Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (37 page)

“He offered to show me the pictures of you and the girl. Girls. If I had any doubt.”

“Did you take him up on it?”

“Of course I did. I’m a reporter. They’re you, Terry. I know you didn’t do what they show you doing, but they’re you. They’re good.”

“But what did he
want?
”

Donna sighed, then turned to face me. I could see the small light reflected by her eyes. “Terry, I honestly believe all he really wanted was to help me. His concern seemed genuine. And he wanted to rattle your cage, too. One accomplishes the other, doesn’t it?”

“
Help
you? Did he
touch
you?”

“No, he did not. And if I were you, I’d derail that train of thought before it made a real fool out of myself.”

I will admit I felt nothing that moment except the desire to pound Ishmael senseless with my bare hands or, even better, an ax handle, hammer, gun butt, Mag-Lite, irrigation pipe, tire iron, Louisville Slugger …

“I know what you’re thinking, Terry. And that’s exactly why I didn’t tell you the day it happened. But God knows, I couldn’t wait forever.”

There was a long silence while we faced each other in the dark. I could see the distant freeways past Donna’s shoulder and the little gleam coming from her eyes.

“Look, it’s late,” she said. “Take your woman to the shower now, will ya? Suds her up and smooth her over. She’s beat up by the world as we know it, and she could use your arms. Can’t let some jealous lieutenant ruin your whole day. What do you say, crime-buster?”

“All right, Donna. Okay.”

She stayed in the shower for almost an hour. When she came out she was in her robe. Her hair was damp and combed straight back and she was clean and fragrant. But I’d never seen her look so tired. So small. Still, I had to know her answer, and that meant I had to ask.

“Would you be willing to testify in court for me?”

She looked startled, then suspicious, then, quite simply, exhausted. “Testify to what?”

“Being with me at the hotel, January eleventh.”

She walked up to me and looked hard into my eyes. She leaned against me.

“Yes,” she said.

“I don’t think it will come to that.”

“But let me tell you just one thing, dear man—someday you’re going to have to give back as much as you take.”

She walked into the bedroom.

I nodded, not really understanding, but wanting to. I sat up for a while thinking about what she had said. Oh, I owed: I understood that much. I understood that I owed Donna the truth, and hadn’t fully offered it yet. Secrets are debts. And the more of them you hold inside, or the bigger they are, the more you owe. I was a heavy debtor. But there was nothing I was proud of in what I could offer of truth. And I believed then, as I had believed all along, that when I paid the debt I owed her, she would leave me. I had long ago accepted the fact that I am not an honorable man. But I wanted her. And lack of honor can’t destroy desire. Just ask The Horridus. Or me.

I lay in bed beside her, but I didn’t sleep.

T
he “serpent field” off of Laguna Hills Road and Moulton Parkway was actually a park. Not a groomed and organized place, no rest rooms or picnic benches, no fire rings or forest fire warnings—just a hundred acres of Southern California scrub on low foothills tapering down to Moulton Creek. The creek was slow and shallow and I could see flags of algae waving in the current just under the surface. It wound around the west side of the park, then passed under a wooden bridge. There was an old asphalt road running through the property, long closed to traffic and used on this fine morning by joggers and bicyclists and mothers pushing strollers. The brushy hills rose up from the edge of the road. I could see some rock out-croppings near the tops of the hillocks.

Hug the water.

I walked a narrow trail along the stream, which was mostly hidden from sight by a thick canopy of bamboo and sumac and wild dill. You smelled water, dead branches, sprouting leaves, sunshine. You heard grasshoppers, the stream moving, cars in the distance and the occasional wheel squeak of a dove doing thirty-five mph overhead. Every few hundred yards was a small clear area of what looked like beach sand, and from those you could see the lazy little creek heading back into the darkness of the bamboo. When you’d push through the foliage and walk out onto a spit of that sand and glance at all the rich green and running water before you, it seemed like an unspoiled little corner of nature. Then you noticed the cigarette butts and beer cans, the candy wrappers and footprints, the dog turds and flies and the pathetic little nests of shredded clothes and newspapers used by human beings desperate for a night’s sleep, and you knew better.

I stood there on one of those sandbars with my paper shopping bag containing five thousand cash, my fake mustaches—what a value
that
had turned out to be—my sunglasses and my baseball cap down low. I felt like the bottom feeder I was. The cap was a gag gift from Ardith one year, and it has a ponytail coming out the strap hole in the back. It’s not real hair, but it looks real enough. I went back out to the trail and loitered along, waiting for contact.

Ten minutes later I got it, just a quick
hey man
from the dense bamboo along the water. I stopped. I looked toward the voice but saw nothing but the rampant trunks of bamboo and the deep green daggers of leaves that hid the stream below. A spider web stretched across three feet of space in front of me caught the sunlight. In the middle its architect hunkered dark and still in the silver wires. He believed himself hidden.

Hey Mal? That you?

“Yup.”

Got it?

“Got it.”

Heat?

“Don’t feel any.”

See that blue-eyed kid in the Dodgers jersey?

“No. You want this or you want to talk all fuckin’ day?”

Not for me to touch. See the Bongo Man down at Main Beach. He’ll instruct. If you pass the boy in the Dodgers jersey, could you bathe him for me, get out the dirt in all his secret little places?

“Have your own fun.”

Oodles of cuddles, Mal.

I heard the rapid-fire chatter of a camera motor drive as I turned away. Never saw the camera. Never saw him.

I sat on a picnic bench in the shade of the eucalyptus trees at Laguna’s Main Beach. I listened to the Bongo Man working a pair of waist-high drums,
bit-a-bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM.
He was a pale white guy—early twenties, probably—with tan dreadlocks down to the middle of his back and beads braided into the locks and a red tie-dyed shirt with an orange sun on the chest. He had his back to the blue Pacific, of course. Instead, he faced through sunglasses the little playground, where he could watch the boys and girls on the bars and swings and slides, watch them naked in the outdoor shower stalls where Mommy and Daddy rinsed them off before trekking back to the car …
Bit-a-bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM, bit-a-DUM
…

Where do they get these fake Rastas, anyway? He’d set out a glass jar on the boardwalk in front of him for tips. There were a couple of dollars in it—seed money, I guessed—but that was about it.

An old man in a straw hat stopped and smiled at me. He was well dressed: blue oxford cloth shirt, tan trousers, loafers. He had a camera hung around his neck by a strap. I could see the little rods of sunlight that came through the straw mesh and dappled his face. His cheeks were abundant with gin blossoms and his eager blue eyes were outlined in watery pink. His teeth were yellow.

“Fine day, isn’t it?”

“For what?”

“Just being alive. Mal, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Cleveland, friend of Shroud.”

“Lucky him.”

“Guess you might want to take a stroll?”

“Whatever’s needed.”

I headed down the boardwalk beside him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the playground. I studied him and saw that the clothes that had looked so crisp and conservative at first were in fact stained and dirty. He was like Moulton Creek—kind of presentable until you looked harder. A girl and her puppy and mom came toward us and Cleveland knelt down to pet the dog. He smiled up at the mom and told the girl he used to have one like that when he was a boy and it was his favorite one ever. Called him Noggin, because his head was so cute. He stood and crossed his arms paternally, looking down on them. I knelt and pet the dog, too, always a sucker for puppies. Cleveland took my picture with the dog and the girl.

“You two have a wonderful day,” he said.

“Thanks,” said the girl.

“We will,” said the mom. She looked at the old man fondly, and me a little guardedly, then put her hand on her daughter’s back and guided her down the walk.

“That’s a lovely age,” he said.

“Um-hm.”

“Going live, eh?”

“I’d like to pay up and get the hell out of here, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I don’t touch it. Just be on your way down the sand now. When you get to the wall with the peace signs on it, set your treasure on the rock that looks like an engorged member. You can’t miss it. I call it cock rock. Keep walking and don’t look back. When you get to the cement stairs, take them up to Coast Highway. Don’t look back from there, either. We’ll take care of everything else. Just a second, Mal.”

He lifted the camera and snapped a couple more shots of me.

I bumped past him rudely and jumped off the boardwalk into the sand. I had him in my mind and I’d come back for him when the time was right—a week from now, a month, a year. I’d come back for him: guaranteed, absolutely, without doubt. And I’d come back for the perv in the bushes at Moulton Creek, too. A hundred yards south I hit the wall with the peace signs, and saw the outcropping of rocks. Sure enough, one of the formations nearest the sandstone cliff looked something like a penis, if you used your imagination a little, if you had an imagination like Cleveland’s. I looked around. Some boogie boarders out over the reef. Some sunbathers south fifty yards. A boy flew a kite with a green dinosaur on it. I set the shopping bag down on cock rock and continued down the sand. When I got to the stairway leading up to PCH I took the steps three at a time and arrived on the highway just a few seconds later, with my pulse throbbing hard in my neck and my heart aching to administer justice to Bamboo Man, Bongo Man and Cleveland. I headed north two blocks, then jumped somebody’s fence and crept along to the back where his yard overlooked the water. I parted the palm fronds like an explorer and looked down at the beach.

I could see the rock but the bag was gone. No obvious suspects. Nobody at all.

So I went back out to PCH and ducked into a taco joint. I ordered up a shot and a beer to go with lunch. I ate the tacos and felt a little sick. Then I ordered up two more drinks. There. When I came out the sunlight was golden and slower and all things possessed the unique specifics assigned by the Maker in an age more graceful than ours. I watched my shoes advance below me and believed they were guided by moral feet.

I hustled back down to Main Beach but Bongo Man, Cleveland and my bag were all gone.

Melinda’s home—my ex-home—was cool inside, redolent with the smells of Mel and Penny and Moe. Moe rubbed against my leg as I stood on the hardwood floor of the living room and looked back out the front window to the lawn, where the
FOR SALE
had its back to me, and I wondered what had led Melinda to list the place. Money? I doubted that—she had some savings, and I had made it clear I would continue as an investor should things not work out between us. Things clearly were not, and I was temporarily without a job, but she knew I’d be good for the money if she could hold on a few months. Didn’t she? Even if the mortgage was that big a problem she could always get a roommate. No, I thought, it wasn’t that. All I could come up with was that she and Penny were too traumatized by my accusal to even stay in a home they had once shared with me. I wondered at the depth of the wound I had laid open in them—in the wound that Jordan Ishmael, to be accurate, had laid open in them—and realized that I really had no understanding of its gravity. Had he even thought it through? How could his despising me justify the pain he brought to them? It was beyond me. I did not understand. It was more than sad to see that for sale sign there, a sign that said to all passersby: this life failed, these people ruined, this house ready for the next suckers eager to try.

“I don’t know, Moe,” I mumbled.

He rolled over onto his back and wagged bis tail. My wasted bird dog, reduced to a shameless household pet. That’s what happens when you don’t hunt a hunter. I guess I couldn’t blame that on Jordan Ishmael.

I knelt and pet him for a while, thinking about the life I had once had between these walls. A woman who loved me, a girl who had come to like me, a job, a dog. And as if my sudden passion for Donna Mason was not enough to ruin all that I had had here, there were the photographs that exploded the world all around me—with Melinda and Penny and everyone else I knew in it. And that, I could and did blame on Ishmael.

By two I was back in my apartment, dealing again with I. R. Shroud.

I. R. Shroud: Reports all good. Payment received.

Mal: Don’t appreciate the Kodak moments one fucking little bit. Very disappointed by you.

I. R. Shroud: For my peace of mind, TN, OCSD. We want you so badly to be one of us. Took great trust to show you our faces.

Mal: Point taken but unhappy still. Perhaps some shots of you would level the playing field.

I. R. Shroud: Riotous. Use legal letter envelope for balance. Hundreds only. Place envelope in paperback book, one-third of envelope visible. Embark Green Line Metro Rail from Norwalk station on first train after 4
P.M.
. today. Board last car only. Prepurchase transfer to Blue. Further instructions to come.

Mal: Am wanting results quickly.

I. R. Shroud: First things first.

Mal: Will wait with patience.