Scavenger hunt

by Robert Ferrigno

  "The scene of the waitress taking a shower-that was new too," said Rollo, thinking. "I checked the production notes. It was one of the last things Walsh shot. Gratuitous, maybe, but that blue tile with the mermaids looking over her shoulder as she's washing her hair-it was kind of hot."

  Jimmy nodded. The scene was hot, but it was more than that: It was loving and appreciative too, almost too intimate. He was sorry that Sugar Brimley hadn't been able to get them into Walsh's old beach house. If the new owners hadn't remodeled, Jimmy was certain, absolutely certain, that the bathroom would have had a blue tile shower with decorative mermaids.

  Chapter 38

  "I already left three messages with his service," said Jimmy. "Do you have any idea when he's coming in to the office?"

  "Felix the Cat better not show his face. That twitch blew off two gangbang scenes yesterday and didn't even bother calling, so if he thinks he's still got a job here, he's out of his fucking mind."

  "It's really important I talk to him."

  "If you got the clap, I have a list of preferred providers." The Intimate Ecstasy Productions talent wrangler's voice hardened. "If you got the bug, you didn't get it on one of our movies, so forget suing-"

  Jimmy clicked off his cell phone.

  "Still can't find Felix?" said Rollo.

  Jimmy chewed his lip. Felix had been scared at the porn shoot, but he didn't talk like he was ready to run. Now he was AWOL. "I wanted to ask him some more questions. I'm still trying to locate Stephanie, the agent's secretary."

  Rollo dropped the VW van into first gear, the engine whining as they drove up the winding road toward the crest of Orange Hill. "He must have gone underground again."

  "Maybe."

  "What's that mean?" Rollo glanced over at him. "Should I be scared?"

  Jimmy didn't answer.

  Rollo edged away from Jimmy, as though that would help.

  It was an overcast morning, the sun not making much headway against the haze.

  "Screening the rough cut of Hammerlock for Nino was the smartest thing I ever did." Rollo pushed back his glasses. "I just wanted to bring something special to the party-I didn't expect Nino to bankroll a documentary about the last days of Garrett Walsh. How cool is that?" He hunched over the wheel, trying to see through the dirty windshield. "First time I ever made a movie without having to move a load of laptops." He glanced at Jimmy. "I can still upgrade that crappy Trinitron of yours. It's not like I'm retired."

  "That's a comfort."

  "I got a question, and I want you to take your time answering. Ready?" Rollo took a deep breath. "You think I should bleach my hair?"

  "No."

  "You're sure?"

  "Oh, yeah."

  "What if I got a sports car? Gerardo says he can make me a deal on a slightly warm Porsche. Can't you see me in a red turbocharged nine twenty-eight?"

  "I see you on the way to hairplugsville, grinding the gears all the way."

  "I need help, man. You see those women at Nino's on Saturday night? I was in play a couple times, but as soon as the pussy saw my wheels, good-bye, Rollo. Winning the scavenger hunt helped, but that was last month. You're good with women. I still don't know how you nailed Jane Holt."

  "She said I was the only man who could beat her at Scrabble."

  "So I have to beef up my vocabulary if I want to get laid?"

  Jimmy shrugged. "I cheated."

  The car crested the top of the hill. An ancient Volvo with a peeling Greenpeace bumper sticker was parked next to Walsh's trailer. Yellow police-tape streamers rippled listlessly in the breeze. The windows to the trailer were broken, and the door was torn off its hinges. Past the trailer Saul Zarinski waded in the koi pond, a bony intellectual wearing rubber boots, khaki shorts, and a denim shirt.

  Rollo parked next to the Volvo and set the handbrake. He reached for his digital video camera, but Jimmy was already out of the van.

  The inside of Walsh's trailer had been trashed, the cheap furniture smashed to splinters, the refrigerator overturned, the cupboards empty, the mattress cut open, stuffing clumped on the floor. Graffiti had been sprayed on the walls: pentagrams, gang slogans, profanity, even a call for the Anaheim High School football team to "go all the way!"

  Rollo moved around Jimmy with his camera, making a slow smooth pan of the main room, one knee bent, muttering, "Perfect, perfect," as he took in the crushed fish crackers and Ding Dongs smeared into the carpet.

  Jimmy walked out of the trailer and headed toward the koi pond. He could see the main house higher up the hill, still vacant, its shutters closed, but the lawn was green and freshly mowed. The smell got worse at he neared the koi pond. "Professor Zarinski?"

  Zarinski looked up, blinking. He wore surgical gloves, the breast pocket of his shirt was stuffed with pens, and hair was curling around his ears.

  "I'm Jimmy Gage. We met-"

  "I remember you." Zarinski wet a pencil in his mouth and wrote in a small notebook.

  Jimmy was closer now. A metal screen dangled from the tripod. Something gray and amorphous rested on the mesh, its skin swollen to bursting, maggots wriggling across the surface. Blackflies drifted overhead, their buzzing like static. The stink burned his nostrils, and breathing through his mouth just made him taste it. "What is that?"

  "Pig." Zarinski cranked a handle, lowering the pig back into the water. Flies walked through his hair and marched across his eyebrows. "Domestic pig." He made another notation in his book. "Twenty-four point seven grams less pig than yesterday."

  "Waste of good barbecue." Jimmy watched a gold-streaked koi poke at the bloated carcass. "This is an experiment?"

  "It's not sadism, I can assure you." Zarinski splashed out of the koi pond and over toward some thornbushes. He reached into the brush, slid out a hidden stainless-steel device, and checked the dials. "Hydrothermograph," he said, answering Jimmy's unspoken question. "Measures ambient air temperature and humidity."

  "What are you trying to prove?"

  Zarinski kept writing. "Finally. Someone who realizes that the purpose of an experiment is to prove something. You have no idea the foolish questions I've had to deal with. 'Do earwigs nest in your ear when you sleep?' he mimicked. 'Do scorpions sting themselves when they're cornered?'" He looked up at Jimmy. "Entomology is the most disrespected specialty in science."

  "Not by Katz though."

  Zarinski smiled.

  "I heard that she and Boone got into an argument in the forensics lab. One of the techs told me it had something to do with you."

  "Detective Katz has been very supportive of my research. I wish I could say the same for Dr. Boone."

  "That's what you're doing? You're challenging the Walsh autopsy?"

  Zarinski pursed his lips. "Let's just say that the man is a very sloppy scientist." Helen Katz backhanded the fly in midair, bouncing it off the wall and onto the bird's-eye maple floor. Then she stepped on it.

  The realtor dropped to one knee, wiped up the squashed insect with a pink tissue, and tucked it into the pocket of her navy blue suit with white piping. "Detective, I have a prospective client for the house coming by any moment now."

  "This shouldn't take long." Katz saw the realtor glance at her watch and wanted to backhand her too. Skinny-ass broad wearing a thousand dollars worth of clothes on her back-don't get Katz even started about the woman's shoes, some matching blue lizard job with an open toe. Regular pedicures on those dainty toes. They probably didn't even make shoes like that for Katz's splayed feet. Not that she would wear them anyway. She wouldn't. "I wanted to ask you about the last time you saw Walsh."

  "I already gave you my statement right after poor Mr. Walsh's body was discovered-"

  "Tell me again."

  "As previously stated, it was on the sixth. I checked my Day-Timer." The realtor sprayed air-freshener around the living room, a vanilla-cinnamon potion intended to make spending a million dollars on a fixer-upper with no backyard seem like a smart idea. "I was showing the Orange Hill house to a
nice Brazilian family. It's an overpriced property, and there hasn't been much interest-"

  "You're certain it was Walsh you saw?"

  "Who else would it have been?" Zarinski dangled the white maggot in front of Jimmy's face. "This is a first-stage blowfly larva, Chrysomya rufifacies."

  Jimmy stared at the maggot squirming between the thumb and forefinger of Zarinski's pink surgical gloves. "Vermicelli."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Vermicelli-the pasta. It's Italian for 'little worms.'"

  "I didn't know that." Zarinski looked at the maggot like he wanted to kiss it. "Vermicelli." He nodded. "Thank you for that delightful factoid, Mr. Gage."

  "I've always been interested in bugs."

  "Insects."

  "Right." Jimmy watched the fat white maggot bending back and forth in Zarinski's delicate grasp. The grub reminded him of a tourist doing sit-ups.

  "Most laypersons find my research disgusting."

  "Sometimes you have to get down and dirty to know what's really going on in the world."

  Zarinski beamed.

  "So you and Boone disagreed over the results of the autopsy?"

  "Dr. Boone is an ignoramus." Zarinski cleared his throat. "Medical examiners depend on data like lividity, organ deterioration, and rigor mortis to estimate time of death, but those measurements are questionable at best with a body half-immersed in water." He held up the maggot to Jimmy. "This vermicelli is the single most precise method of establishing time of death. If Dr. Boone had even a basic understanding of entomology…" He leaned over the koi pond and tenderly replaced the maggot on the pig. "Within ten minutes of death adult blowflies are on the scene, feeding on blood or other body fluids, depositing eggs into the body cavities, either wounds or natural cavities like eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The blowflies start the clock. Understand?"

  "I'm listening."

  Zarinski nodded. "During the mean temperature range at this time of year, egg-laying on the corpse would continue for approximately eight days. The life cycle of the blowfly-egg to maggot to pupa- takes eleven days. When I arrived on the scene with Detective Katz, I found discarded pupa cases floating in the koi pond. So eight plus eleven-death occurred at least nineteen days prior to your discovery of the body. That's our baseline. The flesh flies arrive three to four days after the blowflies, as soon as the body begins to putrefy. Local weather conditions are critical to determining the onset of flesh flies. This gives us another temporal line for our calculations. Where those two lines intersect is crucial to determining time of death. Are you with me?"

  "I'm tagging along as best I can."

  "Good chap. I wish I could say the same for Dr. Boone, but he was threatened by my theory. He actually revoked my privileges at the crime lab."

  "What exactly was your theory?"

  " 'Forget the fieldwork, Saul, get to the hypothesis.' I've heard that before." Zarinski pulled out his notebook and tapped a line of figures. "I presented Dr. Boone with my research, and he wouldn't even discuss adjusting his report. That's when I redid my experiment." He pointed at the bloated gray mass bobbing in the koi pond. "One thirty-kilo pig, drugged with the same narcotic mixture found in Walsh's toxicology results, the dosage proportionate to body weight-"

  "Professor, what was your disagreement with Boone?"

  "Dr. Boone estimated time of death as sometime on the seventh, but my research establishes that time of death occurred no later than the fifth."

  "So how does that discrepancy affect Boone's findings? How does that prove that Walsh didn't drown, that he was murdered?"

  Zarinski looked confused. "It doesn't prove anything of the kind."

  "You said you and Boone disagreed-"

  "Not over cause of death. Cause of death isn't my area of expertise." Flies hovered around Zarinski, but he ignored them. "Postmortem interval is my subspecialty. Time of death. Boone's estimate was wrong by at least forty-eight hours."

  "What about Boone's conclusion that Walsh had drowned?"

  "I don't speculate outside my area of expertise."

  Jimmy stared at the rotting pig bobbing in the koi pond. Zarinski might not speculate outside his expertise, but Katz did. Speculating was her job, and it was Jimmy's too. She must have figured that if Boone fucked up the time of death, he might have been wrong about the cause of death too. He looked over at the professor. "Your time-of-death theory must have impressed Katz. That's why she got into an argument with Boone last week, wasn't it?"

  "Detective Katz is a fierce advocate of the scientific method. Dr. Boone kept backing up until he tripped over a chair." Zarinski peeled off his surgical gloves with a snap. "I believe the argument also had something to do with you. Detective Katz kept mentioning your name. She's quite fond of you."

  "Yeah, I could tell by the way she almost broke my face."

  "Aggressive action on the part of the female is quite common before mating."

  "If you're a praying mantis maybe, but-"

  "Female behavior is remarkably consistent across the phyla," Zarinski said idly, scooping a black beetle out of the koi pond.

  "Jimmy?" called Rollo, coming up behind him. "Whoa, dude. What's that in the pool?"

  Jimmy's phone rang.

  "Is this Jimmy Gage?"

  "Hi, who's this?" Jimmy watched Rollo filming the floating pig.

  "Carmen. We met at the Healthy Life Cafe."

  Jimmy heard her cough and imagined the henna redhead with a cigarette propped in the corner of her mouth. "Hey, Carmen, how are you?" He tried to contain his excitement. "Did you find that Christmas card from Stephanie?"

  "You sure you're not a bill collector?"

  "Cross my heart."

  "Well, you got a nice face." Carmen hacked into the receiver. "Went through ten shoeboxes full of cards and magazine clippings before I found it. Stephanie's address is right there on the back, just like I remembered. Three years ago and it seems like yesterday. Makes you realize how time flies." She cleared her throat. "I'm thinking of starting some decoupage projects next weekend, getting right on it, no more excuses. You think if I decorated a lampshade for you that you'd use it?" "At our first interview, you said you saw Garrett Walsh. Now you're not sure?"

  "The person I saw was quite some distance away." The realtor rooted in her purse. "I-I was showing the view from the second-floor bedroom when I saw him at the far edge of the property. I just assumed it was Mr. Walsh. I never saw anyone else there."

  "You assumed it was him." Katz wasn't really annoyed-she was pleased. The realtor's assumption fit in with Zarinski's theory. She would never have thought to contact the professor if it hadn't been for Jimmy's doubts about Boone, so score one for the reporter. She didn't understand half of what Zarinski was talking about-all she knew was that the professor said that Walsh had died at least two days before Boone did. There was a problem with that. Her initial interview with the realtor had merely corroborated Boone's findings-she had seen Walsh on the afternoon of the seventh, the same day that Boone pegged his time of death. According to Zarinski, however, Walsh had already been dead two days when the realtor spotted him.

  If Zarinski was right, the realtor had seen someone on the property that day, but it wasn't Walsh. It wouldn't have been Harlen Shafer either-that two-bit ex-con would have been gone as soon as he realized Walsh was dead. It wouldn't have been kids-they would have trashed the place then, not later. No, the realtor had seen someone else strolling the grounds, someone who had unfettered access to the trailer, someone who had plenty of time to look for the screenplay and notes that Jimmy was so interested in.

  "Detective?" The realtor tapped her foot on the hardwood floor. "Are we finished?"

  Katz slammed the door on the way out.

  Chapter 39

  The street sign at the intersection had been knocked down and lay half in the street. Jimmy got out of his car, walked over, and checked the sign. The broken stump gave no indication which of the streets was N.E. 47th Court; he got back into his car and
picked one, checking addresses on the houses as he drove slowly past. Heat waves rose from the pavement, blurring the numbers.

  Jimmy glanced at the Christmas card tucked above the car's visor. He saw a tired woman in a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sweater and a little girl dressed as an elf standing beside a blue Christmas tree.

  Victorville was a small windblown town on the edge of the Mojave Desert-about ten years ago it had been touted as a bedroom community for L.A. and Orange County, the two-hour commute a trade-off for clean air and affordable housing. The town had boomed for a while, tripling in population as housing developments with names like Desert Rose, Sunset Estates, and Tumbleweed Valhalla were thrown up as fast as nonunion carpenters could work. The recession changed everything. When business soured, Victorville's eager commuters were the first fired, their hours cut or outsourced to Mexico. The new housing developments were ghost towns now, whole blocks foreclosed and abandoned, the yards reverting to sand and weeds.

  Jimmy peered through the windshield, checking numbers, when a bee bumped against the glass. He thought of Saul Zarinski and his flesh flies and beetles at the koi pond. To the entomologist, the overlapping life cycles of the insects that had made a condominium of Garrett Walsh's corpse were a marvel of precision. Jimmy was impressed with the man's research, but bugs still creeped him out. He glanced at his files on the floor of the Saab, notes to himself strewn across the seat, with Zarinski's postmortem timeline highlighted in yellow. There was something there, something nagging at him. Right now, though, he wanted to talk with Stephanie Panagopolis.

  Jimmy slowed. The blue rambler across the street had a Barney pup tent on the dry lawn, the bright purple fabric flapping in the constant wind. It was the only sign of children he had seen since he got off the freeway. The address on the house matched the Christmas card.

  The doorbell rang the theme from Zorba the Greek.

  The woman who answered the door looked like the one on the Christmas card, wearing jeans and an untucked white blouse instead of a reindeer sweater. She was even more tired-looking now than in her photo, her skin sallow, her dark hair dry and flyaway. She peered out at him from the far side of the security chain. "Can I help you?"