnerability. You are drawn to them because you think they need protection. They make you feel like big stuff, strong and capable. Leslie made me feel that way. Until she took a drink through her straw.

  Leslie pushed her cup aside and roughly grabbed the arm of a passing busboy. Her expression was severe enough to scare the boy.

  “Tell Arturo to come over here,” she ordered. “Tell him I said move fast.”

  I turned to watch the boy scuttle away. “Something wrong?”

  “These kids. Just when you get one trained right, they go quit on you. It’s just constant aggravation.” She softened again.

  “I’m used to it, though. I always said I had six big babies, five kids and George. Now I have about ten times that many. Believe me, you gotta know how to handle them.”

  A tall, lanky boy about seventeen sidled over. He had dark, close-cut hair and a single stud earring. If I’d had to choose which of them, him or Leslie, needed a protector, I would have taken the boy. His knees shook.

  “You want me, Miz Metrano?” His voice changed register twice.

  She handed him her cup.

  He paled as he took it. “I forgot.”

  “Arturo, your job is recharging the soda base. There’s nothing in this cup but fizz and water.”

  “The fry timer went off when I was standing right there. I had to take care of the fries.”

  “Are fries your responsibility?”

  “No, ma’am.” He looked weepy.

  “Were the fry people around to take care of their job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your job is the soda dispensers. You come on in the middle of the lunch rush, Arturo. The soda base is gettin’ real low by then. If you don’t do your job, what happens when the customers get their drinks?”

  “I’m sorry, Miz Metrano.” Arturo was backing away. “I won’t forget again.”

  “You got that right,” she said. “Go back to work.”

  I did a quick reevaluation. The woman was no creampuff. She turned her attention back to me. “Sorry. Where were we?”

  “Mrs. Metrano, do you know a family named Ramsdale?” I asked.

  “Ramsdale?” She ran it over in her mind. “Commonish name, I guess. I can’t think of anyone in particular, though. Why?”

  “They had a fourteen-year-old daughter named Hillary.” I tapped a Pisces picture. “She has been identified as Hillary Ramsdale.”

  “Did she run away?” Leslie asked.

  “She ran or was pushed away.”

  “Dammit, though,” she said in her soft voice. “If I’d known how hard it is to hang on to your kids, I would have had them all tattooed.”

  “Amy has something better than a tattoo. She has her parents’ DNA. Did you and your husband give samples to the police so they can run a DNA screen?”

  “I did.” She emphasized I. I couldn’t read her. All she had to do was give a small amount of blood. It was neither scary nor painful. Nothing to be embarrassed about. “They only needed one parent. Might as well be me. George doesn’t like needles.”

  “My pictures haven’t helped, have they?”

  “Tell you the truth? They only make things more confusing.”

  I gave her my card with Mike’s home number written in below mine. “Call me anytime. You can leave messages.”

  As I gathered up Guido’s pictures, Leslie Metrano gathered hers. She handed them to me. “You might as well have them. You never know what will help.”

  “I’ll keep in touch,” I said. “I’ll let you know what happens.”

  Following Leslie Metrano’s precise directions, I approached Belmont Sho
re from the east end this time. I crossed the bridge onto Naples Island, passing over the ski boat basin and the channel to the open sea. The scenery on Naples was more boats, more yacht harbor, more million-dollar houses.

  I had looked up the address of the yacht club in the Thomas Guide map book I’d found in Mike’s car. The area was a maze of narrow streets and intersecting waterways. I got lost a couple of times, stymied by one-way passages and dead ends, before I found the right path.

  I drove around a horseshoe-shaped bay and over a two-lane bridge. Past a swimming beach with an opalescent boat-oil veneer shimmering on the water, and past the Sea Scout headquarters, I found the yacht club.

  The main building sat on a promontory that bulged out into the boat channel. A spiky collar of naked masts defined the contour of its water side. The clubhouse looked something like a Polynesian restaurant left over from the sixties, a long arc of heavy wood and fieldstone shaded by shaggy-leafed banana trees and leggy coco palms.

  Though everything looked well tended, I wouldn’t have described the club as posh. It was the boats out back and the cars in front that defined its status. Here were Mercedes station wagons, sleek Jags, more Cadillacs and Lincolns than I had seen in one place outside of Detroit, and litters of Volkswagen convertibles — the California teenager’s car of the moment. What this said to me was that there were at least three generations of the affluent playing in the same sandbox.

  I walked in past the brass plaque on the door that said “Members and guests only,” crossed the parquet entry, and headed straight up the stairs toward the sound of voices. Not a soul said boo to me.

  On the second floor, I found the bar, a large, cozy lounge walled by glass. Terraces overlooked the Olympic-size pool on the deck below and ranks of moored boats beyond. Through the open windows a brisk breeze blew in off the water, smelling more of bait and petroleum than sweet ocean. A dozen fat brown pelicans rocked in the wake of a passing harbor patrol boat. A peaceful place.