“Make and year?” Greg’s gaze never left my face. He was trying to get a read on me and I didn’t blame him for that. I could only imagine the sort of nut cases he had to deal with on a daily basis.
“Crown Victoria, 2003. Blue. Dark blue, that is. Almost looks black, depending on the light?” The car had belonged to my mother and it had come my way when she passed on last year. It was a bit of a gas hog, but it was in prime condition because she’d hardly ever driven it and it had less than thirty thousand miles on it. When we went on trips—up to Oregon to visit Leah’s sister or to Vegas for R&R—we took Leah’s Honda to save on gas.
Greg gave me a smile that stretched his mustache to the breaking point. “Let’s go have a look,” he said.
So I spent the next half hour tramping back through the parking structure, this time with Greg at my side. “I’ll be your point man,” he said, and we started off up the ramp on the first level, Greg keeping up a stream of chatter the whole time though the drum was beating ever louder in my brain. I heard him as if at a great distance, the ramp swaying under us as cars labored on by. He filled me in on the problems of running a public parking structure, the fistfights over spots when there was a big event going on, the graffiti, the vomit, the sex in the stairwells and the bums making their nests in cars people had foolishly left unlocked. Anytime we came to a car of any make that happened to be blue or black, he pulled up short and asked, “This it?”
But of course it never was.
“All right,” he said finally, “let’s have a look at that tape and see if we can find out what happened to your vehicle.”
THE PERPETRATOR’S SLEEVE
I don’t have any tattoos, though Leah has a blue and gold butterfly just under the crease of her right buttock so that it seems to flutter when she’s walking ahead of you on the beach in her bikini. I mention it because the perpetrator—the thief—was a tattoo junkie and it was his sleeve that gave him away.
Greg and I went back to his office, which turned out to be a room not much bigger than the ticket kiosk located on the lower level of the parking structure, and waited for his “tech person” to come across town from one of the other garages to extract the feed from the camera and play it for us. “Fifteen minutes,” Greg said. “Twenty at most.” Then he looked into his computer and I pulled out my laptop, though I couldn’t concentrate and wound up staring at the wall above Greg’s desk for the hour and a quarter it took the tech person, another high-schooler, to arrive (and that was frustrating because the thief had obviously stolen the car in a narrow window of time and the sooner we got the cops on it the sooner the situation would be resolved, the car restored and Bidderbells returned to me. And Leah. Who was at work and as yet didn’t know a thing about it.).
The high-schooler, who actually turned out to be a university student, played the feed for us on Greg’s monitor, all three of us leaning in to watch the kid in the hoodie jump and dance and sit and spring up again as we fast-forwarded through the morning’s transactions till finally I shouted out, “There! There it is!”
My car had entered the scene, a grainy presence, sleek and substantial, and here was the window rolling down and the shadow of the dog in the backseat, pressing her nose to the glass there. The kid in the hoodie extended his hand and the thief handed him my ticket, his arm casually resting there on the window frame until the amount showed on the kiosk’s display—$1.50, first seventy-five minutes free, $1.50 for each hour after that. Which meant that the car had been broken into, hot-wired and driven to the exit just minutes before I emerged from the library, minutes! What was I feeling? Anger and regret in equal parts. If only I’d been there I could have stopped him before he’d even got started, the son of a bitch, but the problem was he was a son of a bitch without a face—or at least we couldn’t see his face given the perspective of the camera and the shadows inside the car resulting from the angle of the sun at that hour. All we could see was his sleeve—the tattoos he wore on his left arm, dark solid blocks of color like a grid of railroad ties running from his wrist to his bicep. Then the money was exchanged, the gate rose and my car was gone.
OFFICER MORTENSON
Two hours later Officer Mortenson pulled up in front of the parking structure in a Crown Victoria very much like the one that had been stolen from me, with the exception that hers—a newer model—carried a roof rack of flashing lights and bore the San Roque city logo on both front doors, with POLICE emblazoned beneath it in block letters. I was sitting on the low concrete wall outside the library in the company of half a dozen bums and watched her pull up opposite the kiosk and park along the curb in the No Parking Anytime zone, at which point I rose and hurried across the pavement to where she was just emerging from the car. “Hi,” I said, tense still but feeling just the smallest relief of the pressure that had been building in me over the course of the past two hours. Here she was, the servant of the law, ready to put things to rights.
Unfortunately, I seemed to have taken her by surprise, approaching the car too eagerly, I suppose, so that as the greeting emerged from my mouth she was in the act of squaring her shoulders and adjusting her duty belt, her fingers running familiarly over the service revolver, the nightstick, mace and handcuffs, and she swung round on me so precipitously you would have thought I was the perpetrator. Or a perpetrator. A perpetrator in potentia.
So there we were. The sun beat at the back of my head. I tried for a smile but couldn’t quite manage it—I was that wrought up. Nor did it help that I towered over her, my six-three to her five-five or -six. Add to that that she looked too young to be a cop and maybe a bit heavier than the ideal, which made me think of the junk food she must have been forced to bolt down during her busy rounds taking statements from agitated citizens whose safe, secure little worlds had just been cracked open like so many walnuts.
She surprised me then by coming up with the smile I couldn’t manage and a soft sympathetic gaze out of eyes the color of the caramel chews Leah likes in lieu of dessert every once in a while. “You’re the one whose car’s missing?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, and in the next moment it was all pouring out of me in a rush of verbiage, every detail I could think of, from the car’s description and license plate number to where I’d parked and how I’d spent my morning and the salient—and most corrosive—fact that Bidderbells was in the backseat and for all I knew being held hostage.
She heard me out, but she wasn’t writing anything on her pad beyond the make, model and plate number. When I’d run out of breath, she said, “Let’s back up a minute here. Name?” she asked. “And I’m going to need an address and a number where you can be reached.”
Once she’d recorded the information, she straightened up and swept a look round the area, scanning the faces of the bums, to whom this was all in a morning’s entertainment, and then she turned back to me. “Well,” she said, “let’s have a look at that video feed, shall we?”
We were in stride now, heading into the shadow of the parking structure, when another thought came to me. “It’s not just the car. And the dog. I just remembered my golf clubs are in the trunk. And my fishing equipment. Which includes my fly rod? That my grandfather gave me? I mean, it’s handmade split bamboo and pretty much irreplaceable.”
She gave me a sidelong glance and I shortened my stride to stay even with her. “You say he has tattoos?”
In the agitation of the moment I thought she was talking about my grandfather, but then I saw my mistake and nodded.
“Don’t you worry,” she said, “we’ll get your car back and your dog and your golf clubs too. My bet? He’s got a rap sheet, which means those tats are going to give him away.”
I wanted to thank her, wanted to thank her extravagantly and tell her I was feeling much better and that I appreciated her help in resolving this matter as expeditiously as possible, but all I could think of was Leah and the dog and what would happen if Officer Mortenson was wrong. Or maybe overconfident. Maybe that was a better wo
rd.
THE BLAME GAME
One thing I like to do in the late afternoon once I’m done with work (I consult for a couple of the big wine-growing operations on the Central Coast) is pour a glass of wine, put on some music and wait for Leah to get home so we can decide what to do about dinner. Half the time we wind up going out. We’re not foodies per se, but there are a whole lot of fine restaurants in this little tourist enclave by the sea, and our choices are virtually limitless. Plus, our two favorite places are an easy walk from the apartment. On this particular afternoon, the afternoon of the theft of the car and abduction of the dog (whether planned or incidental), I got back late, having declined an offer of a lift from Officer Mortenson only to wind up walking the twenty blocks home. Every step of the way I’d been thinking about Leah—her look of shattered disbelief when she found out, the tragic extenuation in the way she would freeze her lips and pinball her eyes, her uncanny ability to hurtle from shock to sorrow to accusation and play the blame game—and if I’d already put away half a bottle of an ambrosial Santa Rita Hills pinot by the time she came in the door, who could blame me? It had been a day. And it was far from over.
About Leah: she’s thirty-seven, a year older than I, and she works for a sometimes intemperate older woman named Marjorie Biletnikoff, who has her own interior design business here in town. Most days are placid, meeting with clients, choosing fabrics, carpets, antiques, that sort of thing, but every once in a while—once a week, it seems—things can get inordinately stressful because Marjorie Biletnikoff goes off the wagon in a major way (if she ever even bothered to climb up on it in the first place) and tends to take her frustrations in life out on Leah. Maybe I’m imagining things, but from the moment I heard Leah’s key turn in the lock I thought I could detect the sort of forward thrust and abrupt wrist action that would indicate that today was one of those days.
The door yawned open, slammed shut, and here came Leah down the entrance hall and straight into the kitchen, where I was standing at the counter, cradling my wineglass. She didn’t say hi and I didn’t either and there was no pecking of kisses or embraces or anything usual because as soon as she came through the door I said, “Something happened,” and she said, “You’re drunk,” and I was on the defensive.
Finally, when I got the news out that the car had been stolen from the parking structure at the library, she softened and murmured, “Oh, James, that’s awful,” even as she went to the cabinet to reach down a wineglass for herself. “You must feel terrible.”
“Yeah,” I said, shifting my gaze, “but that’s not all.”
She’d swung round, glass in hand, and had lifted the bottle by its neck before she paused, her eyes boring into me.
“They got Bidderbells,” I said. “I mean, she was in the car. They probably didn’t even know. And the police, I went to the police, and they said they—”
“What are you telling me? You took my dog? To the library? Left her in the car? And you, you—you lost her?” Implicit in this, which rode in on an accusatory tone I didn’t particularly need or like, was her history with Bidderbells, a rescue dog she’d got after her divorce, the dog who had literally saved her life when she was so depressed all she could think about was killing herself every minute of every day and nothing on this earth seemed worth living for. Until she went to the shelter and saw that sweet thing with the big-eyed gaze and her furry front paws scrabbling there on the wire mesh till it was like to break her heart, etc.
“It’s not my fault. How was I to know? And I’m just as upset as you are.”
Very slowly, she set the bottle back on the counter and put the empty glass beside it. I watched her face, the interplay of emotions there, as if something caught under her skin was trying to fight its way out.
I gave her a pleading look. “You know we can’t leave her alone in the apartment.”
“But why? Why did you even go out? I thought you were supposed to be working—?”
I pinched my lips together and pointed out the window to the construction site. “The noise,” I said. “I couldn’t concentrate.”
I thought she was going to say something more then, something with a barb in it, overgenerous with blame, as if I was the criminal and not the loser with the tats who’d started all this in the first place, but she just looked past me and murmured a soft exclamation. “Jesus,” she said, and then she did fill her glass.
THE PHONE CALL IN THE NIGHT
Dinner was sandwiches washed down with wine and tap water, Leah far too agitated even to think about going out. We tried to watch an old movie on TV, one of those screwball comedies that feature people running in and out of rooms while mistaking each other for somebody else and hiding Jean Arthur in one closet or another, but neither of us could really get into it. For one thing, Leah kept pacing and fretting, the wineglass held out before her like a mood sensor. For another, without even realizing it, we both drank more than was good for us—three bottles, in all. She kept saying, over and over, “The cop did say he’d call, right, if they heard anything?” and I kept correcting her with regard to the pronoun. “She,” I said. “I told you, it was a woman cop. Officer Mortenson.”
“Not Julie Mortenson?”
I was on the couch. Jean Arthur flickered by on the screen. “I don’t know. She didn’t give me a first name. Officer Mortenson, that was all.”
“Christ,” she said, flinging back the dregs of her wine. “That’s all I need. Of all people, Julie Mortenson—”
“What, you know her?”
Furious now, every twitch of her brain focused in her eyes, which were focused on me: “Know her? She’s a backstabber and a slut, is all. She bullied me on the volleyball team in high school till I had to quit and then turned around and stole my boyfriend senior year, who I’d been going with, like, from my sophomore year, Richie, Richie Lopez? If it’s the same Julie Mortenson, and how many could there be in a town this size?”
That was when the phone rang.
I won’t say it was like a bomb going off, because that’s a cliché, but it did stop the conversation dead in its tracks. I got up and answered it.
“Mr. Mackey?”
“Yes?”
“This is Officer Mortenson. We haven’t yet located your vehicle but we did find your dog.”
I said something like “Wow, great,” while mouthing the information to Leah, whose face froze in expectation.
“Apparently the suspect let her out on the off-ramp at Glen Annie Road and a witness saw what was happening and stopped for the dog, otherwise things could have been a lot worse.”
I was trying to process this information, picturing the dog mangled on the freeway but for the intercession of some dog-loving Good Samaritan, when Officer Mortenson added, “The dog—Bidderbells, is that right, a basset mix?—she’s at the animal shelter on Turnpike and all you have to do is present ID to reclaim her.”
“But I can’t—I mean, I’ve had maybe a glass of wine with dinner? And I wouldn’t want to, you know, get behind the wheel—”
Officer Mortenson—she had a voice like honey heated on low in the microwave—just laughed. “I meant, in the morning. They close at five weekdays. Open at eight, I think—you can check it out online.”
I would have felt relief, but for the fact that Leah was glaring at me, all the tension and blame-assigning of the past few hours livid in her face. I looked down at the rug. Cupped the phone to my mouth. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you so much. This is huge.” The conversation should have ended there, but the wine sat thick on my tongue and thicker in my brain. “Could I ask you something?” I said, lulled by the patient rhythm of her respiration on the other end of the line. “Is your first name Julie, by any chance?”
There was a pause that allowed me to feel just how far I’d stepped over the line here, attempting to personalize what was a purely formal, bureaucratic transaction, but then her voice came back to me, soft and almost sugared. “It’s Sarah,” she said, and broke the connection.
> THE THIEF REVEALED
Leah was still furious with me in the morning. She’d hardly slept at all, she claimed, thinking of Bidderbells locked up in that cell with strays and pit bulls and she didn’t know what else. Did I realize that since Bidderbells had come into her life, they’d never spent a night apart. Never?
I hadn’t realized it and I was sad to know it now. I kept my counsel, leery of provoking her, though my own sorrow was a new and festering thing that the loss of a car to a car thief couldn’t even begin to contain. Breakfast was a cold and hurried meal. We were out of the apartment by seven-thirty because I had to drive Leah to work so I could use her car to go rescue the dog. Which I did. Promptly at eight. Here came the dog scrabbling down the linoleum hall on a leash gripped by a humorless woman who made me sign a form and pay a fine because Bidderbells’ license had lapsed, and then I was in the Honda and heading home to sit at my desk and work as best I could through the noise of the construction across the street. The dog ate lustily and looked no worse for wear, though one account had the thief flinging her out the door while the car was still moving.
The next call from Officer Mortenson came at half-past two, when I was deep into my work—a proposal for expanding the acreage of the Escalera Vineyards on the south slope of the foothill property they were thinking of acquiring from the rancher next door—and didn’t at first hear the phone ringing. There was a distant sound, and it finally woke me from my trance on what might have been the fifth or sixth ring for all I knew. No matter. There was Sarah Mortenson’s soft, soft voice on the other end of the line, betraying not the least hint of impatience.
“Mr. Mackey, good news. We’ve located your golf clubs, or what we think are your clubs, which you’ll have to come down and identify, and we have the suspect in custody.”
I was still in the vineyards. I murmured something incoherent.
The Relive Box and Other Stories Page 13