Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Shephard’s hatred was gone, spent with his bullets in the Hotel Cora. His sense of forgiveness was bankrupt, his sense of betrayal complete. When he looked inside himself he saw no signs, heard no counsel, received no guidance from his own unparticipating heart.

  Dr. Zahara changed an appointment to accommodate him. She studied him quietly from the depths of her big chair. They smoked. Shephard was aware of her green eyes prying into him.

  “There’s something I should do,” he said finally. “Something that the law says should be done. Must be done. But if I do it, I’m not sure it will make any difference, and some people I love very much are going to get hurt. One of those—a woman I’m in love with—is innocent. The other is my father.”

  A long silence followed. Dr. Zahara lifted the telephone and asked her receptionist to reschedule the next appointment also. When she was finished, she brushed back her black hair, then settled still farther into the shadows of her chair. “I’d like you to explain.”

  When he had finished, Shephard could hear the traffic outside, thickening toward rush hour. Throughout his story, he had noticed that Zahara made no notes. She tapped her pen on the desk and turned her green eyes on him. “So, to get Joe, you must sacrifice the career and public standing of your father. How would the arrest affect Jane? I’m not sure you explained that, Tom.”

  “Tim Algernon perjured himself for money. To pay for his wife’s cancer treatment. Jane and Tim weren’t very close at the end of his life. She seems to have made a peace with him that I don’t want to shatter. He’s all the family she … had.”

  “I can appreciate that. Would such a detail be likely to arise from the arrest of Joe Datilla? Tim’s perjury?”

  Shephard thought it over, trying the angles. “It’s possible. Joe will play dirty.”

  “Then we’re back to those secrets you wanted to keep, aren’t we? This time to protect a woman you love, rather than yourself.”

  “I guess we are.”

  The silence that followed was a long one.

  “There’s a voice in there somewhere,” she said, “trying to be heard. Let it come to you. Go somewhere quiet if you can. I’ll tell you just one thing. When you consider all the people you may hurt through your actions, don’t forget to include yourself. You’re responsible for you as much as for your father, even Jane. Don’t sacrifice yourself. It might be easy, but it would be wrong.”

  “I’ll try to find that quiet place.”

  “When you first came here, it was for post-shooting trauma. Strange, Tom, but that’s one thing we haven’t talked about. Have you … come to terms with Morris Mumford? With Mercante?”

  Shephard considered her words. “I left them both in Mexico,” he said finally. “At the Hotel Cora.”

  In the end, as always, it was instinct that took him forward.

  Late that evening he found his father in the garden, tending the roses that had been ravaged by the last wind. Shephard came quietly through the living room and into the kitchen, watching through the glass patio door as Wade touched a yellow rose and tried to catch the petals that drifted off and floated to his feet. Wade turned and smiled as Shephard slid back the door. The Reverend Wade Shephard, he thought, all smiles.

  “Tommy, I thought you’d sleep a week.” He peeled off his garden gloves and hugged his son, then pushed away and glanced at his side. “How is it?”

  “Just a little stiff. Fine.”

  Shephard sat down at the patio table in the shade of a large umbrella. The sunset was accumulating high in the west, a wispy, cirrus-streaked tableau that promised reds and blacks. Wade brought lemonade and two glasses.

  “To God’s own sunset,” he toasted. “And your good work. Salute.”

  “Salute.”

  They exchanged not-very-happy smiles. From across the table, Wade seemed to read his thoughts, or at least some of them. He sighed and folded his hands.

  “I know how you feel, son. When I was just a little older than you, I shot a man. He would have pulled his trigger first if I’d let him, but even then I felt like my heart had broken when it was over. You’ll get over it. You will.”

  Shephard tested the waters: “Some things you don’t ever get over, do you?”

  His father sipped from his glass and looked out over the Pacific. Testing his own, Shephard thought. The burden of three decades showed on Wade’s face, in the creases around his eyes, the droop of his mouth, in the hollow, inward expression.

  “Some things, no.”

  “I think you tried, though. Miracle bricks, you called them. Those regrets that build up inside and grow into something good.” Wade smiled shyly. He loves it when someone remembers his sermons.

  “Ah, you remembered,” he said. “We all have our miracle bricks. Azul Mercante is now yours.”

  For a brief moment Shephard felt the roar returning to his ears, the same one that surrounded him before he’d pulled the trigger at the Hotel Cora, the one that whined through his brain only to vanish and leave him with that awful moment of silence. He listened now to the same nothingness. Maybe this is it, he thought, Dr. Zahara’s quiet place. As if from far away, he heard himself speaking.

  “I know he didn’t kill her. I know that she and Mercante were lovers.” Shephard forced himself to look at something other than his father, choosing a red rose at random. He heard Wade’s glass lift from the table, a gulp, the sound of glass on wood. When Wade spoke again his voice was grainy and soft, as if it belonged to a much older man.

  “You’re the only person on earth I’m ashamed to have know that.” After a long pause he spoke again. “Do you understand what I mean?” Shephard’s silence answered for itself. “I mean that I know I have sinned. And I don’t mean against God, but against another man. Every day of my life I’ve thought about confessing that, about telling everyone the truth. Sometimes when I’m home alone at night. Sometimes Sunday mornings on the pulpit. But I couldn’t do it, Tom. I couldn’t let you see that happen.” His voice was soft and distant, as if coming from under the earth.

  “Well, it happened, pop.” Shephard looked at his father’s quivering face, then to the glistening Pacific beyond.

  “I knew about them for quite some time,” Wade began. “A month maybe. I couldn’t confront her with it. It’s … one of my flaws not to be able to confront people with things. I hoped it would end. I tried to improve myself. But when it just kept going and going, I gave up and drank instead.” Shephard watched his father study the glass in his hand, recollecting perhaps the days when it was filled with bourbon and not lemonade.

  “I remember one day I asked a friend on patrol to go by the house and see if his car was there. She was leaving then, so he followed her to a hotel where they met. And the next day I had her followed, too, and this time they went to his studio and they made love on the patio outside under the trees. I don’t know what all my friend saw, but that was all he told me. Then, I decided it was enough and I couldn’t go on any more. I was going to tell her I loved her. Tell her she could go with him if she wanted. I wanted her to be happy, truly. I think only a young man can love so much.

  “So I drank a lot that morning when I was on patrol because the liquor made it all seem unreal and almost tolerable, and I drove here, to this house, and I came up the walkway. I remember it was a hot day and clear and I could smell the eucalyptus and the bourbon mixed together. Something inside me just gave out. I remember thinking it would feel good to have it over with, so we could go our separate ways and maybe be happy again with other people. So I walked through the door and there they were, right in there, in my living room. Up under her dress and I saw the underwear at her ankles and her eyes closed and his arm down there and him kissing her neck. She was groaning, I can remember that too.”

  Wade’s eyes were pools and his face sagged as if it was being pulled by invisible strings. He was staring out at the water.

  “We were friends, you know, Mercante and I. Tennis partners at the Surfside. We drank and made
jokes. He was a fine painter, an energetic, funny little man. Your mother admired him very much. She started painting herself, you know.

  “But when I saw them against the wall in the living room, I felt so outside them, so violated and betrayed. So foolish. And the look on his face when he saw me wasn’t humiliation or fear, but triumph. He looked at me like I was a fool to let this happen and a dunce to be there to witness it. So … so I pulled my gun and shot him.” Wade’s face succumbed; it shattered. “But she was there instead … Good Christ; she was there instead.”

  In the long silence that followed, Shephard searched for something to say. Dr. Zahara’s words came back again. Sometimes when we lose ourselves, we find ourselves, too. When Wade turned to look at him, his face was glazed, his eyes wide, as if in amazement.

  “And I lay there on top of her for a long time. I heard Mercante pick up the gun and I felt him holding it to the back of my head. I hoped he would do it. Then he dropped it and ran out the door. Colleen was … not breathing any more. And I breathed into her for a long time but nothing happened. So I stood up and went to the phone to call the watch commander. To tell the watch commander that I had just shot my wife but it was an accident. And I dialed and got him and I said, John, John, my wife’s been killed. Colleen is dead. And he said, good God how did it happen, and I said she was shot. Her lover shot her. Azul Mercante shot her and I watched him do it. And it was then, Tommy, that I knew what it meant to sin, to kill someone you love and make someone else pay for it. It was so easy. So easy to back out. Joe loaned me a little money for a favor and that was that. Later, a few days later I think it was, Joe called on me to return the favor and I took a dead man in my car to Newport Beach. It just got deeper and deeper.”

  Shephard looked at his father again, the picture of a man holding himself together by sheer willpower. Everything about him seemed ready to dissolve.

  “Every day I thought about changing it. Setting Mercante free. Telling. Confessing. And years later, when I was finished wishing I could die, I thought the next best thing was to help someone else live better. And I prayed and prayed and God asked me to act on his behalf. I felt that He asked me. I wanted it. I wanted to do something I could feel good about, finally. When I heard Azul died in prison, all I could do was double my prayers for him.” His father looked up, and Shephard held his gaze. “That’s why I understand forgiveness,” he said. “Because the hardest thing I ever did was to try to forgive myself. And when I had done as much of that as I could, I started trying to make up for it all. I think everything decent I’ve ever done since that day was for Colleen. I think maybe … she was my God.” Wade’s voice trailed off to nothing, a whisper against the background surge of the sea.

  “It was Datilla who hired Harmon, pop. They gave Mercante a car and money. He sent him to Mexico to find you. He wanted you dead.”

  It was apparent from the vacant, infant-like expression on his father’s face that Wade didn’t understand.

  “Joe told me he was afraid you might make that confession someday. He was afraid he’d finally have to pay for Burton Creeley. He helped Mercante get Hope.”

  “Joe did?”

  “He did. It’s conspiracy, pop. Conspiracy to commit murder. Do you understand what that means?”

  In his confusion, the reverend was a cop for a moment. “More than one person planning, arranging, or intending to bring about the—”

  “Not that, pop. Do you understand what it means to you? If I take Joe for conspiracy?”

  Wade leaned forward, as if the news to come should be told in secret. Later, Shephard remembered thinking that it was at this instant his father finally broke. Wade slowly shook his head. The evening breeze stirred his father’s hair, much as the breeze on Isla Arenillas had stirred Mercante’s.

  “It means that if Joe goes for conspiracy, he’s going to take you with him. Everything you just told me. Colleen, Burton in your car. Everything.” Shephard heard his own voice trembling, and he fought to control the heaving of his heart. And then, in a moment of clarity that all of his previous thoughts had failed to bring to him, Shephard knew what he should do.

  No, he thought. Never. I can’t do that to him.

  Wade stood up and put his gloves back on. Behind him, the sun had nearly touched the horizon, and the island of Catalina lay balanced like a gray body on the rim of the ocean. The water danced in crimson. It will be better this way, Shephard thought, as his father moved toward the rose bushes. It has to end somewhere, why not here, while something remains.

  “What are you going to do?” Wade asked. He had picked up a pair of pruning shears and was nudging them into a thick bush near the center. “Come here, son. Come here.” There was a new tone to his voice, a tone that Shephard hadn’t heard in years. Ten, he wondered? Twenty? “Tommy. Get the other gloves. In the garage, far wall.” As Shephard walked off to the garage, he recognized the difference. It fit with the walls of the house, the flowers, the same carpet and wallpaper he had always known, the smell of his father’s breakfasts cooking on Sunday mornings. It wasn’t Wade the lawman; it wasn’t Wade the man of God.

  He got the gloves off the wall and returned to the rose hedge. Wade’s head was angled down at a bush that he seemed to be inspecting in some minute detail.

  I can let him be, Shephard thought. After all this, I can let him be.

  But the feeling inside him was not relief, only surrender, and it was the first time he could remember ever giving up on something he truly cared about. The thought of Datilla going free brought a sick lump to his throat.

  “Put the gloves on, Tom, and go through these bushes after the dead branches. The wind was pretty hard on them this time. All in all, roses are pretty hardy flowers, but sixty miles per hour off the desert is just too much. The little branches didn’t make it. The big ones are okay.”

  Sure, Shephard thought. I know that voice.

  Then Wade had turned away and was working silently, pruning the limbs, tossing the outcasts into a neat pile on the lawn. Shephard looked out and watched the last sliver of sun dunk behind the island. Wade turned and stared at him.

  “What are you going to do, Tommy?”

  Shephard could not answer the question. He fiddled idly with a branch.

  “I ran a little experiment on these roses years ago,” Wade said as he clipped. “When I planted them. The ones to your left I just stuck in the ground that was here when your mother and I bought the house. Then I went to the nursery and found out the proper way to plant roses. Got mulch, vitamins, a book about it, the whole shot. The ones over there I planted with all the knowledge of just how to do it. Well, when they grew up and started giving us flowers, guess what? The ones on the left grew better. The flowers weren’t any bigger and there weren’t any more of them, but they were shaped better. They were tighter, brighter, more believable.” He stood back and made a show of studying the roses on the two sides. “So much for the mulch, I said. And from then on I just stuck them in the ground without the additives and let them go. Careful to keep the pests away, of course.”

  He shot his son a smile, one that Shephard hadn’t seen in years, one that went with the voice. Not the cop, not the reverend, but just the man, and the father. Uncluttered, unforced. Believable.

  “Tommy, if you don’t take Joe, I’ll be deeply ashamed of what I raised. You wouldn’t for a minute entertain that idea, would you? Because when you’ve done that, I can take myself and plant me in some real soil. I think it’s time for that. It’s not too late for me to quit living the lie, but it’s much too early for you to start. You have my blessing.”

  After a brief time in which Shephard decided to let a half-dead branch stay on the bush, he felt his heart settle and a new balance spreading inside. He thought of Jane. At the cove again, tonight.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  They worked after dark amidst silence and small talk, and when the roses were in order, Shephard went home.

  THIRTY

  The moo
n appeared an hour later, low on the horizon, dangling strings of light over the water at Diver’s Cove. Shephard and Jane crossed the sand barefoot and worked their way north past the tidepools, which shone up at them like mirrors. As they walked toward the cave, the waves that lapped at Shephard’s feet seemed to nibble away at everything that had happened to him in the last few days, just as they had done the first time he walked the shore with Jane. A week ago, he wondered, or a century? The memories seemed to be inching out of him: the three shots cracking through the early morning in the Hotel Cora; Datilla’s bitter confession; Wade’s enfeebled, then rejuvenating voice. Even before they found the cave and stripped naked in the glow of the flashlight, he could feel relief and forgetfulness pouring in.

  The stitches in his side brought him sharply back to reality.

  “Ouch,” Jane said, running her fingers over them for the hundredth time. “Sure you want to do this?”

  “This is where I got to know you, chum. I’ll never get tired of that.”

  This time they undressed each other, eagerly. She came close and put her arms gently around him.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Let’s talk later,” he said, wondering about Tim. Would it do any good to tell her?

  They waded together through the rocks, and when they were knee-deep in the rolling waves, they dove under. The first wave thumped him as he went under it, stinging his side. He came up and saw Jane pulling through the water ahead of him. Another wave, another thump, but he was closer to her now and each time he brought up his head for air he could hear her laughing.

  Silver shoulders, silver arms ahead in the moonlight. When he came up even with her, she was still laughing, but it didn’t seem to be the right time to ask why. Later, he thought.

  And the farther out they swam, the less things back on shore seemed to matter: absurdly, what was ahead of them was suddenly more important than what was behind, although he knew that it was just the Indicator rocks, the Inside Indicator coming up not far ahead and somewhere behind it the Outside Indicator where Jane said all real lovers go. They passed the first rock side by side and neither of them stopped to pay it any attention.