“All right?” Paula cast her a sideways glance.
“Yes, fine.”
“I’ll open the window if you want.”
“No, it’s all right.”
“Really. I don’t mind. It’s no trouble.”
“Well, maybe just an inch or so.”
Paula opened the window a crack and pretended to shiver. The draft blew the smoke right into Sarah’s face.
“Shit!” Paula missed a turning and went around the roundabout again. Sarah thought of the little roundabout in Venice, one of the few she had seen in the United States. She felt a momentary pang of homesickness for her beach house. It was the only place where she had felt truly at home in years, perhaps because it was where she had started putting her life back together after Gary.
But thinking of the house also brought to mind a fleeting image of the severed arm and the heart in the sand. Then she remembered the letter she had slipped in her luggage, unopened. She had found it when she dropped by the house with Stuart to pack—at the last minute, as usual—before going to the airport.
She looked out of the window and saw a local diesel train rattling along beside a canal. Two boys stood on the stone banks leaning over the water with fishing nets. She doubted they had much hope of catching anything there in December, mild as it was. A yellow sign showing a man digging with a shovel appeared by the side of the road, then another. Soon the motorway was reduced to two lanes and they were crawling along between a silver Peugeot and a juggernaut from Barcelona. But there were no men digging with shovels.
Only when they had left the Manchester conurbation behind did Paula seem to relax at all. She still sat hunched forward in her seat, though, gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white and squinting at the road and the cars ahead as if they were some sort of malevolent entities bent on her destruction. She doesn’t like driving, Sarah realized. It must run in the family. Her father and mother, she remembered, had never owned or driven a car in their lives.
Soon the Pennines loomed ahead, furry green hillsides made eerie by mist swirling on their lower slopes.
There was still plenty of traffic on the roadway as it passed through the grimy urban sprawl around Rochdale and Oldham, but the cars thinned out as it climbed a long, slow hill and cut a swath through the Pennines.
All around, sheep grazed and becks and streams trickled through deep clefts in the dark green hillsides, flashing in the winter sun. They passed lonely barns, hamlets, small stone bridges, a reservoir. At one point the roadway got so high up that Sarah’s ears went funny like they did on the plane. She yawned.
Paula glanced sideways again. “Tired? You’re quite a hit over here, you know. There’ll be plenty of people in the village wanting your autograph. Just thought I’d warn you. You probably get enough of that over there.” She jerked her head back, indicating the Atlantic.
“Not really,” Sarah said. “Hardly at all, in fact.” In the first flush of her television success, Sarah had worried about people recognizing her and approaching her in public places. She dreaded living the kind of life Elvis Presley had, for example, imprisoned in Graceland, having to hire a whole movie theater just to see a film, or an entire fairground to go on one ride, always surrounded by bodyguards.
But after a while, she had learned a very interesting thing: people tended not to recognize her unless she went out of her way to be noticed. As herself, she could walk along the street, shop in the Beverly Center, or browse along Rodeo Drive, and nobody came up demanding autographs.
On the other hand, if she dressed more like Anita O’Rourke, then people spotted her immediately. Most of the time she went around in jeans, a T-shirt and a Dodgers cap. Even the detective she talked to at the beach hadn’t recognized her at first.
Again, she thought of the letters and the body in the sand. She remembered the touch of the hand, cold and stiff like a broken marble statue, and then the dark blood clotted with sand. There had been a body, she couldn’t deny that, but it had nothing to do with her. When she went back there with the police, the heart had gone. She had been under so much stress she must have started seeing things, she told herself.
“Have you seen the show?” she asked Paula, snapping herself out of the reverie.
“Oh, aye,” said Paula. “We seem to get nothing but American stuff these days. The kids like it. Not that I think they understand it, mind you, but they know it’s their Auntie Sal. It’s not bad.”
“And Dad?”
In the silence that followed, Sarah looked at her sister’s profile and saw the lips pressed tight together, the dry, raw skin of her cheeks. Paula had never been the beauty—always just a little too shapeless, her features just a little too pinched and sharp, hair too coarse and oily—but the years had also been unkind to her.
Though she was only thirty-six, Paula looked in her mid-forties, at least, Sarah thought, with deeply ingrained lines around her eyes and the corners of her thin lips, and a permanent aura of weariness and suspicion. She could do something about herself if she tried—wore more suitable clothes, went to a good hairdresser and chose the right makeup, for example. Her eyes were still beautiful. A lighter blue than Sarah’s, they could light up a room when they weren’t poisoned by distrust and bitterness, a sense of always being hard-done-to, as they usually were.
“He doesn’t watch much telly,” Paula said finally. “Only old films on video.”
“What does he do?”
“Reads the paper. Looks at his stamp albums. Stares into space a lot.”
“Does he get out much?”
Paula shot her a scathing glance. “He’s got bloody emphysema,” she said. “He spends most of his time in a bleeding wheelchair with an oxygen tank strapped to the back. What do you expect?”
Sarah said nothing. She felt herself redden.
“Course,” Paula went on, “it’s the bloody pit that caused it, you know. Over thirty years down that pit, he was, then what do they do? Thatcher’s lot closes it down and chucks him out on the dole, that’s what. On the bloody scrapheap in his prime. A few years later he starts getting shortness of breath. And do you think there’s any compensation? Is there hell-as-like.”
Sarah remembered that her father had smoked about sixty unfiltered cigarettes a day as well as working down the coal mine, but she didn’t see any point in mentioning that to Paula. She also had to get used to the idea that, while Paula might complain about not getting money she felt she was entitled to from the government, any offers of help from family or friends would be taken as charity and dismissed. It was fine for the state to pay out, but not for her sister to do so.
Sarah had been allowed to put down the deposit on the cottages and pay for the renovations when they were knocked into one, but Paula would struggle with the mortgage, with the help of Dad’s pension and her earnings as a barmaid, and she even made it clear that she regarded the down payment as only a “loan.” Stubborn northern pride, Sarah thought. But she knew she might not have got so far without it herself.
They edged away from the difficult subject of their father and Paula asked Sarah about life in Hollywood. Somehow, Sarah got the impression she didn’t have much interest except for the occasional opportunity it gave her to put down the Americans and their ways.
To Paula, Sarah soon began to realize, Hollywood was, quite simply, a fantasy. It wasn’t real; it didn’t exist except on celluloid and in newsprint; its inhabitants were cartoon figures or cardboard cutouts that just happened to look like handsome men and beautiful women. Their real-life exploits were scripted to titillate the masses.
Actually, Sarah thought with a smile, Paula wasn’t far wrong, if only she knew it.
The sun had disappeared behind clouds now and rain was already starting to spatter the windscreen. Paula turned off the M62 south of Leeds and swung north-east toward the York bypass. It was too warm in the car now. Stifling. Sarah found herself fading in and out of sleep.
Rothwell, Swillington, Garforth. S
he saw them all through half-closed eyes. Run-down housing estates, burned-out cars on patches of wasteland, the odd small park with bare trees and empty flower beds, lots of pubs, squat churches, schools with iron railings around the playgrounds, zebra crossings and Belisha beacons out front, the occasional strip of shops—newsagent’s, mini-market, DIY, grocer’s, turf accountant’s—all in the inimitable mixture of dirty red-brick and dark millstone grit.
The road ran close to the house and shopfronts, separated only by a narrow flagstone pavement. Everything seemed so tiny, so scaled down. It all felt so close, pressing in. Stout old women in threadbare overcoats waited at pedestrian crossings, faces obscured by umbrellas.
Paula cursed the weather and lit another cigarette. Sarah opened her window another inch. The cool draft roused her a little. She could hear the hiss of the wheels along the wet road surface. The rain smelled fresh and sweet. A few drops moistened her cheek.
Paula glanced sideways. “All right?”
“Mmm. Just a bit tired.”
“Forecast says we’re in for a miserable Christmas,” Paula said with relish. “Rain, rain and more rain. Maybe gale force winds, too. And hail. We won’t be having a white Christmas this year. That’s what they say. Course, they’re not always right.”
Sarah closed her eyes and imagined fat snowflakes drifting into the sea and melting. Despite the freak conditions at Manchester, she had no illusions that the weather was going to be anything other than grim; she knew she would feel chilled to the bone day and night, no matter how many layers of clothing she wore or how high she managed to persuade Paula to turn up the central heating. After all, she had lived in England most of her life.
On the other hand, she really didn’t care whether it rained or hailed—at least she knew it was going to be cold. That was all that counted. She couldn’t get at all excited about the Christmas spirit in LA, especially with the unusual number of warm, sunny days they were getting this year. Even the few Christmas trees she had seen appeared to be wilting. She wondered what it must be like in Australia, when Christmas came in the middle of summer.
Sarah rolled the window up again when Paula finished her cigarette. As they headed over the bleak wilderness of the North York Moors, the rain driving almost horizontal and pouring so hard the windscreen wipers could hardly keep time, she slid sideways and rested her cheek against the cool glass. She closed her eyes and smiled to herself.
Paula was cursing a van churning up spray in front, but it didn’t matter. Here, at least, were demons she could deal with, demons she knew. Family. It was hardly going to be a merry Christmas, but she might be able to rebuild a few bridges and, more important, while she was away all her problems back in Los Angeles would disappear. When she got back to the beach house, all would be as if it had never happened.
Or so it seemed as she sat with the cool glass against her cheek and the rhythmic swishing of the windscreen wipers lulling her to sleep for the first time since she had pulled that severed arm out of the bloody sand.
11
“YOU DIDN’T ASK ME DOWN HERE JUST TO PICK MY brains about the college bowls, Arvo,” said Joe Westinghouse. “What’s on your mind?”
Joe and Arvo sat in a bar on Broadway—Joe’s choice—a dim, quiet place for serious drinkers and adulterous couples. It was a vinyl and molded-plastic kind of place, nothing special, but nobody bothered you if you wanted to drink and talk. Or just drink. Nobody came here to make deals; nobody talked on cellular phones or tapped away at notebook computers over cocktails; there wasn’t even a pianist.
Soft elevator music permeated the smoky air like a whore’s caress. The bartender had his back turned; he was polishing glasses and watching a small TV with the sound turned off. The Kings were playing the Maple Leafs in some weird time zone somewhere across the country. Arvo had a soft spot for the Leafs. Detroit was only a couple of hundred miles from Toronto, after all, and LA was a long way from both places. Still, when it came to baseball you could keep your Blue Jays, Dodgers and Angels; he was a Tigers fan all the way.
It was mid-afternoon. Apart from the bartender, the waitress, a few pairs of illicit lovers and a seasoned alcoholic at the bar knocking back the Martinis as if they were going out of style, Joe and Arvo were the only ones in the place.
Joe Westinghouse was a detective with Robbery-Homicide Division. He and Arvo had consulted on a case once before. They shared an interest in football and baseball and had been to games together now and then. Joe had been to UCLA on a football scholarship until he tore up his knee.
Joe was tall and broad-shouldered, his skin the color and texture of well-tanned leather. His cropped black hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples, and his deadpan eyes occasionally twinkled with humor. Arvo thought he looked a bit like Dave Winfield, the baseball player. Also like a baseball player, Joe wore a lot of gold—watch-band, wrist chains, gold stud in his ear, and probably even more under his white button-down shirt, where Arvo couldn’t see.
Joe was working on a rye and ginger, and Arvo was drinking coffee. They had been playing catch-up on sports and department gossip for half an hour, bitching about the brass, but now it was time to get down to business.
“Okay. You’re right,” said Arvo. “It’s about that body your guys found on the beach near Pacific Palisades a couple of days ago.”
Joe took another sip of rye and ginger. “Uh-huh.”
“You know anything about the case?”
“Let’s say I’ve got a passing interest.”
“Anything on it yet?”
Joe squinted at Arvo for a moment, swirling the ice in his drink, then seemed to decide to cut him a bit of slack. Must have been those great seats to the Dodgers’ last game of the season, Arvo thought.
The waitress came by in her black fishnet tights and pink tube-top. “Youse guys all want another?” she asked.
“Why not?” said Joe. “He’s paying.”
She smiled and went to fetch their drinks, wobbling on her high heels. Joe and Arvo watched her go. A body like hers took work, lots of it. Joe raised his eyebrows. They waited until she had set the fresh drink in front of Joe, refilled Arvo’s coffee cup and tottered off again, then Joe said, “Okay. Shoot. What do you want to know?”
“Have you ID’d him yet?”
Joe nodded. “That was the easy part. Prints on file. Name’s John Heimar, Caucasian male, just turned nineteen last October.”
“What’s his background?”
“Exactly what you’d expect of a good-looking kid from the boondocks come to find fame and fortune in the city of sin.”
“He worked the streets?”
“Uh-huh. The Boulevard.”
Arvo nodded. He knew Joe meant the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard that passed through West Hollywood, a big gay cruising area. A saccharine string arrangement of “All My Loving’ drifted across the room like a bad smell. Arvo winced and sipped his coffee. “Where’s he from?”
Joe rubbed his eyes then spoke in a monotone, as if he had heard it, seen it and said it all before. “Grew up in Magic City, Idaho. Would you believe that? Middle-class parents, ordinary decent folks who didn’t know what to do with a wayward kid. Pop runs the local hardware store and Mom teaches kindergarten. Real Leave It To Beaver shit. It seems Magic City, Idaho, didn’t have whatever magic it took to keep young Johnny around, ’cause he kept on running away since he was thirteen. New York once. Chicago twice. New Orleans. San Francisco. He wound up out here a couple of years ago. Lived on the streets ever since. Hollywood Division’s had him in and out like they’ve got revolving doors. Nickel-and-dime stuff, mostly. Shoplifting, a little dealing. Nothing violent.”
“So what happened?”
Joe shrugged, tapped out a Winston and lit it. Arvo licked his lips. He’d given up smoking three years ago, when he moved out to LA to join the TMU, but he hadn’t gotten rid of the craving yet. Cigarettes, he remembered, went especially well with coffee. With alcohol, too. And after dinner. Not to ment
ion sex.
“You tell me,” Joe said, blowing the smoke out. “Just plain bad luck, I guess.”
“Sex crime?”
“Looks like it.”
“How was he killed?”
“According to the coroner’s office, somebody slit his throat from behind with a very sharp knife and stabbed him in the chest and neck. Then cut him up with some kind of saw or serrated blade. Arms. Legs. Head. Torso. Put him together again on the beach like a jigsaw puzzle and half buried him in sand.” He shook his head slowly.
“The throat?” said Arvo. “That’s pretty common in homosexual homicides, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. Shrink says it’s got something to do with the mouth and throat connection with oral sex.” Joe shrugged. “I don’t know about that. All I know is I’ve seen too much of it. You get it in a lot of high-octane emotional murders, too, mostly domestics. Seems when people see red they aim for the throat and chest with a knife. What the experts call the “overkill” element. Means the poor fucker’s dead before the last fifty stab wounds.”
“Any fingerprints? Footprints?”
Joe shook his head. “No physical evidence at all. Not yet.”
“Was Heimar killed on the beach?”
Joe tapped a column of ash into the glass tray. “Nope. Not enough blood. He was just . . . reassembled . . . there. With about as much success as Humpty Dumpty.”
“Where he was killed, there’d be a lot of blood, right?”
“Yup. But so far we’ve got diddly. No suspects and no idea where it happened. Could’ve been some other beach, maybe the desert, up in the hills, or anywhere else out in the wilds. Could’ve been in some apartment for all we know. Or a house. A nice house somewhere in the ’burbs like Palos Verde or San Marina. People’d be surprised some of the things going on there behind locked doors out in the ’burbs. Gacey. Dahmer. Who the fuck knows anything any more?” Joe tossed back the rest of his rye and ginger and crunched the ice cubes. He waved for the waitress and she brought another. Arvo stuck with coffee.
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