Wambaugh, Joseph - Floaters

by Floaters (lit)

  One of her neighbors, who installed security equipment for commercial buildings, told Blaze that before she moved in a tweaked-out Charger cheerleader had kicked that gate wide open when she came to see a linebacker whose wife had thrown him out. That was the kind of security the gate provided. And just thirty feet from the gate was a tall brick planter. Someone could pull himself up on it and climb over the fence without breaking anything . Some security.

  But there was nobody coming or going from any of the units at that time of night. Blaze hadn't realized how beat she was until she climbed the stairs to the second floor. She'd even forgotten about Dawn Coyote until she got her key in the lock.

  Then she remembered, calling, "Dawn? You home?"

  No answer. She walked three steps along the balcony to a banana tree growing in a big pot. She felt for the key where she'd told Dawn it'd be hidden. It was there under the banana leaves.

  Blaze entered her apartment, kicked off her shoes, opened the fridge, and poured a large glass of orange juice. After that she went into the bathroom and took a shower.

  When she was toweling dry the phone rang. Dawn, no doubt. A flat tire, maybe? A problem of some kind? Well, Dawn wasn't going to get her out of the apartment, not if she was in a full body cast, dying at Mercy Hospital.

  "Hello," Blaze said, wrapping a towel around her head.

  "It's me," he said. "Simon."

  "Simon! Why're you calling so late?"

  "Sorry, Blaze," he said. "I know I shouldn't. I'm cold sober."

  "That's a relief," she said. "Most people do things like this when they're dead drunk."

  "No, it's, like, well, I can't sleep. I been thinking about it."

  "Look, Simon," Blaze said. "Don't make a hasty decision tonight. Let's meet tomorrow and talk about it. I think we can make it work."

  "That's jist it," he said. "I ain't weaseling out. I decided to do it, I need the ten grand, and I couldn't go to sleep till I let you know."

  "Wonderful!" Blaze said. "That's wonderful, Simon!"

  "I think it'll happen next Thursday," Simon said.

  "I know," Blaze said. "I've been reading every article about the races. Thursday the Kiwis're gonna take it."

  "So you'll have to do your thing Wednesday night."

  "Let's not discuss it now," she said. "Are you on a cell-phone?"

  "No, I'm at home," he said. "There ain't nobody with me. My roommate's gone to Ensenada for the weekend."

  "We'll talk tomorrow," Blaze said. "I'll call you before noon. Get yourself a good night's sleep."

  "Blaze?"

  "Yeah?"

  "You wouldn't wanna come over tonight, would ya?"

  "Not tonight, Simon. I'm pooped."

  "Okay," he said. "Let's talk tomorrow."

  "Night, Simon," Blaze said.

  "There's one thing, Blaze," Simon said. "Only way I'll go for this is if you get a little something for yourself. I was thinking five percent. I wanna give you five hundred bucks."

  "You don't have to do that," Blaze said.

  "But I want to."

  "Okay," she said. "That's really sweet, Simon. Go to bed now. Sleep warm."

  When she hung up, she thought she heard something out on the balcony.

  "Dawn?" she called out.

  Nothing.

  Blaze went in the bedroom and put on her blue terry robe. With her hair still wrapped in the towel, she went to the door and peered through the peephole.

  Nothing.

  Blaze finished toweling her hair but was too tired to blow it dry. She pulled back the bedspread and folded it across the foot of her bed. She liked to sleep with her feet under it. Her feet were forever cold, always had been even when she was a child sharing a bed with two little sisters. When she got enough money to get out of the massage business, she was going to wear warm socks ninety percent of the time, and the hell with how they looked to men.

  After getting in bed she heard it again. The scraping of a footstep? But this time it felt like someone had run a cold blade along her backbone.

  She thought of calling the police but decided against it. What if it was her neighbor Charlie's cat? What if it was her neighbor, Charlie? An alcoholic who came home soused several times a month. He might be trying to find his keys. He might have fallen down.

  She got out of bed and put on her robe and slippers. She went to the closet and reached up next to the ski cap, where she kept her mad money, and found the .32-caliber nickel-plated revolver she'd bought from the horny gas station owner who serviced her car.

  She'd never fired it, but he'd told her that he had and that the ammunition was "fresh." She'd told him she thought of lettuce as fresh, and men. But never bullets.

  As Letch was finishing up his shift that night, driving back to Central by way of the Gas Lamp District, his partner couldn't stop talking about the Simpson murder trial, which to Letchas it was to most Americans who didn't need Prozacwas sickening:

  "The Dream Team," Westbrook snorted, referring to the Simpson defense. "The Dweeb Team is more like it."

  "Forget about it," Letch said. Then, "There goes four more Medal of Honor winners."

  He pointed to a quartet of ragpicking bums whom cops now had to call "the homeless." Two of the ragpickers had a couple of tourists pinned against a restaurant window and were ready to reach into their pockets for buy-off money.

  One of the "vets" yelled, "Got any spare change for a Vietnam vet, buddy? I can't work because a my wounds."

  Letch rolled down the window, shouting to the tourists, " Spare change consists of anything with a string of U.S, Treasury serial numbers on it."

  The other two ragpickers were pushing debris-laden shopping carts, causing Letch to say to Westbrook, "They're putting the cart before the hearse. Barely." Then he yelled to them, "How far you gotta go to your place of unemployment ?"

  When one of the ragpickers flipped him the bird, Letch said, "Didn't we share a croissant and cafe au lait at Club Med last summer?"

  Letch thought Westbrook had abandoned his Simpson case obsessing, but the bearded cop said, "Wonder why O.J. used a blade? Why not a gun with a silencer? A guy like him could get any weapon he wanted. Why a blade?"

  "Don't you know anything?" Letch said. "A knife is the most phallic of killing tools. When you wanna fuck your babe to death , you use a knife. You stick it in all the way!"

  Letch Boggs would recall those very words when he took a telephone call the next day from a detective who worked the Homicide Unit.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT WAS SILLY, SHE FINALLY DECIDED, TO LET THE PROBLEMS OF someone like Dawn Coyote affect her life in any way. The Dawn Coyotes of this world were viruses, and the best way to escape infection was avoidance. Yet from back when they'd trained together in the massage parlor, she'd always pitied the little junkieback when Dawn was a teenage runaway and Blaze had just bolted from a miserable marriage to a construction worker.

  Her mother had had no right to bitch about Matt. Her mother had lived with construction workers, and a career marine, and a dishwasher before she turned into a really sick drunk. Her mother had had no right bitching about any of her three daughters who had lived for the day they could escape the tiny apartment in Escondido paid for by welfare checks and the kindness of virtual (but not virtuous) strangers.

  Blaze was the oldest and the brightest, and had always wanted to learn a skill, maybe even go to college. But waitress jobs had kept a roof over her head for two years and then she had met Matt and got talked into marriage by a pipe fitter who had plenty of pipe but lacked thirty IQ points. After the divorce she'd seen the ad in a throwaway about applicants wanted at Fingers Divine, a massage parlor on El Cajon Boulevard.

  Tomorrow she'd be rid of Dawn Coyote forever and there'd never be another Dawn in her life. Blaze wasn't sentimental, had never been burdened with emotional baggage. In a dog-eat-dog worldor a man-eat-woman world-she was not going to be devoured. No man was ever going to control her, and nobody of either gender was
ever going to manipulate her again as Dawn had done.

  Dawn. A pathetic loser with cornflower-blue eyes like those of Blaze's youngest sister, Rosie, who'd died in a flaming pickup truck driven by a Pine Valley cowboy whose blood alcohol level, the coroner had said, was 31. Or too drunk to be walking, let alone driving. Dawn had always reminded Blaze of Rosie, that dead little sister.

  There was no sound on the balcony.

  And here she was standing next to the door like a fool with a revolver in her hand and beads of sweat running down her face, stewing over a junkie and a dead sister. She was a fool. There was nobody out there. Nobody.

  Dawn and her creepy lifestyle were diminishing Blaze's self-control, that was it. And Blaze, much like Ambrose Lutterworth, had to be in control or suffer grave consequences. She understood that, but unlike Ambrose, whose control was exercised by a choice of clothes or by meticulous housekeeping, hers extended further and deeper. That made her ponder the cassette.

  It was her insurance policy. You never knew when insurance might pay off. Someday, when she had real money and a decent life, she was going to purchase all kinds of insurance. But for now that cassette was her policy. An annuity, if she needed it.

  Blaze decided to put the gun away and go to bed. For all she knew, Dawn wouldn't even come back tonight. If she was lucky, Dawn would never come back.

  She got into bed again and punched the button on the clock-radio, wanting to hear soft hits, sleepy music. She closed her eyes.

  Then, of course, the phone rang.

  Reaching out in the darkness: "Hello."

  "It's me, Dawn."

  "Goddamn it, Dawn!"

  "I lost the code to your garage. Can you buzz me in the walk-in gate?"

  Blaze didn't say anything. She pushed number eight on her telephone and heard the buzz. Then she sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.

  Control yourself, she thought. Scream? Lecture? Complain? That would be silly. It had never worked on Rosie, had it? Dawn was a street whore and a junkie and she'd be dead within a few years of an OD or AIDS. So just maintain, Blaze Duvall told herself.

  It was so dark. She wondered why there weren't more walk lights. You could fall and break your ankle, and hers hurt like hell already, where was the moon?

  With every step Dawn Coyote could feel the thick roll of bills she'd stuffed inside her panties. It was a good feeling. She knew Blaze would really be, pissed off when Rudolph showed up at the gate later. Dawn worried about what she'd say to Blaze then, but she didn't worry all that much. She couldn't think about anything but slamming that speedball. Dawn closed her eyes, the better to imagine it.

  Her eyes were open when she passed a large banana tree by the darkened stairwell that led up to the second floor. But her attention was caught by a tiny pale object on the ground. A white flower had pushed through a pavement crack, struggling for life out of the darkness. It was so touching and sweet that she closed her eyes again, imagining the smell of white roses.

  And before she opened them, a powerful hand was on her mouth.

  This time Blaze definitely heard a sound on the balcony or on the steps. A thump. She figured that Dawn had been doing speedballs and staggered against the wall. Or maybe she'd fallen down like Blaze's drunken neighbor, Charlie.

  Fuck it! She got out of bed and put on the blue terry robe, then headed for the front door.

  When she opened it, she heard what sounded like a far-off cry of a gull. They didn't fly into her part of Mission Valley all that much, unless they were scavenging around Jack Murphy Stadium. A gull was crying in the distance.

  She saw that the stairwell light was out. That was unusual. Maybe Dawn had fallen down. It was very dark and very quiet. Then she heard the gull again.

  It wasn't a gull. And it wasn't far away. It was down there. Down in the stairwell. She never sensed danger, not for an instant. All she could think was that Dawn had fallen down the stairs and was hurt. Moaning in agony, maybe from a broken

  She rounds the corner of the stairwell, eight feet above a homing silhouette with its arm upraised. Oliver Mantleberry doesn't even see Blaze as he plunges the buck knife into the pale, sunken belly of Dawn Coyote for the last time.

  Blaze screams! Oliver Mantleberry rises up, raging. Blaze turns to run but hears him coming. Coming for her.

  She reaches the balcony level and rounds the corner. But she can't move.

  As in a nightmare, she tries to run but can't. Blaze falls to her knees. She realizes that he's clutching the hem of her robe.

  She scrambles and crawls, crawls out of her robe. Then Blaze runs naked to the open door of her apartment. She hears his footsteps. His panting!

  She reaches the apartment and slams the door just as he crashes into it.

  He howls one word: "Bitch!"

  Blaze ran to the telephone and dialed 911. She heard heavy footsteps running away, down the stairwell.

  Blaze screamed the address of the apartment building at the 911 operator, along with the word "Murder!"

  Then she hung up without giving her name or any further details, while the operator yelled, "Wait! Don't hang up!"

  Blaze dashed into the bathroom and locked the door without knowing why she did it. She was surprised to feel sobs deep in her chest. She never heard herself cry but she felt the sobs. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and was shocked to see that her face was contorted and tear-streaked.

  She opened the door and ran to her closet, taking down the nickel-plated revolver. Then, realizing that her telephone number had been automatically recorded and that soon the police would come knocking at her door, she pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and waited for them.

  They called her "Anne of a Thousand Names." That's the moniker her fellow detectives hung on her because during her police-department career she'd been Anne Zorn, Anne Bartlett, Anne Sullivan, Anne Minsky, and now Anne Zorn again. Which was her maiden name (and

  for ever name!) because no way, under any circumstanceseven if he looked like Kevin Costnerwas she going to marry again.

  The bad marriages had occurred because of her mother's religious background, Anne believed. Her mother should have been a nun. She made her children go to church three, four times a week: mass, confession, novenas, you name it. And her mother was still alivewas she ever! Every time Anne had even discussed living with a man not her husband, the old lady had threatened to die from a coronary, yet Anne Zorn did not doubt that her mother would survive her.

  So, because of her mom and the way she'd raised her eldest daughter, Anne felt the need to marry every goddamn one of them, even though divorce and remarriage were also forbidden by the church unless you were rich and famous or a Kennedy.

  You couldn't tell her mother that. Her mother would just say that being married the second and third times in civil ceremonies was better than "living in sin."

  Yet, at least in the eyes of the church, after each divorce Anne was living in sin with subsequent husbands. But you couldn't tell her mother anything, not then, not now.

  So here she was, forty-six years old, with one grown daughter and three half-grown ex-husbands and a freaking moniker: Anne of a Thousand Names.

  When the telephone rang, she was having a very sweet Bridges of Madison County-ish sort of fantasy, with herself 35 the country wife and Harrison Ford as the stranger. Clint Eastwood was just a little too old.

  "Hello," she mumbled.

  "We shagged one," the voice said. "Get those big brown peepers open, grab a pencil, and pay attention."

  "Dope, gangs, robbery, or domestic?"

  "None of the above. Somebody did an O.J. on a babe. Wear fishing boots. They say there's enough blood to overfeed every vampire in Romania."

  "How delightful," Anne said.

  When the uniformed cop knocked at her door, Blaze peeked through the viewer and was surprised to see that he looked so young, much younger than herself. She was glad somehow, even though she couldn't pinpoint why his age made a difference.

 
He was no taller than Blaze, and slender. His tan San Diego PD uniform was too large for him and the nine-millimeter riding high on his hip looked oversize, as did the big flashlight he carried. He was blond like Dawn Coyote.

  "You the one who called nine-one-one?"

  "I'm sorry I hung up," Blaze said. "I was shocked."

  "Understandable," the cop said, looking around the apartment. "Anybody else here when it happened?"

  "No, I live alone."

  "You Ms. Singleton?" he asked, having gotten the name from the gate directory.

  "Yes, Mary Ellen Singleton," Blaze said, giving her true name.

  "What'd you see? What'd you hear?" The cop sat down on the chair by the door, his notebook ready.

  "I just heard a cry," Blaze said. "Like like a gull."

  "A sea gull?"

  "Yes," Blaze said. "I thought it was a sea gull."

  "You said 'murder' to the nine-one-one operator. Did you see the woman being stabbed?"

  "Not really," Blaze said. "I just heard something and went to the stairwell and saw saw all the blood . So much blood."

  "Did you look at the victim?" the cop asked.

  "Not really," Blaze said. "Does she live here?"

  "We don't know yet," the young cop said. "We're waiting for the detectives to arrive. I just wanna get a few facts."

  "Yes.".

  "Did you hear anything? Somebody running away? Any voices?"

  "Who," Blaze said. "Only the gull. What I thought was a gull crying."

  Somebody said at the morning briefing that they'd handled 2.3 homicides a week all last year, down from the year before. Anne asked, How do you kill .3 of a human being? She was one of four women of detective rank working the Homicide Unit, along with one female sergeant. A homicide team consisted of four detectives plus a working sergeant, and there were four teams on call, meaning on twenty-four-hour availability. Anne figured that she'd pulled about one on-call case a week since coming to Homicide four years earlier.