by Chuck Logan
“I, ah, brought you a housewarming gift,” she said.
Remembering his lines, he smiled, “I’m afraid I don’t drink.
Anymore.”
“Oh, no, it’s…a custom. See, you’re supposed to carry the tray through all the rooms of your house before you spend the night, to appease the former residents. A kind of offering.”
“You mean ghosts.” Danny’s voice went flat as a shadow sat up in his mind.
“Welll,” she drawled playfully. “It’s not that serious.”
“I’ll give it a try,” said Danny. He opened the screen door and started to take the tray, then he looked around. No place to sit it down. He motioned outside, to the deck chairs and the small round table between them.
He placed the tray on the table and offered her one of the chairs. “I appreciate the gesture. But I already spent a couple nights here.”
“We know,” said Ruby. “At first we thought you were a cop.” She lowered her eyes. Shy. “Are you. A cop? I mean.”
“Why do you ask?” He drew it out in a slightly neutral voice, playing the drama, enjoying it.
“Well, there’s been a lot of cops here since the fire.”
“No. I bought the house from the cops, they auctioned it off. The guy who used to live here was cooking speed, they said. Turns out he wasn’t such a good cook.” Danny shrugged. “It was pretty cheap.” He hunched his shoulders.
“Needs a little work.”
“I’ll say. Well, just wanted to drop by and say hello. My partner is Terra. We have a lot of cats.”
“I noticed.”
“We try to keep them home, but they stray. You don’t mind cats?” She raised a slim eyebrow.
“Nah,” he said, almost visibly excited. Not by her. But by stage fright. His first real conversation from inside his new identity.
She waved, walked down the deck and disappeared around the side of the house. Danny marveled at how Ruby was, well, perfectly manufactured. And how utterly without sex appeal.
In the long shadow of Ida Rain.
That night, for the first time, he woke up with his ears plugged by the roar of rushing water. His eyes tracked across the dark porch to the tray of offering presents, and he had a piercing memory of Caren Angland falling away, shrinking, tiny-gone in the thrashing pit.
The next night, after a microwaved supper, Danny opened a can of Coors and strolled his fence line. Ruby and Terra had their CD player turned up. Gurgles of whale music belched, groaned and farted on the evening air. Obscene.
Cows fucking. Them fucking. Disturbed by the sounds, he went home and shut his doors.
He sat on the bare floor, sipped his beer and studied Ruby’s tray with its burden of offerings. The wine, the bread and the salt.
He did not believe in presences that needed appeasing in old houses. He did not believe in ghosts. What he did believe in, powerfully, was the potency of secrets. There was an old cop adage: getting out isn’t as hard as staying out. It was easier to escape than to avoid detection on the run.
There were so many opportunities to talk, to reveal oneself.
To explain yourself.
To confess.
After an interval, he went back outside and determined that the awful racket had stopped next door. In the dark, faintly, he heard Ruby calling. “Here kitty, kitty.”
The dream was just that. A dream. Not a nightmare. In it he clearly saw Broker and his baby girl. She of the big eyes and thick eyebrows. She was watching him grab the money off the floor of the workshop. Her eyes getting bigger and bigger.
That’s all. Then he woke up, slick with sweat. And for a while, he felt around the mattress he’d laid out on the back porch, to establish its reality. His own.
He got up, shaking. Fumbled for his contacts. Too much bother. Put on his glasses. The air clung like wet sheets. Mist fumed in the porch screens. Monet painting with a steam hose. The yard light looked like a smear of Vaseline.
The rumpled covers plucked at his sweaty skin, turbulent waves he might sink in.
Barefoot, he picked up the tray containing the wine, bread and salt. As he carried them through the rooms of his new house he pretended that his life also had rooms that he was making clean, and he was moving through them as well.
57
A sultry orange rain came down for days. And every day, Travis called to inquire how things were going. Then he came in person, driving through the gate in a late-model, black Ford Expedition.
“Nice wheels,” Danny said, going out to meet the inspector.
“Came from a bust in Menlo Park.” Travis walked into the house. The floors were clean, barren of carpet, glue, and staples. All the floor and window molding had been removed.
“You’ve been working. Looks great,” said Travis.
“I’m going to rent a floor sander, called in an order,” said Danny. He glanced at the dripping sky. “But I was hoping for a letup in the humidity.”
“You, ah, wanted a computer, right?”
“It was part of the deal,” said Danny.
“Just so happens we stumbled onto one.” He marched out to the shiny Ford and opened the rear hatch. In the cargo bay, piled haphazardly in mismatched boxes, in a tangle of cables, was a computer, monitor, keyboard, modem, fax and copier, a printer.
“Where’d you get this?” asked Danny.
Travis grinned. “Same place we got the Expedition. Repar-ations from the war on drugs. This is nothing. The guy had a stable of racehorses.” He tugged one of the boxes toward the hatch and raised his eyebrows. “Pentium 233, you like?”
“Definitely.”
“There’s an America Online kit in there, too, thought you might need it. And this.” Travis reached for his wallet, selected a piece of plastic and handed it to Danny.
A VISA card. “How’d you do this?”
Travis shrugged, like what the hell. “Consider it a little bonus. It’s drawn on the incidental fund at my office. We put you on as an authorized user until you get your credit rating up. I’d prefer you keep it under two hundred dollars a month. Any big-ticket items for the house, you clear it with me first. But, you know, there’s a lot of little shit”-he pointed to the computer-“like hooking up on-line, you can do over the phone with plastic. Otherwise it’s a hassle.”
“Thanks,” said Danny.
Travis adjusted, but did not remove, his sunglasses. “No.
I’m thanking you. Usually when I launch a witness, even if they don’t have a family, I have to hold their hand every day. Sometimes I have to stay with them, sleep on the couch, around the clock until they adjust to being inserted.”
They carried the boxes inside, and Danny decided to set up in the cleanest room in the place, on the screened porch.
The humidity wasn’t good for the machine, but the only way to escape humidity in the shadow of El Nino was to leave the state. The dust in the house would be worse.
“So, is there anything else you need offhand?” asked Travis.
An impulse leaped. Unplanned. “There is one thing, kind of a tangent,” said Danny. He thought of it as pulling the tiger’s whiskers. “I’ve been reading the books they gave me on Santa Cruz. One of them referred to the town being the murder capital of the world in the early 1970s.”
“Serial killer capital of the world,” corrected Travis. “Yeah, there were three killers active, two of them at the same time. Ed Kemper, he’s up in Vacaville; he got the most ink.”
“He hung out with cops, didn’t he. I mean, when he was doing the killings.”
“Yep. The original cop wannabe. A theory the FBI fell a little too much in love with. Ask Richard Jewel in Atlanta.”
“I hear you,” Danny grinned. “I was wondering, have you ever relocated a killer?”
“Hell yes. What do you think we do? Handle nuns? That’s why you’re such a walk in the park.”
“What’s it like, being around a killer? I mean, are they different?” He wished he could see Travis’s eyes.
<
br /> “Well…” Travis leaned back, again the furrows on the brow. He ran his square hand through his styled hair. “Depends. There’s the high-up ones and the soldiers.”
“I mean, do they feel different, being around them. You know, this close.”
“These guys, they only think of one thing. Getting their way. it’s like-‘I’d never do anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, so obviously Louie had to get whacked.’ Like that.
Ego maniacs. Mob guys I mean. But most of them had been in the joint by the time they got around to me, so they had old-fashioned prison manners. Now, the new ones we get, the druggies, who the fuck knows about them.”
Danny pondered, then brightened. “I was wondering. Is there any way you could hook me up with a local cop who worked the Kemper case.”
Travis’s forehead furrowed above his shades. “Ah, hmmm.
What I could do…is talk to a guy I know who teaches criminal justice at UCSC. He’s been around for a while. Maybe he could find one for you. That way I don’t have to get involved.” Travis nodded, took out a slim pocket organizer, a pen and made a note to himself. “Anything else?”
Danny shook his head.
Travis slapped him on the arm. “Look. You’ve been busting your balls all week. Take a break. Set up your computer. Go see a movie. Buy some new clothes. I’ll check in a couple of times next week…”
“Uh-huh?”
“I mean, call you. And try to drop by in six, seven days.
You all right with that?”
“Sure.” Danny felt like a witness remembering his lawyer’s advice. Simple concise answers.
“Great. I have a new pile of people to process, so, if you’re doing all right, just get in touch with me if you need something. You got the number?”
Danny patted his hip pocket. “Right here.” He tapped his forehead. “And here.” He made a mental note to call Travis, thank him for the computer. Sound grateful.
Travis walked back through the living room. For a moment he paused and tipped down his shades. He was facing away and Danny couldn’t see his eyes. But he was looking at the tray, which sat in the corner of the barren living room on an upturned cardboard box. The faint astringent scent of ripe mold insinuated from the mossy green bread sitting next to the unopened bottle of wine and the saltshaker.
Three half-burned candles jutted from a formation of wax that had spilled over the side of the box and reached to the floor. Travis pushed his sunglasses back up on his nose and kept walking, out the door, across the overgrown front yard, got in his confiscated black Ford Expedition and drove away.
Danny spent the rest of the day hooking up the computer and situated it on a makeshift desk made out of an old door and two end tables he had found in the junk room. The software was Windows 95, which he’d never actually worked on. He played with it, ran the AOL disk and called in to start an account. That took another hour.
By the time he had it all hooked up and running smoothly it was getting late. He drove into Watsonville, ate Mexican, had a few beers and drove home in a steady rain.
The next morning was Saturday, so he slept in. Floating onto the day, opening his eyes to a damp fluffy cloud of fog, his head ached pleasantly from the beers.
He saw the silly shrine he’d erected in the corner and laughed. He padded over in his bare feet and picked it up.
“Tough shit, Casper,” he said as he dumped it all in the trash.
He yawned and scratched his stomach. Put water and grind in the Mr. Coffee and went to take a shower. Later, after he’d shaved, the phone rang about three sips into his first cup of coffee.
“Hello.”
“Dan Storey?”
There was that second when the name flew by. Then contact. “Speaking.”
“This is Arnold Templeton. I teach at UCSC. We have a mutual friend. Joe Travis.”
“Sure Joe,” said Danny.
“Joe said you do some writing and you’re kicking around Santa Cruz picking up atmosphere.”
“You know,” Danny said expansively.
“Sure, well, about the good old days, when the ravines were full of bodies. I know this retired county sheriff’s deputy-Harold Wicks-I’ve had him in to talk to a few classes. He’s a sound guy. He was on the job then, with Kemper and Mullin. He said he’d meet if you buy the drinks.”
“That’s great”-his memory spun without traction for a beat, then caught-“Arnold.”
He took the name and number and called the man immediately. Wicks was the only person left in America who didn’t have an answering machine. The phone rang nine times until a gruff voice, slightly breathless, picked up.
“Hold on, hold on,” said Harold Wicks.
And then. “Yeah sure, Arnie Templeton over at the college talked to me. Writer huh? Okay. How’s tomorrow. Say two.
You want atmosphere? There’s this place called the Jury Box Bar on Ocean Street. Across from the court-house. That’s where Ed Kemper used to hang out with the cops. You know.
Him buying the drinks and asking us how the investigation was going.”
“Sounds great.”
58
Dead acorn husks and rain dripped on the flat roof. Danny had slept a full eight hours and had not dreamed. It was too foggy to run, so he showered, shaved, and fooled in front of the mirror with the hair drier, fluffing his new haircut.
When he emerged from the bathroom, the new coffeemaker he’d bought had his coffee waiting, and he took a cup to his computer on the screened porch overlooking the backyard.
Coastal fog basted the foliage, drifting like a cloud through the screens; he had to wipe down the computer. First day in his new office. A little rustic, but that would improve.
His video monitor cut a crisp black rectangle in the morning mist. The screen saver was a flowing star scene that created the sensation of traveling through deep space-the view from Captain Picard’s command chair on the Enterprise.
He sat down, sipped his coffee, and logged into the net.
The whole world just a click away. Cruising.
Old habits. He’d started the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Cruz Sentinel, but they hadn’t shown up on his stoop yet. No problem. He’d peruse the St. Paul paper’s Web page. He typed in the address. The awesome Pentium gobbled up the bytes, constructing the site.
When the page was intact, he selected the weather icon and waited for the display to come on-screen. The familiar forecast symbols marched across the page. White dots sprinkled from a cloud on a blue field. Snow today. High 31. Low 13. Snow turning to sleet tomorrow…sounded ugly.
Through the screened mist he heard Ruby’s voice, “Here kitty, kitty.”
Danny grinned. The voice came again. “Dan…can I come over. I’m missing a cat.”
“Sure,” yelled Danny back. “I’m on the back porch.” He clicked off the site.
She materialized out of the vapor in shorts and a blouse tied in a loose square knot above her navel. No shoes. Flossy white hairs coated her brown stomach. The idea of touching her was as sexually appealing as hugging a bundle of cotton sheets fresh off the wash line.
Looking at her. What? Nothing happened.
Ruby. I’m sure. I’ll bet your name was a solid Lutheran Emily or Gertrude back in Iowa before you came to California and were reborn in Licker-ville. Was she the pitcher or the catcher? Which one strapped on the dildo? Some night he’d drop over for a peek.
“Hi, Ruby. Want some coffee?” he said pleasantly.
“Thanks,” she said. “You haven’t seen any of the cats have you?”
“Nope.” He got up and went into the kitchen. As he poured a cup he called out, “You take anything?”
“Some two percent if you have it. You’ve really been fixing this place up. Pentium. Nice box,” she added.
He poured in a dollop of half-and-half and returned to the porch. Ruby took the cup and sat in a wicker chair he’d brought in from the deck. Her smooth thighs would feel like tennis balls if you sq
ueezed them. Or if you got squeezed by them. He pictured Terra, her butchy partner, whom he’d only glimpsed, caught in a choke hold between those thighs. Fat zapper tongue, he bet-like the frog in the Budweiser commercial.
“Cats are independent. It’ll come back,” sympathized Danny.
“It’s not that simple around here,” she said.
“Why’s that?” Curious.
“Do you believe in precursor events?” she asked seriously.
Danny gnawed his lip. Hmmm. Some New Age mumbo jumbo?
Seeing his lost expression, she explained, “I mean to earthquakes.”
“Oh.” He leaned back to listen. As he did, he discovered that if he looked at Ruby and thought about Ida Rain, he started to get excited.
“Dan, you’re living in the footprint of Loma Prieta,” she announced in hushed tones. “I was in downtown Santa Cruz, at work, when it hit. And I never want to go through that again.”
“What’s that got to do with cats?”
“Well, that was before I…met Terra, and I only had one cat. And before the quake, my cat vanished. When I met Terra she told me she had two cats, and both of them ran away two days before it hit.”
“Cats,” said Danny, looking at her flawless delineation of inner thigh, remembering the clasp of Ida’s legs in the dark.
Here pussy, pussy.
“Terra explained it to me. Abnormal animal behavior is common before seismic events. There are scientists who keep track of lost cats. When the cats run off, watch out.”
“Ah-huh.” Playfully, Danny moused into accessories, pulled up networking and dialed the 800 number for the St. Paul paper. It was about eight o’clock. Ten in Minnesota. Ida Rain ran on strict time. Sunday mornings, she went out to breakfast and then grocery shopped for the week. It was safe to assume she wasn’t logged on to her computer at home or in the newsroom.
Still thinking Ida, he watched Ruby cross her legs. Ow, that was nice.
The network marquee came on the screen. Under user name, he typed in Ida Rain. Password-one of the first things he had learned about Ida was her password. He’d just watched her type it in until he had the sequence of keys. It was Burgundy, her favorite color. He toyed with the notion of reading Ida’s e-mail, getting seriously kinky and voyeuristic as his eyes tracked south of Ruby’s belly button. The computer screen shivered, repixelated. He was in.
