A World the Color of Salt (23 page)

At the front windows, he stood to my right, both of us inspecting the poster paint applied to the glass, he at a cluster of poinsettia, I at a camel with a belt of jingle bells scooping around the hump. I said, “Hey, Joe.”

“Hm?”

“You know if you wear a bell on your backpack in the mountains, you scare a grizzly away?” He looked at me with his features pulled back, the expression lightened. I nodded
toward the camel. “I mean really—you think there's grizzlies in the desert, that's why the camels wear them?”

“I hadn't given it much thought.”

“It's fucking Christmas and I haven't shopped yet.”

“I thought all women shopped.”

“Think again.”

“You had all that time off.”

“Right.”

He moved closer to the front door, away from me. I saw the patrol cars out in the lot, the curious people standing off behind them, the yellow crime-scene tape swinging like a jump rope in slow motion from the wind.

Flyaway blood had lodged along the door frame. More on the east wall. Joe's kit was set up on the field table. He went to it, bringing back with him a cotton swab he had dipped in saline and a slide. As he swabbed, I asked, “Somebody do a panorama in here?” referring to a method of stepping in, standing in one spot,
click, click, click, click
with the camera, and delivering up if not a 360- then at least a 180-degree representation of the scene.

Joe said, “Billy Katchaturian did.”

I checked the sill, where two flies were exploring in opposite directions.

It was a peculiar moment to bring up the subject, but I said, “You're right. I
am
cranky. There's a reason.”

Joe stopped his repeat examination of the glass to look at me.

“Maybe this isn't the time or place, but I want to know something. Since you asked.” I stood facing him; I guess I expected him to read my mind.

“Well?” he said. I liked the look of him, the caution, the kindness. “What?”

“I want to know why you didn't tell me you left your wife.” Now I thought I saw regret and surprise, and then a disturbance I couldn't name. I continued, “Not that you
needed
to tell me. I have no claims on your privacy, God knows. It just would have been something, you know what I mean? It would have meant something to me.”

He looked out the window, into the world out there: a woman in shorts getting something out of her trunk near
Builder's Emporium, looking over at the yellow scene tape, and frowning, a Vietnamese man glancing our way too, then tugging at his son's hand, who trailed behind him, the boy's small, triangular face turned our way. Joe said, “Can we talk about this someplace else?”

I moved off to the other side, where there were red “Merry Christmas” letters and something printed in blue I assumed was Vietnamese. Several red-black drops had splattered on the wainscoting near the floor. I swabbed it and transferred it to a round of filter paper, wrote a label, and set it near the others to dry in the tray.

Then, down the right lower corner of the window, behind a starved philodendron with leggy yellow stems, I saw a white terry-cloth towel on the floor. I said, “Something here,” and Joe came over. We moved the plant.

Joe took a dowel and lifted the stained cloth overhead like a torch. On the glass above the plant was more red stain, where I guessed the camels were heading, toward the snow—what do the Vietnamese know about deserts?—they can paint camels in snow if they want to. The towel had hit the window there and slid behind the philodendron, I supposed.

“He'd go out the front?” I said. “Why go out the front if he capped the woman back there, where there's a perfectly good back door? That doesn't make sense.”

“It will. Guy's probably a proofreader in an M&M factory.”

We went back to the kitchen, where the victim sat upright against a cabinet. Her head was hooded with a towel, the edges of bright stain in the front fanning to pink at the crown. The towel must have been wet when the killer put it there, avoiding having to look in the woman's eyes as he closed this life down forever. I said, “Killers cover the faces of victims they know. Isn't that right? They can't look in their faces?”

“That's a good bet, especially since the round is
through
the towel.” By the sink, he took up a long fork from the drain-board and scratched around in the gray water for anything on the bottom—a knife, a gun—because the tools of destruction are often left nearby, almost as a dare, but sometimes because, as Joe says, criminals are stupid.

Billy Katchaturian stood outside the back door with his camera, shooting more pictures from that angle. The Westminster
cop was behind him, a young man with taut skin over high cheekbones and an alternately frightened and intense look on his face. Billy hadn't even said hi, maybe because Joe was there. I didn't want to think about it.

“I think we have two victims here,” Joe said, indicating the front of the shop.

I said, “I think we do too. The woman wasn't going anywhere,” referring to not out the front door, and not to the table to splatter fluid after she was shot. Bullets in the brain don't let you do that too well. “So where's the other blood coming from?”

Joe shrugged. “Could be there was someone else here, someone kidnapped. The patrolman told me his partner interviewed both sides of the store and across the street. There's detectives at Alpha Beta now. Looks like nobody saw anything. Just like the Dwyer case.” His voice dropped before he said “the Dwyer case.” No, I thought, not just like the Dwyer case. He added, “The woman definitely had a husband. He could be the one. Victim number two, or murderer number one.”

“I've got to talk to you about the Dwyer case. I mean later.”

Joe took out his notebook and wrote something. He said, “Okay. Let's stop on the way back to the lab, have coffee somewhere.”

I said, “Could somebody call the officers who are at the husband's? We should Luminal the sinks.” Luminal is a peroxidase solution we spray to find traces of blood where people have cleaned up, or forgotten to clean up, say, under faucet handles or around the top of the sink where the water would have risen. Spray, swab, throw a blacklight on it; get Billy K. to photograph it as the fluorescence blooms. “But that still doesn't explain the spill on the table, right?”

“Right.”

“Of course, as you say, if there's a
second
victim, he could have been hustled out, punched or something. Blood flies onto the window. Killer makes him go home to dig out any valuables—shit, take the whole thing, the TV, the garden tools, the Hyundai.”

Joe listened, rubbing his cheeks as though checking the stubble. He turned to look at me, nodded, said, “Not bad.”

Already we were arguing. We were walking toward the Westminster Municipal Court. Joe decided we could get a cup of coffee near the courthouse, after he'd taken care of some business. I didn't ask what it was, just followed in my car.

We'd started the argument in the parking lot. He was saying the doughnut shop was similar to Dwyer's, and I was saying fucking no way. When we got into the broad expanse of sidewalk and grass near the buildings, I really zapped him, unfairly, I suppose, saying his judgment was screwed because he was getting a divorce. Wanting to mention the divorce again so I could get some things straightened out here. I said, “Your mind's on how much alimony you're going to have to be paying for the rest of your life.” Only kidding, boss.

We'd paused not far away from a big tree whose bare branches fingered up symmetrically like a menorah, and under the tree with no leaves I could see a bird, bigger than a jay but smaller than a hawk, tearing at a lump. I studied the bird, trying to identify it and thinking of the pintail on my balcony.

Joe said, “This has been coming on for a long time, Smokey. Jennifer takes care of herself. She's not expecting anything from me. As a matter of fact, we've been separated a long time now.”

“Oh? How long?”

“Three months.”

“You dog, you!”

“What? What's the problem?”

I started walking again. The sun was out, burning off remnants of a fog, and I couldn't decide if I was cold or not.

“You didn't come visit me in the hospital and you could've.”

He said he could have anyway, even if he was still with Jennifer. In fact, she would've come along. “I thought you didn't want any visitors.”

“You were right. Thank you. Thank you for not visiting me. It was the noble thing to do. I looked like hell. I saw myself in the mirror the next morning and wanted to call the police.”

He laughed, and we started closing the distance to the entrance
of the courthouse. I saw a bench and sat on it, surprised at how cold the bench was through my jeans. “I'll wait here,” I said.

He stood above me. “I figured you'd be upset—the kind of operation it was. I'm sorry.”

“Not all women regret losing those things.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“Why'd you kiss me last week?” Lay it on him. No more beating around the bush. The cad. I waited.

“Because I'm nuts, I guess,” he said. A deep sigh sank him down to the bench beside me.

“All divorced men are nuts. I don't date them.”

“That's wise.”

“Neither do my friends.”

“That's good,” he said, slowly nodding his head. Then: “Smokey, I apologize about what happened in the office. That's bottom line here, isn't it? I apologize. I was screwy. I had a hell of a week and a worse one after that. Not that I'm making excuses—well, I guess I am. I'm sorry, is what I'm saying.”

A moment passed before I said, “There are ways to approach a woman, you know.”

“Are you going to let me apologize or not?”

The bird I'd seen under the tree was visible now in my dead-on view. Almost as soon as I focused on it, it flew up to a branch, calling,
killy, killy, killy
. Blue wings, rust body. “That's a kestrel,” I said.

“What?”

“That bird over there. See? On the branch. A small falcon, sort of. American kestrel, it's called. I was trying to figure out what it was when we came in. You can tell by the blue wings. See the blue wings?”

“How do you know that?”

I shrugged. I wanted to tell him about the pintail.

He said, “Are you going to let me apologize, Ms. Brandon?”

“All right,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw his pretty silver hair, and all of a sudden I felt, for no reason I can explain, a wave
of profound sorrow and deep weakening. My hormones were probably out of whack.

“Can we be friends again?” Joe said, curling three fingers into my palm.

I said, “I want to talk about the Dwyer case now.”

He shook his head and smiled, and so we did, holding hands for a long time, and wound up arguing again. I accused him of letting the Dwyer case get buried, and he said he hadn't, that there were two very hot suspects, one named Lee Yardley who looked very good, operates with a hood named Burns on small-time stuff. Another named Forrest Sinclair. This I did not want to hear.

He said, “Sinclair's been snitched off by a yellow wanting a court favor.” Yellows are minimum-security inmates, but not as minimum as whites. Whites are there for infractions—drunks, disturbers of the peace—but because there's no room at the inn, they're out as soon as they're sober. A yellow's a misdemeanor customer, usually a repeat who couldn't bond out. Jail colors change now and then, but right now the maxies wear orange jumpsuits unmistakable in the general population. Blues are camp inmates, real low on the security scale for Orange County customers, but higher power in L.A.—it could get confusing, an O.C. cop and an L.A. cop together, talking colors.

Joe said, “The yellow burned Sinclair. Says he read about the Dwyer murder and knows who did it, could they make a deal? Detective Felton checked it out. Turns out Sinclair's got: one—no alibi; two—he's on the pipe, which would give him motive; three—and most significant—he's an ex-cop, accounting for the Glasers.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, sorry to hear it, sorry someone who was sworn would get his head so unscrewed. We used to talk about those kinds of cops, in bars, at buddy get-togethers. But we'd talk about them with the word
pukes
on our lips. With meth, coke, crack, crank, and every vein of mother-lode dope you can imagine attracting truckloads of both real and fake green, it's just too much for some badges, and they cave.

I took in what Joe was saying about the possibility of this ex-cop Forrest Sinclair performing nasty business, but the old
cerebrum said Forrest Sinclair did not do Jerry Dwyer. “There were
two
in that case, Joe. How tall's this guy?”

“Smokey, it's being taken care of.”

In the bay behind my house, along with the littleneck clams, are gaper clams. Those things are
ugly
, but they're survivors. The shell gapes open at the side, like a sneer, permitting the feeder tube—which has grown thick as a man's penis—to ease up as far as two feet out of the mud. There it stands, minding its own business, waiting for dinner to come by, its flowered siphon making cute in the currents. Instead, along comes Jones, in the person of the yellow-fish croaker. That guy chomps off the tip of the siphon tube. Yum, dinner for him. The clam survives, grows another tip, something the males of our species would be happy to do, I'm told. It was that picture of the dumb tube waving in the currents, and the yellow croaker nibbling away another live thing's possibility, that passed over me. I said, “So what you're saying is, as far as you know, everybody's happy. Fat, dumb, and happy.”

He frowned and said, “If you want to call it that.”

I don't know when it was we stopped holding hands. I only noticed it when Joe put his hand out on the bench again as if to touch mine. “Sinclair is not our guy,” I said, standing, because now there was no doubt about it: I was definitely chilled, and glad for it, really, November having been cruelly hot and December so far emulating.