Carcass Trade (11 page)

I told her about the male Doe we brought in from the campground. “Do you know anything about it?”

“I did that one,” she said. “As I remember, he had a fractured skull, four ribs, femur, and tibia, and a dislocated patella.”

“Worked him over good,” I said.

She tested her sore lip with the top one, then said, “They used his chest for an ashtray.”

“God. I didn't see that.”

“You wouldn't, with the shirt on. There was wire around the neck, but that was not the manner of death. I sent it to Property.”

“What did the wire look like?”

“It was flat but had these little nubs on it, triangles, that dug into the flesh. It wasn't even long enough to strangle him with. I think it was tied to something else that broke.”

“Joe Sanders and I found some strange wire about ten miles from the campsite in a trash can.”

She smiled and said, “I can't believe you guys.”

“Well, it's a long shot.”

In the autopsy room, she opened a lower cabinet door and looked inside, then two more. At the far end of the room a life-sized plastic skeleton held a placard painted with a skull and crossbones. The sign is used for morgue tours for drunk-driving arrestees:
YOU BOOZE, YOU LOSE
.

Dr. Schaffer-White found what she was looking for. She brought out a book. “I'm studying law. I don't want to do this forever. We had some downtime today, then it got busy.”

“Law?”

“Keep it to yourself, okay?”

“You got it.”

“I think I like what you do better than what I do, Smokey. But then some people are never satisfied.”

“Well, neither of us exactly hold the glamour jobs,” I said. “But hey. What do they say around here? ‘Five hundred a week and all you can eat?'”

“
I
don't say it.”

“Pardon me,” I said, smiling. “Our victim. He died of the beating, then?”

“He died of a blow to the suprasternal notch, that hollow right here?” she said, and fingered the swale where the two collarbones meet. “Shatter that and all sorts of things collapse. Bones puncture vital blood lines. I saw one of these in med school, I'll never forget it.”

“They have to use a special weapon?”

“The hand. The victim's scalp had abrasions where someone grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. Someone else chops downward with the side of the hand,” she said, demonstrating. “I told your friend, ‘Your suspect will know martial arts.'” She sighed, patted her lab coat as if it had keys in it somewhere, and said, “You take care now, Smokey. I've got to run. One of my girls is sick and my husband's having a tantrum. He's a good father, but he can't handle diapers and he can't handle sick.”

Before even reaching the end of the lot I phoned Ray Vega from my car and told him to get his fanny off the freeway and come see me.

He said, “Are you crazy, girl? This is my night for stopping all blondes. Francine and me had a major fight. I need a new date.”

“You are really disgusting.”

“Ain't I?”

“Be a friend tonight, okay, Raymond?”

“All yours, babe. Where you taking me?”

“How about—?”

“You up for fish?”

We met in a seafood eatery next to a topless joint named Captain Cream's in a dark corner of a lot just off the freeway.

Every time I see Ray Vega in his CHP uniform, I think he's just so darned handsome, like a TV cop.

I gave him a rundown of my day. “I still have baby pee on me, Raymond, from a little boy who won't have a mother to diaper him in the morning.”

He squeezed my arm that lay on the table. He was quiet for a while. The waitress brought us water without asking, a surprise after seven years of drought, and took our orders. When she left, I said, “That's not all.”

“What's up? Tell your old buddy, or what's a buddy for? Shakespeare say that or something?”

“Yeah, Shakespeare.”

“So, what's eating you?” He watched a young woman come in, her tight beige skirt like an Ace bandage over her perfect thighs. The shade of her stockings matched. “Jesus,” Ray breathed.

When I got his attention again, I told him about my brother phoning me Saturday; about our walk around the island and my deep fears. I said I sensed Nathan's ex-wife/present lover was a murder victim, despite none of the numbers adding up, really. And then I said, “I want to go and violate procedure.”

“You've got to give me more than that,” Ray said, sipping off three inches of his ice water.

“What I want to do, I want to go talk to her husband myself. See if he's lying.”

“Why are you telling me this? You want my permission? Listen. You go messing around, you better start makin' blueprints for your home under a freeway. 'Cause you're going to be fresh out of a job.”

I thought back to how close I'd come last year to being, as Ray said, fresh out of a job, for involving myself in what should have been strictly a police matter. That time I gave
myself
permission because a friend was threatened. Miranda wasn't a friend, but she wasn't exactly a stranger either.

“What could it hurt, Raymond? That's what I've been tossing around in my mind.”

“You're going Fifty-One-Fifty on me,” he said, using cop code for a crazy. “How about I just get you blitzed and we go over to my place? I just did the sheets. You'd be proud.”

Vinegar and a plastic basket of calamari strips were set in front of us at last, and Raymond dug in without so much as a glance upward. In time, he mumbled, “You know that bumper sticker says ‘Friends don't let friends drive drunk?'”

“Yeah.”

“I saw one today says ‘Friends don't let friends drive Subarus.'”

“That's funny, Raymond. What does it mean?”

“It means a
friend
don't let another friend go lookin' down her own barrel. Do you want a job in a nice clean laboratory, or do you want to, like, start your own business as a bikini-wearing street vendor?”

“I could open a detective agency. Maybe I'd meet Bruce Willis.”

“He died hard, didn't he? Man. He fell in the toilet. Who cares? He'll be singing doo-widdy with you under the freeway.”

Ray poked a calamari my way and I shook my head no. He said, “I don't want to talk about this. It upsets me.”

“Upsets you?” I was amused, insulted, and annoyed. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Francine wants to get married.”

“You keep running into that problem,” I said.

“How come that is? I don't understand.”

“Neither do I. Who'd want to marry you?”

“Right,” he said, and didn't blush, but let his guard down. “Smoke, do you suppose all the old people in the world have this thing figured out?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“All those old people, having anniversaries all the time. Golden, diamond, whatever. You think it was better back then? People were smarter?”

“I'd like to think so, Ray. But maybe they just give up. They know that's about as good as it's going to get, so they pretend they're happy.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” Ray said. He looked at me as if trying to figure how serious I was. “I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“I warned you.”

He said, “If your husband woulda lived, do you think . . . ? What do you think—?”

“Ray? My turn to change subjects.”

He lowered his eyes. His black hair gleamed under the light. When he looked back up, he was smiling. “Hey,” he said. “You know what happened to me today? A lady dressed in a suit, she flew by me while I was writing a guy up. Gives me the finger. How you like that?”

I met Nathan in Huntington Beach at the mouth of the long pier “rehabbed” in recent years to something yuppies could love. Despite it being a Tuesday, plenty of fishermen stood at the railings with their poles weighted downward from the tug of the sea. Like a spill of bright coins, the sun glinted brokenly off the water. I turned and pointed across the highway, suggesting a couple of great lunch places. He said, “Let's walk first.”

Midway down the pier, a small boy ran into Nathan's leg, pasting my brother's slacks with the wet rim of a half-eaten chocolate bar. With a where'd-you-come-from question in the boy's unlit eyes, he stumbled and spun off. “Oh man, he got your leg,” I said.

Nathan looked down at the chocolate transfer on his leg and then out at the horizon, as if he'd already forgotten why he looked.

We stood at the rail, watching men in rubber wet suits ride the waves. He said, “Before I met her she never let anyone watch her sleep.” He said “her,” not needing to say her name. “She trusted me. Maybe she shouldn't have. Who the hell knows anybody?” His knuckles showed through his pocket.

“Why wouldn't she trust you, Nathan?” I said it outright. No waver, no apology, but no accusation either. Sometimes you need to say things for your own confirmation, and sometimes if you do, you get reactions you didn't expect.

But Nathan's thoughts were far away and he gave me no grim surprises. He said, “I called the son of a bitch myself.”

“Her husband?”

“You know what he says? He says, ‘She's not your charge anymore, Montiel.' What the hell kind of word is ‘charge'? Is that what he thinks of her, his
charge
?”

“What difference does it make what words he uses?” I asked. “He's not worried about her, that's clear. That must mean she's fine, she's off doing her thing. Buying pasta makers in Italy.”

“He wouldn't tell me a damn thing, that's what gets me. What would it hurt? I ask him, ‘Do you think I could talk to her, have her number over there?' No.”

“What's she supposed to be doing over there?”

“She's got an aunt, cousins. I never met them.”

“You think he knows about you two?”

“Impossible.”

“Nothing's impossible.”

“He doesn't, that's all. I ask him, ‘Have you heard from her or not?' He tells me to get lost. I'll go to goddamn Italy myself, I have to.”

We turned to walk back. Ahead of us, a man rode a bicycle, though none were allowed on the pier. A little farther down, a bright wriggling thing whipped frantically on the concrete surface. Nathan stepped ahead and scooped up the fish. “Let's give him back to his maker,” he said, and strode to the side to heave the tiny missile over.

When he resumed walking it was as though he'd never lost focus. “I'm sick, Sammi, sick. I don't know whether to scream or jump in the ocean. She's gone. She's just gone.”

“I've never heard you talk like this before,” I said softly, trying to see his face, but he turned away and stepped again to the side to look over the long expanse of washed sand. A gull glided widely between us and a scattering of sanderlings line-dancing on the shore. “Nathan, I'll see if I can talk to him. Just give me a day or two.”

He pulled me to him sideways. That surprised me, since we are not a touchy family. He said, “I can't wait that long.”

“You
can
wait that long. Be patient.”

“That was never my strong suit.”

Nor mine, I thought.

We ate Italian, though that might not have been a good idea, and left each other for separate parking lots after awkward talk about the national scene, our parents, and one cousin who killed himself in prison.

When I got back to the office, on my desk was a copy of Dr. Schaffer-White's report from the Blue Jay homicide. I turned pages and saw that Les Fedders was the dick on the case. So. Now we had two cases together. I'd had the misfortune of working with Les before, though on as lean a basis as I could. He's given to gloating about how he can cover the “poppers” with no wad up his nose, poppers being corpses in that state of advanced putrefaction wherein the buildup of internal gases splits the skin like seismic violence. Teflon nostrils this detective says he has.

But once, on a case in 104-degree summer heat, I watched a gag wrestle in Les's throat when a coroner's tech pulled on the arm of a corpse left too long in a car behind a building and the arm came away at the seam. Dick of the Year saw me catch the reaction, and ever after he gets a dig in when he can.

I no sooner had him on the phone than he said to someone in the background, “What was the score on that fingerprint, Jesse? ‘B' quality? That's good enough for me. I'll sign off on it.”

He returned to me. “We got a hit on a serial bank robber. Dumb shit's going to federal quicker'n hell can scorch a feather. He left his prints on a checkbook cover.”

“Les, you wouldn't happen to have the campground case on your desk?”

“That one down off Ortega? Yeah, I do.” I heard the smack of folders. “I got there right after you frenzies left.” Frenzies—his word for forensics people. “That was a pretty one, wasn't it? Le's see . . . Rollie Wilson Pierson, age fifty-five, housepainter. Arrested for public intoxication four times. Two unpaid traffic cites. That's it. Trudy Kunitz says she doesn't think we can get anything off the duct tape. Just a big smudge. But I'll tell you something. Whoever messed him up was a skilled practitioner of martial arts.”

“How do you know that, Les?”

“Experience.”

I should have leveled him myself, stealing the doctor's evaluation. But I wanted to ask him a favor, and I was working up my courage. “Have you talked to the family yet?”

“By phone.”

“Anything there?”

“I talked to a sister. The wife'll be giving me a call.”

My pencil kept rolling off the desk. I checked the nicks and scratches on my desk to be sure I wasn't the victim of a midnight swap.

“How about our canyon Jane, Les? What have we got on her?”