Trauma (8 page)

“Thanks, Mom. Outstanding. Is Dad coming to see me?”

“He said he would. But he has to go for a job interview this morning. Bar work, over at the Century Plaza.”

“You're kidding.”

Bonnie gave a wry smile. She stood up and watched Ray for a while, while he watched television.
You think you know your children. You think they're you
. But of course Ray was Duke as well. In fact, he was more like Duke than she had ever realized. She kissed him gently and precisely on the cheek and then she left. He didn't say anything, not even “good-bye.”

She drove up to UCLA. The morning was already very warm, and she opened all the car windows. When she stopped at the traffic signals at the intersection of Wilshire and Beverly Glen, a gold Mercedes convertible drew up close alongside her, driven by a fiftyish man with wraparound dark glasses and a bald head mottled with sunburn.

“Hey, honey!” he called out. “You're a road hazard—did you know that?”

She looked in the other direction. She knew that there was a long section of trim flapping loose from the Electra's offside door, and whenever she put her foot on the gas a cloud of blue smoke billowed out, but apart from that the car was running not bad.

When she didn't respond, the man leaned across his seat and said, “I can't keep my eyes off you—that's why!”

The signals changed to green and she pulled away with a squeal of tires and a deafening backfire, which flustered her even more. The Mercedes kept pace with her for a while, the man grinning at her with unnaturally white teeth, but just before they reached UCLA he gave her a toot on his horn and turned off toward Bel Air.

When he was out of sight, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. The woman who looked back at her was as much of a stranger as Ray.

Dr. Jacobson's laboratory was in a prefabricated cedar-wood building at the back of the main science block. Bonnie parked directly outside, at an angle, and a mourning dove was calling sadly in the trees as she climbed up the wooden steps. A small sign said DEPARTMENT OF ENTOMOLOGY. PLEASE CLOSE ALL DOORS.

Bonnie had to push her way through three sets of finely meshed screen doors, which slammed behind her one by one. Inside the laboratory it was uncomfortably humid and smelled of dead vegetation. The walls were lined with glass vivaria of insects—stick insects and praying mantises and locusts and fat white grubs—as well as dozens of cases of dead butterflies
and moths. There were also diagrams of insect life cycles and hugely magnified photographs of flies and larvae.

A young girl with very long dark hair and large circular glasses was bent over a workbench in the center of the laboratory. She was carefully squeezing something from an eye dropper into a cardboard box. Bonnie came up to her and peered inside, and then wished she hadn't. Crouched in the bottom of the box was the largest, hairiest spider she had ever seen. It was trembling, as if it were just about ready to strike. “What do you call that?” she asked, wrinkling up her nose.

“Chelsea,” the girl told her, without looking up.

“Pretty unusual name for a spider.”

“I don't know. It's more personal than
aphonopelma
.”

“Is Dr. Jacobson here? I was supposed to meet him at ten-thirty but I'm running late.”

“He's in back. Go right on through.”

Howard Jacobson was sitting in a small sunlit office in front of a Fujitsu PC, furiously hammering at the keys. He was tall and angular with bulging blue eyes and tufty black hair. As soon as Bonnie came in, he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. “Bon-
neee!
Come on in! Great to see you! How would you like some coffee?”

“Sure, that'd be welcome.”

“How's my favorite trauma-scene cleaner? I haven't seen you since that ax thing, have I? Jesus, the blood! The guts! Ugh-a-rugh-a! I don't know how you had the stomach to mop that up.”

Bonnie moved a stack of computer printouts and sat herself down and covered her eyes with her hand.

“Are you okay?” Howard frowned.

“I've had a couple of problems at home, that's all. My son's in the hospital. Nothing life threatening, but it's bad enough.”

“Flu?”

“Fight.”

“That's too bad. But boys will be boys, huh? I was always getting into fights when I was younger. The other kids called me Bug Boy and used to sit on my head and fart in my ear. Amazing I can still hear.”

“I just lost my job at Glamorex, too. Well, maybe not. I'll just have to see.”

Howard handed her a mug of coffee. On the side it said,
Never ask yourself questions you don't know the answer to
.

“I'm not interrupting you?” she asked.

“Of course not. I'm polishing my latest paper, that's all. ‘New Techniques for Determining Time of Death from Sarcophagidae Larvae Invasion.' Read it first, eat lunch afterward. Unless you're deliberately trying to lose weight, that is. You been busy?”

“Pretty much. People keep on killing each other. Somebody has to clean up after them.”

“You said on the phone you had something interesting to show me.”

“I don't know. Maybe it's nothing. I never saw one before, that's all.”

Bonnie handed Howard a brown paper bag. He moved his keyboard to one side and carefully tipped the contents onto his desk—a scattering of fig-leaf fragments and the black caterpillar that she had found at the Goodman home. The caterpillar began
to hump its way slowly across a sheet of graph paper. Howard leaned forward and peered at it from only inches away. Then he took a pair of half-glasses out of his desk, perched them on the end of his nose and peered at it even closer.

Bonnie said, “I almost didn't bring it—you know, what with Ray being in the hospital and all. But I thought I'd better in case it died.”

“Sure, sure. I'm very glad you did. Where did you say you found it?”

“On a fig plant. There were maybe six or seven of them. You must have seen that shooting on TV—the guy on De Longpre who shot his three children and then blew his head off? The fig plant was on the windowsill in one of the bedrooms.”

Howard nudged the caterpillar with his fingertip to prevent it from crawling under his computer console. “Now, you're a
very
unusual little guy, aren't you?”

“I don't know whether it has any direct connection to the trauma,” said Bonnie. “But a couple of days ago I found some black chrysalis-type things at another trauma scene, and I just thought—you know—this is kind of weird.”

“You didn't keep a sample of the chrysalis-type things?”

Bonnie shook her head. “I couldn't even tell you if they were the same kind of bug. But I just thought—you know—this is kind of weird.”

“It
is
kind of weird, Bonnie. It's
highly
weird. This looks like
Parnassius mnemonsyne
, the Clouded Apollo. It's a large butterfly with white, black-veined wings
with black spots. The dark, shadowy form occurs only in the females.… With age, the wings of the males become almost transparent.

“The interesting thing is that
Parnassius mnemonsyne
is found in only two places in the world: in the mountain pastures of Western Europe and in the hills of Chichimec territory in northern Mexico. Nobody knows for sure how this one butterfly could have developed in two such disparate locations. But there's no doubt that it was the same butterfly. I have some samples outside, if you want to take a look.”

“No, thanks,” said Bonnie. “Just tell me why this caterpillar should have been crawling around some trauma scene.”

“I don't know. I mean, the Clouded Apollo has something of a sinister reputation in Aztec culture, but that's superstition, nothing else.”

“What reputation?”

Howard Jacobson frowned at her and said, “You're serious, aren't you? You don't think that this larva could have had anything to do with your trauma scene?”

“I don't know. Not really. It was so tragic, that's all. I can't understand how a loving father could have murdered his children like that.”

“Well, I'm not a psychologist. I'm still just a bug boy.”

“What reputation?”

“It's a legend, Bonnie. Forget it.”

“
What
reputation?”

“Okay … the Clouded Apollo butterfly was supposed to be the daytime disguise of an Aztec demon called Itzpapalotl. She was the most dreaded of all
Aztec demons, a combination of insect and monster. She had butterfly wings edged all around with obsidian knives, and her tongue was a sacrificial knife, too.

“Sometimes she wore magic clothes—a
naualli
or cloak that enabled her to transform herself into an innocent-looking butterfly.

“She was the patroness of witches and hideous human sacrifices. She presided over the thirteen unlucky signs of the Aztec calendar. On those days she used to fly through towns and forests at the head of an army of dead witches, all returned from the underworld in the shape of butterflies.”

“And what? What did she do?”

“She drove people mad so that they killed the people they loved the most.”

Bonnie stared down at her cup of coffee as if she didn't know what it was.

“Cookie?” asked Howard. “I have some terrific pecan crunch.”

Around 11:30 she drove to Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica to give a quotation on a suicide pact. She was supposed to meet the family lawyer outside the house, but he called her almost as soon as she drew up to the curb to say that he was delayed. He had one of those voices that sounded as if he were wearing a swimmer's nose clip.

“Delayed?” asked Bonnie. “How long?”

“I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Okay. But if it's twenty-one minutes I won't be here. If it's twenty-and-a-
half
minutes I won't be here.”

She sat in the car listening to country music and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. She wondered if she ought to visit her mother. She always felt guilty about her mother even if she visited her
twice a week. Bonnie always felt that there was an unspoken question between herself and her mother—a question that was never answered—and the trouble was, she didn't even know what it was. Their relationship was like one of those cryptic crosswords that don't give you any clue numbers.

She dialed her mother's number, but she pressed the clear button as soon as her mother snapped, “
Hello
?” It would be better if she visited her by surprise. It would be even better if she didn't visit her at all. No, it wouldn't. She had to.

The house where the suicide pact had taken place stood on a corner plot of the 500 block—a two-story frame building with peeling white paint. It was deeply overshadowed on one side by a tall cedar tree, which gave it an almost unearthly gloom, and it had all the telltale signs of recent tragedy. An untended lawn, sagging drapes, and a Ralph's supermarket cart tipped over by the front door.

Not only that, but two of the upstairs windows were boarded up, and there was a smoke smudge just above the left-hand window, shaped like a waving black chiffon scarf. Bonnie didn't know the full details, but Lieutenant Munoz had told her that a forty-seven-year-old widow had been having an affair with her fifteen-year-old nephew. When her brother found out, he had called the police and threatened to have her prosecuted for child abuse. The same night the widow and the boy had lain on her four-poster bed together and doused themselves with three-and-a-half gallons of premium-grade gasoline. Clinging tightly together, they had set themselves alight.

There is never anything romantic about burning alive. The boy had leaped up from the bed and rushed around the room screaming in agony, setting fire to the drapes. Then he had run downstairs and tried to get out of the house by the front door. His fingers, however, were already too charred to draw back the safety chain and turn the handle. His body was found by the fire department still standing against the door, stuck to the paint like a grinning, shriveled monkey. The widow's body had been so badly burned that they couldn't decide which was mattress ash and which was human cinders. The contents of her funeral urn had been part widow and part Sealy.

Bonnie checked her watch. If the family lawyer didn't show up within four minutes exactly, she was leaving. She was sweltering, and she was feeling so hungry that she was nauseated.

She had already started her engine when a shiny red Porsche convertible drew up on the other side of the street, and a tall, suntanned man climbed out of it, wearing a cream polo shirt and white tennis shorts and carrying two racquets under his arm. He had well-cropped blond hair, mirror sunglasses and a strong cleft chin. He reminded her of somebody, but she couldn't think who it was.

He was about to walk toward the house opposite, but then he stopped and lifted his sunglasses and frowned at her. He came across the street and said, “Pardon me. Can I help you with something?”

“I'm fine, thanks.”

He laid his hand on the door of her Electra. His
arm was very brown, with fine golden hairs and a fine golden Rolex.

“You know what happened here?” he asked her. She was absolutely sure that she had met him before. But when did she ever get to meet men who looked like this? She averted her eyes, but then she found herself looking at his firm, suntanned thighs, and the bulge in his crisp white tennis shorts. Immediately, she lifted her head again and looked at herself in his reflecting lenses—two of her, both plump, both distorted, both perspiring.

“I know what happened here, sure.”

“Well, we've had quite a few people driving by to take a look at the place, and we've even had people getting out of their cars and peering into the windows and having their photographs taken on the front lawn. One family even brought a picnic. I'll tell you. Can you believe that? Cold barbecued chicken legs.”