Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Two weeks ago,” she said. “About.” She looked down, brushed something from her leg, then stared at Shephard.

  “What did he say? Did he come here or did you go to see him?”

  “He came here,” she said quietly. “He sat where you’re sitting now, and we talked for a few minutes. Nothing in particular.” She turned to face the sunlight that slanted through a window. Shephard studied her profile: her nose straight and thin, her lips full, the eyelashes golden in the rush of sun.

  “Was he worried, preoccupied?” He continued his study of sunlight and woman, a combination he decided was insurmountable.

  “My father was very calm,” she said, still facing the light. “That comes from breaking horses as a young man.” She looked at Shephard. He ducked into the photo album.

  “Uh, finances. In order?”

  “He made enough money to gamble away and drink on,” she said sharply. “He was bad at gambling, good at drinking.”

  Shephard heard the bitterness in her voice. “Do you own this house, Miss Algernon?”

  “What do you care? I thought you’d decided I was bitter because he didn’t help with money.” She brushed her hair from her face and looked back out the window.

  “That was just to piss you off.” He stared at her legs, for the moment supremely happy.

  “Well then, one for you, detective. I rent. Father was never interested in helping out that way. Booze and horses had first priority.”

  “It’s hard for people our age—how old are you, Miss Algernon … ?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “To finance homes themselves. I’ve wished my father had been in more of a position to help me when I was looking to buy. Resented it a little, too.”

  She turned to him, a dull gaze. “I’m not interested in your resentments, detective.”

  “Then I figured that love and common courtesy must count for something too. That’s more than a lot of people ever get.”

  “I’m happy for enlightment,” she said. “But I always thought that poverty makes us all look a bit ridiculous.”

  Shephard heard the rage working its way back into Jane Algernon’s voice. His head began to ache again, as if in warning. “I’d like to see his house now.”

  “No.” The reply was curt and final. She stood, went to the window of the breakfast corner, then turned to look at him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I could … look at his things right now. I don’t feel I can do that kind of thing just yet. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, and that’s why we have to go now. I need you in a mood to talk. Filters off, feelings raw. Do you understand?” He stood and set the photo album on the coffee table. His heart was beating with inexplicable speed. He wondered if it was the coffee. He watched her round the kitchen table, look out the window again, then disappear into a back room.

  A moment later she was back, with a purse slung over her shoulder and a pair of pumps on her feet. “You first, detective.” She motioned to the door. “You stare at my legs any longer, they’re going to fall off.”

  They stood on opposite sides of Tim Algernon’s den, the small bed between them, the identical pictures of the same horses peering over each of their shoulders. Jane had picked up a small trophy from the dresser.

  “What I remember most about growing up were the good times we had here at the stables,” she said, handing him the trophy. “But dad used to talk about this club all the time. How grand it was.” She handed him the trophy, which read: TIM AND MARGARET ALGERNON—THIRD PLACE DOUBLES—SURFSIDE MEMBERS TOURNAMENT—1947. “That’s the Newport Beach club. Mom and dad were members until the early fifties, until she got sick, I guess. He was always talking about the great days at the Surfside, the two of them playing tennis and sailing. Kind of idealized it, maybe.”

  She took the trophy back from Shephard and set it on the dresser. The house had made her pensive, as he had hoped it would. He followed her as she rambled, remembered. In the living room, Jane stood in front of the big fireplace and looked into the ashes. “When I was a girl, we were close. Even when I started getting to be a woman, he was kind of a father and a mother. I guess I was eighteen maybe, before I saw the drinking doing its work on him. He’d go up and down—manic. High as a kite, then too depressed to get out of bed. Get violent too, but not with me. I watched him punch one of his horses in the face once, because she bit him. He was a strong man.” She laughed quietly, tears welling in her eyes. “Yeah, I might have blamed him for mom dying, even though I never knew her. I blamed him for blowing his money at the track, drinking, passing out in the stable feed trough, things like that.”

  Jane turned her weakening face to him. She ran her hand against her eyes, then returned to the ashes. A strand of dark hair fell across her face, hiding it from him.

  “He was an easy man to be hard on,” she said finally. “And I took advantage of it. By the time I started college I was truly ashamed of him—the way he’d carry on in town. People always telling me stories about him, where he ended up some night, how he fought, got sick. A village idiot, a clown. And gambling away the money. I could have used a little help. We all could, I guess. Anyway, there was something cold inside of me, and I knew he felt it.”

  Shephard could hear her voice wavering, and Jane trying to force it under control.

  “So I’d just slam him against that coldness, give him what I thought he deserved. It hurt him—I know it hurt him. Somehow, that only made me feel more right in doing it.”

  When she turned again to Shephard she was red-faced, beginning to sob. He sat down on the couch, put a Racing Form across his knees and studied it. “Everybody blames himself when a parent dies,” he said. “My mother was killed when I was four months old, and when I got big enough to realize I didn’t have a mother I blamed myself for it. You grow into it, like a shirt. But go ahead and feel sorry for yourself if it makes you better.” From the corner of his eye he saw her head cock sharply in his direction.

  “Up yours, Shephard. I can cry if I want to.”

  “Long as you understand you’re crying for yourself.”

  She was in front of him, thighs positioned straight before his face, her hand beginning its arc from outside his vision but descending with a swoosh through the air, gaining speed as he dropped the newspaper, caught her wrist, and forced her down, all in one motion. He stood and shoved the Racing Form into her hand. It dropped to her lap when she brought her hands to her face.

  “There’s two kinds of crying, Miss Algernon. You cry for someone else and you choke the sounds right out, and it sounds like a dog gagging on a bone. You cry until your tears are gone and there’s nothing left to come out except maybe your guts. But when you cry for yourself, it sounds long and sad, like music. Like you sound right now. You haven’t cried for him yet, you’re still working on yourself. How come?”

  It was easier than he had thought it would be. When she looked up at him, he saw it was over. Her eyes were big and blank, and she spoke quickly, as if disgorging something poisonous, long-held.

  “It wasn’t two weeks ago when I saw him last,” she blurted. “It was Friday afternoon. He came to my house and stunk like whiskey, and I was revolted. I screamed at him. And he told me he was scared and wanted to know if … if …” Her head was shaking.

  “If he could stay with you?”

  “For a few days, he said. Someone was going to hurt him and he was afraid. But he always said such crazy things when he was drinking. I said he was just imagining. Jesus Christ, I told him he was just drunk and stupid. I finally gave him a little peck, a little ugly peck on the forehead, and then, I sent him out. God, I sent him out.”

  “Who was going to hurt him, Jane?”

  “Someone. He said someone was coming to get him. But he didn’t say who, or why, or for what, and I’d heard him say things before that were wild. I thought he was maybe just lonely, tired of living alone.”

  Her last words were little more than a whisper, blown tearlessly in at the end
of her storm. She had dropped her face into her arms, dark hair cascading over her knees and dangling in mid-air as she shook her head in disbelief.

  “What else, Jane?”

  “He said there might be others in trouble too. That it wasn’t just him.”

  “Who?” Shephard watched the tears dropping onto Jane’s feet, the liquid shiny on her skin. He could scarcely hear her.

  “He didn’t say. The whole world, maybe. He just didn’t say.”

  Jane pitched over onto the cushions, drawing up her knees, burying her face in a pillow. Shephard saw her shoulders beginning the first shudders of what would be another storm. Worse this time, he thought. For her father. He spread an afghan over her quaking body, and went into the kitchen.

  In a drawer near the telephone Shephard found a small address book, which he quickly leafed through, then pocketed. No Greeley was listed. He remembered Theodore’s words. Why would Algernon hope it was Greeley in trouble? Tim Algernon was a consistently sloppy secretary. One look at the address book told him that it wasn’t Algernon who had written in the Bible. Then who had? Had the killer written it himself, after the act, a triumphant good-bye? Or, perhaps, had the Bible come to Algernon earlier, the threat that had made Tim come to Jane and call Little Theodore for protection? If so, how had it arrived? Personal delivery, or by mail?

  Shephard walked outside. With fumes of garbage wafting up into his face, he systematically pulled the contents from a trash can on the side of the house. Halfway down through the mess, smeared with the sticky pitch of orange juice concentrate, he found a plain brown wrapper, Bible-sized and torn open. He retrieved it with some sense of accomplishment, then set it on the ground, where he brought the fragments back to their original form.

  Tim Algernon’s name and address were written across the paper in the same ink and same neat hand as in the Bible that contained the threat. The postmark was Wednesday, August 20, Sacramento. Three days before Ed Steinhelper was rolled. Four days before whoever took his wallet came into Laguna on Greyhound line 52. Eight days ago, he noted: five days before Algernon died.

  He found Jane on her father’s couch, breathing deeply, covered by the afghan. Looking down at her, he felt a fluttering inside, of wings perhaps, as if a covey of quail were about to take flight. Then, the same frantic impulse to act that he had felt the night before, the urgent but undirected desire to do something. The conflux of feelings was rapid and contradictory. Paternal: he could adjust the pillow under her head, pull the afghan more comfortably to her waist. Carnal: he could simply stare. Professional: he could wake her. He felt paralyzed, or was it, he wondered, dumbfounded? He smiled stupidly. His path of action became clear. He walked quietly across the floor and shut the door behind him, sure he had done the right thing. As he moved through the bright noon heat he realized how long it had been since so little had mattered so much.

  He felt altered, as if his system had just received a transfusion of something new.

  NINE

  A telephone company printout listed all calls made from Tim Algernon’s phone the week before he died. Shephard was handed the information by a reluctant company manager, who reminded him that the release of such data was illegal, then hustled him into a small room that contained a desk and chair. The manager’s patience seemed fatigued to its breaking point when Shephard requested a number-indexed directory. The manager delivered it after a punishing wait, sighed, and shut the door.

  Using the directory and Algernon’s address book, Shephard translated the called numbers into names, and listed in his notebook parties called, times, duration of calls. After an hour’s work, it appeared that Algernon’s “fine old woman who lives in town” was one Hope Creeley. So Theodore got it a little mixed up, Shephard thought. To “hope it was Greeley.” Not bad for a man who can’t read or write. Her address was listed as 9487 Waveside, Laguna Beach, and Tim Algernon had called her a total of twenty-four times between 5 P.M. Saturday, August 23, and Sunday, August 24. Twenty-four calls of a minute each. The last was made at 11:54 Sunday night, six hours before Algernon had had his last whiskey with the man who killed him. What can a terrified man say in twenty-four one-minute calls that he couldn’t say in one twenty-four-minute call, Shephard wondered. He dialed Hope Creeley’s number from the booth outside, got no answer, and dialed again.

  Back in the Mustang, he headed for Waveside Drive in the north end of town.

  The house was a tidy, three-story Spanish-style manse with a clay tile roof and a spacious portico whose shade smelled of citrus to Shephard. He pushed the doorbell, which after a momentary silence prompted a muted chime from deep inside the house. Just to the right of the wooden door, a mailbox contained three envelopes. He removed them, glanced at the first and saw that it had been delivered that day. He rang again. No answer.

  A wrought-iron gate opened onto a walkway that led around the right side of the house. Shephard pushed it open, the hair on his neck rising when it squeaked like fingernails on a chalkboard. The walkway was narrow and shaded from the house next door by a tall fence of redwood. It opened to a generous backyard that in spite of its size was still cloistered from the neighbors by three large avocado trees, growing in a semicircle against the back fence. Between the dark green avocados stood lemon trees, their round, symmetrical bodies sprinkled with fruit. The cement patio spread out before him like an island in a sea of grass, covered with chairs, tables, lounges, a barbecue. He judged it a peaceful backyard.

  To his left he saw that the sliding glass door was open nearly halfway, the edge of a white drape lapping outward in the breeze. The family dog, a smallish breed by the look of it, had fallen asleep inside the house and its head was dangling over the tracks of the door and onto the patio. Not much of a watchdog, Shephard. Thought, considering the whining gate. He whistled quietly, but the dog still didn’t budge. The breeze stirred a windchime, scattering random music.

  Shephard whistled again and went across the patio to the dog. Standing over it now, it was clear to him that the animal was dead. It was a basenji, eyes half open, its tongue dangling out, the tiny chin stained with blood.

  Pushing back the drapes, he stepped inside. He stood and listened for a moment, hearing nothing. The living room was hushed in shadow and emitted none of the lingering friction of recent activity. The upholstered chairs were humped quietly around a low coffee table, a piano with covered keys blended into the darkness of the far corner, a meager portion of light forced its way through the drapes and washed almost unnoticeably into the pale green carpet. Shephard drew the Colt Python from his shoulder holster, but it felt wrong in his hand. Moving into the dining room, he put the pistol back.

  Why is it so difficult to see a dining table and five chairs and not imagine people sitting there, he wondered. But the dark walnut chairs, polished exuberantly and waiting just so, were vacant. The armoire towering behind them twinkled with crystal even in the dreary light. The kitchen showed no signs of recent, or any other kind of use.

  “Mrs. Creeley?” Shephard’s voice echoed quickly. He backtracked to the basenji and found that his powers as an investigator of human affairs meant little in the world of dogs. The throat seemed large, the neck swollen, but didn’t basenjis have a thickened, Egyptian head? The blood on the chin suggested strangulation, or did it? The expression on the dog’s face told him nothing. Standing once again on the pale green carpet, he regarded the staircase that began at the far side of the living room.

  He climbed to the second story, aware for the first time that the house, despite the opened patio door, was stuffy and ill-ventilated. Each of three bedrooms on the floor was decorated with a zeal for American Colonial: hardwood floors covered with red throw-rugs, white and blue bedspreads across which huge eagles cocked their heads, massive maple headboards cut with Colonial heft and grace. The effect was museumlike, he thought, more to be looked at than lived in. Nowhere were there signs of a family’s energy, that wake of activity that leaves at the very least a chair out of kilter
with its table, a coat tossed across a bed or sofa, a dish in the sink.

  The stairway carpet changed from green to white where it began its rise to the third story. Shephard felt a quick flicker of vertigo when he reached the final floor: the relentless white skewed his sense of balance. He called again.

  The third floor was as vast as it was colorless. The white carpet opened before him to a capacious anteroom whose walls, furniture, even fireplace, were crisp white. Unlike the downstairs rooms, the anteroom stood bleached in sunlight, which entered two west-facing windows unobstructed by shades or curtains and parceled itself into bright rhomboids on the carpet. Shephard noted again, as he had as a child, that in shafts of sunlight dust settles upward rather than the more logical down. He crossed the pristine carpet to a set of double doors, white, at the far end. Swinging them open he found still more of the pale carpet, expanding before him into the master bedroom.

  Shephard thought it was the brightest room he’d ever seen. A cream-colored settee was backed against the wall to his left, over which hung a mirror framed in white that reflected more white from across the room. In the center stood a king-sized bed that seemed magnified by its lack of color. Shephard suffered the momentary illusion that everything was made of plaster. When he pressed his hand against the bed, the soft texture felt incongruous.

  He stood in the bathroom doorway, faced with a full-length reflection of himself. The mirrored partition gave way on the right to a large vanity area consisting of two sinks fitted with white porcelain fixtures, a mirror that ran the length of the wall in front of the sinks, a white wooden chest fastened to the far wall beside a toilet, and a sparkling bidet. He turned back to the bathroom entrance, moved past the entryway mirror again, and found himself in a similar room: white walls, white tile.

  But rather than a toilet and bidet, along the far wall was a bathtub, and Shephard’s first reaction when he looked at it was, Well, my sweet God Jesus, there is something that isn’t white.