Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  He knew, too, that the trunk would include Wade and Colleen, Datilla and Helene, Tim and Margie, Burton and Hope. They seemed tangled, inextricable, one and the same. As he reached for the volume marked 1951, his rational side urged him on while his instincts rebuked him, and for a moment he felt as if his hand were moving both toward and away from the book, like a cat feeling water with a hesitant paw.

  But in the end it was more Helene Lang’s advice to know thyself than his own sense of duty that led him to take the volume and bring it to his lap. Outside, the wind shuddered into the windows again and he felt chilled, though sweat was tickling down his head. Her words echoed as he began reading: Welcome to the club.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The year had started quietly. The first pages were neatly pasted with shots of New Year’s Eve parties, and long lists of attendees. Shephard found that Joe and Helene were the featured players, although Burton and Hope Creeley were pictured three times. The gala mood quickly gave way to the more trivial goings-on in the Surfside: wedding announcements, births, deaths, and scholarships awarded. These smaller events were contained in a modest members’ newsletter called Surfsiders. The editor was Helene Lang.

  As spring arrived, so did the tennis season, and the scrapbook soon filled with tournament pictures, mostly clipped from the newsletter. The May edition announced the building of a new wing of suites on the club’s north shore, and contained a brief message from co-owner Joe Datilla, who was pictured smiling at the ground-breaking ceremony. Burton Creeley stood beside him, spade in hand, but it was apparent that the photographer’s interest was in robust Joe.

  Shephard studied Burton Creeley’s face and posture. It was easy to imagine him falling for the charms of a woman like Helene, whom Shephard found nearly out of the frame, casting a warm smile in Creeley’s direction. He was small, almost hunched, and he looked uncomfortable in the dark suit. His smile was wan and forced. But as hungry as a man like him might have been for a sultry woman like Helene, Shephard thought, there was still something hesitant in his look. It was hard to imagine him cheating on his wife … and on his best friend.

  The spring season gave way to a rash of summer parties: women in light, sheer dresses, men in strangely outdated casual wear. In one picture, apparently taken on the Surfside beach, Wade and Colleen Shephard posed with their newborn son, Tom. Well, Shephard thought, Helene’s trunk contains another surprise. Wade looked big-chested and proud, and Colleen’s lovely face was turned downward to his own. The cutline read: “Mr. and Mrs. Wade Shephard show off their new son, Thomas Wade. He was born four weeks ago and tipped the scales at six pounds and four ounces. Congratulations to members Wade and Colleen!”

  On the next page he found a Register article on Burton Creeley, the “silent owner” of the prestigious Surfside Club of Newport Beach. It was Creeley’s contention that the club could soon blossom into a little city of its own, complete with roads, schools, shopping areas, and, most importantly of all, access for everyone to the golden bayfront property of the club. He spoke of the Surfside as his “vision” and “dream of tomorrow,” and in the accompanying photograph Creeley seemed physically enlarged with his own ideas. His smile was more relaxed, and there was a muscular tension to his face. The reporter had apparently asked if there was some disagreement in the upper levels of Surfside management as to what the future of the club would entail. “There is always a degree of give and take,” Burton had answered. “That’s what makes great ideas even greater. I can tell you that Joe and I see wonderful things ahead for this club.”

  But the summer gaiety ended abruptly on September 9, when Surfside member Colleen Shephard was shot and killed by a man named Azul Mercante.

  Shephard read the article again, the same one that Wade had shown him that evening before his first day of school. And just as it had done all those years ago, the picture of Colleen brought an overwhelming sense of violation to him, a sense of being intruded upon, penetrated, opened. He stared again, and felt again the loss of something he had never known, the itch in the phantom limb.

  LAGUNA WOMAN SLAIN

  Policeman Husband Watches in Horror

  A Laguna Beach woman was fatally shot earlier today in her Arch Bay Heights home while her husband helplessly looked on.

  Colleen Shephard, 22, wife of LBPD officer Wade Shephard, was shot once in the chest by a gunman who fled the scene. Police are now searching for the suspect.

  According to Police Chief Donald Pantzar, Mrs. Shephard was apparently alone in her home when the gunman broke in and attempted to rape her. Her husband, returning home for lunch, found his wife being accosted in the living room. The suspect, whose name is being withheld on order of the chief, allegedly pulled a handgun and fired the fatal shot.

  A fight for the gun ensued between Mr. Shephard and the man, who escaped on foot.

  Mrs. Shephard was pronounced dead on arrival at Community Hospital in South Laguna Beach.

  Police say that the murder weapon has been recovered and believe the motive for the break-in was rape.

  The Shephards are four-year residents of the city. Earlier this year they had their first child, a son.

  Shephard turned the page, relieved to find a full-page shot of fifty-four debutantes coming out at a Surfside-sponsored party. He studied their faces, trying to forget the story from the page before. Their cheery faces seemed to belong to a different world.

  But two pages later he was plunged back into the murder of his mother, front page:

  MURDER SUSPECT NABBED

  Police Capture Laguna Beach Man

  Laguna Beach Police yesterday arrested their prime suspect in Wednesday’s murder of Colleen Shephard.

  Azul Mercante, 25, also of Laguna, was arrested in his Temple Hills Terrace home after a brief struggle, police reported.

  LBPD Captain Lonny Wilcox said that a loaded shotgun was found in the suspect’s home.

  Mercante was identified by the victim’s husband, Wade Shephard, as the man he found accosting his wife in their Arch Bay Heights home Wednesday around noon.

  In a press conference held yesterday, LBPD Chief Donald Pantzar stated that Shephard, a LBPD officer, had attempted to subdue the man when a struggle ensued. According to Pantzar, Shephard lost his gun to the intruder, who then turned it on Colleen.

  Shephard attempted to revive his dying wife while Mercante allegedly fled on foot.

  The suspect barricaded himself in his home and held police at bay for an hour with a shotgun, Pantzar said. He surrendered at 2:30 P.M. and no shots were fired.

  The District Attorney says no charges will be filed until the preliminary investigation is completed.

  There was a dim photograph of the family’s Arch Bay Heights home beside the article, with the crude but informative caption: “Colleen Shephard, 22, was shot to death in this house Wednesday.” Shephard’s stomach had knotted, and sweat soaked his shirt. He stood up, set the volume on the director’s chair, and stared through the blinds to the green bay surging below him.

  The news of Mercante’s arraignment was covered in a short article on the next page of the scrapbook. Assistant District Attorney Jim Peters was pictured beside the piece, as was the suspect, covering his face in his hands. Shephard knew that with formal charges brought a mere two days after the arrest, Peters must have considered his case a good one. An eyewitness was enough to make any D.A. drool. Peters was a middle-aged man with a thick, combative face and a nose like a heavyweight’s. Mercante retained a public defender by the name of Eugene Weingarten.

  Another article on the same page told of Mercante’s outlandish behavior at the jail. After refusing food for two days, he gashed his head on the bars of his cell in a “sudden fury, while screaming his innocence.” The day after his arraignment, Mercante was removed to the criminal ward of the county hospital for “further examination and for his own protection.”

  With the coming of fall, the Surfside quieted. The big event of October was an annual yacht race that orig
inated at the club and terminated in Ensenada, Mexico. The local press failed to recognize the serious side of the event and referred to the annual beer-drenched race as “The Booze Cruise.” Surfside dockmaster Dick Evans was featured in a newsletter interview, trying to restore some sense of maritime drama to the race. “We like to think of it as a race for both the serious and the recreational yachtsman,” he said. Another newsletter photograph showed the foundations of the new wing of suites, which were framed against a Surfside sunset and looked like ruins more than beginnings.

  A trial date for Azul Mercante was set. The opening day would be Monday, October 14, and the presiding Superior Court Judge would be Francis Rubio. The article noted that Rubio, at the age of fifty, was the youngest judge on the Superior bench.

  Then came the September 26 article Shephard had seen in Hope Creeley’s collection, the brief account of Burton’s tragic drowning in the Newport Channel. The whole Surfsiders newsletter was devoted to the memory of the co-owner. The title-page masthead, usually done in a light-hearted sea green, was a somber black. Creeley’s portrait took up nearly a quarter of the first page, and beside it was a touching obituary written by none other than Helene Lang. She called him a “visionary” and a man “to whom the future was always a place of happiness and hope, a man whose loss dims the hopes and happiness of the futures of us all.” Joe Datilla wrote a guest column on his personal friendship with Burton, the long days and worried months that constituted the birth of the club. “Somewhere inside myself,” he wrote, “even during those times when it seemed our project might fail miserably, I always retained a solid foundation of optimism. Looking back on those times it is easy for me now to see that it was the endless faith of Burton that shored me up. He was a man who proceeded utterly without doubt and utterly without malice to anyone. He was the best of what a man, and a businessman, can be.”

  Shephard was struck by a third-page photograph, taken only a month earlier, of Burton and Hope Creeley side by side on the Surfside tennis courts. Her smile was reluctant and elusive as always, but her husband seemed to be brimming with vigor. They couldn’t have been much over thirty years old.

  A bad summer for the Surfside, he thought. As Creeley had written in her diary, bad luck seemed to hang over the club as over the pyramids at El Giza. He glanced up at the Mayan deity on the wall, which from his angle seemed to be doing a death dance on the silent chest of Helene.

  He lit a cigarette and used a potted plant for an ashtray. He could hear the wind outside mounting for another attack, and when it hit, the glass behind him rattled with a vengeance. He shifted in his chair, the smell of his sweat rising around him, mixing with the dry aroma of smoke.

  Helene had also clipped the Register article on the alleged sighting of Creeley in Laguna Beach the night he died. Shephard thought back to her account of the bungled murder, the hoods from Los Angeles unable to tell the Newport Channel from Diver’s Cove. And friends to bring the errant body back north to Newport Beach. But the cops had scoffed at the idea of the body drifting north, and when Shephard considered the logistics of such a drift, he couldn’t help but scoff too. What if Helene had told the truth about the drowning? Even if she were as sick as Datilla and Wade had said, might she have still sprinkled her fantasies with bits of truth? Which bits, he wondered, and whose truth? But the newspaper’s heated call to reopen the investigation dwindled into disinterest, and the next page of the scrapbook contained only a small article stating that Azul Mercante’s trial for murder had been postponed three weeks and a large photograph of a Surfside Halloween gala in which the celebrants dressed up as ghosts.

  On the next page of the Surfside scrapbook, the trial began. Weingarten immediately made headlines by requesting not a jury trial but a trial whose outcome would rest solely in the hands of the Honorable Francis Rubio. From his own experience in court, Shephard knew that the request was extremely rare and inevitably was made by defendants who believed that their chances with a jury were nil. Nevertheless, the Academy cliché that an innocent man will demand a trial by judge was sometimes true. Judges were less susceptible to pressure from the press, less impressed with the gyrations of prosecutors, and—perhaps from human reluctance to single-handedly pass judgment—often more attentive to the details of justice than a tired and underpaid jury might be. They were harder to fool. He also knew that judges tended to consider the evidence rather than the man, and could better differentiate between the act and the actor.

  But the move to a trial by judge seemed futile as he read Jim Peters’s opening remarks. His first statements portrayed Mercante as a dangerously aggressive “playboy,” a man whose “very concept of women leads to serious questions about his state of mind at the time of the crime.” He promised to produce adequate testimony to demonstrate Mercante’s “everyday” behavior as potentially ripe for this kind of sexual crime. And the cornerstone of his prosecution, as he put it, was to produce a murder weapon clearly covered with the fingerprints of Mercante and reveal the results of paraffin tests, which would show that the defendant had in fact fired the fatal shot.

  Weingarten’s opening remarks were brief and to the point: Azul Mercante was a good friend of the Shephards, especially of Colleen, and had visited the house in goodwill, with honorable intentions. According to Weingarten—and the assertion made Shephard sneer with contempt for the man’s stupidity—Wade Shephard had come home unexpectedly, and in a jealous rage fired at Mercante and instead hit his wife. He failed to address the fingerprints and the berium and antimony—the two telltale residues left by the explosion of gunpowder—that were found on Mercante’s right wrist.

  Shephard read the testimony with a slow anger shifting inside him. But it was apparent to him, as he began the article on the next page, that Mercante couldn’t even hold up his end of Weingarten’s thin charade.

  MERCANTE GAGGED IN COURT

  Murder defendant Azul Mercante, accused slayer of a young Laguna Beach mother this summer, was ordered gagged yesterday by Judge Francis Rubio.

  Rubio’s action took place after Mercante continually interrupted the proceedings with violent outbursts directed at prosecutor Jim Peters. The judge told Mercante that any further outbursts would land him outside the courtroom of his own trial.

  Mercante’s shouting came during the testimony of police researcher Dwayne Maxwell, who said that a paraffin test of Mercante’s skin shortly after his arrest was positive.

  Mercante screamed that the berium and antimony found in his skin were there because he is an artist and the paints he works with contain these substances.

  The trial is now in its second week.

  With a giddy feeling of pursuit, Shephard flipped quickly to the next page of the scrapbook. It was now Weingarten’s turn to build a case, and he began by summoning several witnesses who testified that Mercante was in fact a frequent tennis partner of Wade Shephard and “apparently” a friend of both Wade and Colleen. Weingarten brought Wade to the stand on a Thursday morning. For nearly the entire day he questioned Wade’s relationship with his wife, with the members of his department, and finally with Mercante, whom Wade described as “a volatile man but apparently a good man.” He went on to state his shock in finding Mercante trying to accost his wife. Wade called their relationship one that was “building toward friendship,” but that he only saw Mercante as a casual acquaintance at the Surfside Club.

  Shephard was not surprised to read that Mercante was a member.

  Weingarten finished the day’s proceedings by bringing Dwayne Maxwell back to the stand to state that berium and antimony were common components in the paints used by fine artists and that such residues might stay lodged in human skin for “several days.” Mercante was carried screaming from the courtroom after breaking his gag, and was banished by Rubio for the next two days.

  The two names that jumped off the next page brought Shephard a swirling sense of exhilaration.

  The next day’s witnesses were Tim Algernon and Hope Creeley.


  WOMAN TELLS OF RAPE TRY

  Hope Creeley of Newport Beach testified that murder defendant Azul Mercante had once tried to accost her in the spa of the plush Surfside Club in Newport Beach.

  The 24-year-old Creeley, widow of drowned Surfside co-owner Burton Creeley, said that she lived in fear of Mercante following his attack on her at a Fourth of July party this year.

  Mrs. Creeley was called to the stand by prosecutor Jim Peters, who has claimed throughout the trial that Mercante is a “dangerous sexual outlaw.”

  Following Mrs. Creeley’s testimony, another Surfside member, Tim Algernon, said that Mercante often made suggestive remarks about women at the club and often expressed a desire “to have relations” with several.

  The damaging testimony was brought by Peters to show that Mercante entered Mrs. Shephard’s home Sept. 9 with the “singular purpose of sexual assault.”

  He is asking for the death penalty.

  Shephard broke into a fresh sweat as he finished the article. Standing up on nervous legs, he lit a cigarette and took the scrapbook with him to the window. In the bright afternoon light that shot through the blinds, he scanned ahead to the final article on the trial of Azul Mercante, killer of Colleen. There was a picture of Mercante being led from the courtroom, his face glaring at the photographer.

  He was judged guilty by Francis Rubio, and sentenced to life imprisonment at Folsom State Prison, California.

  Rhythms that by now seemed ancient found their way back from Shephard’s memory.

  Liars Burn and Little Liars

  Burn First

  And the long-delayed, but painfully obvious:

  THIS BIBLE PROPERTY OF

  FOLSOM STATE PRISON

  Shephard brought the last rumpled Identikit sketch from his pocket and held it beside the hateful face in the photograph.