THE BLUE HOUR

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "Good." He looked in at William Wayne's feet again. Then at Merci, whose eyes were cold and dark.

  "He really is in charge of this hellhole, Hess. That damned Dr. Slurpee is who I want. I really can't believe what I just saw."

  "I couldn't either."

  Merci turned and kicked a hole in the wall. "Steel toes. I'm just a little bit pissed off right now. Call Riverside Sheriffs."

  • • •

  Back out the Ortega the sky was dark and the hills were darker. The road was just a black ribbon with a yellow line through it that kept snaking out of his headlights, then out of Hess's focus. He stared at it, the only line on earth.

  Finally, Merci cut loose.

  "The worst part of it is none of those people did anything wrong. They probably never did anything wrong. William Wayne probably didn't. And the scum we deal with every day, this Purse Snatcher puke we're after? All they do is bad things. They've got good minds and good bodies and all they do is bring the hurt down on other people. But you get unlucky enough to be born like those people back there, you end up in the Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore. That isn't right, Hess. You keep trying to tell me to feel what other people feel and think what other people think and all that? Well, I never could, until I looked at the people in the rooms back there. That's the first time I could really feel—and smell, and see and think—just exactly what other people felt and smelled and saw and thought. And it made me ashamed to be a human being and it made me furious. I'm always furious, though. That's a different story."

  She leaned across the seat and Hess thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she drove a stiff index finger into his shoulder and leaned toward him.

  "Those people aren't ever going to get better. And they never did anything bad to anybody. That pisses me off and I intend to stay pissed off about it just as long as I can. I wish Dr. Slurpee had a jacket. I wish she was looking at some time."

  Hess nodded. "She might get some. You did the right thing, calling the police."

  "I should have waited for that bitch and blown her heart out."

  "Save your shells for the Purse Snatcher."

  "I got plenty for whoever needs them. We just wasted three hours, Hess. Maybe that's what pisses me off most."

  • • •

  Merci stared out at the darkness and the stars as they dropped back down into Orange County. So much sky, she thought, and so little time. Her fury had cooled down to a simmer but she could feel it eager to boil up and over again. That was fine; it was what kept her going.

  But her heart felt wrong. It was all mixed up, not unanimous like it always was. It felt heavy with her failure to save Jerry Kirby. It was tender at the sudden and powerful empathy she had felt for the people at the Rose Garden Home. It was still coiling with her own indigenous anger. And there was something else inside her, too, something underlying it all like a small blue flame warming a pot, and this had to do with Hess.

  He pulled up next to her car in the Sheriff Department lot, left the engine running. She looked at her watch: pushing midnight.

  "Come over?"

  "Sure."

  • • •

  She shooed some cats out of the way and made drinks. Her big toe hurt. In the living room she sat across the sofa from Hess and tried to let the smell of the orange grove inhabit her. That didn't work.

  Hess stared at the tube but didn't touch his drink.

  "Stay tonight?" she said.

  "No. I'm going to go in a minute."

  "Why'd you come over in the first place, then?"

  To make sure you were okay. Didn't want you to kick all the walls in."

  She thought about this. "I'm okay. Look, it's good if you go. I'm better off alone when I'm like this."

  "I know."

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Hess parked and walked across the sand to the lifeguard stand at 15th Street. He could feel the dampness on his cheeks and in his ankles. He climbed the stand and sat on the platform with his back against the house and watched the silver-black Pacific ripple under a sky shot with stars.

  He began a prayer but fell asleep. He woke from a dream in which a huge bird crashed through a mirror and emerged on the other side as a Porti-Boy embalming machine. His watch said 4:54 A.M.

  He made coffee, paced his apartment, looked at his new head in the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror. Left side. Right side. Front. Pretty different, really. The smoothness looked okay but the color was bad, kind of a yellow, like there wasn't enough blood behind it, or the blood had turned clear. Borderline anemic. Bonnie the beauty would have to embalm me with plenty of flesh tone, he thought. He kept looking at his pale, hairless reflection.

  The mirror glass was old and thin at the edges but it gave a true likeness, Hess thought. He opened the door and tried to read the name of the maker inside, but the ink on the sticker had succumbed to the decades.

  Mirrors, he thought: mirrors in dreams, mirrors for baldness, mirrored walls not installed, steamed mirrors in Merci's bathroom, and what was it Colesceau had said, Send me through the looking glass again?

  It was the again part that bothered Hess. Why again?

  Because Holtz had taken him out the back door before.

  But why? The mob hadn't been there before.

  Goddamned Colesceau again, he thought. Inside my brain like a tumor that won't stop growing. Age. Repetition. Senescence.

  He turned the TV to local news. For a moment he considered the screen, how it looked kind of like a mirror but had its own images inside.

  Unless you turn it off. Then you could do whatever you wanted in front of the dark gray screen, and see yourself doing it.

  He turned it off and looked at himself. With the living room lamp behind him, the reflection was surprisingly good: a bald old man with a sharp face. He could even see the wig on its faceless foam stand in the background, $89, human hair.

  An idea. He got Rick Hjorth's pictures from his briefcase and the enlargements that Gilliam's people had produced. He found the Saturday, August 14, 8:12 P.M. shot that showed Colesceau downstairs in front of the TV, and set it aside. What he wanted was a picture of Colesceau watching TV with no picture on.

  But no luck. Probably not enough light, Hess thought: and why would Colesceau sit in front of the tube without turning it on?

  He looked through the pictures again. They showed him now what they had shown him before: that Colesceau sat watching TV in his apartment while Ronnie Stevens was slaughtered at a construction site on Main Street in Santa Ana.

  Enough, he thought. It's ... not.. . him.

  Hess sighed and shook his head. It was 5:10 now. Without real purpose, he dealt the photographs onto the yellow dinette tabletop, like cards in a game of solitaire. He turned them up one at a time, studying each. Then he grouped them by subject: the interior shots of Colesceau, taken through the crack in the blinds; exterior shots of Colesceau on his porch; exterior shots of the apartment, taken from the street to show both the lower and upper floors; the protesters; law enforcement; media. He'd done all this before and learned little.

  Hess looked out the window again. The years have become minutes and this is what we do with our lives. As a protest against the passage of time, Hess rearranged the pictures according to sequence: an act of small order in a world of grand chaos.

  Of course, he'd done this before and learned little, too. The date/time feature was a help but it couldn't show what wasn't there.

  But now, as he gazed over the time line again for no better reason than to be doing what was apparently useful, something caught his attention. Something he'd seen but not thought about, looked at but not noticed. Just an oddity, really, a question. He could feel the gears starting to mesh now, the teeth coming together, the wheels starting to turn.

  The 8:21 P.M. exterior shot showed both the downstairs and upstairs lights were off.

  The 8:22 interior shot, taken through a crack in the blinds, showed Colesceau watching TV.

  So far, so good,
thought Hess.

  Then an 8:25 exterior showed the upstairs light on.

  Okay, he either went upstairs or used a convenience switch downstairs. Simple enough.

  Another 8:25 exterior showed the upstairs light off again.

  Still all right.

  But the next interior shot, taken at 8:25, showed Colesceau watching TV.

  Why hadn't Hjorth taken a picture as Colesceau came back to the couch? Every shooter's prize: a picture of his subject's face? Why had he waited until Colesceau turned his back to him and sat back down? He'd already shot the back of Colesceau's head, at 8:22. Why again?

  He flipped his blue notebook open to Rick Hjorth's number, and dialed it.

  He got an answering machine, but identified himself and waited. Sure enough, Hjorth picked up.

  "Man, it's early, Detective."

  "It's quarter to six."

  "Did my pictures help?"

  "Maybe. I want to know why you don't have a picture of Colesceau's face. I mean, after he turned off the upstairs lights and came back to the couch to watch TV. You let him turn his back, sit down and get settled. I know you got to the window fast because both of your outside shots and the Colesceau shot were all taken at 8:25. You were fast."

  "Well, not fast enough. See, I can't tell you the times but the light upstairs was pretty much off all night. Then it went on and I thought I'd document it. And I liked the way the lit window showed up against the sky. Then the light went off real fast—it was only on for a second, like he just wanted to check his watch or something—so I figured he was done upstairs and he'd come down to the TV again. And I realized I could get a face shot. So I ran to the window, to shoot through the crack. But he was already sitting there. I was totally bummed. It was like he never even moved."

  Like he never even moved, thought Hess.

  Like someone other than Colesceau had turned the light on and off again.

  Like someone upstairs had made a mistake with the light, caught himself, switched it back off in a hurry while Colesceau watched TV.

  "Thank you," he said, and hung up. He checked his watch against the softening darkness beyond the window glass. It was 5:48.

  Hess stood then, his heart chugging a little faster, his mind alert. He looked at the wig, touched it. He went to the window and looked toward the ocean but what he saw was the inside of Colesceau's house: the beige carpet, the white walls, the rough acoustic ceiling, lawyer's bookshelves filled with painted eggs, the TV, the stairway leading up. Then, upstairs, Hess pictured the main bedroom on the left: Colesceau's narrow bed neatly made with its brown spread, the bright yellow Shelby Cobra poster from Pratt Automotive on the wall, the dresser top littered with change and movie ticket stubs, the framed poster of the castle on the mountaintop. Next Hess pictured the spare bedroom, the lonely black plastic crucifix hanging on the wall opposite the bed with the Jesus who, facing his own image in mirrored glass, had struck Hess as the loneliest savior he'd ever seen.

  Mirrored walls. Jesus in glass. Lonely and black.

  Who's in there with Colesceau? Who turned out the lights for him? Maybe this friend plays the role of Colesceau so Colesceau can go out. Idiot Billy Wayne?

  But how could Colesceau go out, or anyone get in, with the crowd right there?

  Something that Hess had just seen drew him back to his own bathroom. He looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror again. He opened the door and looked at the manufacturer's sticker. He closed the cabinet door and watched his face reappear. He opened it and watched it vanish into a shelf of shave gear and medicine bottles.

  Glass. Glass, a hole in the world.

  Sending me through the looking glass again.

  Again.

  Hess felt a funny little rush in his head and got his blue notebook. He found the home phone number for Quail Creek Apartment Homes manager Art Ledbetter and dialed it while he looked out the window. He answered on the second ring. Hess told him who he was and told Ledbetter he had a simple question.

  "All right, Detective."

  "Do any of the smaller bedrooms in the Quail Creek apartments have mirrored walls?"

  "No, sir. None of the Quail Creek units do. We don't use glass on the closet doors, either. It's too expensive."

  "So a tenant would have to put up mirrored walls at his own expense?"

  "We wouldn't allow it. But it would be easy enough to do without us knowing."

  Hess considered. He thought of his dream, a huge bird crashing through a mirror, then changing into something else on the other side. A Porti-Boy.

  Was the bird an ostrich? Hold that thought.

  "Can you give me the name and phone number of the tenant who lives directly behind 12 Meadowlark? That address would be ... I have that complex map in my file here..."

  "It's 28 Covey Run. And the tenant is one of the ghost people I hardly ever see—I told you about her—a single woman. Anyway, I'd have to call you from the office with her name and number. I don't have it here."

  Hess asked Art to call both his office and home numbers as soon as he had them.

  Next he dialed New West Farms, hoping that someone might be there an hour before the start of business. Farmers could be like that, he thought, up before the sun. But he got a recording and left a message, identifying himself and saying a return call was important.

  What was it about the big bird breaking through the mirror?

  What was it about Spurlea buying ostrich and emu meat?

  Hess was hot now and he knew it, and he knew the luck was with him and he thought—for the first time in days—that he should trust his instincts again.

  He was starting to understand. He saw the picture: a big bird crashing through the mirror, a big bird hatching from a big egg.

  Hold that thought.

  He called the station and got the watch commander to have someone check his fax machine. A moment later the watch commander called back.

  "Hess, you've got some document with a signature on it. A UPS delivery receipt, I think."

  "Who took the delivery?"

  "Looks like William Wayne."

  "No doubt?"

  "The writing's good and clear."

  "Look like an eleven-year-old did it?"

  "No. I'd guess man's writing, slant forward, low, heavy, kind of rushed A grown-up."

  "Put it in the top drawer of my desk, will you?"

  "Okay. Anything else?"

  "That's all."

  "How you feeling these days?"

  "Better by the second."

  Hess hung up and went to the window again. Dawn was breaking behind him, to the east, and the first faint line of the horizon was coalescing above the gray ocean.

  The phone rang.

  The owner of New West Farms told him that Helena Spurlea had never bought so much as one ounce of ostrich meat from him.

  Hess understood why.

  "She only buys the eggs, correct?"

  "That's right. She doesn't eat the goddamned things. She paints them."

  "Can you give me the delivery address?"

  The owner was happy to.

  It was Wheeler Greenfield's place in Lake Elsinore, just like Hess knew it would be. Of course, she rents from him —

  Hold that thought.

  Spurlea is Colesceau's mother.

  Hold that thought.

  He called Art Ledbetter again.

  "Just heading out the door, Detective."

  "Is the woman who rents 28 Covey Run named Helena Spurlea?"

  Ledbetter was quiet for a beat. "I don't know. Like I said before, I don't collect the rent—I just oversee maintenance and sec—"

  Hess exhaled and felt his heart thumping in his throat. "Where do the rent checks go?"

  "Schaff Property Management in Newport Beach."

  Monthly checks of $875 for storage to Schaff. . .

  Hess hung up and dug into his miscellany file, where he had kept the documents relating to Matamoros Colesceau. At the bottom of the second page of C
olesceau's protocol agreement with the State of California, the document specifying the terms of his parole and his chemical castration, was Colesceau's signature.

  It was slant forward, low and heavy.

  Mother and son, he thought.

  He got Judge Ernest Alvarez's home number from his black book and dialed.

  Ten minutes later he was granted phone warrants to search the apartments of Matamoros Colesceau and Helena Spurlea for a Porti-Boy embalming machine, formaldehyde-based solution, a homemade car alarm override, a Deer Sleigh'R, chloroform and a blond wig.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  In the grainy half light preceding dawn, Big Bill Wayne sat in his van and sipped a Bloody Mary from a mason jar. He wondered where the top had gotten to, probably out in the Ortega somewhere. No worries. He stared as Trudy Powers and her husband got out of their Volvo wagon, shut the doors, joined hands and walked together slowly across the park toward the rise. It was 5:14.

  Trudy had a Bible in her right hand and the same purse slung over her shoulder as the day before. She was wearing a white dress and sandals. To Big Bill's satisfaction, her hair was up. Her husband, Jonathan, tall and bearded and storklike, wore shorts and a T-shirt and a baseball cap. He looked like something that would propagate only in wetlands.

  Colesceau had said that Trudy Powers would be good to her word, and she had been. He had thanked her for the pie, arranged to pray early the next morning in the park just east of the Quail Creek Apartment Homes. Colesceau had told her the sunrise was beautiful from there—that he'd often gotten up early and gone alone there to see it and pray. Bill hoped she'd honor her commitment.

  In fact, Colesceau had never prayed from the park, but Bill had been there twice before, unable to sleep and looking for a place he could dump Lael or Janet if they got to be too much of a problem. He'd covered half the county looking into places for occasions like that. Which was how he found the hanging trees in Ortega. And how the bodies of his first three completely botched preservation attempts had ended up deep in the bottom of Black Star Canyon, in a forgotten mine shaft half a mile beyond the

  DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF THE FIRE MARSHAL sign.