Girls in Pink

by Bob Bickford

  I followed her to her house. After months of seeing the place every day, it was somehow strange to find myself standing on her porch, breathing in the fragrance of her honeysuckle. She turned in the front doorway and looked at me.

  “You didn't ask me my name.”

  “I figured you'd tell me when you were ready,” I said.

  “Annie Kahlo,” she said, and put out her hand. “What does it mean…your name, Crowe?”

  “I don’t think it means anything,” I said.

  She held the door open for me, and I followed her inside.

  “Everything means something,” she said, looking back at me. “Anyway, I have a confession to make. Someone told me that you were a detective, for hire. I’m sorry…I wasn’t honest.”

  “It isn’t exactly a secret,” I said. “I’d take out more advertisements, if I could afford it.”

  “I want to hire you.”

  I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. She led me inside.

  The walls were dark wood and the furniture heavy, spare and elegant. It was cool and hushed, and it all looked and smelled like it had cost someone a bundle. Even the dim light shining through the colored windows said money. A vase of white flowers stood on a table, and I stopped to look at it.

  “Lilacs?” I guessed.

  “Orchids,” she said. She seemed amused. “They remind me of ice cream. You don't know very much about flowers, do you?”

  “There's a whole long list of things I know nothing about,” I said. “I've gotten used to it.”

  She led me further into the house. I looked back over my shoulder. The flowers did look like ice cream. We went through a dining room and into a black-and-white tiled kitchen. The cake sat on the counter. It had cream frosting and thin slices of orange and lime and lemon. “Happy Birthday, June” was spelled out on it in pale green sugar. It looked like a pretty good cake.

  “She was ten years old when she died,” she said.

  I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about. I shrugged in what I hoped was a sympathetic way.

  “I used to read to her every night, but then I went away. I had to, but I wrote the story so she would still have it when I was gone. I have it now. I'll show it to you.”

  She went out. I heard her footsteps go across the wood floors out of sight, and then disappear. I looked around while I waited. An enameled ice box hummed softly in the corner. A little yellow bird watched me from a cage hanging in the window. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. In a minute, she came back carrying a sheaf of papers bound in a cardboard folder. She held it out to me.

  “I'm illustrating it now,” she said. “I always meant to. I'm an artist . . . it's what I do.”

  The papers were yellowed at the edges. I riffled through them. The writing on them had been done with a typewriter, and the letters were faint. Either the ribbon was tired, or they had faded with age. The top sheet said ‘Goodnight, June’, and below it in pencil: To Junie, Love from Annie…June 17, 1922.

  “This is from quite a few years ago,” I remarked. “You're just getting around to illustrating it now?”

  “It was lost,” she said. “I found it again, not very long ago.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, considering whether or not she could trust me. Finally, she gave a tiny nod.

  “I need to find out what happened to June,” she said, and I looked up. “She died while I was away. I got a telegram. Something bad happened to her, and I think it was because of me.”

  “Because of you?”

  “I think so, yes. She was always afraid the Hespers were going to get her, and I think they did.”

  “Maybe you'd better tell me about these Hespers,” I said, because I didn't know what else to say.

  “They’re the footsteps behind you on a street at three o’clock in the morning. They’re the sea creatures in your bed that slide and wrap cold around your legs, the men with long beards standing behind the door when you go into a dark room. They’re the ones that hunt in the middle of the night. The things that follow and laugh…and bite.”

  “Bogey men,” I said. “Nightmares.”

  “They get called a lot of things,” she said. “Children dream about them. June always called them the Hespers. I think it may have started when she was too small to say monsters, and it stuck. I think of them as Hespers now, too. Aren’t you afraid of them?”

  I looked at the delicately frosted cake. The manuscript in my hands started to feel haunted, so I put it on the counter. The little bird suddenly cheeped, once, startling me.

  “I’m not afraid of very much anymore,” I said. “Sometimes I wish I was.”

  “So you'll do it then?”

  I started to feel uncomfortable. I kept my voice as gentle as I could.

  “Your sister is dead? And you want me to find her for you? Her grave, you mean?”

  She shook her head vigorously, and again I caught the fragrance of her. She smelled wonderful.

  “No,” she said. “I already found her. I want to know what happened to her. Do you need a retainer? When can you start?”

  “How long ago did she die?” I asked. “For that matter, how did she die?”

  “She died in 1922, just a month after I went away. The telegram said she had died in a fire with my father. That wasn't true. She died, but not in a fire.”

  “She’s been dead for twenty-five years?” I asked.

  This was crazy. I was willing to chase crazy if the money was right, but a sister that had been dead for a couple of decades sounded like a waste of time. I looked at the woman in front of me and opened my mouth to say as much, but something about her made me hesitate. She had a face that looked like it had seen a lot of rejection and somehow kept its dignity. She looked like she expected me to brush her off, and would never let me see an ounce of hurt.

  “My plate’s a little full right now,” I said. “Let me check when I’m at the office, and we’ll talk again. How would that be?”

  “You won’t forget?”

  I promised I wouldn't. On the way out, we paused on the veranda. I searched for a way to politely say goodbye. Her eyes had changed. Something moved in the dark behind them that made me think of lightning flickering behind black clouds. She reached out and touched a vine that trailed down from the edge of the roof.

  “Night-blooming cereus. Do you know it?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “That's right, you don't know about flowers,” she said. “They bloom all at once…only once a year, and only at night. I came in the other day and saw that they had come and gone, and I missed it.”

  She looked inexpressibly sad. “I counted the dead blossoms. There were eleven of them. I missed it.”

  “There will be other nights,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Other years.”

  I went down the steps, and crossed the lawn back toward my place. Her grass was soft, lush, and I realized that I had never seen anyone water or cut it. I was embarrassed by the moldering carpet of walnut shells on my side of the drive. She spoke from behind me.

  “You never had any cake, Mister Crowe.”

  I looked back at her. She stood on her steps, looking slender and vulnerable. I wondered if she was as surrendered to being alone as I was. I knew one thing. She was crazy, and I had enough crazy on my dance card without adding to it.

  “You can call me Nate,” I said. “Save me a piece, would you?”

  She smiled at me. “You can call me Annie.”

  Her smile wasn't just pretty like a swimsuit face in a magazine. It was beautiful. The full moon in warm wind that smells like rain is that kind of beautiful. It gives you the idea that it's raining on the moon, even though they say it never does. It's a spooky kind of beautiful, something you don't forget, and her smile was like that.

  I had thought I was past noticing such things, and I promised myself now to stop noticing it about her. She’s crazy, I told myself again. She stayed shut in her house all day
and baked birthday cakes for dead people. She went for long walks in the middle of the night. She had nothing I needed. Telling myself all of that didn't help much.

  She waved and turned away, and I climbed my own steps. I didn’t want to go out anymore.

  “I have a feeling you’re going to run me right off the road, lady,” I muttered. “Right off the road.”

  I went inside to find my cigarettes.

  -Four-

  Trouble found me the next morning, and in a big way, and Annie Kahlo, her crazy ideas and her dead sister went by the wayside. I was waiting for the coffee pot on the stove to begin to percolate, and studying the cigarettes and the book of paper matches on the kitchen table. I tried to postpone my first smoke of the day until after I’d finished a cup of coffee, because I’d read a magazine article that said tobacco was unhealthy on an empty stomach. Having to wait made an annoying way to start the day, and spoiled my mood.

  The telephone on the wall rang, startling me. I crossed the room and snatched up the receiver on the second ring. It was Rex Raines, a cop I knew pretty well, on the other end.

  “Got anything to do this morning?” he asked. “Drop it, if you do. I’m on my way to a situation out in the canyons. County boys found something in a lady’s purse. I’d like you to take a look at it with me.”

  Raines worked homicide out of the station up the street. He had a round face and a sunny smile that made him seem cheerful for the job, but it was a front. I knew he’d seen a lot for a man not quite forty. Part of one foot was missing, and he walked with a limp. He’d stepped on something nasty while wading onto a Japanese-held coral lump in the middle of the Pacific. He never talked about it.

  He gave me directions to a place inland, in the canyons south of Santa Teresa. I figured it for about thirty miles away, outside the city jurisdiction, but I knew better than to ask questions.

  “Sounds like a perfect morning,” I said.

  “So far, so good,” he said. “I’m on my way. See you there.”

  I knew I had time to finish my coffee. Raines’ customers usually weren’t in a hurry.

  Coastal fog hung a gray curtain over the city. It looked like rain, but the low cloud drifted as dry as smoke. I took the ocean highway south to Summerland, a scattering of beach cottages that clung to the hills, and I turned inland, onto the canyon road.

  The sky cleared into a hot blue almost as soon as the ocean left my rearview mirror, and I began a series of corkscrew climbs up and over the Loma Linda pass. The road hung onto the dusty shoulders of the hills for dear life. In places the drop-off fell better than three hundred feet. The steep grade up forced most vehicles to slow to a walking pace, which reduced the danger of overshooting a curve. Going down the other side was a different story.

  By the time I crested and started the descent, the Ford was close to boiling over, and the springs complained loudly. I used the engine in low gear as much as I could to keep from overheating the brakes. The brush grew thick, and close enough to the road to hide anything approaching from the opposite direction.

  Off to the side, I saw a small collection of buildings in an arroyo. Around the next bend, a black-and-white county sedan blocked the road. A deputy in tan khakis stepped out and held up a palm, but as my smoking brakes brought me noisily to a stop, he changed his mind and waved me by. He was expecting me.

  I turned gingerly into the remnants of a dusty drive that snaked down sharply into the arroyo. Several vehicles stood parked at the bottom, but my brakes were too hot to trust. I stopped the Ford at the top, took off my suit coat, tossed it on the front seat, and started down the drive. The gravel was loose under my feet as I slipped and skittered my way down.

  The air had a last edge of coolness, but the sun was already starting to sting, reclaiming the hot dry landscape from the chilly night before. A mourning dove sang softly, repeating the same five notes over and over. The crunch of my steps and the monotonous birdsong were all that broke the silence.

  An ordered grove of smallish trees stretched away to the far side of the valley. They probably hadn’t been tended to in years, but they looked healthy and uniform with gray trunks and dark green leaves. A good-sized barn and a pair of sheds stood at the bottom. None of them had ever seen a coat of paint, and they were all the same silver color. Off to one side were the remains of a house. It sat in the shadow of the hillside, with the road running above it. It had no roof, and empty window holes dotted the walls.

  A car was nose down at the bottom of the embankment, in what would have passed for the front yard. I saw the path it had carved through the brush on its way down. Raines detached himself from the small group of people gathered around the wreck and made his way over to me.

  “Little bit out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” I asked. “This is county.”

  “Don’t care about car crashes,” he said, and then stopped to think. “Unless I’m in one, maybe. This isn’t what it looks like.”

  The ruined car was a sand-colored Ford convertible, crumpled into the base of the hill. Through the driver’s window I saw a spill of blonde hair. One pink sleeve with a slender wrist and hand, hung over the doorframe. I knew the dress and I knew who it belonged to.

  “Why’d you call me out here?”

  “This,” he said, and handed me a piece of paper. The check had been crumpled and then carefully straightened. It was made out to me. The ink had run in the middle, spattered by a single teardrop.

  “Charlene Cleveland,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Her name is on the check,” he said. “Hers and yours. She didn’t get around to signing it.”

  I looked at the ranks of trees that stretched to the other side of the canyon. On their tops, the reflected sun glittered off waxy leaves, but the rows below them were dark and quiet.

  “Oranges?” I asked.

  He shook his head, dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. When he was sure it was dead, he looked up at me.

  “Avocados. Oranges don’t do so well up here.” He thought for a moment. “You have a dog?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “You have to watch out for dogs in these groves. There’s nothing they like to eat more than a nice soft avocado that’s fallen on the ground. Once a dog gets a taste for them, you can hardly stop it from running into the trees. Problem is, these groves suit snakes, too. If you’re looking for a rattlesnake, avocado trees are a good place to start.”

  “Good way to lose a dog.”

  “They should know better,” he said. “Dogs can scent a snake a mile away. Most of them go after the avocado anyway. They can’t help themselves.”

  “What you love can kill you,” I said. “Is that your point?”

  He looked over at the wreck, shrugged, and started back to it. “Don’t know that I have a point,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m talking about dogs.”

  From where I stood, the dead woman's blonde hair gleamed strangely bright in the morning sunshine, and it made me feel sad.

  “Got to go some way,” I said. “Might as well be love.”

  I trailed him over to the base of the hillside. The windows of the house watched me. I could see the remnants of scorch marks around the openings. It was a wonder the long-ago fire hadn’t taken the outbuildings and trees at the same time. The support posts for a good-sized veranda remained, spaced out across the front. I wondered if the tenants had sat out at night and looked at the desert stars and wondered at their prospects, out here so far away from everyone else.

  Closer to the car, I caught the stink of gasoline and oil.

  “Don’t light a smoke,” Raines said. “Gas tank busted on the way down, and the whole hillside’s soaked. Too bad for them they didn’t just throw a match after her. We’d have never known what happened. They probably couldn’t find their way down in the dark.”

  “They’re stupid enough to think they staged things well enough like it is,” said another man, walking up to join us. “Even more likely they just didn’t care.�
��

  “Coroner,” Raines said. “Mel Runtz. He got here first. Called me.”

  “Staged things?” I asked.

  The coroner was a morose man with black-framed spectacles. He indicated the car with a nod, and we followed him, picking our way over rocks. Charlene Cleveland slumped back in the driver’s seat, her body turned slightly toward us. Her features were mostly obscured by a sheaf of hair that had fallen across her face. There was no one else in the car.

  Runtz leaned in, took her face gently in his hands and turned it. A red dot, like a birthmark, marked one cheekbone. I looked over his shoulder at the mess that was the back of her head. What the gunshot had left of her hat was still in place. The coroner let her fall back. Her distorted face was a long way from pretty now. Her mouth was slightly parted, exposing the small gap between her front teeth.

  It made me sad, all at once. I had been wise with her only a few hours before, and she had cursed me and cried. I looked at the tear stain on the check I still held, and felt a stirring of anger at whoever had done this to her. She might not have been my type, but she hadn’t deserved what she got. She had been someone’s little girl.

  “They shot her and pushed the car over the side?” I asked.

  Runtz shrugged. “Or shot her while as she drove, and she lost control. The powder on her face means the shooter was close, probably in the car with her. They jumped out, or took the ride down with her. It isn’t a big enough drop that someone couldn’t have gotten out and walked away from this.”

  We looked up the embankment to where the road ran, on top of a thirty or forty foot drop. He was right. It was survivable.

  “Seems like a hell of a risk, though,” I said. “Shoot a driver in the face while you’re on a canyon road at night. You wouldn’t know if you went off the side how far down it went. Makes more sense if they killed her and pushed the car off, trying to make it look like an accident.”