A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  “No, please don’t worry about that.” My voice was warm and friendly, but with a practiced seriousness underlying the pleasantry. It was the voice I’d developed over the years for talking to victims’ families. “When I said ‘anytime,’ I meant it.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “What can you tell me about your father?” I asked.

  She said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been investigating the murder of a man here in Long Beach. We’ve been having some difficulty positively identifying him.”

  A nervous edge slipped into her voice. “Do you need me to look at him or something?” And a tinge of trepidation. “I don’t even know if I’d recognize him.”

  “No, I’m afraid that wouldn’t help in this case.” I shouldn’t have said that. In the silence, I could almost hear her mind running through the various reasons why a body might not be able to be visually identified.

  “Why?”

  “The victim’s body was in a condition that would make that kind of identification difficult.” Now I was just sounding like a dick. “What we’d really like to do is a DNA test. Would you be willing to help us with that?”

  She thought about it. “Yes, of course. I could do that.”

  I made arrangements to meet her the following evening after she got home from work. It would have been easier to arrange for the sheriff’s department to do the test in La Quinta and forward it to us in Long Beach, but I didn’t want to wait. And I didn’t want to trust it to anyone else.

  I’d be heading out to the desert again.

  “Want to go to La Quinta?”

  “What do you mean?” Jen asked. We were eating takeout from Enrique’s in her backyard. I thought it was still too hot to eat outside, especially since she had air-conditioning. She didn’t agree. “The motel?”

  “No,” I said. “The city.”

  “I didn’t know there was a city. Where is it?”

  “Out by Palm Springs. It’s ‘The Gem of the Desert.’”

  “That why you want to go there?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s in La Quinta?”

  “Bishop’s daughter.”

  “When do we leave?”

  We took my Camry. The overtime request had been turned down, so that meant we’d have to make up the time, but Jen was still on board. We cleared our call lists and messages and wrapped up as much paperwork as we could after lunch in order to get on the road by two thirty. Much later and the traffic would have doubled our driving time.

  I kept waiting for Jen to ask me why we were doing this. By the time we passed Riverside, I went ahead and answered the unspoken question myself. “I know we could have had the locals do it.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “The DNA swab. We didn’t need to make this drive ourselves.”

  “I know.”

  “I figured it would be quicker this way. How long would we have to wait for some deputy to make time for a low-priority request?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “And then how much longer would it take to get it processed through their office and transported to us?”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “And you didn’t need to come. I could have managed myself. But thank you. I’m glad you did.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I was tempted to keep explaining, but I knew better. I think I also knew, on some level at least, that the explanations were as much for me as they were for her. I needed to rationalize my connection to the case. Driving two hours one way to do a simple DNA test wasn’t unheard of, but it also wasn’t something we’d do for many investigations. We were going out of the way, and not just in the geographic sense. But I needed to do this one myself. I needed to make the connection. And I needed to know. Jen understood.

  On the stereo, the Fresh Air podcast that had been playing ended with Ken Tucker reviewing Bob Dylan’s Another Self Portrait. I wondered if I was still interested enough in him to give it a listen. I probably was, but I realized I wasn’t really invested in what I was listening to and that within five minutes I’d forget I’d ever heard the review. Bishop and his daughter were the only things I could actually focus on.

  My iPhone cycled another installment through the Bluetooth connection.

  “Are you kidding?” Jen said. “How much Terry Gross do you have on that thing?”

  I stopped it and said, “You pick something.”

  She took the phone out of the cup holder and began searching through the music. Her choice surprised me—Loudon Wainwright III’s High Wide & Handsome. I don’t know why she chose it, but it didn’t take long for his banjo frailing and his buoyant voice on the title track to get me out of my head.

  Rose Fischer lived in a gated community called Solida del Sol. It looked like just about every other gated community we’d passed since Orange County. It was just after five when we got there. The guard had our names on a list and gave us directions to her house. Everything looked the same inside, too, all beige stucco and red-tile roofs, but Jen paid close attention to the signs, so we made our way through narrow and winding streets without any wrong turns.

  The guard had called ahead. She was waiting for us outside, surrounded by drought-tolerant plants that looked surprisingly lush. She gave us a small wave as we pulled up to the curb. I opened the door, and it felt like I’d stepped too close to a bonfire.

  “Ms. Fischer?” I said as we climbed the two glazed-tile steps up onto her porch.

  “Yes, hello. Detective Beckett?”

  I nodded. “This is my partner, Jennifer Tanaka.”

  Jen shook her hand.

  She led us inside and closed the stout alder door behind us. Jen had almost chosen one like it for her house, but decided the wrought-iron detailing made it look like it was trying too hard. It wasn’t a big house, but it was very comfortably furnished. Everything seemed to be at least a few years old, not worn or shabby, but well used. After the door, I was expecting something that looked a lot more like a Pottery Barn catalogue.

  She led us into the living room, and we sat on a plush, rust-colored sofa with a subtle geometric print.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s all right.”

  She lowered herself into a matching chair and folded her hands in her lap. From the information I’d found on her, I knew she was thirty-nine, five foot seven, and that the last time she’d renewed her driver’s license she weighed 139 pounds. She might have gained a little weight, but she was almost exactly as I thought she would be. I also knew she’d been divorced, hadn’t taken her husband’s last name, hadn’t had any children. She’d lived in this house for nine years, the last five by herself. She worked as an administrator for a retirement community.

  “So how do we do this?” she asked.

  I smiled as warmly as I could and said, “Can you tell us about your father?”

  In her memories, her father seemed like two different men. The daddy from her early childhood, the doting man who always needed a shave and would take her to the park and up into the hills to play in the snow when the first white fall came in the winter, who would buy her a Thrifty ice cream cone when she skinned her knee, who would lift her so high she screamed with glee every time he came home. But those memories were tinged with the hazy blurs of time, and they faded first into the emptiness of the long absences, of her first- and second-grade classrooms where she never knew what to say when someone asked why she didn’t have a dad, and then into much more complicated recollections of the times he’d return to her and her mom, and the way the joy she felt would turn into something dark and fearful almost as soon as he came back into their lives.

  “Daddy drinks too much,” Mom would say.

  “Why doesn’t he stop?” Rosie would ask.

  “He tries, sweetie, he tries.”

  The father she remembered most clearly, though, was the one who ret
urned when she was in Mrs. Stephenson’s second-grade class. The one who put her mother in the hospital. After that, she never again felt the giddy excitement that she had always associated with his visits. He wasn’t Daddy anymore.

  He was gone a long time after he hurt her mother. Rosie would, once in a great while, hear her mom on the phone, late at night, an exasperated tone in her voice, saying, “No, William, no,” and try to remember the last time her mom had called him Bill.

  Once, when she was in junior high, he talked her mom into letting him come home again. They’d moved to Palm Desert by then. So it felt different to have him in the home the two of them had built together on their own. He didn’t have any history there, and he didn’t seem to fit.

  But he did try.

  Rosie, though, couldn’t forget the father he’d been so long ago, and after a few weeks, she began to offer tiny tokens of trust to him. She’d tell him about her day at school and let him help with her math homework. She began to feel that she might be able to forgive him.

  It was almost six months until he missed a dinner. Rosie and her mom both knew, but they allowed themselves small measures of hope that gradually faded until the night he came home too late, drunk and smelling of vomit, and shoved her mom across the kitchen and into the refrigerator, shaking it and knocking loose the magnet holding Rose’s school citizenship award on the door. She watched the faux-parchment certificate drift to the floor and slide underneath the stove.

  “He’s gone for good this time,” her mom said the next day.

  And he almost was.

  She was in the winter of her first year of high school the next time he came home. He’d changed. At least her mother said he had. And Rose believed her. He did indeed seem different. She thought she saw the father she remembered from her preschool days, the father who taught her how to make snow angels and why chocolate chip was the best of all the flavors. He stayed through spring and summer and well into the fall, long enough for her to begin to trust him for the first time in ages. She remembered how he’d tell her he loved her and that this time was different and how she began to believe, if not in him exactly, in the possibility of him. Without ever realizing it, she began to allow herself brief flashes of hope for a future in which the three of them really were a family. Gradually, she did come to believe in him again.

  She surprised herself one evening at bedtime when he kissed the top of her head and she said, “Goodnight, Daddy.”

  And he didn’t lie, not about it being different. It really was. There were no raised voices, no fights, no nights when her mother would fall asleep long after midnight, still in the living room wondering where he was and when he would be home. There were none of the signs they’d seen so many times before. There were no reasons for either her or her mother to let go of the hope they felt growing inside them.

  Nothing was as it had been.

  The biggest difference of all, though, was his departure. Rosie remembered vividly the last night she saw him. They watched a baseball game. The Dodgers beating the Padres. He told her he’d take her to the mall on the weekend, and he kissed her goodnight.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She almost said it back to him.

  When she woke the next morning and found her mom in the kitchen making her favorite French toast for breakfast, she asked, “Where’s Dad?”

  Her mother didn’t answer.

  And that was that.

  “I haven’t seen him since,” she said. I tried to read the emotion in her voice. The tone seemed more sad than bitter.

  “Have you had any kind of contact at all with him?”

  “A few cards. Some letters. But nothing in years.”

  “Would you know how to contact him if you needed to?

  “I don’t know why I would need to.”

  “If you wanted to?”

  “No.” More sadness crept into her voice. “I wouldn’t have any idea.”

  “When was the last time he contacted you?”

  “Christmas, nine or ten years ago?”

  “That was a card?”

  “Yes, with a note.”

  “Do you happen to remember what he wrote?”

  “Rose, I’m thinking about you like always. I’m sorry and I hope you’re happy. I won’t insult you by asking for your forgiveness, but I am truly sorry. This probably doesn’t matter to you, but I’ve finally managed to quit. Have my own place and I’m trying to put things right as much as I can. I feel better than I have since you were little. If you want to, you can write back to me here, but I understand it if you don’t. Love, your father.”

  I was surprised that she remembered something so long word for word. Judging by her expression, she was too.

  “Did he give you a return address?”

  “Someplace in Ventura, I think.”

  “Did you write him back?”

  “No,” she said. “Not right away, at least. When I finally tried, it had been almost a year. My letter came back with ‘Return to sender—not at this address’ on it.” She looked down at the carpet as if she were trying to decide if it was ready for a shampoo.

  “Any chance you still have that?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good,” I said. “That might help.” Telling us the story had drained her. I didn’t want to push her too hard, so I said, “What we’d like to do is to take a swab from the inside of your cheek and we’ll run a DNA comparison against that of our victim. We’ll be able to either positively identify him, or rule him out altogether. Is that still all right?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “Do we just do it right here?”

  “Yes,” Jen said. She took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and pulled them on.

  “It’s really simple,” I said while Jen was peeling away the packaging of the collection kit. “She just needs you to open your mouth, and she’ll rub the swab inside your cheek for a sample, and we’ll be all set.”

  Rose nodded and said, “Okay.”

  Jen unsnapped the plastic tube and removed what looked like a large Q-tip.

  “Ready?”

  Rose nodded again and opened her mouth. Jen collected the sample, put it back in the plastic tube, and dropped that into an envelope she’d already labeled.

  “Could we do one more?” I asked.

  Jen looked at me and then said, “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Fischer. I’d like to get one more just to be safe.”

  Jen repeated the process, smiled at her, and said, “That’s it. We’re all set.”

  Rose Fischer said, “Are you sure I can’t get you anything? It’s such a long drive.”

  “No, thank you,” Jen said.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said. “We really appreciate your help with this.”

  She led us back to the door. When we’d stepped out onto the porch and turned to say goodbye, she said, “I hope it’s not him.”

  I looked at her and tried to offer a reassuring smile.

  “That last note he sent?” she said. “It meant a lot to me. I wanted to keep hating him, but I couldn’t. When I read that, I did forgive him. I convinced myself that he would be all right and that I might be, too.”

  “I understand. We should have more information for you soon.”

  “Thank you. Any idea how long we’ll have to wait?”

  “Probably two or three weeks.”

  “Oh, I thought it would take longer than that.”

  “Hopefully not. Thanks again, ma’am.”

  She closed the door behind us. When we were in the car, Jen said, “So you’re going to go to a private lab and pay for the test yourself?”

  “Only one of them.”

  27

  LAUNDRY DETERGENT: ULTRA TIDE, SINGLE-USE PACKETS, SEVEN.

  By the time we got back to Long Beach, it was nearly eight, and for the first time in weeks it seemed cool when we got out of the car. Even though the sun had set and the last traces of color were fading in the sky
, the temperature was still in the eighties. Nothing like a trip to the desert to keep things in perspective. When we had been passing through Tustin, Jen phoned in a takeout order to Enrique’s. Because she’d left her car at my place, we decided to eat there. I think it was the first time we’d shared a meal in my living room since she’d moved into her house.

  I left Jen in the kitchen with the food and went into the bathroom. As I sat down on the toilet, I looked up into the shower and yelled, “Shit!”

  She knocked on the door and said, “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling my pants back up.

  When I opened the door, she said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Look in the shower.”

  She squeezed past me and did as I asked.

  “What?”

  “I forgot to take my old showerhead with me today. They changed it out.”

  She looked at me like I was a three-year-old who’d just thrown all his food on the floor and was complaining about being hungry. Then she reached into the shower and turned on the faucet.

  The water came out in a fine mist that I could barely feel on my hand. I couldn’t believe I’d been so careless. “That’s horrible,” I said.

  She watched me for a few seconds, then glanced down at the crescent wrench on the bathroom counter that I’d left out to facilitate the daily removal of the old showerhead. She sighed and went back into the kitchen.

  I stayed in the bathroom and spoke loudly so she’d be able to hear me in the other room. “I know you think I’m just being a baby, but I need that water pressure.”

  She came back into the bathroom with a paring knife in her hand and nudged me out of the way.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Jen didn’t say anything. She just grabbed the wrench and took off the new showerhead. It was dripping, so she shook the excess water off into the bathtub and held it under the light. Then she took the knife and removed the little screened washer and looked down into the opening. She put the tip of the knife back into the hole and wiggled it around a bit. The blade found a bit of purchase, and Jen gave it a twist, then turned the whole showerhead upside down and a small, cylindrical piece of green plastic fell out in her hand. She made a show of holding it up for me to see, and then replaced the washer and screwed the showerhead back into place. She turned the hot water on, dried her hands on the towel hanging on the rack on the sliding bathtub door, and without so much as a glance at me, went back out into the kitchen.