California Girl

by T. Jefferson Parker

  A ripple of fear and revelation shivered down David Becker’s back. “Are you an evangelist or a television marketer?”

  Whitbrend blushed and looked away. “I’m a minister by calling. But I’ve never delivered a sermon that can compare with one of yours. I’m not even in the same league. You have strength and authority. Your strength is wide and inclusive rather than focused and specific, which is what it takes to minister. I attend your church occasionally. When I can’t, my wife attends on my behalf. In a white sixty-two Impala. She tape-records your sermons for me so I can learn from them. I’m probably the only minister on earth who hustles home from his Sunday duties so he can listen to another minister perform his. Incidentally, there’s a nice aftermarket out there for tapes of your messages. I’m surprised you haven’t tapped it yet.”

  “Why flatter me? You’ve got twice the imagination and ambition that I do.”

  “But you’ve got all the talent.”

  David considered this twenty-two-year-old minister. “What do you want?”

  “To be a vehicle for God’s power.”

  “Does He speak to you?” asked David. More eagerness in the question than he had planned.

  Whitbrend looked at David. His blush was gone and his expression was grave. “I feel that He guides me.”

  “Have you ever actually heard His voice?”

  “No,” said Whitbrend.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “It’s the soil for my faith.”

  “God’s silence is the soil for your faith,” said David. “That’s good.”

  Whitbrend shrugged. “Have you? I mean, have you actually heard the Voice?”

  “No. So I listen all the harder.”

  “What more can anybody do?” asked Whitbrend.

  An uncomfortable silence.

  Then David looked out at The Raising of Lazarus. Saw the colors clear and rich in the morning sun. Tried to picture the Chapel of the Grove of God peaking toward the heavens. Imagined the glass flanks dotted with oranges. His own father could plant and tend the grove. David imagined his congregation inside. Imagined the sky bristling as the Word rode the airwaves to the corners of the universe. The Word the rider. His voice the horse.

  “I’d like you to deliver the Sunday message,” said David. “All three services. After that, we’ll talk again.”

  Whitbrend studied him with a tensile calm but a brightness in his eyes. Trying to keep his enthusiasm under control, thought David.

  “Okay,” he said, breaking into a nervous smile.

  David wondered how he’d broken the front tooth. Why he didn’t take the whiteness down a notch to match the others.

  AT TEN that morning David counseled a young couple about their upcoming marriage. Ron and Diane. This was one of his favorite pastoral roles, because he got to experience the power and energy of love between human beings. The younger they were, the more pure and simple this love would be. David often believed he faltered in this capacity, because he failed to warn some young people strongly enough about all that can go wrong. The list was awfully damned long. Perils upon perils. So why not let them find out on their own? Maybe they’d be just fine. The divorce rate was soaring and this “free love” thing seemed to have everyone under thirty heading for the sheets and everyone over thirty heading for the motel or the divorce court. But people were still getting married like there was no tomorrow. David tried to emphasize forgiveness, and giving your partner respect and liberty as well as love. Basically, with the young ones, he just sat across the desk from them while they held hands and nodded. Ron and Diane were very young and very much in love. Ron had gotten a medical exemption for flat feet from the draft board. Diane was going to put him through college. Ron was headed for IBM. Scrubbed, pink-faced, straight-toothed. They actually had pimples. Not severe acne, just the vestigial marks of youth. David noted that Ron hid an erection, which amused Diane. The young lovers made him smile.

  Just before noon he ministered to a believer dying in a hospital. It wasn’t easy to watch a person die. It challenged his belief in an afterlife when the present life so conspicuously and finally departed a body. And after such a long and tenacious fight. Life was the strongest thing he’d ever seen, but it was really kind of brief. It was there, then not. Really, totally, absolutely not. The dying person was a mother of three. Metastasized lung cancer, though she’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. Her children were too young to endure the scene, and the overwrought father was a blur of tears. He looked at David as if David’s God—the one to whom he and his family had reported for duty every Sunday of their lives—had specifically chosen his wife for this unfair and painful end. Which David fully believed and was exactly what he’d said about Janelle Vonn in his sermon on her death. That God chose some people to endure so that others wouldn’t have to. That we should love and respect these people.

  The father looked at David like he wanted to kill someone.

  When the children were ushered out David asked the young father if he would like to pray.

  I hate your fucking God, he hissed, tears hitting the linoleum floor around him.

  Let’s pray, anyway.

  That afternoon David sat in with the Grove Drive-In Church youth league. It was Barbara’s group, Tuesday and Thursdays. Social, spiritual, and philanthropic. They’d recently delivered another two thousand dollars’ worth of new clothes to children in Tijuana. David sat at a table in the back of the meeting room, his presence simply to encourage them. Watched Barbara handle the details of a car-wash fund-raiser. Thought back to an earlier voyage to Tijuana and the way Miss Tustin Janelle Vonn had been so beautiful and unself-conscious as she handed a new red sweater to a skinny wisp of a girl with dusty black hair and a smile bright as a lightbulb. The rain was pounding on a leaky sheet-metal roof and David clearly remembered what Janelle had said to the girl.

  Quiere a Dios con tu corazón, preciosa hermana. Pero lava tu pelo con tus manos.

  Love God with your heart, pretty sister. But wash your hair with your hands.

  David looked down at the little stack of worship pamphlets on the table. Yellow this week. Leftovers from the Tuesday youth league meeting. Picked one up and read the title of his scheduled sermon, “Integrity in a Relative World.” Had some nice moments in it, but not his best. A moot point, he thought, now that the Reverend Darren Whitbrend was set to take the stage. An acid test for the young minister. If Darren couldn’t move the congregation, then there was no point in further discussion.

  He thought again of Janelle and the towering foolishness he’d committed by bringing her an early copy of just such a worship pamphlet. On that of all nights. Night of nights. He closed his hands around the pamphlet and closed his eyes and thanked the Lord for the trust of a brother and the love of a wife and the loyalty of a friend. And prayed that the vile Hambly of the FBI had only been bluffing, trying to get something for nothing.

  When David opened his eyes Nick was standing before him. He looked tired and unhappy. Exactly how he had looked every day since taking his first homicide case. But dark around the eyes now and heavier and somehow dangerous.

  David set the curled worship program back on the table, stood, and led Nick outside.

  “Terry Neemal wants to talk to you,” said Nick. “I think he’s going to confess.”

  “He told me he didn’t do it.”

  “He’s been changing his story. Better take your own car, David. If he’s good for this, I might be there late.”

  25

  DAVID FOLLOWED NICK and Lobdell into the interview room. He’d never been in one before. He assumed the big mirror was really a window from the back. Like Whitbrend’s chapel. And that it was wired for sound and maybe video, again like the chapel. A green metal table and four chairs were bolted to the floor. The tabletop was marked with scratches and what looked like cigarette burns. A black plastic ashtray. Bright light overhead. David wondered how many sins had been confessed in here. How many tears had fallen. How
many hearts had finally cracked.

  “I’m going to stand in that corner,” said Nick. “Lucky’s got the opposite. We might butt in. If things get hot, that’s part of the deal. Stay cool. I’m taking off his cuffs. If he gets too close to you in a way I don’t like, I’m going to move him away.”

  “Usually the less you say the more you get,” said Lobdell.

  David stood there awkwardly, unsure what to do. He watched Nick go to his corner, open a briefcase, and bring out a manila folder. Nick arranged three large black-and-white photographs from the packinghouse on the table. Two of Janelle’s body. One close-up of Janelle’s face. All visible from wherever you sat or stood.

  David stared down at them. Astonishing. Indescribable. He’d never seen anything like them before. It wasn’t the death. It was the evil. The cruelty and obscenity. His throat tightened and his stomach dropped.

  Then Nick set out three of the old SunBlesst orange crate labels with the girl who looked like Janelle. Also visible from anywhere in the room. He remembered them flying all around Tustin in the Santa Ana winds one fall. Where had he gotten those old things?

  Then three childhood pictures of Janelle. Janelle sitting on a tree stump. Janelle holding a guitar. Petting a cat on a porch.

  Then David watched Nick go again to his corner and come back with a child’s stick horse. Happy little pony with a red felt tongue sticking out. Nick considered his tableau, then set the horse down diagonally amid the pictures.

  “The horse was named Bobby,” said Nick. “Used to be Janelle’s. I’m trying to pry open Neemal’s heart any way I can.”

  “You never know what’ll set them off,” said Lobdell.

  “I’ve never seen pictures like these,” said David. He felt light-headed and nauseous. “They’re the most hideous things I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe you should sit down, David,” said Nick.

  “Where?”

  “Put your back to the mirror,” said Nick.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  David worked his way into the unyielding metal chair. Took a deep breath against the sudden throbbing in his head. He folded his hands on his lap. Fixed his eyes on the doorknob across the room, well above the plain of horror and innocence laid out on the table in front of him.

  Neemal seemed dwarflike in his baggy orange jumpsuit. The hair on his shaven head and face had grown back enough to cast shadows. The big mustache drooped. His tawny tan eyes settled on David as Nick took off the handcuffs. Neemal smiled at him. David saw the black mark on his hand and arm. Like a tract of burned land, he thought.

  Rubbing one wrist, Neemal looked down and saw the photographs and labels and the stick horse. Stopped rubbing. Walked around the table, studying the pictures.

  When he went behind David, David saw Nick ease in his direction. Heard the movement of Lobdell in the corner behind him.

  Nick clicked on a tape recorder and spoke quickly. “This is Investigator Nick Becker and Sergeant Al Lobdell, and the jail chaplain, the Reverend David Becker. The suspect is Terry Neemal, who requested this interview and the presence of the Reverend David Becker. It’s Thursday, October seventeenth, nineteen sixty-eight.”

  David turned to see Lobdell leaning back in the corner, arms crossed and necktie crooked and his gut snugged into a wrinkled white shirt.

  Neemal got back to where he started. “I don’t understand the horse.”

  “Its name is Bobby,” said Nick. “It was Janelle’s.”

  Neemal nodded, looking down at David. “God forgives this?”

  David had no idea whether God forgave this or not. Why should He?

  “Yes,” said David, trusting in his God to lead him now.

  “A person who does this can still go to heaven?” asked Neemal.

  David felt his soul reverse and crawl back over itself. “Yes.”

  “How?” asked Neemal.

  Dear Father, speak through me now.

  “It is in His power,” said David.

  “But what would the person have to do?”

  God help me.

  “Ask forgiveness. Lead a life of good acts from this moment forward. Be generous and honest and always help the people around you.”

  God will accept those puny acts for what these pictures show?

  Neemal stared at David for a long moment. Something new registered on his face but David wasn’t sure what. Connivance? Subterfuge?

  “I did it,” said Neemal.

  David felt himself vanish. Because Terry Neemal’s soul was in the hands of God, but his body was now owned by the People of California.

  “Did what?” asked Nick, glancing hard at his brother.

  “What you see in these pictures,” said Neemal.

  “Which is what?” asked Nick.

  “I killed her and chopped her head off. See?” Neemal nodded at the picture in front of him.

  “Janelle Vonn was her name. You killed Janelle Vonn and chopped her head off?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Neemal started around the table again. Staring at the pictures. Stopped for a moment in front of each of the packinghouse shots. He had his blackened arm up, chin resting on his fist, elbow cradled in his other hand. When he went behind David again, Nick drifted toward them. Lobdell stepped forward, adjusted the tape recorder, stepped back.

  “Terry,” said Nick. “Of your own free will, you’re saying you killed Janelle Vonn and chopped her head off?”

  “Positively.”

  “How did you do that?”

  Neemal rounded David and stopped in front of the picture of Janelle’s face. He looked down at David. “I don’t remember.”

  “You remember that you killed her but you don’t remember how you did it?” asked Nick.

  “Precisely.”

  “Tell me about that night, Terry,” said Nick. “I want to know all about it.”

  Neemal continued to stare down at David. Tan eyes, the big fan of mustache, his face beveled into light and shadow. “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes, Terry, but I—”

  “And trust your God? Because the God that got inside my head for all those years was a real bad guy. Made me walk to Arizona.”

  “Yes, you can trust Him but He—”

  “I don’t remember very much. Just that she was wearing a blue sweater. And boots and a short black skirt. I don’t know what she was doing there. I was looking for something I lost. We talked.”

  David looked to Nick, who nodded tightly.

  David’s voice was hardly more than a whisper. “What did you say to her?”

  “I don’t remember very much. She had a very sweet voice.”

  “Sit down now, Terry,” said Nick. “Take the seat across from David. “How about a cigarette and a cup of coffee?”

  Neemal shuffled over, cuffs and sneakers flapping quietly on the floor. He slid into the metal chair opposite David. Nick took the seat to David’s left. Lobdell stayed in his corner out of sight.

  David kept his eyes on Terry Neemal’s face. The images just below his line of sight wavered up into his awareness like bodies in a lake. Beyond them waited the tan eyes. A flame flickered into David’s view and smoke rose from Neemal’s cigarette.

  “I was already in when she got there,” said Neemal. “That night. Inside the packinghouse. Looking for some matches I lost.”

  “How did you lose matches in the packinghouse?” asked Nick.

  “I lit a fire inside a few days before. I got cold. I left the matches there.”

  David saw that Neemal was now staring at the coal of his cigarette.

  “A book of paper matches, Terry?” asked Nick. “Or a box of wooden ones?”

  “Paper.”

  “Plain, or some design or company name on the cover?” asked Nick.

  David saw Neemal’s brow furrow. Big thought lines across his forehead. He looked at the coal again, then brought the cigarette to his mouth and drew. “Pep Boys. Manny, Moe, and Jack.”

  Lobdell cleared hi
s throat. Nick glanced back at his partner.

  “Did you locate them again in the packinghouse, Terry?” asked David.

  Neemal shook his head. “No. I did not. But I will say…that was when the girl came in.”

  “Janelle?” asked David.

  “Janelle Vonn,” said Neemal. “Vonn.”

  “Then what happened?” asked David.

  “She said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ I said I was fine and what a lovely evening it was. After that, I remember nothing.”

  “If you don’t remember killing her, maybe you didn’t,” said David.

  “Maybe you’re just making up a bunch of shit and wasting our time,” said Lobdell. Lobdell came around to the right of David. Stood behind the last open chair.

  “Oh, I definitely did it,” said Neemal.

  “Did you chop off her head before or after she was dead?” asked Nick.

  “She was still alive.”

  “What color was the handle of the machete you used to chop off her head?” asked Nick.

  “Black.”

  “How come you tossed the machete outside?” asked Lobdell.

  “Well, obviously,” said Neemal, stubbing out his cigarette, “so you wouldn’t find it.”

  “But we did. Where did you get it?” asked Nick. “The machete?”

  “Sav-On.”

  “Terry,” said Lobdell. “Are you ready to sign a confession?”

  Neemal looked at David again. Took a deep breath. “Yes. I am.”

  “I’ll write one up,” said Lobdell. “You can read it and sign it and it will prove what Nick’s other brother wrote about us in the paper this morning was shit.”

  “I didn’t agree with that article,” said Neemal. “I think Nick is an excellent detective.”

  “See?” said Lobdell, smiling. “Just ask Wolfman.”

  David felt half disgusted and half mystified by the proceedings. Man’s law was not his area. But he felt obligated to speak. “Is he competent to sign a confession?” he asked.

  No one answered.