A World the Color of Salt (11 page)

In the late afternoons, there's a pink-and-golden sheen on the stands of willow and mule-fat and across the bright-orange stringy parasite called dodder that laces itself in patches upon the pickleweed along the water's edge, a tiny succulent that stores the salt in its picklelike sections, then sheds them to get rid of it. There's sea fig and saltbush and tree tobacco, and, on the cliff sides, yellow bush sunflower all year round. Often, out on the gleaming mud, or in a patch of saltgrass, I'll see the great blue heron, motionless as a piece of driftwood, waiting,
waiting, for the slightest movement underfoot that would furnish a meal. Looking out from my balcony restoreth my soul.

I must have been out there a good fifteen minutes, and then, for whatever reason, the visage of Jerry Dwyer dead on the Kwik Stop back-room floor came back to me. I thought that maybe I should put on my sweats and go jog around Back Bay, or go down to Balboa Island, a couple of miles straight down Jamboree to the Pacific, and have a croissant and egg.

Maybe I'd ask Trudy Kunitz to come with me. I went rummaging in the piles of paper and envelopes along the kitchen counter under the wall phone, and found the booklet with the crime-lab personnel phone numbers. I'd never called Trudy at home before. We were friendly on the job, but not friends as such. She has a hard time looking me in the eye. I don't know if it's because she doesn't like me or she's that way with everybody. But I liked Trudy right off. A definite non-complainer. One slow afternoon both of us reorganized the stockroom; when I suggested it, she looked at me over her round metal glasses and said, “Sure, it all pays the same.” She has shapeless dark hair and pale skin afflicted with breakouts along the jawline. I've never seen her in anything but stovepipe jeans and dark colors to hide what I think might be big legs. Her job as an artist is to do the sketches of corpses when they need to be ID-ed, for release to the papers, or she refines the scene sketches of others for use in court.

There were only three other names between Katchaturian and Kunitz. I dialed her number, thinking that even if she didn't have information on the Dwyer case, maybe I could figure out if she knew already how big a fool I'd been last night, figure out how much damage was done. I wondered if Joe knew already.

“Trudy, this is Smokey.”

“Hi, Smokey,” she said, as if she'd been up for hours and was used to me calling her every Saturday morning. Friendlier on the phone, almost happy, “What's up? We got a hot one?”

“No, nothing really. I'm sorry to bother you at home, but I heard you had something to tell me, and I didn't get to see you last night.”

“Oh, yes. I told Billy. He didn't say?”

“Just you had something.” Did she know about Billy and me or didn't she? God, how embarrassing.

“Oh. It's that thing you brought into Property. I understand you're kind of hot to see that case solved.”

“Yeah, I am. Did someone ID it already?”

“Well, not exactly. But sort of. Julio Hernandez says it's a collet.”

I knew what a collet was, though it was one of those objects you learn the word for once and think you'll never need again. “It goes on the end of a drill, I think, for holding the bit in. Right?”

“I think that's it.”

“It didn't strike me as a collet because it was too big. I've seen small ones on my father's drill, I guess. So you think we have something worthwhile here, Trudy?”

“May be. Julio, see, knows about welding. He makes these little airplanes out of sheet metal and stuff and hangs them up for mobiles, sells them even. There's one over his desk. Go take a look. He says he solders, not welds. For some reason that's an issue. But, hey, I'm impressed. Looks cool to me. That thing you brought in—it's fused, he says. I guess it got too hot or something.”

“Could he hazard a guess as to what it might belong to?”

“Nope. He couldn't figure it.”

“Okay. Well, thanks, Trudy. We know any welders?”

“No, but Tools found something else about it.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “No prints.”

“That's correct. It's crosshatched, like gun grips. But that's not all.”

“Then,
what
?”

“Those guys in Tools are great, you know?”

“Trude, for God's sake,” I laughed, “you want me to play twenty questions?”

“Sorry. But it's fun, isn't it, like a big puzzle? That's what I like about this work. It is definitely intellectual. Definitely better than crosswords, huh? Okay,” she said, “here's the deal. Another guy in Tools put his tongue on it, the collet thing? He does that a lot, he says; tastes stuff, smells stuff. He can tell all sorts of things that way. I told him he better not be sampling any cyanide capsules, and he says, no, he uses them
for party favors. That's the new guy from Boston. You meet him yet?”

“What sort of things did he find out about here?”

“That your collet had been in saltwater. As in ocean.”

“Okay . . .”

“So he calls around yesterday afternoon, describes the thing to somebody. They think it might be a diver's tool, goes on an underwater cutting torch. Hey, Smoke?”

“Yes?”

“Julio says the guy's got the busiest pearl-tongue he'd ever seen, and he was laughing. You know what that means?”

“I think so.” I had to smile at her voice; I wondered if I should tell her. I sat down on the floor, resting my head on the wall. “It means he's good at oral sex.”

There was silence on the other end.

I said, “Trudy, did Joe Sanders tell you I was particularly interested in this case?”

“He told me
he
was particularly interested in this case. He told me you may have found something important.”

“He didn't act . . . funny?”

“No. Not at all. What do you mean?”

So Joe wasn't spreading it around that I was a borderline incompetent. I said, “I'm surprised he mentioned it, really. We don't know if it's even remotely connected to the crime. I found the thing way off in some grass at the edge of the driveway, far from the taped area. Is Joe, do you know, following up with Mr. Dwyer on whether he had any workmen around, welding?”

“Well, here's the good part, Smokey.” Trudy must have been pleased to have someone to talk to on a Saturday morning, the only reason I could figure she was drawing this out. Then she dropped the bomb. She said, “One of the men your friend Ray told me you saw at the jail last night? Brothers, both felons?”

“Yes?”

“One of them's a diver. A deep-sea diver up in L.A.”

It took a second for it to sink in. I thought the Dugdales were dead gone. Irrelevant. Not apropos. The little one, Phillip, was a housepainter. But the other one, what was he? Did he say, in there? Did I miss it? We'd come in late. The two
brothers had been detained for some time before we got there, and we were there only about half an hour. So I didn't hear how the tall good-looking one earned his money when he wasn't doing convenience-store robberies. If it's too good to be true, it isn't; and yet I wondered if Gary, because of his grudge, might take a photo lineup over to Emilio at the taco stand with the Dugdales' mugs mixed in. You take half a dozen mug shots of people who look like the described perpetrators to the witnesses, instead of them coming to the station and going through hundreds in books. The photo lineup is not very reliable, but it still seems to convince juries. Even so, but I wanted Gary or the detectives to have tried it anyway with Emilio, except that the whole process would probably have made him poop his pants, poor little guy.

“Trudy,” I said. “Want to join me for breakfast? There's a nice little place on Balboa. Where do you live? My head needs coffee, my stomach needs gruel.” It'd be a chance to know her better, and we could discuss the case.

Her voice dropped, and she told me that she lived in Tustin, and that she'd like to, but by the time she got down to Newport after baby-sitting her wash in her apartment-house laundry room, it'd be real late. I didn't know if she made up the details or not, but it seemed like a legitimate excuse so I let her off the hook. “Another time, then,” I said, and she said, “Sure.” But I wanted to
do
something. Get out of the house. Get some fresh air. If only Joe L. Sanders weren't married, I could call him up and we could go figure this new piece of information. We could go talk to Mr. Dwyer. We could see what Gary Svoboda had to say about the collet. We could even drive out to L.A. harbor, where the ships come in. Where deep-sea divers hang out.

Have a look around.

No, I didn't go. Then. By the time I ate, gassed the car, did bills, wrote a reluctant note to my parents telling them I was fine, nothing new, I'd had time to regain my balance. Trudy doing her wash reminded me I needed to do mine. Chores help. I was folding clothes on the bed when the phone rang at two. It was Patricia. I scooched the clothes over and lay down.

“You sleep all right?” she asked me. “I was afraid to call earlier.” Her tone was hesitant, as if she thought I was going to be mad at her.

I said, “I made a fool of myself last night. A total dopeette.”

She kindly said, “You weren't the only one.”

“Oh, really? That naughty boy Raymond. What have I done? You and my buddy?”

“We didn't get to the stage you're thinking, but serious enough. I think he'll be calling.”

“You remember—”

She said, “He's got a girlfriend, yes. He told me. They're not getting along all that well. But listen, there are two things I want to talk to you about, Samantha. One, I'm insulted.”

“I'm sorry. What'd I do?”

“Why didn't you tell me you were a . . . a . . . dancer once? Did you think I'd think less of you?”

“Oh, that. It was a long time ago. It was nothing really. I was living in Nevada. It seemed an okay thing to do at the time.”

“You're embarrassed about it.”

“If I were embarrassed about it, would I let people call me by my stage name?”

“You're not embarrassed but you couldn't tell
me
.”

“I don't mind it—I just don't announce it to people who don't already know. The people at the lab know because I let it slip out one night when I had too much too drink, okay? You can understand that, can't you? Didn't you have a wild period when you were younger? That was mine. That was it. Not very exciting. It was just a job. You want to know what I did after that? I became a grocery checker. Now, that's exciting.”

I rolled onto my shoulders and pointed my toes at the ceiling, trying to stretch, as long as we were going to be here awhile. I said, “Then I met Bill and went off to the academy and got married, the whole thing. No big deal. I wasn't a
prossie
, Patricia. You didn't think that?”

“Well, no. Not that. Anyway, I couldn't figure how they'd let you be a cop if . . .” She was silent again.

I pulled my legs in then, rolled down, and did a few leg extensions, keeping my abdomen tight. “Like I said, it was a long time ago. I was seventeen. Believe it or not, I never lied on my application to the academy, and if anybody investigated, it never came back to me.”

When it was just quiet on the other end, I said, “Hey, you want to come over? It needs a dark, quiet bar to tell about it. Come on over, we'll go someplace.”

“I have errands to run.”

“Patricia, it's
my
life. What does it have to do with you?” I didn't know how I was going to get around this. I sat up and my head hurt. “What's two, you got to tell me?” Two things she wanted to talk to me about.

“I don't know if I'm imagining it or not.”

“Are you crying, Patricia?”

“I'm not crying. What do I have to cry about? It's just I hate mentioning it.”

“Mention it.”

“This morning I go out to get the paper—you know how my apartment has that little alcove they call a porch? Well, there's an egg sitting next to my newspaper, just like a hen laid it there.”

“It's not Easter yet, is it?”

“Not that I know of. Listen, I'm not kidding. So I don't think too much of it at first. I pitch it off down the bank near the bike path, where all that brush is? Because I think maybe it's rotten. Or it's got a puncture hole in it with cyanide injected or something.”

“I'm a bad influence on you, Patricia.”

“There're all sorts of crazies in the world, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, then. Just a minute. I have to pee.”

I waited. In the background I heard the mechanics. I didn't tell her, when she returned, that I really don't need the details of her absence.

She began again: “Later I go out to my car and find another one, another
egg
, plastered on my
windshield
!”

“Kids,” I said. “Kids did it. They go down the streets popping windshields with pellet guns for the hell of it. Happens all the time, the little shits.” I said this at the same time my skin fairly tightened across my chest. I get real suspicious when it comes to things happening around women. I've had a few experiences myself.

She said, “I had one hell of a time getting it off, let me tell you. It's like
glue
. I didn't see anybody else's car with eggs on it. They're all out there in the carport same as mine, and mine's the only one with egg on it. Now, how can that be? Gives me the literal fucking creeps, I mean it.” Then she laughed and said, “So, what d'ya think?”

“You dating any weirdos, pal-o-mine?”

“Not that I remember,” she said, and loosened up a bit with a sort of laugh and moan and sigh all at once. “Jeez, what's the world coming to, Samantha?”

I told her I was sorry it happened, but I wouldn't let it ruin my day. I said we'd get together for dinner or a movie—huh?—soon.