Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

  “There’s something else.”

  “Name it.”

  “Dale’s in trouble, professionally speaking.”

  “According to the paper, so are you.”

  Wanting to stay in control, I ignored her comment. “I help you get your father back,” I said, “you owe Dale and me. And I mean both you and your dad.”

  “Okay.” She got up, wobbling a little. Standing beside me now, red curls aflame in the window light. “So, what now?”

  “No violence,” Carmen said from the couch.

  Kimberley blinked. “Fine with me, sweetie.”

  Then Carmen rose and glided wordlessly out of the room, disappearing up the stairs.

  Kimberley watched Carmen go. “What was that about?”

  “Nothing. You feel well enough to take a ride over to Glendale?”

  The last of the morning overcast was evaporating, and everything outside my window seemed tinted a pale, cold yellow. Kimberley turned away.

  “I’m ready.” She slipped her shades back on, coughing into her sweater sleeve. “For a cigarette.” Hacking again.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” I said.

  She smiled tightly, her face pained. “No, I’m serious. The nicotine’ll help clear my head.”

  “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “I want my dad back.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  I wanted to end this thing, to get back to tending to my career and Carmen and Albert, to shooting hoops again at lunch in the basement gym, to fixing an upstairs toilet that wasn’t flushing quite right, to taming a front yard that was starting to look a bit tropical, even in February. To get back to doing my F-due reports (late, of course).

  But we weren’t going anywhere just yet. Kimberley stayed frozen, gripping my forearm for balance.

  “Do me a little favor,” she said, her voice no more than a wisp of the throaty croak I knew.

  “Sure.”

  “Take this ice pick out of my ear.”

  Twenty-three

  That forty percent chance of rain the weather guy was talking about last night seemed to jack to about eighty on the drive twenty-five miles inland to Glendale. A ceiling of ribbed clouds the color of wet cement stretched across the San Fernando Valley, shadowing the sun from the drizzled Hollywood Hills to the north and casting the cars and buildings and trees and rows of houses in a gentle half-light. It was as if the city were locked in an old-fashioned black-and-white photo, and it made me fix on a single thought: Everything dies.

  Kimberley was mostly silent, wrapped in her own thoughts. I’d let her choose a tape from the glove, and she’d gone straight for Pearl Jam. As we pulled off the Glendale Freeway and headed due north on Pacific Avenue toward Rudy Kirkmeyer’s home, Kimberley cranked up the volume just as Eddie Vedder capped the tale of a murderous flashback with a refrain that counterbalanced my fatalist perspective: I’m still alive.

  I suppose. We rolled along, pinned to our seats by a wall of guitars.

  Rudy lived about a half mile north of the Glendale Freeway, in a neighborhood of sensible homes that I guessed were built sometime around the 1920s. Smallish houses with a semblance of style, some with red tile roofs and Spanish arches, others with leaded glass and steeply pitched rooflines for an English twist. The uglier homes on the block just sat there like shoe boxes, as if the architect had taken a vacation.

  “It’s the white one with the green shutters,” Kimberley said, nodding.

  Rudy lived in one of the better-tended shoe boxes on the street, with a decent lawn, a cement driveway, and a brick porch. Oversize junipers lined the far side of the front yard like a row of missiles on a launching pad. Closer to us, a tangle of mature hibiscus obscured the side windows and spilled onto the wood shake roof. Nice fire hazard, I almost remarked, but Kimberley was keyed up enough about her dad’s safety, so I let it pass.

  Dale’s Buick was parked just ahead, where the road began to curve away. I cruised past the residence and slid in behind the sagging Regal.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  Kimberley was talking about Dale. She tore out of the door before I even cut the motor, cupped her hands against the Buick’s passenger-window glass to see better, then stood back, aghast.

  “Oh my God, he’s not moving!”

  I came around the driver’s side and opened the door. A Mc-Donald’s bag puffy with discarded paper rolled off the seat and onto the pavement. Dale was still in the pair of jeans I’d bought him last week and the blue cotton dress shirt Carmen had loaned to him from my closet. The top button on the jeans was undone and his shirtsleeves were rolled back. His mouth was open, a pile of gold fillings glittering in the dark.

  “Jesus, what is that sound?” Kimberley said from across the hood.

  The man was snoring like a hippo.

  “Dale,” I said, shaking his shoulder. His head rolled back, one eye sliding open. I couldn’t smell booze on him, but Christ, I was certainly thinking about it. His other eye opened, and I thought he was swallowing his tongue when the snoring abruptly stopped.

  He tried to sit up straighter, grimacing. “J., hey, J., where … Wow, what time is it?”

  A chill wind buffeted the Buick’s open door and seemed to help Dale wake up quicker. I let him get his bearings, and scanned the backseat for signs of alcohol. No empties in sight.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not sauced.”

  “I didn’t say you were, man.”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t have to.”

  Still an excellent observer.

  “You didn’t call,” I said.

  “I was up most of the night. That’s why I’m so wiped out.” Kimberley came around the front of the big Buick and stood beside me, staring in at Dale. “They were up really late, lights didn’t go out until two A.M.,” he added, grinning at me.

  “Don’t tell me, you played commando,” I said.

  “No sweat, I played it safe. Waited an extra two hours, then I went around the side there by the hibiscus trees. Got a good look, too.”

  I frowned. “Exactly what I told you not to do.”

  Kimberley shifted her weight, leaning forward. “So, whatcha see?”

  Dale paused as if to savor the moment. “You may not like this. The place is torn apart.”

  “Oh God!”

  “They trashed it?” I said.

  “Tossed it is more like it. Stuff everywhere. My guess, they were looking for something they couldn’t find.”

  Kimberley pressed a hand to her forehead and paced in the street. “They know! They know!”

  Dale eyed the strutting redhead quizzically. I filled him in on the fact that Rudy didn’t have a will, describing the deal Kimberley had cut with Angie to get a divorce rolling.

  “Well,” Dale muttered.

  “Well what?” she barked.

  Dale took measure of her jumpiness before he spoke, then said, “As a DA I made plenty of bargains with bad guys over the years. They almost never worked out quite the way I wanted.” Dale rubbed his chin, which looked like it had a good three-day salt-and-pepper growth going. “Don’t know if I’d trust those two to keep up their end in any situation.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Kimberley shot back. “They’ll get fifty grand more when the divorce is done. That’s easy money for a criminal.”

  But Dale was already making the critical connection, and he jerked his thumb toward the house. “Inside, they were looking for a will that doesn’t exist, weren’t they?” Kimberley was too keyed up for me to agree with Dale out loud. “He dies intestate, she gets half, isn’t that right, J?”

  I nodded subtly.

  Kimberley caught my nod, stopped pacing and slapped her hand on the Buick’s hood. “Brilliant! Boy, you two are just too smart for words.”

  I realized that she had only half believed me when I laid out Rudy’s situation for her both last night at the Captain’s Galley and this morning at my place. I still couldn’t grasp
why Rudy Kirkmeyer would marry Angie, let her clean out his safe-deposit box, and fake a degenerative disease just to get his daughter’s undivided attention. But I was beginning to see how remarkably obtuse Kimberley could be. Now it was as if she’d finally got the message and was kicking herself—and Dale and me—for not seeing it before.

  “That’s it, I’m going in there and getting him,” she said. “Right now, goddamn it.” Stalking across the street, eyes straight ahead.

  I hustled up the curving drive behind her, Dale lagging back a good fifty feet as he tucked in his shirttails and combed his hair with his fingers. A fresh puddle of oil freckled the cement opposite the garage door. Probably from Carlito’s rig, I thought, which meant he wasn’t there. Not that I feared the idiot, but not dealing with him would be a plus. Kimberley mounted the brick porch, blew off the doorbell, and pounded the front door with her fist.

  “They’re probably not here,” I said after a solid minute of intermittent knocking.

  Kimberley swung around and glared at Dale. “You were supposed to be watching him.”

  Dale gazed into a planter of overgrown azaleas. “Must’ve slipped out while I was resting.”

  Kimberley shook her head. “Nice. Leave it to Dad to hire Rip van Winkle as his lawyer.”

  She was pushing it too hard. “Cool the sarcasm,” I said, “it isn’t necessary. If you’d have included us in your little dealings with Angie, we wouldn’t be here right now.”

  Kimberley huffed, standing back from the big green door. “Guess I’m not used to dealing with ‘bad guys.’” She paused and regarded Dale, who was still half out of breath from his scramble up to the porch. I suppose that what she finally saw was a tired old lawyer who’d spent a cold February night in his car, trying to keep tabs on her addled father.

  “Sorry, Mr. Bleeker. No offense.”

  I imagined that Dale Bleeker was used to taking grief from victims and their families whenever they felt the “System” had let them down.

  “None taken,” he said.

  Her eyes were suddenly full of tears when she turned to me. “What do we do?”

  We needed to get inside to have a look around, maybe find out something about what Angie and Carlito were up to. “Got a key?” I asked Kimberley.

  “No, how should … Oh! I know where Mom used to hide one.” She led us off the porch and around the side of the garage to a decorative brick wishing well with a wood shake roof to match the house. “I was a little wild as a teen,” she said over her shoulder as she reached into the well, tamped her hand around a bit, and pulled out a rusty silver key. “Dad would lock me out if I stayed out past my curfew. I thought he was being ridiculous.” A smirk crossed her face. “So did Mom.”

  “He was probably just concerned for you,” Dale said.

  Kimberley stopped dusting off the old key. Her nose was pink from the cold. “Oh really,” she said, not like it was a question she wanted him to answer.

  “I have a beautiful young daughter, too,” he said. “You know, having a father who cares about you is not all that bad.”

  Kimberley’s face grew clouded. I took the house key right out of her hand.

  “Wait on the porch,” I said.

  I turned the dead-bolt and stepped inside, leaving the door cracked behind me. The air was pungent and stale, like a pile of dirty laundry. The entryway was done in bone white Formica, a small patch that gave way to wall-to-wall frost green carpeting throughout the living room. To my left was the kitchen. On the right, a hallway that led to the bedrooms. A brand-new big-screen TV set was parked on the tiles in front of the fireplace in the living room. The box it came in was flattened and leaning against the dusty cream-colored draperies, which were drawn across a pair of wide sliding glass doors leading to the backyard. The room was an unholy mess, the glass coffee table littered with fast-food cartons and empty beer bottles. Satin throw pillows were propped against the base of the white leather sofa, an ashtray tilting in the pile carpet a few feet away. I caught an unpleasant whiff of rotting food, looked down, and saw an open bag of cheese puffs swarming with ants.

  The kitchen sink was piled with dirty dishes. Cupboard doors hung open. Every glass in the place, from highball glasses to juice tumblers to a fancy German beer mug with a pewter cap, had been pressed into service of late. The pantry looked like bears had raided it. A pile of Cocoa Puffs crunched beneath my shoe as I reached up to grab a checkered dish towel from a hook on the wall.

  I smashed a few thousand ants in the dish towel and wrapped the cheese puffs tightly inside the cloth, then opened the door for Kimberley and Dale. Rudy’s daughter staggered about from room to room, muttering “Oh God” over and over.

  “J., take a look,” Dale said from a room down the hall. It was a bedroom converted into a study, with a nice oak desk and custom-made bookshelves fronting plaid wallpaper accented in Kelly green. A black metal filing cabinet stood in the corner beneath a potted bamboo. All four cabinet doors were ajar. Beneath them was a foot-deep pile of manila file folders and loose papers.

  “Oh!” Kimberley sputtered from the doorway. Her body began to shake all over. I reached out and caught her just as she collapsed. We stood there, not moving. The only sound was Kimberley’s sniffling sobs into my shirt. When at last she lifted her head, I let her stand on her own. “This used to be my room,” she whispered.

  Dale looked offended by the sight of the woman crying. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’ll find him.”

  The front door creaked. Kimberley caught her breath. Then silence. I put my index finger to my lips and motioned them both to stay still. My feet made no sound on the carpeted hallway as I stepped slowly and lightly, my back hugging the long wall. The front door cracked open and the shadow of a man spilled onto the entryway. Carlito? The nose of a handgun inched inside, stopping me dead.

  I glanced about. Holy shit, what now, genius? I was halfway down the hallway and didn’t have time to rush the door to repel the gunman without getting shot, so forget that. I couldn’t retreat in time to hide either. What brilliant timing.

  The gun hovered just above the gold doorknob. Like a helpless insect, I had simply frozen in place, grateful that the ceiling light above me wasn’t on.

  Carlito would shoot me, I was sure. Even if he wasn’t a true killer, I figured he felt murder for revenge was justifiable, even noble. And by now, revenge had to be on his mind. I’d nearly torn his arm off that first time we’d met at the savings and loan, right in front of his woman. Then he and his homies had taken a sound thumping that day at the pier. And that day at my house, Max had ventilated the dude’s backside with his teeth, another unmanly episode played out in Angie’s presence. I’d damaged his pride enough. He might be a coward and a bully, but I believed he would find the sack to pull the trigger.

  As the door swung farther open, I said a prayer: Dear God, let him be a terrible shot. I flattened myself against the wall, hoping he might head into the living room without glancing right, toward me. But Kimberley gasped somewhere behind me and the gun swung around.

  “Hold it!”

  “Don’t shoot!” I said from the shadows.

  Tamango Perry came out of his shooting stance and relaxed. “I should have known.”

  “Jesus. What are you doing here?”

  He put the gun in his shoulder holster. He wore a black suit with a white shirt and a subdued burgundy foulard tie. The confrontation had taken his breath away, but his poise returned as he straightened his lapels and looked around the place.

  “I told you I would keep an eye on the situation.” He held up his cell phone. “A neighbor called and said there was a possible break-in.”

  I shook my head. “We used a spare key.” Showing him what Kimberley had extracted from the wishing well.

  Tamango looked around. Not a sound came from the study.

  “It’s okay,” I called out. Dale and a pale-faced Kimberley peeked into the hall. I waved them over. Tamango and Dale said a brief hello an
d shook. “This is Rudy Kirkmeyer’s daughter, Kimberley,” I said. “He’s with the Glendale PD.”

  Tamango bowed slightly. “A pleasure.” Then he looked at me. “So, you had a key.”

  “I used to live here,” Kimberley said. “It was in the same old place after all that time.” The detective was his usual straight-faced self, which seemed to unnerve her. “It is my dad’s house,” she added. “I’ve got a right to be here.”

  Technically she was wrong, but I let it go.

  “I see,” the detective said. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “And why are you here today?”

  He flipped open his notepad, took out a black ballpoint, and listened patiently as Kimberley gave him a short version of Rudy’s developing predicament.

  “I am sorry,” Tamango said, “but I have to ask you to leave. You’re trespassing.”

  Kimberley looked staggered. “What the hell kind of cop are you?”

  One who knows the law and plays it refreshingly straight, I thought.

  “No, he’s right,” I said quickly. “We can talk about this more on the street, right, Detective?”

  Perry looked amused. He didn’t seem to have much of a touch with women, and clearly didn’t care. “That is what I had intended.”

  “Wait,” Dale said. In his hand was a framed color photograph. “I should put this back before we go, but you may want to check it out first.”

  “That’s my parents on their forty-fifth wedding anniversary,” Kimberley said. “The last year my mom was alive.”

  In the picture, Rudy stood arm in arm with a beaming grayhaired woman. Rudy’s wife had saggy jowls but the same high forehead, fine nose, and creamy skin as Kimberley. They were outdoors in a forested place, posing on a knotty wood porch lined with wooden railings. To their right on a corner of the porch was a handmade birdhouse with a sign over the open door that said “Casa Kirkmeyer.” They stood in bright sunlight, but the entire porch was perched among large trees. Behind them a mix of aspens and pines rose from a steep gorge.

  “I saw it in the other room,” Dale said.

  Kimberley held the photo now. “Our cabin in Big Sur.”