A Stranger Lies There (29 page)

As I headed for the water, the landscape suddenly changed from a lifeless brown-gray to a verdant, agricultural green. It seemed much cooler now, an illusion provided by the sprinkler systems spraying water into the air and the blue irrigation canals crossing under the road every few miles. The road looked freshly laid. A shiny black strip bisecting the green on either side, on which trucks laden with produce rolled by. The pungent scent of onions hovered in the air, but as I approached the shoreline, the sulfurous, rotten-egg odor of the geothermal plants took over. Thick white steam billowed from stout smokestacks. A profusion of massive, rusty pipes led to and from inert pools of brackish water in dirt pits. The entire area was a study in contrasts: clouds of pillowy cotton floating tranquilly above rusting metal buildings; foul, muddied soil surrounded by fertile green cropland on one side and a blue mirror on the other. And if you looked beyond that, the blistered brown desert spread far and wide.

After passing the polluted New River, which emptied into the Salton Sea, I made a few turns to get around its southern tip, then proceeded north along the western shore. The town I was looking for was about two-thirds of the way up, a place Turret had described to me many years before.

It was just after noon. I took out the sandwich I'd packed for the day. To my left the Superstition Hills, scene of yet more military training activity as well as recreational off-road vehicle use, rose from the desert in stunted humps, a few shades darker than the surrounding flatlands. More irrigated farmland stretched away to my right, much of it going right up to the water. A few miles farther, I was waved uninterestedly through a Border Patrol check station. The people in the lane next to me weren't so lucky. A couple of brown-skinned men wearing cowboy hats in an old Buick sedan. As I watched in the rearview mirror, they got out of the car with their wallets out. Moments later the trunk flipped up, and was surrounded by two or three inquisitive Border Patrol officers.

Eventually the farmland gave way to flat, graded desert. This area had once been known as the Salton Riviera, with hundreds of subdivided lots squared off from the shoreline. Now it was a checkerboard pattern of desolation and abandonment. Cracked, weed-infested roads being rubbed from existence by drifting, windblown sand. Landscaped palm trees succumbing to the heat and neglect, their fronds collapsed and down-turned like rotting haystacks. Street signs that pointed nowhere, with designations such as Seabreeze Drive and Pelican Way—resort names that evoked sparkling waters, cool breezes and fresh air but now only emphasized all that had been lost. Or truthfully, had never been here in the first place.

In the 1950s, the start of the post-war California land boom, optimistic developers had envisioned the Salton Sea as the ultimate desert resort. A haven for water-skiing, yachting and fishing, blessed by ever-present sunshine and fresh sea breezes. They saw it as a natural extension of the playground for the rich and famous that Palm Springs fifty miles away was becoming. Developers bought huge, ultra-cheap tracts of desert land, subdivided it into lake front property, built a yacht club and golf course, and expected people to come in droves. If they'd looked a little closer they would have seen that it was little more than a mirage built on shifting desert sands. The few buyers that did succumb to the high-pressure sales pitches were somehow able to ignore the hellacious heat and the remoteness and harshness of the region. Their houses stood out few and far between as I approached Salton City. Tiny homesteads defiantly resisting the surrounding emptiness, connected by thin lifelines of utility and telephone wires strung limply over acres of vacant lots and along destitute, pot-holed streets.

The main road into town, Marina Drive, crept from the highway like a brittle snakeskin, looking all the more pitiful for its former glory. The majestic palm trees that used to line the broad four-lane boulevard were now spindly skeletons against the blown-out sky, the once flower-filled median lifeless and colorless and crumbling into dust. The pavement I drove over was fissured and broken, with tumbleweeds parked on its surface and weeds sprouting from the cracks. A peeling, weatherbeaten sign that hadn't seen paint for years rose from the median and whispered “Welcome to Salton City” on the sighing desert winds.

A few hundred yards further up, the defunct Salton Bay Yacht Club hunkered next to the water behind a jagged chain-link fence with a pockmarked notice reading “No Trespassing.” The remains of the yacht club sign oversaw it all, still advertising “Cocktails” to the deserted parking lot.

I stopped and got out of the car for a closer look at the place. Off to the right a small two-story inn was falling into ruin, its foundation choked off by weeds and the trash and tumbleweeds that had blown up against it. In front of me, the yacht club and restaurant fared no better. Its big bay windows were broken, with knife-like shards still extending from the frames in various places. The shadowed interior had wires and conduit dangling from the ceiling as if it had been disemboweled. Broken glass littered the floor inside. Patches of rotted carpet clung to it like fungus. The exterior paint was faded and peeling and covered by graffiti, and the broad, curving roofline, once suggesting a seabird in flight, now resembled a broken wing.

I imagined the place in its heyday forty years ago as Turret had described it: the best fishing spot in Southern California, where tilapia and plump corvina were just waiting to be reeled in. He'd come here with his parents to boat and fish, and they'd end the day at the restaurant with a gourmet meal served on cloth-covered tables while seagulls drifted lazily over the water.

It was his vivid description of those trips, on one of which Turret witnessed a near-drowning, that came back to me a few nights ago on the ride down to the Blue Bird. And again when those two coyotes mentioned the hitchhiker with the fishing gear. I wondered if that memory had been trying to get out in the New York warehouse, when I'd referred to my blind trip to the city as a “fishing expedition.” I only hoped that Turret and the hitchhiker were one and the same. The age range was right. And if Turret were fishing, that he'd return to a familiar place.

I noticed a girl holding a rod at the water's edge on the other side of the property. She'd probably climbed the chain-link fence to get there. Between us the resort's plaza was scored and broken, a jumble of concrete chunks and dried-out palm fronds. I took a short walk to the left, careful of my footing on the uneven sidewalk, for a view around the side of the building. There the water met a tiny beach. A line of massive boulders had been piled up on the right to prevent erosion of the club's property line. The chain-link fence proved to be only a half-hearted measure against trespassing. It stopped short of the boulders, allowing access over them to the yacht club grounds—they hadn't bothered to put up a barrier at the shoreline.

I crawled over the big rocks slowly, using my hands often, ignoring the stink of the dirty bathwater a few feet below. Very little moss on the warm, dry stone, though I did slip once and had to pull my ankle from a narrow gap.

After making it around the restaurant building, which looked no better from this perspective, I climbed up to the patio area. I found a bone dry swimming pool with more dead palm fronds and trash at the bottom, its bleached walls cracked like an egg shell. The girl with the fishing pole noticed me approaching and gave me a quick wave before turning back to the water. Friendly people here, I thought, probably not used to visitors.

I was about to excuse myself and ask for her help, but never got it out.

“How's it going, Glenn?” she said, eyes still on the water. Then she turned around, her hand shading her eyes. “Oh. Sorry. I was expecting somebody else.”

“You know Glenn Turret?” A nervous quaver in my voice like the rippled surface of the lake.

The girl had turned back to her task. She nodded without looking at me. Her fishing pole extended over the water, its line disappearing into the cloudy depths. She hadn't caught anything yet, I could see from her empty pail.

“You a buddy of his?” Her voice was soft, without inflection. When she faced me again her features were blank as a sand dune. Probably coasting on some chemical high, reminding me of the half-baked girls I knew in college.

“Yeah,” I lied. “We were going to cast a few today.”

She regarded me a moment longer, as if my words were traveling from a great distance. I wondered, in her apparent haze, whether she'd be any help to me. “That's cool.” She wiggled her line a little bit, hoping for a bite. Nothing happened.

“You seen him around lately?”

“Not today. We fished together once or twice before though.”

I wanted to shake her like a rag doll, shout into her face,
where the hell is he?
but somehow restrained myself. The girl was in her mid-twenties. Skin stained dark by the sun. Barefoot and wearing shabby cutoff jeans and a loose tank top that fluttered in the breeze. Her long brown hair hung limply to her shoulders, oily and dull in the sunlight.

I moved a little closer. “You don't know where he's staying, do you?”

“Don't know him very well,” she admitted after a long pause. “I only met him last week. How do you know him?”

I ignored the question, responded with one of my own. “Where did you two do your fishing? Maybe I could find him there now.”

“Right where we're standing, mister. One time from that jetty over there.” She pointed to a rock-lined extension jutting into the water, beyond the little beach I'd been standing on earlier. There was no one on the narrow pier except a lone gull, still as a statue, perched on its very tip.

“Hope you find him,” the girl offered. “Tell him I said hi if you do.”

She didn't think to tell me her name and I didn't bother asking. Just made my way back around the ruined building, over the rocks and onto the gritty sand. I scanned the area for any sign of a lone fisherman or a boat, but saw not one living soul. Even the girl I'd just talked to had disappeared behind the yacht club buildings.

Surrounded by stagnation and decay, I felt myself losing hope. At my feet, the sluggish, oily tide licked the beach in a manner that was somehow obscene. Dead fish in various stages of decomposition littered the shoreline, desiccated and eyeless, scales flaked off, bones disintegrating. There were piles of them still submerged too, fins swaying lifelessly with the torpid movement of the tide. The water itself looked like root beer, a caramel color with a touch of fizziness caused by God knew what. I wondered how the sand could be so white until I realized it was composed primarily of fish bones ground together and crushed up into tiny pebbles. I crunched my way through it to the rock jetty, hoping to get a more complete view of the shoreline from its tip. When I got there the seagull launched itself into the air and drifted off lethargically, leaving me alone out on the water.

The sun beat down and I squinted against it. The girl had found a new fishing spot on the other side of the marina and was casting her line from shore. I doubted she'd have any better luck there. To my left, I could make out another small beach shining white in the distance with what appeared to be two solitary sunbathers stretched out side by side on the sand. Other than that, there was no sign of anyone anywhere. I resigned myself to knocking on doors in order to find Turret.

I turned back toward shore. A man was standing there watching me, unmoving, holding a rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other. My eyes went tunnel vision from the end of the jetty. My feet somehow found their way smoothly on the rocky pier. It was as if I were walking on water, gliding over the surface as I approached him. A few moments later, I was on shore.

“Been a long time,” Turret said quietly, eyes riveted on mine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Before I knew it he was on the ground, a thin ribbon of blood trickling from his lip. Turret struggled against the fishing line I'd wrapped around his throat. He'd gotten his hands up in time to prevent the nylon thread from slicing his Adam's apple, though I could see a razor strip of blood cutting across his palms where it bit into them.

“I didn't … kill … your wife,” he gasped, his pale blue eyes fixed on mine, as direct and unflinching as I remembered but without the murderous intensity I'd recognized too late thirty years ago. He probably saw it in my eyes now as I tightened the makeshift garrote.

“You can't … do this,” Turret croaked weakly with the last of his strength. His face was beet-red, eyes wide with fear, and when I understood the real meaning of his words, the rage drained out of me and evaporated in the super-heated air.

I got off him, panting hard, head reeling under the hot sun. Put my hands to my temples and let out a primal roar that had no echo from the mirror-flat sea. Behind me I could hear Turret writhing on the ground, taking deep, ragged breaths. When I turned around he was unwrapping himself from the fishing line with trembling hands. The tackle box was upended a few feet away, spilling hooks, line and lures. A shiny fillet knife glinted menacingly in the dirt.

I offered him a tentative hand up and he eyed me appraisingly before grabbing it. With part of the fishing line still draped over his shoulder, the rod came up with him, like some sort of skeletal twin. He disentangled it from his collar and let it drop. Leaned over with his hands on his knees and breathed deeply, catching his breath as the sweat dripped off his face into the dust at our feet. For a second I was tempted to walk away, afraid of what I'd just done, but I knew in the end there was too much between us to let it go at that.

When Turret was done dusting himself off, he squatted next to the tackle box to clean up the mess, methodically ordering the items in their separate trays, muttering agitatedly. The knife he didn't give a second glance to, just tossed it in the main box under the trays. Maybe I'd left it in the dirt for him as a test.