"Ride 'em, cowboy!" He smiled back.
But Alexander Morley was on his mind. The old man was up to something, and Bob Thompson wanted to know what it was. This Indian psychiatric deal was a stroke of genius, but why had an outsider been brought in to nail it? Henderson, Morley had said. A negotiator named Henderson.
Bob Thompson never forgot a name that was worth remembering. And he'd never heard of a negotiator named Henderson.
Chapter 7
The new haircut, Bo decided on Friday morning as she stared groggily into the bathroom mirror of her Ocean Beach apartment, was either hideous or a refreshing fashion statement. The short curls framing her face and neck seemed embarrassingly youthful, even wholesome in a rakish sort of way. Like the hair of a woman whose bath soap, if sliced in half, would produce cartoon bluebirds doing a medley of tunes from The Sound of Music. The image was unnerving, but short hair would be less of a hassle during the tail end of the depression, in which everything continued to be a hassle.
On the floor of the bedroom closet she found the laundry basket of clean but unironed clothes and grabbed a pleated white blouse. Unworn since the last time she'd ironed it over a year ago. Wrestling the ironing board from its clamps in the hall closet, Bo paused to wonder why she was bothering. It had something to do with white, she decided. "Chinese white mourning," like Emily Dickinson. With a long white duck skirt she'd bought for its row of tiny buttons down one side and then never worn, the pleated blouse would look appropriately austere. And a white ensemble would covertly honor the deaths of both Mildred and Mort Wagman while reinforcing the clean-cut image bequeathed by short hair. She wondered what Dickinson had done about accessories.
"Madre de dios!" Estrella exclaimed an hour later as Bo opened the door to their shared office at San Diego County's Child Protective Services. "You look like a nun."
Bo switched on her desk lamp. "They said that about Emily Dickinson, too."
Estrella's dark eyes widened in alarm. Actually in panic, Bo thought.
"Bo, it's too soon for you to come back to work," Estrella said. "I knew it yesterday when you were in such a rush to get your hair repaired. Look, I know you want to help Mort's little boy, but why don't you just let me do that while you... you know, stabilize for a few more days?"
"Stabilize?" Bo repeated dramatically, pushing her dark glasses down her nose in order to glare over them. "If I were any more 'stable' I'd have to become a right-wing religious fanatic with a petition to abolish votes for women. Surely you don't want that."
"No," Estrella agreed. Her manicured fingers drummed thoughtfully on her abdomen. "The baby can't have a right-wing godmother."
"There you have it then. So who got Bird's case?"
The little office felt at once familiar and hostile, Bo noticed. As if the walls and utilitarian furnishings had taken her absence personally and were at best ambivalent about her return. The awareness, if permitted to expand, could become paranoia. But the medications would control that, Bo reassured herself. In the meantime she rearranged items on her desk with large and proprietary movements, dramatizing for the furniture her right to be there.
"You're in luck; it's Nick Paratore," Estrella answered. "The case file's on his desk across the hall, but he isn't in yet."
Bo sank into her swivel chair with a determined smile. Things were falling into place. "Does Madge know anything about Mort, about Bird and his dad being at Ghost Flower with me?" she asked. If their supervisor, Madge Aldenhoven, knew anything of the connection there would be no chance of getting the case. It was a flat rule that investigators with any connection whatever to a child could not investigate that child's case. Not that it mattered in this situation, Bo thought. There were no allegations of child abuse, just a need to locate the family. No conflict of interest.
Estrella stood and faced the window as if modeling her layered maroon knit maternity ensemble for the eucalyptus tree outside. "Bird's file says he was picked up from Ghost Flower Lodge after the death of his father," she answered slowly. "Does Madge know that's where you were?"
Bo remembered an absence of get-well cards from her supervisor during her recuperation, a complete dearth of concerned phone calls. "Not unless you told her."
Estrella adjusted a carved wooden comb in her upswept hair and then sighed. "She didn't ask."
"Well, then," Bo grinned, rubbing her palms together, "where's Nick?"
"At a save the sharks demonstration," Estrella whispered, eyeing the door as if Madge Aldenhoven were glued to its other side. "You know how he's into diving and snorkeling and all that? Well, after the death of that woman yesterday, shark-hunters descended on San Diego in droves. And this marine life protection group Nick's in—it's called Scales of Justice if you can believe that—is sponsoring a demonstration against the big hunt that's going out this morning. Nick and the others are in the water in wetsuits waving white flags at boatloads of heavily armed shark haters. He told Madge he had to go to the dentist."
"What does Nick's group think..." Bo began and then stopped as the door swooped open, propelled by Madge Aldenhoven in an astonishing navy silk blouse with huge white polka dots. The blouse's floppy bow completed a look Bo associated with clowns.
"I see you're back early," Madge addressed a space two inches to the left of Bo's broad grin. "And dressed as a bride. No doubt this has something to do with your illness and so everyone is expected to ignore it. But most people don't wear white after Labor Day, Bo. Surely you'd be more comfortable if you made some attempt to fit in."
Bo couldn't stop envisioning Madge in a sawdust ring, juggling bowling pins. "The Labor Day rule doesn't apply in the tropics," she replied. "Everyone in Boston knew that when I was a kid."
Madge Aldenhoven sighed and handed a case file to Estrella. "Hand-shaped bruises on the baby and the three-year-old sister has worms as well as lice," she outlined the case. "Reporting party is a barrio priest. There won't be any problem getting the petition. And Bo..." she glowered levelly through contact lenses tinted to make her blue eyes violet, "... this isn't the tropics. You'll get the next case that comes up. Don't go anywhere."
Bo saw her chance. "I thought I'd take the free time to do a little decorating in here," she said. "Maybe redo my bulletin board, change the plants around, you know."
Madge believed in sterile work spaces, almost as zealously as she believed in the Protestant work ethic. It was rumored that even plastic plants died in her office.
"Nick is at the dentist," Madge said with sudden purpose, grabbing a pen lodged in her flyaway white hair and pointing it at Bo, "so you might as well take his new case. It's a six-year-old boy whose father was accidentally shot up in the desert near Campo. If you can find the mother or some other family before the weekend we can close it without involving juvenile court. The file's on Nick's desk. Let me know by this afternoon what you turn up. Your hair, by the way, looks much better short."
When the door had slammed shut after Madge, Bo looked at Estrella. "Accidentally?" she said. "Mort wasn't shot accidentally, he was murdered!"
"You don't know that. It might have been an accident, Bo." The word was pronounced "bean," a sure sign of anxiety. Estrella's Spanish accent always escalated with her stress level. Bo experienced a warm flutter of neck muscles. Guilt. She hadn't meant to upset her best friend.
"You're right," she admitted. "And I know taking this case is pretty dumb, but I want to do it for Mort." Striding the two steps necessary to cross the tiny room, Bo hooked both thumbs in the waist of her skirt and stared into a spindly bottlebrush shrub beneath the window. "He was... really close to me."
Estrella feigned interest in the case file on her desk. "Andy will be back from Europe in a week," she mentioned. "I hope you and Mort didn't get, you know, too close." Estrella's vision of Andrew LaMarche escorting Bo to an altar had reached obsessive proportions.
"Our favorite pediatrician," Bo answered, "has not been supplanted in my dubious affections or my bed, if that's what you're asking, and it is what you'
re asking. When Andy heard I was in the hospital he wanted to cancel that training program on child abuse prevention on foreign U.S. military bases he's doing for the government, but there was really no point. I wanted him to stay in Frankfurt. He's sent flowers every other day. Also an enormous cuckoo clock, three pairs of kid gloves I'll never wear unless I move back to Boston, and an illustrated strudel cookbook in German. My relationship with Mort Wagman was different. We were friends."
Estrella was pensive. "Maybe in a place like that, where everybody's just trying to get on their feet, that could happen," she mused. "I still don't really understand what Ghost Flower Lodge is, to be honest. And what are you going to do with a German cookbook?"
"I thought I'd run an ad on Craigslist for a German cook," Bo answered. "And Ghost Flower Lodge is a subacute psychiatric facility, like a rehabilitation center, the only one of its kind. The Neji started taking in people with chronic psychiatric illnesses years ago. It's a special purpose they have, a tradition. Now famous people go up there to rehab after a hospitalization or a medication change. Movie stars, pro sports types, everybody." Bo unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse and rolled up the sleeves, creating wrinkles. It felt better.
"But not everybody pays at Ghost Flower," she went on. "Half the guests are indigent, trying to stay alive on Social Security Disability benefits. Ghost Flower is actually licensed by the county as a board-and-care."
"Ycchh!" Estrella said. "I've seen those places, private homes where the owners get paid to keep mentally ill people. Most of them are pits. But Ghost Flower has that fabulous building with the thick walls. It must have cost a fortune to build."
"The walls are made out of dirt," Bo answered, thinking. "And there's plenty of that on the reservation. But the Neji had an architectural firm from Los Angeles do the building, so it couldn't have been cheap. You're right. Wonder where they got the money?"
"Why don't you ask them?" Estrella said, wiping lipstick from the corner of her mouth with her little finger. "I've got to go, try to make sure these kids get sent to the same foster home."
"Maybe I will," Bo answered as the door closed behind her officemate. The other bands of Kumeyaay left in San Diego County after sequential displacement by Spanish, Mexican, and then American invaders, had all lived in grueling poverty until casino interests and waste-management entrepreneurs discovered them. Only the Neji Reservation had avoided becoming either a hazardous waste dump or a gambling mecca.
The Neji history was interesting, Bo thought. But it couldn't have anything to do with the death of a stand-up comic. Or could it? Zachary Crooked Owl would know. And she was going to ask him.
Chapter 8
Hiking her long skirt with one hand, Bo climbed into the four-wheel-drive Pathfinder she'd bought at a police auction four months earlier, and sighed. The CPS parking lot looked exactly the same as it had for three years. Her office building, a rambling two-story structure of colorless brick, also looked the same. In the yard overlooked by rows of gray windows, an unchanging eucalyptus tree wore the same mantle of dust it wore every October. What was lacking, she realized as she guided the Pathfinder carefully past Madge's immaculately clean beige coupe, was autumn. Just one red leaf anywhere on the horizon would provide a focus. But there would be no red leaf. San Diego's autumns brought nothing but dust and a nearly unendurable glare.
Sunlight's good for depression, Bradley. Enjoy it and save some money so you can fly to New Zealand in the spring, where it will be fall.
The thought was energizing. She'd embark on an austerity program, Bo decided, in order to stockpile the airfare. She'd make her own clothes, plant vegetables in pots on the deck, maybe try to sell some of her paintings at craft fairs. And if she didn't start smoking again she could save fifteen dollars a week on cigarettes alone. On that concept she was ambivalent.
Mort Wagman had talked her into quitting shortly after she'd arrived at Ghost Flower. "You're depressed, you don't care about anything, so you won't care about going through withdrawal," he argued while pacing in a tight circle beside Bo's nest in the couch corner. "The misery will give you something concrete to think about."
At the time his weird pacing had been irritating, its pointless energy a criticism of her sluggishness. "Either stand still or go away," Bo had told him. "You're making me dizzy."
"I'm going to tell you a secret," he answered, leaning over the leather arm of the couch. "You know how dogs circle around and around before they curl up to go to sleep?"
"Leave me alone," she said, not relishing a conversation about dogs.
"They do it because their ancestors made nests in tall grass that way, and the memory got wired in."
Bo pulled a length of tan acrylic blanket over her head, but the voice continued.
"I'm not a hundred percent human," Mort Wagman whispered as though revealing a secret thousands were dying to know. "Somebody did this surgery on me, somebody in my family put in pieces of animal brain. See the scar? That's why I circle sometimes. It just feels right."
In spite of herself Bo had emerged from the stifling blanket to look at his scalp beneath his long, ebony hair. There was a small scar, probably from a childhood fall or some other accident. And Mort Wagman was still delusional, she thought bleakly. Crazy. Paranoid. Good thing he was in a safe place until his meds kicked in.
"Not only that, but I've kissed a frog," he went on. "Think maybe I'll marry her."
"I won't smoke around you if you won't pace around me," Bo offered. Anything to shut him up, silence his intense, meaningless stories. And he agreed to the deal. But then he'd been constantly at her side, joking, cajoling, dragging her out for countless walks in the desert. She'd finally quit smoking without really thinking about it. But the change wasn't permanent, she was sure. She felt none of the melodramatic idiocy so evident in nonsmokers. Not a single urge to flap her hands and cough dramatically at the mere sight of a Bic lighter. Nothing. About smoking she just felt nothing. And that, she was sure, wouldn't last.
Slipping a tape of the soundtrack from The Mission into the Pathfinder's tape deck, Bo watched the urban landscape revert to its natural state as she climbed east on Interstate 8. The hilly terrain was pocked with boulders and where the ground was not shadowed by coast live oaks, sycamores, and elderberry trees, an occasional cholla cactus grew, baking in the sun. They looked like the fuzzy arms and legs of dismembered teddy bears. Little forests of teddy bear limbs growing from each other at odd angles, matted with barbed spines that could bury themselves an inch deep in rubber shoe soles. What they could do to flesh did not bear thinking.
In the morning glare Bo felt a growing unease. The closer she got to Ghost Flower Lodge, the more she felt as if she were driving into an old black-and-white movie. The sun had devoured color, leaving nothing but gradations of ecru relieved only occasionally by splotches of shadow. Ennio Morricone's score blaring from her tape deck only reinforced the eerie feeling, but she couldn't bring herself to turn it off. The single oboe, the boy soprano's haunting miserere, the threat audible in a rumbling timpani, brought up an edginess that had nothing to do with depression. Something was wrong in these baking hills; Bo could sense it. Something unholy happening. Something fearful in the white glare.
As she turned off the freeway onto the patched concrete road leading toward the Neji Reservation, Bo noticed a small wooden sign professionally painted in letters reading, "Hadamar Desert Reclamation Project, Site II." Beyond the sign a narrow road wound into the hills, littered with tumbleweeds. A university project of some kind, Bo thought. Geology. "Hadamar" was undoubtedly some academic's pun on an excavation for the fossilized marine life left baking after the retreat of ancient seas. "Mar" meant "sea" in several languages, she remembered, wondering if "had a sea" was typical geologist humor.
Curious, Bo made a mental note to explore the area later. For now, she reminded herself sternly, the goal was to explore the muddy financial situation of the Neji.
Zachary Crooked Owl was standing in the court
yard as Bo pulled up, talking to a man who looked like George Washington with a crew cut. The man had slung his dark suit coat over a shoulder and his black wingtips were covered with a film of dust, but even in the high desert heat he seemed cool, composed. Zach was sweating. Bo could see dark blue arcs under the arms of the big man's blue workshirt, and the leather cord holding the owl's claw at his neck was dark with moisture.
"I've already told you, Henderson..." Zach said as Bo opened the Pathfinder's door to a wall of dry heat.
But the man merely nodded and turned toward a rental car parked under the cottonwood. "We'll be in touch, Crooked Owl," he replied and then paused to perform a smiling appraisal of the lodge's exterior. A satisfied, self-congratulatory look. Like a man who's just purchased an expensive toy. Then he folded himself into the little car and drove away.
Zach stared into the dust cloud trailing the man's exit for minutes before acknowledging Bo's presence. "Good to see you, Bo," he finally said. "But don't stand around in the sun without a hat. Come on in."
"Can't," Bo answered. "I've come to talk about Mort, and I know we have to do that outside. What's going on, Zach? Something's wrong; I can feel it. Who was that man?"
"Just business," he answered, hunching massive shoulders as if battling a chill. His eyelids were swollen and with the graying stubble on his cheeks his long, braided hair looked less Indian than derelict. Zach, Bo noted with alarm, was at this moment scarcely the pillar of strength she knew and respected. "What do you want to know about Mort?" he asked. "I haven't heard anything from the sheriff's people since they were here yesterday."
"You mean you haven't called? And what about Bird? Doesn't anybody care what's happened to Bird?"
"Bo, we've got eleven sick people here to manage. Until yesterday you were one of them, so you understand what I'm saying. Why'd you drive all the way up here? What do you want?"
The words drove a wedge between them that Bo felt in her stomach. She wasn't a guest anymore, wasn't going to be treated with the easy patience demanded by illness. She'd left; now she was an outsider. Hard to take. And Zach's count was off. There had been fourteen guests at Ghost Flower until yesterday. Mort's death and her return to San Diego would not leave eleven.
Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four) Page 5
