Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Lying in the tub is something definitely not white.

  He backed against the wall as a flood of sweat erupted along his back, and stepped back out to the bedroom. He stood watching the dust settle upward, breathing rapidly. Then a series of mental detours, in the form of questions. When did Jane Algernon awaken? Did Cal like last night’s dinner? How long could a dog survive on a strict vegetarian diet? Why does dust settle up? Who cares? Then there was the problem of his pistol. He drew it, put it back, drew it again: somehow he felt better with it dangling from his hand as he walked back into the bathroom and approached the tub.

  The vortex of all the whiteness that spread around him was a naked woman. She was blackened so badly by fire that she seemed to have been reduced to some birdlike creature, a pterodactyl perhaps, with claws at the end of feeble wing-arms, a puffy underbelly, foreshortened legs that spread open obscenely and looked as if they could do little more than grasp a branch or fold flush to the body in flight. He saw a narrow face on which only the eye sockets and mouth were recognizable. One of the tiny hand-claws clutched the end of a shower curtain rod, which was blackened to its midway point. The shower curtain itself lay jammed into a white wicker wastebasket.

  The discoverer of such secrets is always first aware of his own uselessness. And Shephard, much as he had done when he looked down at the sleeping mystery of Jane Algernon, looked down at this changed woman and wondered what to do. He wanted to cover her. He felt as if he should pray. He knew he should call other policemen to divvy up the problem: Pavlik to the minutiae, Pincus to the press, Grimes to the crowd that would form outside and inquire shyly about the nature of the tragedy; Chief Hannover to the mayor, Lydia Worth and other officers to search the neighborhood fruitlessly, Robbins to remove the body, and Yee’s dispassionate hands to interpret it. And he, the detective, to gather the essential from what the others found, fit the pieces together, discard the falsehoods, and approach the killer on his own.

  Good Jesus Christ, he thought. What he really wanted to do was sleep. His legs weakened as he backed to the wall and eased himself down it, the Python clanging and spilling from his hand when it hit the tile.

  PART TWO

  TEN

  It wasn’t until late that night that Shephard found what he was looking for in the three-story mansion of Hope Creeley. And having found it, some time passed before he knew that he had.

  After the strength returned to his legs, he had risen to call Pavlik, then stood waiting in the kitchen, locked in a waking dream. Even when the crime scene investigator arrived, Shephard was unable to fully break from the penumbral trance that enveloped him. The entrance of Pavlik played itself out with the familiarity of déjà vu. Shephard watched through the front window as he lugged his forensic case up the driveway, stopping not once but twice to check the address against a slip of paper in his free hand. He greeted Shephard with a haggard, 2 A.M. smile even though it was two in the afternoon, and followed the detective upstairs to the white acreage of the Creeley bedroom.

  Staring down at the twisted body in the bathtub, Shephard offered some flattened words about “another stiff” and “getting to work,” hoping to ease Pavlik away from the numbing reality of it. But the words were wasted. Pavlik slunk back out of the bathroom as Shephard had and stood in the brazen sunlight of the bedroom, his mind, Shephard guessed, filling itself with the same kinds of deflecting questions that had filled his own. They returned to the tub side by side, like teammates breaking huddle, silently buttressing each other by their mutual presence, concentrating with an intensity geared to leave no room for fear or revulsion. They worked quickly, and the pace accelerated. Pavlik’s Baggies and petri dishes suddenly seemed to blossom upon the bathroom floor. They sorted scrapings of flesh and ash from the body and tub, hair samples from the floor and beside the body, more from the wastebasket after they had removed the wadded shower curtain using a pair of cooking tongs that Pavlik claimed, in his increasingly animated chatter, were far superior to the wooden ones extolled at the Academy. The gathering of the evidence progressed smoothly, until the question of the woman’s eyes arose.

  “Looks like she’s watching us, Tom,” Pavlik said. Shephard ignored him until he noticed that Pavlik had quit working and sat silently looking at the woman’s face. “Can you close her eyes for me, Tom?” His face had soured to gray and there was a nervous urgency in his voice. Shephard tried to smooth the woman’s eyelids down but couldn’t quite manage it, neither left nor right. Pavlik leaned forward and tried it, too, but had no better luck, then mumbled something about the glow in her eyes and no damned eyelids anyway. Then he was running his hand along the body, his voice running high as he tilted her head both ways, then leaned over and promised to find her eyelids. Shephard remained silent, watching his shock-bound partner.

  With a trembling hand, Pavlik finally retrieved two fleshy sections from the far side of the body. Each was decisively cut along one side and sprouted hairs along the other. He carefully handed them to Shephard, as delicately as if they had been artifacts, chattering all along about why he became a cop and fishing with his brother on the Bend in Oregon and something about sex, before he collapsed cross-legged on the floor and turned his frantic, crushed gaze to Shepard. After a long and wordless rest, Pavlik carefully put away his dishes and bags, replacing them on the floor with his fingerprinting utensils.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  The investigation in Hope Creeley’s house dragged on with unbroken monotony for the entire afternoon. By the time they had packed up the forensic gear and called Ken Robbins’s bodysnatchers, Shephard was exhausted. As he stood and looked out the window of Hope Creeley’s bedroom, he realized it was not just from the physical tedium of bending, scraping, dusting, spraying, lifting, and photographing for three straight hours. More than the physical frustration of the work was the mental fatigue that comes from knowing that all the work will amount to nothing. The fatigue from realizing—as Shephard had realized even as Pavlik was walking up the driveway and checking the address—that he wasn’t doing the job wrong, he was simply doing the wrong job.

  The idea had hit him quickly.

  That night he sat up under the single lamp remaining in his razed apartment and made out a list of predictions on what Robbins and Yee would find. He anticipated that the accelerant would be turpentine again, that at least one of the scores of human hairs collected would match the ones found in Tim Algernon’s tightly clenched fist, that the killer had entered sometime during the early morning or evening through the unlocked sliding patio door, that the dog’s neck would be broken or his throat crushed. In short, a repetition of the sundry, fragmented, peripheral, and presently barren intelligence that he already possessed. He drank a Scotch and smoked. Later, with the wretched image of Hope Creeley in his head, he wandered with Cal through the city, a tall figure in a wrinkled jacket, his gaze rarely leaving the dark sidewalks, his lanky body bent forward at the waist as his long legs carried him with effortless and deceptive speed.

  For the first time since he had looked down on the disfigurement that was once Hope Creeley, Shephard felt the protective numbness lifting from his mind. He realized as he passed the quaint and long-closed shops of Forest Avenue that the murder of Hope Creeley had taken the case from routine homicide—if there was such a thing—into a darker, more menacing realm. A realm governed by logic and purpose, still well hidden. So well hidden, in fact, that not even three days of exhausting work had allowed him to guess an answer to the most fundamental question: Why? Wade had often told him that solving a premeditated murder was nothing more than the reading of a story. To understand the murder was to understand the plot, he had said. Crimes of passion and crimes of profit offered their scenarios to even the least competent detectives, who had only to read stories that a child could understand. According to his father, every motive was a beginning. The motive became flesh through action.

  But a murder without a motive seemed to him like a story without words, or o
ne written in a strange language. Shephard, his angular face beveled into shadow and light by the street lamp, grappled with the comparison. Somehow, it seemed apt. A book composed by a mind not easily grasped, he thought, like that of a madman or a genius. As he crossed Coast Highway and made his way into the cool onshore breezes of Main Beach, he had a premonitory fear that fingerprints, Identikit sketches, hair specimens, blood samples, and flecks of cobalt could pile up from his desk at the station to the roof of the universe and still amount to nothing but an indecipherable language. A book without understandable words, he decided.

  When he came to the shoreline, Shephard turned south and paralleled the effervescent violet of whitewater that swirled and broke about his feet. He thought of Jane. A party was taking place around a campfire on the sand, the people lit to copper by the flames, their laughter reaching him in snippets interrupted by the waves. A boy and a girl, still wearing bathing suits, broke away from the group and ran after each other into the water, the girl shrieking before she jumped. Another couple stopped to offer him a puff of sweet marijuana, which Shephard politely declined. But the lovely aroma that trailed them as they left, so ripe with forgetfulness and the promise of dreams, tempted him as he hadn’t been tempted in years. Since he was a boy, in fact, and walking along this same beach with Louise. He smoked a cigarette instead, recalling that he had in fact accepted the joint from Louise, eagerly and with feelings of great sin. They had finished it and laughed until they found a dark parting in the cliffs, then snuggled in to kiss and grope and decide once again, with a profound swelling in his heart and ache in his groin, to wait until they were married. They had tried, and almost made it too, though it hadn’t been all that long to wait. Just like Louise to say, let’s try, but not be able to quite do it, he thought. But that was another matter, his defense perhaps.

  Louise, he thought. Was the reality love, or the end of love?

  Just before midnight he stood in front of Hope Creeley’s Spanish-style home, fingering in his pocket the key he had found in her kitchen drawer. After admonishing Cal gently, he brought it out and let them in.

  Cal immediately followed his nose, cruising the hallway for smells, veering unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, stopping suddenly as if something in the air had commanded him to. Shephard took to the house also, wandering, meandering, looking but not knowing for what. Certain fragments found their way into the pockets of his coat: Hope Creeley’s address book, which contained Tim Algernon’s number as well as his father’s; an unopened telephone bill; a handful of matchbooks that had been decoratively placed in a brandy snifter; a shopping list written in a cramped, nervous hand.

  Dimly, Shephard remembered a bedroom wall covered with framed mementos and photographs. On the second floor he found it, in the last of the three bedrooms.

  While Cal sat attentively at his feet, Shephard regarded the framed history. Hope Creeley at high school graduation; in a newspaper photograph that showed her as a Red Cross worker; in a portrait taken as a young woman, standing in her wedding gown with the groom, pushing cake into each other’s mouths. She was a handsome, slight woman, with a plain but friendly face rimmed with light curls. There was something self-contained about her, Shephard thought. Even in the picture of her wedding day, he detected something remote and controlled in her smile. A smile of agreement, conformity, not mirth or abandon. The same smile Hope Creeley wore aboard a motor yacht where she stood on deck with two other couples.

  The photograph was blurred by age. He recognized the couple to Creeley’s left: Mr. and Mrs. Wade Shephard. And the third man was familiar. Shephard closed his eyes and tried to dredge the man’s name from his memory. A handsome, outdoor-looking man, someone to whom life had been good. The face taunted, but remained anonymous.

  Below the yacht picture was a shot of Hope Creeley and her husband standing in front of a tennis net, their racquets in their hands, a trophy at their feet. Embossed into the matte border in fine gold letters was the legend:

  SURFSIDE MEMBERS TOURNAMENT, 1947

  BURTON AND HOPE CREELEY

  The same tournament Tim and Margaret Algernon had played in, he thought. Shephard removed the picture from the wall, examined it under the direct light in the center of the room, and replaced it. Cal yawned and wandered away. The photographs seemed to end around 1950, he noted, as if everything memorable in the woman’s life had been completed by then. He turned off the light and headed for the third story, wondering why it was such a bad year for Surfside tennis players.

  He crossed the white expanse of the anteroom and stood beside the nightstand in the bedroom and noticed something for the first time. No wonder we missed it, he thought. White, like everything else in the room, it blended chameleonlike into the wall behind it. But one look at it explained why Tim Algernon had called twenty-four times instead of once.

  Like a million other frustrated callers around the world, he had gotten the answering machine rather than his intended party.

  Shephard sat down on the bed, turned the rewind switch, and waited for the tape to stop. It didn’t have far to go. Then he pushed the play button, lay back on the hard bed, and stared at the ceiling.

  A man’s voice, calm and peaceful: “This is Reggie, Hope. Just called to say hello. Did you see the yellow rose by the hedge this morning?”

  A woman’s voice, older, enthused, concerned: “It’s Dorothea again, Hope. Thank you so much for your contributions to the Society. I can’t wait to read it and I know the pictures will be a delight. Please come see us again soon. Bye now.”

  Then, a deep voice that spoke slowly and deliberately:

  “Hope, this is Tim. Sorry I missed you. We have to get together and talk, please. My number is 494-1318. Goodbye.”

  The same voice: “Tim Algernon again. I hope you’re on vacation. Please call me as soon as you get in, it’s very important.”

  The next caller listened to the message, waited, and said nothing. It took him five seconds to hang up. Shephard stopped the tape, rewound it, and listened to the empty five seconds again. The sound of cars on a fast street, and one horn honk.

  Tim Algernon called again: “Tim Algernon, Hope. Call me as soon as you get this message. Promise?”

  The first caller, still calm and peaceful: “I hope everything is okay there, dearest Hope. Perhaps we’ll have breakfast again? Toodles.” He hung up.

  Then a long wait, traffic moving in the background again, and the distant peal of bells. The voice came fast and hurried: “Did you get my little package, Hope? I’ll bet it made your skin crawl, didn’t it? You don’t have to call me because I’ll be calling on you. No matter what you do.”

  There was a pause while the traffic and bells continued in the garbled background. Then the voice continued: “Look to God, look to heaven, and look to hell, Hope. It’s so nice to be back in Laguna Beach. Hello, hello …” The caller hung up.

  Shephard lurched up from the bed, rewound the last message, and played it back. Again the long pause, the cars and bells. The hurried, severe voice, speaking as if he had to get the call over with so he could get on to business.

  Followed by Tim Algernon again: “Sorry for all the calls, Hope, but I’ve got something urgent to see you about. Please call me. If I could explain it in thirty seconds, I would. Again, it’s Tim Algernon, 494-1318.”

  And Algernon again: “Hope, call me immediately. I think you may be in danger and I know that I am, too. Please call Tim. Hurry.”

  Then a new voice, or rather, two of them. First a pert “Oh,” as if in mild surprise, then a pause, followed by a voice that Shepard recognized immediately: “Hello, Mrs. Creeley. We’re returning your confidential call of yesterday. Please call us anytime.”

  Marla Collins and Bruce Harmon, he thought: confidential as hell.

  Then the hurried voice again, this time sending a nervous chill up Shephard’s spine: “Poor Timmy, poor Tim. Haven’t you heard?” There was more traffic in the background before he hung up. It was the last c
all on the tape.

  Shephard rewound again to the threatening message. He listened to it twice for the words, which he scribbled into his notebook as they were spoken, and once to count the bells ringing the time in the background.

  There were seven.

  “Good old Saint Cecilia’s,” he mumbled to Cal as he stood up from the bed. “She always tells us the time, doesn’t she, Cal? Even with all the traffic on Coast Highway.”

  Shephard removed the tape in case some other interested party—Bruce Harmon, for instance—should want to hear it. With the first inklings of luck stirring inside him, he stood up. Cal was already asleep on the floor.

  Little package, he thought. Little package. He wondered if it might be book-sized.

  The inklings of luck were true. Not that any great amount of it was needed to pull out the nightstand drawer. But there was the Bible, nestled in the corner beside a bottle of nail polish and an unopened packet of cotton balls. The inside of the back cover bore a stamp more decorative and informative than the stamp on Algernon’s book, a fancy, cheerful filigree that read: Forest Avenue Books, Happy Reading. The book was not new. But he reasoned that the handwriting on the first page was. The ink was red and the familiar penmanship was ordered and skilled:

  For the Lord your God is a devouring Fire,

  A jealous God,

  He is coming to make His misery yours.

  To the collection of matchbooks, address books, and notes in one pocket, Shephard added the Bible in the other, forming a ballast for the long walk home. Outside the door, approaching the darkness of a hedge, he found the small yellow rose that Reggie had asked about. He wondered if she had seen it or not.

  He covered the miles back to his apartment quickly and easily, well ahead of purposeless Cal.