THE BLUE HOUR

by T. Jefferson Parker

  He was surprised to find Lael Jillson's diary included in the box full of personal, medical and financial information that he had requested. There was a gummed yellow tag on it that said, "I've never looked at this, but you can if it will help—RJ."

  He opened to the last entry and read in Lael's graceful hand:

  June 2—A rare afternoon alone in the house here. Robbie and the kids gone surfing at Old Man's but I didn't want to go this time. Too much sun these days, feel like I'm drying up. Sometimes I like it just like this: me and the mansion and the air conditioner off and the windows open and a giant G&T or two, and just me. No talk, no noise, no nothing. For about an hour, maybe, then I start missing them. Sometimes I think there's not quite enough of me to entertain me for long. It's a problem, I know, but I've chosen to raise children rather than develop myself. Robbie says children shouldn't be an excuse. But then Robbie has never complained about my lack of a me, either. Sometimes I don't know why he loves me. Sometimes, like today, when I look around me I see all this bounty I don't deserve and I wonder if it's Ike they say—what goes around comes around and karma and all that stuff—and someday everything you don't deserve in the first place will be taken away and then some. Because if you have so much more than you deserve to have what's to keep you from losing more than you deserve to lose1 Oh well, too much G&T and quality skunk weed. One more puff on the pipe and I'll sign off. 'Til next time, thank you Lord for this embarrassment of riches I call my life. I love it!

  Hess closed the book and tapped his thick fingers on the leather cover. His desire for a cigarette was suddenly strong, but he'd had to stop them when they took out the upper two-thirds of his lung. The first two weeks without the smokes had been almost intolerable but he'd been pretty much alone so he hadn't taken it out on anyone. Every time he wanted a smoke he touched the scar running from the back of his shoulder to the bottom of his ribs. Fifty years of cigarettes were enough—Hess had started when he was fifteen because his older brothers did. He knew that if he'd stopped thirty years ago it might have saved him some considerable pain and maybe some years of life, but there was no profit in this knowledge, no one to pass it along to.

  Hess felt the scar through his shirt and looked at Lael Jillson's picture in front of him. He saw her hanging upside down from a rope slung over the branch of the Ortega oak. He saw the slow twist of her body. At first her arms dangled down, then he saw them tied up behind the small of her back. He saw the blood running from her neck and pooling on the ground. Hess wondered if they had been chosen with their hair up to save someone the trouble of doing it himself. No, he wanted these particular women more than that He wanted them very badly. The hair up meant something else. Hess saw a similar scene with Janet Kane. He saw the scenes again.

  Terrible sights. Hess had learned to forgive himself for them. Sometimes it made him sad to know he was like this. It was part of what made him good at what he did—the detective's version of the athlete's positive imaging. But he never got to see home runs or three-pointers. And he could never unimagine what he saw. The memory was part of the price he paid for a skill he had purposefully worked to develop, a useful part of his portfolio. In the larger sense Hess believed that most of life's givens were just that—given. He had yet to meet a man who had created himself, and this is why he thought he understood the nature of evil.

  Robbie showed Hess into his bedroom. It was half the upper floor, with magnificent views to the west and south. The wall opposite the windows was mirrored glass, which offered the same view, inverted. Hess saw Catalina Island far offshore caught on Robbie Jillson's wall.

  "You want to know her, don't your asked Robbie. "But I can't contain her for you. I can't, like, present her in a few words or with a few pictures and give you an idea of what she is."

  Is, thought Hess: her husband still hasn't accepted it. Hess supposed that if he were in Robbie Jillson's position he wouldn't either. He would love to be wrong about her and Janet Kane.

  They stood outside on a deck off the bedroom. Hess felt the afternoon breeze in his bones.

  "I'm trying to see how your wife's life might overlap with the Laguna woman. Janet Kane. Why they were chosen."

  "It's because they're beautiful."

  "How, specifically?"

  "Her face. Her posture."

  "What about insider?”

  "Her happiness. She . . . was a happy person, and it showed. She was a happy woman, Lieutenant. I mean I was really lucky. She was like that when I met her. It's just the way she ... was. She loved her life, and if you were around her it made you appreciate your life, too. She always knew it would end, though. She wasn't shallow or stupid. But she wasn't morbid and she wasn't cynical and she didn't look for the dark side of things. If there was something good or joyful to be found, she'd find it."

  Hess thought about this. He watched Robbie looking out the window. Six months and the man still couldn't decide whether to speak of his wife in the past or present tense. It was the uncertainty that broke people down, he thought, and he'd seen it happen a lot. When you had a body you had the end, and people could work with endings. But without a body all you have is a mystery that eats the soul like acid.

  Jillson turned and looked at Hess. The expression on his face didn't match the face—it was like a guy in a surfboard ad ready to shoot somebody.

  "I smelled him."

  Hess's heart seemed to speed up a beat.

  "I didn't tell the other cops because the other cops didn't ask. Some guy named Kemp? He's the reason some people hate cops. Anyway, Lael disappeared on a Thursday night. Friday morning her car was found and towed I was called to get it out of hock. When I let myself in to drive it away, I could smell him."

  "And?"

  "Faint. Cologne or aftershave maybe. Real faint. But I smelled him. If I ever see him I'll kill him."

  Hess nodded. There wasn't much you could say to that, except to be practical. "I'd like to, too. But don't. You wouldn't like prison very much."

  "It would be worth it, just to punch a few holes in his face with my magnum."

  "It's a better thing to dream about than do. "Hess looked out to the west. There were other mansions, acres of rolling yellow foothills, clean asphalt roads and the sharp blue Pacific rising up to the sky. Robbie was still stuck in paradise, his Eve departed.

  Hess could say it wasn't fair but he'd already said it a million times in his life. In spite of its truth, the idea counted far less than it should.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Colesceau sat on his stool behind the counter and looked out the dusty window. He read the words aviJomoiuA jjei off the glass for the billionth time in his life and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. He could hear Pratt and Garry out back with the Shelby Cobra, and the occasional cackle of Pratt's wife, Lydia. Every day, half an hour before closing they'd start drinking beer and Colesceau would hear the rising pitch of their conversation punctuated by the cchht, cchht, cchht of the cans popping open. All Pratt and Garry talked about was cars and the body parts of women.

  His job was to count and bag the money at closing, so he counted and bagged it. There was $14 in cash and $220 in checks. He noted the amounts and check numbers on the deposit slip and added the subtotals twice before writing down the total.

  "Hey, hey, Matty."

  It was Lydia, sneaking up behind him again, hanging her hand over his shoulder like they were on the same football team or something. She took liberties with his first name, which he had clearly explained was Matamoros or Moros for short. But Lydia was always playing with words and had called him Matamata for a while. According to a library encyclopedia that Colesceau had consulted, the matamata was a "grotesque" river turtle of South America that caught prey by distending its huge lower jaw and sucking unwary animals down its gullet along with the water. He had asked her not to call him that any longer and she had not.

  "How did your interview go?"

  "Very well."

  "They're not going to rat you out to your
neighbors, are they?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Well," she said, hand resting on his shoulder again, "I hope they don't. It's hard enough to get on in this life without the cops stirring up the water every place a man tries to go."

  He wondered if this water metaphor was a veiled reference to the grotesque matamata, but with Lydia you couldn't say for sure. "I hope for the best."

  "You're an optimist. I admire that. You carry the weight for yourself. You're the only one around here isn't always complaining."

  "You don't."

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "I can keep my own counsel."

  With Lydia, it was always between you and her. She would be vague and playful, then pointed and prying, all in one minute. But she had never betrayed a confidence to her husband or Garry, at least Colesceau had never caught her at it She had this way of pairing off, of making you think that somehow she was in this with you.

  She stood beside him now. With him sitting on the stool they were the same height Her breasts were heavy and low in the tank tops she always wore and she had a way of brushing them against his back when she did this teammate thing. She ran her fingers over the duct tape he wore around his body, casually scratching it through his shirt, like it itched her as much as it itched him.

  Months ago she had gotten him to admit that he wore the tape to hold down his budding breasts. That he folded squares of toilet paper to go over his nipples so they wouldn't get pulled when he removed the tape.

  He had been livid at her lack of manners and at himself for making such an admission, and at Holtz and Pratt for their big gossiping mouths, but to his surprise Lydia had never made reference to the tape or his breasts again. Other than the light fingernail scratch she offered without comment every time she let her hand rest on his body.

  "You let me and Pratt know if we can testify or anything," she said.

  She always called her husband by his last name instead of his first, which was Marvis. She always wanted to help. Like a mechanic/ex-car-thief/beer guzzler or his wife were going to make you look good to the parole board, he thought. She had a thin dark body and lank dark hair with ears that showed through it and a little nose that stuck more up than out.

  "Yes."

  "How'd we do today, Matty?"

  He told her. It surprised him that for such a dusty, poorly stocked, out-of-the-way place, Pratt Automotive managed to take in close to two thousand a week. And the heart of the business was the custom work that Marvis and Garry did in the back. That made some bigger money and he never saw so much as a dollar of it. It was a cash thing between car lovers and he was told from the first that there were really two "operations"—the store and the custom work—and Colesceau was to mind the store. Only. He knew that Pratt was in cozy with A1 Holtz, which is why he was offered the job here. And Pratt was also in cozy with a lot of custom car and biker types and Colesceau wondered if part of Pratt's deal with Holtz was an occasional betrayal.

  "Why don't you go ahead and split," she said. "I'll take the bag to the bank."

  This was no surprise because Colesceau, though trusted with the handling of cash and checks during his workday, was never asked to make the nightly deposit. He assumed this was some furtive directive passed from his PA to his boss. Colesceau had long since lost his amusement over how Holtz demanded his trust but wouldn't trust him back.

  He thanked her and went to the back to say good-bye to his boss. Pratt stood in the high bay behind the office, his arms crossed, looking down at the brilliant yellow Cobra with the black hood and the chrome roll bar and headers. It was an $80,000 car, Colesceau had heard. Four hundred fifty horses, top speed up near 180 mph. You had to register it in Nevada because it wasn't quite legal in California. Colesceau had a brief vision of himself at the wheel and his lover beside him, peeling across the lawless American desert at top speed, outrunning the world. Garry came from the refrigerator with two more beers. Cchht. Cchht.

  "Next week we'll crack one for you," said Pratt.

  "I haven't had alcohol in seven years."

  "All finished up next week, aren't your' asked Garry, though Colesceau knew he already knew the answer. Garry was a man who pretended to be stupid. He believed that you would tell him things because of that. But Colesceau had been around him enough to understand that he was as quick and self-serving as a dog.

  "Yes, next week."

  "Here's to you, my friend."

  Garry tipped his beer at Colesceau and took a sip.

  "Five hundred and four dollars today, Mr. Pratt. And the Ford dealership says the EGR module for the Bronco will be here tomorrow morning."

  "Thanks, man."

  Back in the store he saw that Lydia was outside smoking. In spite of the strong smell of machined metal, motor oil and solvent, Marvis Pratt forbade his wife to smoke inside the establishment. She'd put a wrought-iron patio table and two chairs out there, her smoking area. Pratt had donated a ground-out piston head for an ashtray, but the piston head was full and the ground was littered with her butts.

  Colesceau searched under the counter for his lunch box but remembered he'd left it in the back. He was going through the short hallway that connected the retail store to the work bay when he heard Garry say something about tits, then the low-pitched, wicked chuckles.

  Colesceau pretended he hadn't heard, and grabbed his lunch box off the counter above which hung the centerfolds of beautiful women in bathing suit bottoms and no tops. Today he'd put his lunch under a brunette with a gorgeous smile. His heart was beating hard and he could feel it against the tape. There was a heavy, clumsy silence as he nodded to the men and headed out again.

  He stopped in his driveway at 12 Meadowlark in the Quail Creek Apartment Homes and used the remote to open his garage door. The faded little pickup truck chugged at idle while he waited. A moment later he was inside the cool of the garage and the door was coming down.

  Inside the apartment Colesceau moved in the dim light. Lights off, drapes drawn. He was a pale man who preferred a little shade with his sunlight, a little dampness with his day.

  The California sunshine didn't want you to have secrets like that: just look at what those people had done to him yesterday. How is your libido . . . erection and ejaculation . . . physical sexual arousal ... do her with a Coke bottle or your fist?

  Amazing, he thought, just what people in the government would do to a man. Humiliation. Control. Chemical castration. No better than the state police who had executed his father, really, just different methods, slower rates of extermination. And no dogs, so far.

  On the way past the bookcases he glanced at the scores of eggshells, his mother's treasures. Most of them were pastels—baby blue and pink and pale yellow. Sickening, infantile shades he thought. The ones with the little skirts of lace and bric-a-brac and lace were by far the worst. In his mother's hands, egg painting wasn't so much a noble Romanian folk art as a garish display of inner imbalances too acute for Colesceau to ponder.

  He didn't linger on the eggs however, because he knew that a twenty-six-year-old man must have more to think about than his mother. Not for the first time he wished she lived just a little farther away. The idea that she might move in with him was distressing.

  He went into the kitchen. Colesceau knew for a fact that if the police exposed him and the neighbors rallied to have him removed, then his mother would move in to protect him. It would be her duty. She would fight them like a bulldog. He shivered and felt the tape up tight against his breasts. Thank God he'd looked ahead, seen the possibilities, made arrangements.

  He made a very strong Bloody Mary. The vodka was in the freezer and the mix was in his refrigerator. He loved his drinks cold. But he liked them hot, too. So he ground half a teaspoon of black pepper, shook four jets of Tabasco and three of Worcestershire sauce into the jar, then broke off a stalk of celery and stirred it. It cooled and heated his lips at the same time. Nice.

  • • •

  After dinner and two more dri
nks Colesceau dialed Al Holtz's office number. He knew the fat PA would be home by now, but he thought he might sum up his case for mercy with a brief message on Holtz's machine. He always saved a little bit of old-world formality for law enforcement:

  "Yes, hello Mr. Holtz, this is Matamoros Colesceau. Moros. I want to say thank you for the interview of yesterday. I will successfully satisfy my parole next week. I hope that you will allow me to maintain my life and privacy here on Meadowlark. I will continue to live up to my obligations as in the past I have done. I will never again harm any person. Thank you very much. I look forward to talking with you. Good-bye."

  • • •

  When Colesceau hung up he was already brooding about women and his sexual capacity and he could feel the faint stirrings of desire down in his pants. It was difficult for him that his thoughts about sex were linked to his thoughts about castration, but the two went everywhere together, like twins, one beautiful and one ugly. Castration. The word sent a chill through his nervous system. It was one of the few English words with the power to do that.

  Colesceau had done his research into chemical castration. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a detective who went and found things out. Depo-Provera was a brand name for medroxyprogesterone acetate, a chemical reproduction of the female hormone progesterone. Injected into males it was a hormone inhibitor, and it affected people differently. In some males it nearly eliminated the sex drive; in others it diminished it; in still others it seemed to have little or no effect. Recidivism rates were between 3 and 8 percent, depending on who you believed. It encouraged breast growth, hair loss and a loss of overall energy and strength.