A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  I asked if he’d had a chance to interview any of Jerry Dwyer’s friends yet. Once again he was polite.

  “We have. That’s all taken care of, nothing out of the ordinary. The boy’s friends are confounded,” and I thought that was an unusual word to use but a good one, and wondered what kind of man this was.

  “A robbery gone wrong,” I said.

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “What you’re saying is we’re going to have to wait till a suspect is developed. Is that right?” I could hear another phone ringing near him, and hoped he wouldn’t say he had to answer it.

  He said, “That’s about it.”

  “Thanks anyway. You’re a good man, Felton.” And as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. He could think I was being condescending. People do. Me being two ticks above thirty and he maybe fifty.

  He said, “You cleared up on everything now?”

  “Thank you very much for your time, Detective Felton.” I said good-bye and hung up.

  Late afternoon, I asked around if anybody’d seen Joe, until I found a serologist who was putting away blood samples in one of the household refrigerators that stand in the middle of the room, back-to-back, with alarm wires attached to them. A little overkill, I’d say, but otherwise people would be tempted to put their lunches in there. “He’s in the back killing roast.” The technician clicked the combination lock back on the door then and thumbed the sign that read EVIDENCE—DO NOT FONDLE, as if the tape were coming loose.

  I said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Back there,” he said, nodding toward a room we had used for the freeway killer’s investigation, eight desks in there then, nearly empty now. “Stabbing meat.”

  And he was. He was in a lab coat, standing near a slab of roast on butcher paper, the paper covering a desk. I knew what he was doing. It just took a second for it to sink in. I knew he had to skewer pork fat onto the roast too, because meat comes trimmed nowadays and the human body’s muscle-to-fat ratios have to be matched. But human fat is different, spongier, and yellow. Oh, well. I hadn’t seen anybody do it, but I’d heard about it.

  I came up from behind. “I think it’s tender now.”

  “Hi, Smokey,” he said, almost relieved. He glanced at me, then back to the roast.

  Are we having a cookout?”

  “What we’re having here is Sanders’s unsuccessful attempt to learn what kind of hole a kitchen knife makes. As opposed to, say, a jackknife.”

  “Seems pretty straightforward to me.”

  “Not this one. This one happened when you were off.”

  I moved in closer to see what damage Joe had performed on the roast. Behind him on the counter was his notepad, and I guessed that every time he made a few furious strikes he’d pause and write something down. Next to the notes was a magnifying glass. He said, “We have the knife, with the victim’s blood on it. So we know that’s the goddamn murder weapon. But the wound doesn’t match the characteristics of the knife.” He shook his head.

  “Who was the victim?”

  “A woman. He was a biter, too.”

  At one time I wanted to know everything. On a street in Oakland, in what was, shall we say, the less glamorous part of town, I was watching some undercover policewomen tricking tricks. Down the sidewalk came a man with white sideburns crawling to his chin and the deep chalky-gray skin of African heritage. He wore a tailored gray suit nipped in at the waist, double-breasted. He could have been a retired “supervisor” himself, stopping every once in a while to talk to the women on the streets. When he came up to one of us bad/good guys in a miniskirt and mike, he said this, his voice a polite but steady baritone: “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” He’d go on down the street, talking to the regular girls, talking to one of us, those words about wisdom and sorrow. The girls would say, “Say what?” or “Get lost, old man,” or something of the like, and he would stroll on. But the oddity of it stayed with me and came back to me time and time again, the first occasion after examining belt and burn marks on the corpse of a six-year-old boy from the ritzy part of Oakland near Berkeley Hills, his mother a lady who served on the board of a hospital, and his father a scientist out of Lawrence Livermore. Today I know the quest for some kinds of knowledge comes at high price. Joe says all change is loss, and all loss must be mourned. Sí, and so must some varieties of gain.

  “Maybe I’m slipping. I can’t figure this one out,” Joe said. He whaled at the piece of meat again.

  I said, “The wound gets wider when there’s a struggle.”

  “Yes, I know that.” He stood away from the table and turned to point at his notepad with the knife, pushing up the page and flipping it over to reveal a drawing meant to depict the vertical wound. At the top of the cut, a short horizontal line jagged off to the right. “That,” he said, the sticky tip of the knife touching the line, “I can’t figure out. This peculiar little edge here, this quirk. Why is it there?”

  “Is it important?” He looked at me with a quick raised eyebrow, saying, Whatsa-matta-you? I leaned in to look at the drawing again, and said, “I only meant, if they’ve got the knife and they’ve got the dead person, what difference does it make?”

  “Evidence has to be interpreted, Ms. Brandon. For shame.”

  “Maybe you should use flank steak,” I said. “It’s tougher. How old was this lady?”

  He probably didn’t like me criticizing. After all, he was the one who taught me, directly or indirectly, as I watched him in the department over the years. He said, without looking up, “Sixty.”

  “Hmmpf. The only sex old women get is from fifteen-year-old rapists, right?”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Sorry. You’re a little out of sorts, aren’t you?” Joe knew my humor; he usually laughed.

  He said, “We do have a suspect in custody. I sent an odontologist over a minute ago with a warrant to get bite impressions from him. We think a neighbor did it, a guy she played cards with. And he happens to be fifty-nine.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Does it ever end?”

  “For this one it does,” Joe said, and he was looking at the beef as if it were the victim, as if he placed the X-Y coordinates on the screen, pressed the “Build” button, and the human form imposed itself over the slab.

  While we were speaking of suspects, I asked him if we had any more information on the Dwyer case, or any other suspects. Gary hinted he might have some other suspects. He was being coy, Joe. Give me the dope. What do you know?

  He put the knife down on the desk behind us, checked the front of his lab coat for goo, then perched a hip up on the desk. “What I hear is they did a sort on stop-and-robs, as you suggested. They developed another candidate list. A couple fit the El Cochino witness description.”

  “Yay!”

  “Don’t get too excited. He’s all we got, but it’s all circumstantial. Emilio didn’t see them commit a crime.” This was true. “A couple names on the list do small-store robberies—shoes, yogurt—places off the side of a string of shops, where getaway is easy. They’re just doing look-ups at this point. Two tall men they’re interested in . . .”

  I was shaking my head. He asked me what was the problem. I said I didn’t know. Then: “Emilio’s talking tall guys, about nineteen, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How do we know Emilio can judge ages? Emilio says they were about nineteen. You get a look at Emilio’s face? I would’ve bet a dollar Emilio was thirty-five if he was a day. He says he’s nineteen. Now, those Mexican summers might melt rubber, but if he’s nineteen, I’m ten. Maybe he doesn’t know the English for any other number but nineteen. I say we scratch the ages.”

  Joe said, “You told me the Dugdales were one tall, one short. One has brown hair, one black, right?”

  I nodded.

  “That is definitely not two tall, no matter if they’re nineteen or forty, and he said they were tall. What you got ther
e, my dear, is real skimpy.”

  “They do convenience stores, Joe. How right-on could you get? I mean, that’s a specialty to be proud of. These two are in the area, and they’re creeps on wheels. Okay, look . . . the dark-haired one, Phillip George. Maybe his hair’s not black naturally. Maybe it’s dyed.”

  “Maybe he took the lifts out of his shoes, too?” He was sliding his roast now into a big plastic sack he pulled up from the floor.

  “They’re buttwipes, Joe.”

  “That doesn’t convict a man.”

  “Gary’s going to show their pictures to Emilio. I want to talk to Mr. Dwyer. In fact, I’m going to talk to Mr. Dwyer. You want to come along?”

  He stopped fidgeting and looked at me. “You don’t do anything without clearing it with the investigating team. You are not an investigator.”

  “Why can’t I—we—talk to him? That’s not interfering. How’s it interfering?”

  He was removing his lab coat. With the motion came a scent, the sweet smell of something men’s wives buy for them in a department store, and I felt lonely and confused and both wanted his approval and wanted to get away. A quick way to end this conversation was to tell him I’d spent yesterday afternoon in San Pedro, at Roland Dugdale’s place of employment.

  He blew up. He never used to lose his cool like that. I don’t mind saying it humbled me—no. Not that. It scared me; I had a lot more to learn before I’d say humbled. I told him I’d talked to Felton in Homicide, but he turned and actually grabbed my arm, pulling me into a chair, and said, “You’re going on suspension, young lady, as of right now.”

  “You can’t put me on suspension. I don’t work for you. Check with Stu Hollings, you want me suspended. And quit treating me this way.”

  “What way? You mean like an adult?”

  “I have been an officer, Joe. I know what I’m doing, I know how to handle myself. And where do you get off manhandling me like that?”

  I stood back up out of the chair and stepped away from him. The slippery soles of the new shoes I was wearing nearly took me farther than I wanted to go. I said, “I didn’t compromise any investigation. I didn’t do anything wrong, unless you’re talking about a violation of some policies and procedures handbook that some contractor took two years to write and doesn’t signify two minutes after it’s done. What I did was add to the case. Detective Felton never batted an eye. He appreciated it.”

  Joe was quiet. He’d moved to the side of a desk, to put more distance between us. He said, calmer, “What’s got into you? You bored with your desk job? You want some excitement? That it? You want to go be a cop again?”

  “No, that’s not it. I want to see Jerry Dwyer’s killers caught is all. Is that so wrong? I’m afraid the case will get buried. You know what happens.”

  “This case is not any different from any other case. You think this woman’s”—gesturing toward where the roast was balled up in a bag—“this woman’s relatives, her kids, think Jerry Dwyer’s case should come first? You think they’re not hurting? What about the four-year-old with the bullet in his eye, huh, from a carload of fucking creeps? Everybody wants to come first. Everybody comes first. Everybody.” He glanced away for just a second, then said, “That case is not going to get buried.”

  I looked at him, not giving an inch but saying quietly, “How do you know?” I didn’t want to upset him. I knew he was the best there was, I knew it the day I met him, heard him speaking at one of those annual conventions we forensics people go to. And after a year of finagling, I got to work in his department, and never did know precisely just when it was I fell in love.

  “Because,” he said, “I’m not going to let it get buried.”

  “Okay, I’ll get out of your face.”

  “There was a call for you here this afternoon. From Mrs. Dwyer.”

  Of course. There was a Mrs. Dwyer. Somewhere in the Midwest.

  “Mrs. Dwyer?”

  “She wanted to talk to you because you’re with the police, she said. You knew her son.”

  “You told her I wasn’t with the police.”

  “I did.”

  “But you said I’d talk to her.”

  He nodded. “The number’s here,” he said, drawing out from his pocket a crumpled piece of notepaper. “She’s staying at the Cozy Inn off Newport.”

  He came close to hand me the note, and why then, at that very moment, and at that very time and place, people not all gone from the office yet, he stood not six inches away, me smelling his smell and him breathing hard, not touching but looking down at me, at my mouth, and then kissing me—hard—I’ll never know. But he did.

  And then he turned and walked away. Out the door. Bippo. I yelled after him: “You can’t do that, Joe! Dammit!”

  A man I didn’t know walked through the room from the other side, and gave me a look that said here’s one he wouldn’t want to work with.

  Joe’s kiss upset me for fourteen reasons, though part of me fired from the thought of it. I went home that night and watched an episode of Roseanne I’d seen before. I laughed all over again. She’s got A, as the kids say, for Attitude. Read between the lines; you hear some smart stuff. I thought John Goodman would be fun to cuddle if he’d just pull his pants up in back. I tried not to think of Joe.

  Even though it was ten o’clock before I dialed Mrs. Dwyer, there was no answer in her room. Maybe I waited that long because I didn’t know what the call was going to be like, didn’t want it to be some long teary thing with me having nothing to say that would heal a broken heart. No, that wasn’t it. I knew what it was. I’d have to, if I talked with Mrs. Dwyer, be listening to her and living old pain for my lost Bill in the other part of my brain. I’d have to remember how much it hurt, and which days after his death were most keen. I’d have to remember how for days and days I couldn’t stop saying his name, trying to call him back.

  So I dusted my apartment while I listened to K. T. Oslin’s lusty voice on her “Hey Bobby” cut and felt good, even danced a little, dropping the duster and watching myself in the dark glass of the slider, then stopping, seeing I was looking smaller in the chest some ways and wondering what the heck was happening already—did it have something to do with my op? Maybe I needed a new bra. I didn’t finish dusting; instead, I watched TV until I couldn’t avoid making the call any longer, relieved when Mrs. Dwyer didn’t answer. I plopped on the couch and read the latest BirdWatcher’s Digest.

  Patricia rang my doorbell as I was getting ready for bed. Under one arm was a bunch of roses and ferns. Her dimples twisted full force through the happy smile. I knew those roses weren’t for me.

  “Smokey,” she said. I was Smokey now for the rest of my life. I didn’t mind, but it seems funny, how one tiny episode in your life hangs on. “You are definitely,” she said, “not going to believe this.”

  “You got proposed to by Donald Bren,” I said, closing the door.

  “Who?” She came in and walked over to my dining table and put the roses down, pointing the bottoms of the stems off the edge so they wouldn’t wet the wood. Good girl.

  I said, “God, Patricia. Only the richest developer in Orange County. Probably the world. Try billionaire. He owns . . . Irvine Company, I think. Yeah. Irvine Company. He’s single, and he’s handsome. I saw his picture in the paper. He just bought a lot on Harbor Island for fifteen million, can you dig it? He doesn’t wear suits, you could meet him in the post office, find some reason to go to Newport Beach to mail a letter.”

  “Got it all scoped out, huh? Doing a little scouting yourself down at the local PO? Gooood. Good for you.” She seemed positively jubilant. I offered her a drink even though it was almost midnight.

  As I crossed to the kitchen, I caught my reflection in the slider again. Patricia made me smile without me even knowing it. She’s good for me, that’s what she is, I thought. She and Roseanne Barr, who’da thunk?

  “No, listen, I got to run. Work tomorrow, you know. But what I wanted to tell you is something you are
not going to believe. And I don’t want you to be mad.”

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “Well, mmm, because.”

  “Because what? Come on. Lay it on me.” I had something I wanted to tell her. About Joe. Him kissing me. We could figure it out. She didn’t know how I felt about Joe. I suppose I talked about him quite a bit, but I never came right out and said how I felt, because I was ashamed. It’s not a thing you do to a marriage, fool with that. You leave that stuff a-lone.

  I waited. She was having trouble finding the words, starting out, “See . . .” and then, “Well . . .” and then, “How do I explain . . . ?” By this time I was fixing myself a drink. Wine I’d opened weeks ago and stuck in the refrigerator. Uncouth, I took a taste from the bottle. It was still good.

  “You sure?” I said, waving the bottle in her direction.

  “Wait. I have to tell you this first.”

  I laughed. “Who is this hunk of irresistible manhood?”

  She waltzed over to the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen, looked beneficently down at me, and said, “You sure you’re ready? I don’t want you to be mad. It’s someone who just moved into my apartment complex. Totally by coincidence.”

  “Patricia.”

  “Okay,” she said, and sat at one of the bar stools, resting both folded arms on the counter. “Here it is. I went out with Roland Dugdale.”

  I wasn’t sure I heard her right.

  She said it again. “Roland Dugdale.” Big green eyes looking at me like she’d just learned about Christmas. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, waving a hand. “You there?”

  CHAPTER