Santa Cruz Noir

by Susie Bright

  “That’s Hill,” I choked out.

  “I know who it is,” Joe said.

  He and my dad have been best friends since they were kids, locals who hauled their surfboards down to the beach every day. He’s stocky, with a bristly crew cut that’s fun to run your hands over. There are pictures of him holding me when I was a baby, so I guess he’s like my uncle or something. At first he had misgivings about showing me the ropes of detective work, but I guess I drove him crazy about it and by now I’ve helped him on so many cases I don’t think he feels much regret. He left me in the car and went on talking with the other officers.

  His car smelled clean, like not a speck of garbage or mold was in it. It was practically a spa in there, and it relaxed me. The rain pelted the roof of the car, and the police radio crackled and hissed with other dramas unfolding all over town. A robbery near the Boardwalk. Domestic dispute on Ocean Street. Naked man walking on West Cliff. After a while it became white noise, until Joe got back in and said he’d drive me home.

  “I said goodbye to Ronald Hill and then he was dead,” I said flatly.

  “Sorry, kiddo. You didn’t need this. People don’t know how to drive for shit in this weather.”

  “It rains and someone has to die?” My voice sounded shrill.

  “So it goes.”

  “What did you find out about the driver?”

  Joe took out his pad. “Name’s Allan Lundgren, looks like he checks out by Santa Cruz standards. No record of any kind. Doesn’t have an address, lives in the van. Breath check was clean. According to his statement, by the time he saw Hill, who was not in the crosswalk, it was too late.”

  “How’d you know Hill?” I asked.

  Joe sniffed. “Kind of embarrassing. Sold me some vitamins a few years ago. Not vitamins exactly, but this blue-green algae stuff. Supposed to give you energy.”

  “Whoa. I thought he was a totally different type, not some bogus supplement pusher.”

  “He wasn’t very good at it. A good salesman is usually a little more fun. Makes you think you’ll have fun too if you buy whatever he’s selling.” Then he said, “Let’s just say that I didn’t buy his algae because of some great sales pitch.”

  I told him I’d need a great sales pitch to buy algae. “He must’ve had a different job by now. He looked well-off.”

  “Trust fund, probably,” Joe said. I can’t count how many times he and my dad have muttered about trust-fund kids who showed up to go to college and were able to lead charmed lives around here without having to work their butts off.

  We left the scene. His big fat police car barreled down the grassy alley where me and my dad lived. In the rain there wouldn’t likely be anybody back there, rummaging through the garbage cans or curling up next to a shopping cart in a dirty sleeping bag.

  He pulled up behind our place, which was not one to be appearing in House Beautiful anytime soon. It was a converted garage. Our door looked makeshift, like it had been hastily screwed onto the hinges after a home invasion, and there were mangy gray bushes growing around the windows, filled with cobwebs and feathers that we never bothered to clean out. Let me add that we were lucky to have it—after our last eviction, my dad made the whole thing happen by befriending Connie, the owner, a one-legged widow who’s the bookkeeper at the Pick ’n Save in Watsonville. This was the fifth or sixth rental we’d had since my mother died, which goes to show that we were either a pretty undesirable duo or that the world is cruel. Probably both.

  Joe said he had to take my official witness statement, but I needed a shower and told him to wait. I went inside, turned on the wall heater and the lights, then ripped off my damp clothes in the bathroom and stood under the hot water in the narrow stall, shivering. Coming off the back of my arm, a streak of blood went down the drain.

  Eventually I waved Joe in, and he made me describe what I’d seen while he took notes. My meeting with Ronald Hill was off the record. Joe, who’s been a detective for almost ten years, regular cop for ten before, didn’t want to raise eyebrows in the department for sending work to me. Anyway, he always says it’s the spirit of the law that counts, not the letter of it.

  “You’re worried about something, aren’t you?” Joe said.

  “Yeah, I guess. Something seems strange. Like, sure, it could be a coincidence that this paranoid guy gets run over right after he’d decided to take action on his paranoia, but maybe not.”

  He looked at me, I’d like to think, with a small bit of respect. “Anything solid to base that on? Because this looks strictly like an accident at this point.”

  “I don’t have anything yet. Maybe it’s nothing,” I told him.

  “Let me know if anything strikes you. I’ll call your dad for you, let him know what happened,” Joe said, getting up to go.

  “No, don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want him driving upset.”

  “You sure? You gonna be okay here till he gets home?”

  “I’m gonna be okay. Listen, Joe, could you run a check on Kyle Wilkins?”

  “The boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Seriously? You think it matters?”

  “It’s what Hill came to talk to me about, in the last minutes of his life. So yeah, I think it matters.”

  “Okay, okay,” Joe said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  * * *

  After he left, I sat for a while. Didn’t move a muscle. I was lost in a bunch of random, jumping thoughts and didn’t feel very good, so I did what I usually do at night before my dad gets home: I poured about half a cup of vodka into a glass of orange juice, drank that down, felt the heat move through my shoulders and neck, started to relax a little. And then I started to sob.

  I guess I was sobbing about seeing a person get run over, but there was self-pity, no denying it. My dad used to be a long-distance truck driver before my mom died, and now he’s a short-distance truck driver so he can be around. The work’s hard, delivering boxes and pallets of stuff, climbing in and out, clattering down on the lift gate with his dolly, up and down stairs. He has big callouses on his hands from clutching the wheel and I’m always seeing hemorrhoid ointment boxes in the trash. He has one of those antigravity machines in the corner that he’ll get on first thing when he gets home to stretch out his back before having a huge vodka and tonic and sitting in front of the TV. He takes about ten ibuprofen a day. As long as I read books at home, he could care less how I do in school; he just wants me to grow up to be a cynic.

  It must have been around nine before he called to let me know how messed up his day had been, and that he wouldn’t be coming home because of a five a.m. start the next day. No big deal. I never complain because it’s nothing as bad for me as it is for him.

  Tonight I wanted to tell him, By the way, today I saw a guy get run over and killed. But I couldn’t, because then he’d for sure kill himself driving home to be with me.

  Instead, I made another drink and fell onto my mattress in the corner. All I could think of was poor Teddy hearing the news about his father. Now that Ronald Hill was a dead blue-green algae salesman, he didn’t seem so fancy. Little did he know while we were sitting there talking that he was about to be dead. There he was, watching me guzzle down my yogurt, worrying about some guy showing his kid and his ex a good time and feeling all left out and stuff. Two minutes later, dead.

  No more worries. No more feeling left out.

  Case closed.

  * * *

  Just after two a.m., I got up from the floor, ran to the bathroom, and barfed. It happens. I washed my face with cold water, rinsed out my mouth, brushed my hair, and thought, There’s no way I’m going to sleep tonight, so why even try? The rain had stopped. I’m not sure what was driving me to get dressed and go outside and pull out my bike and take off down the alley and through the wet streets, except maybe the fifty-dollar bill that was still stuffed in my pocket.

  Compensation is a strange thing. I’ve seen it firsthand, how i
n the absence of someone, others will start filling in to make up for what’s lost. I saw my dad change after my mom was gone. I saw him try to learn how to cook and even start filling in forms from my school with his big clumsy hands. I saw him start to worry about me in a way he never used to when my mom was around to worry. Now that Ronald Hill was no longer around to worry about Teddy, I was starting to.

  I had the address Hill had given me of Teddy’s place—where, these days, Kyle Wilkins was also living. The sky was clear and bright, stars blazing, the streets extra quiet. It could give a person a superior feeling to be out on a night like this, the world to yourself while everybody else is snoring away. My mood picked up, and I cycled to Bay, turned at King, then climbed the steep hills to Teddy’s neighborhood, where, just a few years ago, street repair workers found an Indian burial ground. Maybe that’s why I’ve always had the feeling the neighborhood’s cursed. The bluff is crowded with ranch-style houses, roads to nowhere, cul-de-sacs. It’s the kind of neighborhood where people keep their dirty laundry inside, and there’s plenty of it. I’ve helped Joe uncover a few scary “family” men, suicides, ODs, and one time, a psycho housewife who was poisoning cats.

  The address was on one of those cul-de-sacs with a freestanding basketball hoop on the curb that looked like it’d come straight out of the box. I hid my bike in some shrubs a few houses down. Even in the dark, Teddy’s home was tidy and respectable, with a landscaped front yard filled with birds of paradise, mallow, and Mexican sage—the kind of place I usually insult but secretly wish for. No cars in front. Looked pretty quiet.

  I slipped around the side, and discovered dim lights turned on in a back room. It was there, through a sliding-glass door, that I could see Teddy, alone under a blanket, watching a movie. It was a black-and-white Western. A stampede of cattle was mounting a grassy knoll and descending onto the wide-open plains, while picture-perfect cowboys in their chaps and spurs and boots kicked their stallions and rode alongside.

  I could see the side of Teddy’s face. He’d been crying. Of course he’d been crying!

  What was he doing alone? Where the fuck was his mother?

  The scene just about broke me. I don’t remember what my dad and I did the day my mother died, but I have a memory of him driving us, soon after, to Disneyland.

  I began to shiver and decided to get the hell out of there and go back to bed like a normal person. Just as I was drawing away into the darkness, Teddy jumped up from the couch and ran toward the front of the house. I stole around the side. A Ford Mustang had pulled into the driveway, and a man and woman got out.

  They started unloading bags and boxes from the car. In the starlight I saw a tall man in a T-shirt, jeans, black canvas shoes, and bleached surfer hair—likely the one and only Kyle Wilkins. The woman had blond hair, on the young side, pretty. Teddy opened the front door and they started carrying the bags and boxes in, making several trips. I waited in the shadows until they disappeared inside.

  I saw a lump on the ground by the car as I scuttled away. I had one of those primal shudders, like maybe it was an animal about to pounce on me in the dark. I snapped my fingers and the lump didn’t move. I ran over, grabbed it, and ran off.

  It was a coat. Still warm, a few wet spots on it, but heavy and soft. I put it on as I jumped on my bike and rolled away. It was luxurious. It seemed like a raincoat on the outside, but there was fleece on the inside and I had this sudden thought that this was a mother’s coat. A mother’s coat would have to be this way, unlike the cold shells my dad wore over his work clothes.

  When I got home, I hung it up to admire. It was chocolate brown and looked brand-new. Why did I take it? What a creepy thing to do.

  * * *

  The next day, Teddy Hill wasn’t at school, and my head wasn’t either. But I got through the day. You can have the worst thing in the world happen, and a second later there’s a bird singing on a wire, there are leaves rustling in the breeze. Life goes on.

  All I could think about was the life and death of Ronald Hill. Why had I been chosen as witness? What was I supposed to do with it? Joe’d gotten me the background check on Kyle Wilkins, which confirmed he was the bleach-haired guy I’d seen at Teddy’s house. He had nothing more than a couple of bounced checks and speeding tickets. Not exactly Charles Manson but not Boy Scouts either. I don’t like people who bounce checks.

  Wilkins was new to the area, he’d lived in Tahoe before. Here’s the good and bad thing about Santa Cruz: it’s not a place where everybody’s lived here forever and a newcomer gets the once-over. No, it’s a city where anybody can come fit in for a while, and move away before you’ve even had a chance to say hello. It’s a city full of transients, and I don’t mean the ones on the streets. I mean, you don’t always know your neighbors and you don’t ask questions. Kyle Wilkins shows up, moves in, replaces Ronald Hill, the neighbors nod or don’t nod. For that matter, a chubby truck driver and his alcoholic daughter move into a garage, nobody notices that either.

  * * *

  After school that day, I thought I’d ride past Ronald Hill’s former residence near the Circles. And then, what do you know. There was that same Mustang parked in front, the one I’d seen in front of Teddy’s. I jumped off my bike and walked through the open door.

  Inside, Kyle Wilkins was leaning over a desk, leafing energetically through a stack of papers in a file. There was a pile of boxes in one corner, a few bulging garbage bags in another. New theory: Kyle Wilkins was the big creep, not Ronald Hill. I didn’t like how happy Kyle looked rifling through the papers of a dead man. He was like a pirate on a treasure hunt. It looked like more of the same stuff I’d seen them lugging home in the middle of the night after the accident, leaving Teddy alone. Hill wasn’t even cold and they’d already been over here, prowling around?

  “Hey, what’s going on?”

  Wilkins startled, but seeing a teenage girl in a Totoro sweatshirt put him at ease. “Uh, hello?” he said, revealing some extra-big teeth. “You are . . . ?”

  “Neighbor—who’re you?”

  “I’m Kyle, friend of the family. Not sure if you’ve heard, but Ted’s father was in a fatal accident yesterday,” he said. “And I’m helping out.”

  “Helping out doing what exactly?”

  Just then, a toilet flushed. Teddy came around from the hallway. He’s tall and skinny, with black hair that hangs in his eyes. He was wearing sagging black pants and a gray hoodie with a picture of a skateboard on it.

  “Uh, hey,” Teddy said.

  “Hi, Teddy. I’m really sorry about your dad.”

  “Thanks,” he mumbled.

  “We got a big mess here,” Kyle Wilkins said, by way of his oversized teeth. “Not very nice to leave behind a shitload of unpaid bills for people to clean up.” He smoothed back his hair.

  “It’s not very nice to talk about it,” I said.

  Wilkins turned away from me. “Teddy, maybe you could do your social life later?” He sounded like a bully.

  I moved toward the door. “Think you’ll be back at school soon?”

  “I don’t know.” Teddy followed me out, carrying a box of the papers Wilkins had been pawing. I could see a bunch of bills and bank statements on top, including an invoice from something called Life Bonanza for eight hundred dollars’ worth of fish oil pills. There might be something worth finding in Ronald Hill’s papers. Teddy threw the box onto the backseat of the Mustang. “There’s a thing later this afternoon at Peace United, if you’re interested.”

  I said, trying to sound casual, “You know, my pretty-much uncle’s with the Santa Cruz PD. He’s really cool. I mean, if you ever need anything.”

  Teddy looked totally weirded out. “Why would I need anything from the police?”

  “I mean, if anything . . . feels wrong.”

  “A lot of things feel wrong. My father just got run over by some asshole who’s probably forgotten all about it by now.”

  I played my ace: “My mother died when I was eight, so I so
rt of know what it’s like.”

  “Oh fuck! That sucks.”

  “Bye, Teddy,” I said, and gave him a hug. For all my calculated moves, that part came spontaneously. And he hugged back, which made me feel good.

  * * *

  When I got home I slammed the ugly door and threw down my backpack. I couldn’t even look at the coat for a while, though it was right there, on a hall hanger. I didn’t look at it while I made myself a vodka and orange juice and watched a rerun of The Gilmore Girls. I didn’t look at it while I cleaned up my dad’s pile of oily rags and empty oil cans by the door that our landlady Connie recently complained about. She was always asking my dad to help her do stuff, and sometimes he even helped her put on her artificial leg. I didn’t want to think about it.

  But there I was, thinking about that and every other bad thing. About some leg that went on a stump that my dad had to look at, all because my mother died from a freak stroke that she never should’ve died from. I could hardly remember her. I could hardly remember what it was like to be near her. My throat closed like a fist.

  I heard the low rumble of my dad’s truck trundling down the alley. A distinct throttling sound, like the engine was held together by a bunch of loose bolts. It rattled and knocked until he turned it off and then it blew a huge hiss, like a giant dog settling down for a nap. The presence of my dad, in the afternoon, in the truck, could only mean one thing: he was bringing home an overage.

  I jumped up wobbly and ran outside. He had the emergency lights flashing, and he was already rolling up the door in back. “Get ready,” he said.

  “What now?”

  “Take a look at this,” he said, and I peered into the back of the truck. Whatever it was, there was a lot of it. Case upon case of—

  “Toilet paper?”

  “You can’t have enough.”

  “We’re keeping all of that?”

  “Seventeen cases,” he said, with unmistakable satisfaction.

  “Inside?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said, and started stacking the cases on his dolly and wheeling it toward our door. He went inside first and moved his antigravity rack out of the way, then rolled the dolly in and started stacking the cases in the corner. I noticed the figures were printed on the box. Ninety-six. 96 x 17 = 1,632 rolls.