Another tear found its way down her cheek as she shook her head. “No,” she continued, “Didn’t matter if you were a high school dropout or professor at Berkeley, a U.S. Senator or a burglar just out of the can after a long stretch. Belly up to the bar and mind your manners. And just believe that you’re better than no one, and no one is better than you. Now it’s gone. I was so deep in the red that I was less than two months away from going belly up when this thing with Grace began. But now it’s gone. It’s gone to hell, all the same. All done.”
Mary fell back into the chair, her mouth open; she held the Mason jar to her side. Her eyes were empty, and she looked drained. “Speaking of done, just stick a fork in my ass,” she mumbled.
“You can get a lawyer or run. You haven’t much time.”
“A lawyer? I killed a priest. Killed my own son. Wherever I go, jail or nuthouse, I go in and come out in a box. I been to the nuthouse, and I ain’t going back. And run? The saloon is gone. Where do I run to? Where in the world do I run to? Smart guy like you, Jackson, and that’s all you got for advice?”
“What do you want me to tell you? Tomorrow’s another day?”
“Tomorrow,” sneered Mary. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s another day. Things’ll be brighter tomorrow. Hah. Do you know what tomorrow is, Jackson?” She stood up and placed the Beretta automatic in the chair where she’d been sitting.
“Tomorrow’s just another sucker’s bet,” she said, and with that she took the Lady Smith in both hands and placed the barrel in her mouth. Before I could move she fired. The sound of the magnum was like a cannon going off in my small room, and the force of the blast threw her through the bay window. My ears were ringing as I viewed her lying in the front yard in a pool of blood, tissue, and broken glass. For the first time I noticed how small she was. Her arms and legs looked like thin sticks on her decapitated body. I don’t remember what I did first—weep or vomit.
When Captain Hobbs came on the scene I was in my bathroom washing my face in a sink full of ice water. He told the uniformed policeman at the door to stand down, and then he closed the door behind him. He had taken a bottle of Steinlager out of the refrigerator and handed it to me with a towel soaked in warm water.
“I’ll be taking your statement when you’re ready,” he said. “You and I’ll be drafting it together per our original agreement. Problem with that?”
“No. You’ve got the proverbial smoking gun. I guess you can pick and choose what facts suit you and arrange them accordingly. I’m tired; I want all this over. Whatever it takes.” I started to vomit again, but it was a dry heave.
Our eyes met in the mirror.
“You okay, Holiday? I mean, are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be all right.”
Hobbs gave a snort that I took to be compassion. “Tell me about it,” he said, and then he looked down at the floor for a long beat. “You know,” he continued, “I’ve spent more than half my life looking into the eyes of the dead. I told you before that what motivates me is the hunt and the thrill of the chase. And that’s true as far as it goes. But the real thing of it is, the bottom line, is my preoccupation with death.”
I let his words hang in the air for a long moment before I said, “I recall what the philosopher said, something like, ‘I look death right in the eye and step up to it. Then I will no longer be frightened of death and life’s pettiness.”
“That’s good. Who’s the philosopher?”
“It’s Heidegger. Martin Heidegger.”
“I heard of him, but never read him.”
Our eyes met once again in the mirror.
“You should read him. He’s dense, but you’ll find him a kindred spirit.”
“How’s that?”
“Like you, Hobbs, the man was a fascist.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
I don’t know how long my statement took. Maybe six hours, but it seemed like two weeks. When I finished I was so physically and emotionally rung out that the patrolman who brought me home asked if I needed help to my front door. I nearly took him up on it.
I slept most of the next day, and Wednesday morning I was breakfasting on yogurt, grapefruit juice, and an Americano when my phone rang. I didn’t know the number but I recognized the Oregon prefix.
A smoky, throaty voice asked, “Jackson?”
“Grace,” I answered, “are you okay? You haven’t returned any of my calls.”
“After all that’s been happening, I got scared. I needed to go off and have some time to myself. ”
“Where are you?”
“Here. In Oakland. At the gravesite of Jesus. I think it’s called Mountain View Cemetery.”
“Yes, that’s the name. What are you doing there?”
“I’ll tell you when you come. How soon can you be here?”
“In less than half an hour.”
Mountain View Cemetery in the Oakland foothills is more than 225 acres of live oak trees, Italian stone walkways, mausoleums, and urn gardens. The twisting avenues, roadways, and floral designs were created by the same landscape architect who laid out Central Park in New York City. In twenty minutes I was driving through the large iron gates and past the Gothic chapel just inside the entrance. I continued uphill about a mile to where an anonymous friend of the Catholic diocese had donated a plot for the slain priest. The cemetery is big, but his gravesite wasn’t hard to find.
A line of perhaps four hundred mourners with flowers and candles in hand stood waiting to pay respects at the final resting place of the man now known as Father St. Jesus. They came to pay their respects and pray for a miracle. If it looked like a pilgrimage, I guess it was. Much had been made of the rumors of miracles, and according to the media, a procession of more than two thousand came every day. Some from as far away as Florida and Costa Rica. There were claims that the dead priest had cured everything from cancer to HIV to crack addiction. One person had even claimed to have won the lottery after praying at Cortez’s grave.
About twenty feet away from the mourners I saw her standing alone in a form-fitting but proper-looking long black dress with matching hat and veil. Even with her back to me and even from a distance of a hundred feet, there was no doubt who it was. When I called her name she turned, then smiled for a moment and said, “You don’t seem too surprised to see me.”
“I’m past the point of being surprised by anything or anyone. Even by you, Muriel.”
“I thought I did a great impression of Grace Lowell,” she said, hooking her arm in mine. We strolled along a stone walkway, away from the pilgrimage.
“You do an excellent impression of her. Dead-on. Speaking of the dead, it’s just that impersonation that got Jack Polozola murdered, isn’t it? Oh, and by the way, Grace is MIA. You wouldn’t know anything about her whereabouts, would you?”
“No, but you might want to check the local pool halls and bowling alleys. After, of course, you’ve exhausted all the biker bars and trailer parks.”
We started up the hill to where the large mausoleums are the size of cottages. The summer sun cut through a black veil that couldn’t hide her beauty. Her face somehow commingled the looks of a Golden Age Hollywood goddess with those of a Botticelli angel.
“You hired a private detective named Devlin,” I said, when we found a stone bench to sit on. “You learned enough about the parties involved to determine that Polozola, a female impersonator and Grace’s brother, killed your father. And then you found Polozola and called him up and rattled him so much that he freaked out and left town. Were you looking for the money, or for revenge? I think your plan was to make the whole scam fall apart. You assumed that the rats would jump ship, start blaming each other, turn on one another, and confess.”
She gave me an innocent schoolgirl look through her veil, but said nothing.
“I know you were convinced Grace had your father murdered—you told the police as much—and I know you hired Devlin to look into the Smith f
amily. He would have found out about Jackie Polo, probably quicker than I did. Not much of a leap from there. He would have told you Polozola was Grace’s brother. I don’t know when you put it all together, but you found him working with Grace. You guessed him to be the weak link in the chain, and you guessed right. So you pretended to be the police and called him up to offer him a deal. He was ready to roll over. But that didn’t work; instead you got him murdered. ”
She gave me the innocent schoolgirl look again and said, “I got someone murdered? Am I in trouble?” She put her hand over her mouth in mock horror. “Am I under arrest? If so, can we use my handcuffs? They’re fur lined, and so much more comfortable.”
“I’m not the police, Muriel. And I’m not that interested in Polozola. What I care about is Jesus. How you got him murdered.”
“I got someone else murdered?” she said incredulously. She was speaking now in a young girl’s voice.
“The day Jesus was murdered, he received a phone call from an untraceable cellphone. The police couldn’t locate the exact location but it was around Salem, Oregon, about fifty miles from Eugene. That day you were in Salem doing a radio interview promotion for your play. What did you tell Jesus to rattle him and send him to his death?”
She gave me a sideways look. “Are you sure you’ve never read Raymond Chandler? This whole thing with Grace and with Jesus sounds just like one of his implausible, impossibly twisted plots.”
I paused, still impressed that she would keep up the innocent act. “The Polozola and Grace parts all fit together nicely,” I said. “Quite plausible. Jesus? I’m just guessing. What I’m guessing is that you knew who he really was. That back story of his and his simple priest façade didn’t fool you any more than it fooled me. I knew he had some kind of dark secret in his past. I’m guessing one night he’s drunk and he let slip who his father is, and that he’s no simple Mexican priest. How am I doing so far?”
She smiled. “Oh, please don’t stop now.”
“I think you couldn’t handle that he threw you over,” I continued. “I mean you, you, the new Lillian Hellman, the American Simone De Beauvoir. Rich, beautiful, brilliant, and sexy beyond reason, but yes, he threw you over for a high school dropout and piece of trailer trash like Grace Lowell. No, I think you knew who Jesus was—a great guy and an intellectual, but at the same time a drunken womanizer masquerading as a priest and the son of an international criminal. Yes, you knew who he was and somehow you used that information against him to send him to his death.”
Muriel removed her hat and veil. The schoolgirl act was gone. Her face tightened as her chocolate eyes turned the color of charcoal. “Yes, I knew who Jesus was. And what he was,” she said bitterly. “St. Jesus! St. Jesus, my fine, sweet Jewish ass!”
Chapter Fifty-Six
A local TV station news truck passed by us on its way out of the cemetery. We continued to stroll away from the crowd of mourners.
“So how did you get him killed?”
Her anger and vitriol seemed to dissolve as quickly as it had surfaced.
“I’m trying to follow your cue,” she said, smiling. “How do I play this? Like some bimbo out of a Perry Mason TV show? I’m found out and I scream, ‘I did it! I did!’ then start crying and fall on my knees? Or is my role as some kind of Raskolnikovian anti-heroine having this great epiphany about the justice of God? Tell me, how shall I play this? Just what do you expect from me?”
“How about the truth?”
“Jackson, for an intelligent, literary man, you’re awfully naïve.” She shook her head and then in an almost patronizing tone, added, “You don’t want the truth. No one wants the truth. What would you do with it—get me convicted?”
“I doubt anyone could prove your involvement. And I am not in the justice business.”
I stared into her enticing chocolate brown eyes and really saw her for the first time. I looked behind one mask just to see another mask and I realized whichever Muriel it was speaking to me was just another persona in an infinite hall of mirrors. Her self seemed beyond divided: it was splintered into so many pieces that she needed her many personas and impersonations just to hold together this collection of broken mirrors. I knew that, stripped away, I would find the Muriel I’d discovered on her opening night: a girl/woman with a flat voice, devoid of sexuality, and with blank, empty Orphan Annie eyes. I had never before looked so closely into the abyss of another, and it made me feel like I was walking in the Valley of Death. I had to look away.
I stood staring at the green foothills for several minutes. I felt winded, as if I had been sprinting. When I looked back, she was running her tongue across her sensuous bee-stung lips, and humming the melody to Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
“You want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth,” she said, shimmying provocatively. “The truth is I want to play cards with a guy named Doc. I wanna take a walk on the wild side. Do da do da do da do da.”
She called my bluff because she knew that I had a handful of nothing. Muriel wasn’t about to reveal her involvement to me or anyone else. It seemed that all I had left was this conclusion about his death: Jesus had broken rule number three of Nelson Algren’s code: yes, Jesus, a troubled man, had gone to bed with a woman more messed up than he was.
“I’m busted,” I finally said. “I fold. You win.”
“What have I won?” Just like she had done the first time I met her, Muriel adjusted her chin and tilted her head as if wearing an imaginary tiara.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? What have you won?”
She shrugged that off and then said, “Sex in a cemetery can be very exciting. When I was at Smith we went to this old graveyard in this small town in Maine; it was like out of a Stephen King novel. It was one of the best sexual experiences of my life. Have you ever done it in a cemetery?”
“No. But perhaps another time,” I said as I started to walk away.
“Like when?”
“Like never.” Over my shoulder I yelled, “Never works for me, Muriel. How’s never work for you?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she shouted after me. “What have I won?” But I kept walking and didn’t respond. This was my final curtain call with Muriel. I wondered if the law would ever catch up with her, and I decided that whatever law caught up with her would probably have nothing to do with the police or the courts.
She kept shouting after me, “What have I won?” For all I know she kept it up for hours.
As I walked toward my car a Latino family came toward me. A husband and wife in their twenties had two small boys at their side, and the wife carried an infant who looked about six months old. The infant appeared yellowish gold, thin, and sickly.
“Pardon me,” the woman said. She pointed to the line of pilgrims. “Do you know, is that the line where you go get a miracle from Father St. Jesus?”
I paused for a moment before I spoke; then after brief reflection I smiled reassuringly at the woman and her family. “Yes,” I said, “that’s the line where you go get a miracle from Father St. Jesus.”
Part Three
A City without Churches
Chapter Fifty-Seven
A week later I was staring out my office window at a boarded up John and Mary’s Saloon when David Gass finally returned my call. I confronted him about his role in the scam and the schemes of Mary/Eve and Grace. He denied any involvement, and then asked that I be specific about just what I thought his wrongdoing was. At the very least, I said, he was guilty of moral and ethical breaches.
With a laugh, he replied, “You’re questioning my ethics and morals? This coming from a guy like you, Doc? Really, now.” He laughed again and hung up on me. We haven’t spoken since.
As for Horace Hobbs, if there are no second acts in American lives, you can’t prove it by him. The closing of the Cortez case returned him back to folk hero status, and he began to appear regularly on CNN and FOX as a special crime consultant. Part of his newfound fame was the revisit
ing of his famous former cases, but his current notoriety seemed mostly due to the sensational story of Mary/Eve Smith and the homicide of Father Jesus Cortez.
Interviewed on television and quoted in subsequent newspaper and magazine articles, Hobbs weaved a tale of four murders in four cities spanning four decades. Per Hobbs, Eve Smith murdered her sister and stole her identity thirty years ago in Portland and abandoned her young children. Several years ago she sought out and reunited with her estranged children to enter into a scheme to murder her daughter’s rich husband. Because of conscience or cowardice, the son began to falter and so she murdered him. Her daughter was missing and suspected drowned in the Columbia River, and Hobbs was certain of foul play on the part of Eve/Mary. While ballistics tied all the murders together, it still wasn’t clear how Father Cortez was involved. The facts showed that he was a regular at the bar, and it was Hobbs’ theory that he somehow got wind of the murder scheme and had to be silenced.
“While there is no doubt that Mary/Eve Smith was the shooter, all the facts aren’t in, and may never be in,” the once-again celebrated detective said. I had little doubt that all the facts would never be in, as long as Hobbs had custody of the smoking gun.
A week after I met Muriel in the cemetery, Grace Lowell’s small speedboat was found ten miles upstream from her boathouse on the Washington State side of the Columbia River. Her disappearance was under investigation, and while she was officially considered a drowning victim, I doubted Grace was a victim of anything or anyone.
After I quietly collected my reward and a handshake from both the Berkeley Chief of Detectives and the Berkeley Chief of Police, per my agreement with Hobbs, I spoke to no one in the media regarding the death of Jesus. The closing of the Cortez murder investigation seemed to only make the media more aggressive about seeking me out. It was curious to see how journalists backed off when I lifted my jacket to reveal my Walther. Also, a nickname like Doc Holiday helped discourage their questions.
The Big Bitch Page 25