by Noel Hynd
“Bill!”
When she walked past him a moment later, his hand settled on her wrist. She struggled at first then laughed.
“I want you right now,” he said. “Right here and right now.”
She drew the new blinds in the den and felt a little of the old excitement that she used to like when her lover wanted her. She let Bill undress her and they christened the new sofa by making love upon it.
Chapter 12
Alone in an airy apartment in a quiet neighborhood of Pasadena, Detective Edmund Van Allen sank into a comfortable chair in front of a television. He hoisted his feet onto the coffee table in his living room, pushed his shoes off, and let them drop. The shoes hit the carpeted floor with a couple of hearty bachelor quarter’s clunks.
With one hand he squeezed open the cap on a brown bottle of his favorite elixir, Henry Weinhard beer. His other hand played with the remote control of the television. “Beer and television”, he thought to himself. Those were the staples of a newly single man’s existence. Well, he told himself, it could be much, much worse. After all those years on the LAPD he had seen many men stagger through middle age with far more undesirable baggage than his own.
It was quarter past eleven on a Tuesday evening in mid-October. Van Allen was waiting for the sports. He wanted to see how the Lakers had performed that night. Never mind that it was still the exhibition season. A win was a win and a loss was a loss.
As he waited for sports, he was able to indulge in one of the few other small pleasures he felt was left to a single white man of Northern European heritage: A big artery clogging roast beef sandwich with Russian dressing. It was a behemoth of a sandwich, half a pound in weight and about five inches tall. Big, soft, chewy bread with dressing running down the side. This was the type of guy-food concoction that his ex-wife Margaret had always hated.
She hadn’t just hated the sandwich; she had hated the idea that he would eat such a thing. Ten years into their marriage, back in the mid-eighties, something had snapped inside lovely Margaret’s brain, and she had become a vegetarian.
Something had snapped. Well, that was Ed Van Allen’s spin. Why else would an otherwise sane human being become a convert to moose food? Of course, she had called it “eating smart,” with all the sanctimoniousness that the phrase could carry.
Worse, Margaret had not just become a passive lettuce eater. Oh, no. She had become a proselytizing one, always seeking converts to the bloodless world of groats and sprouts and curd. The daily menu had been the first fissure in their marriage. Other firefights followed, as inevitably as the rise and fall of Pacific tides.
The television news faded from the television screen and disappeared in favor of a commercial from a Mitsubishi dealer in Long Beach who said he would sell any customer a car without running a credit check.
Ed Van Allen sighed again. He could remember a more orderly time in the Southland when you at least had to have a job and the inclination to repay in order to get a car loan. Times had changed.
His thoughts drifted again. Sometimes he wondered if Margaret would ever come back. Or if she would get tired of this New Age horsecrap. Sometimes, like now, Van Allen longed for a time ten years earlier when he was forty-two years old and had just made detective second grade. He still lived with a doting wife in a comfortable house ten blocks from his current apartment. His children were still young and a young Kobe Bryant controlled both the Lakers floorboards.
Van Allen settled back. Tonight, at least, the beer was cold and the sandwich was excellent. There was even a nice clump of macaroni salad on the side, along with a kosher pickle the size of a peewee football. Sometimes, in small ways, life could be good.
Of course, paradise can never last. Sports finally came on the tube.
The Lakers had lost 92-86 to the Nets in New Jersey. The parvenu Nets for Heaven’s sake! Sometimes, in small ways such as these, life stank.
Then there were the larger issues in his life.
Ed Van Allen had served more than a quarter century in the Los Angeles Police Department. He had suffered through the carnival of the Nicole Simpson-Ron Goldman slayings and the Rodney King mess. He had heard all the jokes about the LAPD changing its motto from To Protect and Serve to We Treat You Like a King. Over the course of twenty-five years, he had seen too much and forgotten none of it. And nothing in that quarter century had done anything to convince him of the ultimate goodness of mankind.
Quite the contrary had happened. And recently, this line of thought had joined a growing list of things bothering him. If he really pressed the point, he feared that deep down he really knew the reason for his disquietude.
Lately, also without quite knowing why, a general edginess had set upon him. Mercury seemed to be in a permanent retrograde. He attributed all this to an unpleasant anniversary. It had been on the first of the preceding October that he and his wife, after several unpleasant years, had terminated the marriage that had occupied two decades.
Their children were grown. His daughter Celia was currently selling pottery and cohabiting with a twice-divorced man twelve years older than she in Eugene, Oregon. The last time Van Allen had seen Celia, she looked as if she were dressed like a nun.
His son Jason was doing better. Jason was at the University of California at Santa Clara. There he manifested healthy male traits: he chased coeds and played baseball. To his father’s pleasure, he was doing well with both.
So it wasn’t exactly as if a family unit had been put asunder. But at an age when the prospects of a pipe and slippers and some simple uncomplaining female companionship had seemed like a welcome vision at the end of each day, Margaret had started talking about her independence.
Her life. Her freedom. Her resentments. For years he groaned every time the subject arose. Who had put these ideas in her head? What magazines had she gotten hold of? What militant feminist tract had she taken to heart?
Eventually, all of this culminated in her desire for a divorce.
“Maybe I’ll go back to school,” she had once said to him at the lawyer’s office.
“To learn what?”
“There you go. Belittling me,” she said. “Suggesting that I’m dumb.”
“I didn’t suggest anything,” he had answered. “I asked what you wanted to study.”
She had turned toward her lawyer.
“This is the type of thing I’m talking about,” she told her mouthpiece. “This is what I’ve been putting up with all these years. Any new idea, he rejects.”
“What new idea?” he had demanded. “I don’t hate new ideas. What are we talking about? Education for women? Divorce? These are new ideas?”
Her lawyer, a guy named Rob Swain, nodded indulgently and assured her that he couldn’t have agreed more. She must have suffered horribly over eighteen years of holy matrimony, Swain suggested silkily. Mental torture. A prison without walls, he said.
If ever Van Allen had wanted to brutalize a civilian, this was it. Two months later, on one memorable evening, Van Allen also spotted his ex-wife and her lawyer together at a Pasadena restaurant. Her shoes were off under the table and she was playing footsie with his pant leg. But that was another story.
“I’m out of date, perhaps,” Van Allen told himself when the divorce was final. “But at least I’m a man loyal to his own generation. There is nothing dishonorable about holding fast to certain standards of decency. Or morality. Redwoods are out of date, too,” he further concluded, “but they, too, can stand tall in all weather.”
It was an apt metaphor, for Ed Van Allen, particularly for an LA cop, was a bit of a tree hugger. He had gone through university himself, holding a degree in criminology from San Francisco State. Coming from a working-class family, his father had been a fireman in Palo Alto; he had sympathized with bedrock, conservative American values.
Yet the vestiges of Sixties and Seventies counterculture had pulled him, too, even though he had been too young for it the first time around. Above all, he loved the music of
The Grateful Dead. In the study in his Pasadena home, carefully mounted on his wall, was a rack containing his discs of Dead concerts. He figured that for many years early in his career, he had been one of the few cops regularly in attendance at Dead concerts not working as an undercover narc, just as today, he was one of the few L.A. cops to live in Pasadena, instead of Simi Valley.
Well, Jerry Garcia was long gone, dead and not grateful, and Van Allen’s thoughts had turned inward overall, so had his appreciation of Garcia, Weir, Krutzman, Pigpen and whoever else had passed through the band. Van Allen would appreciate his discs and his downloads at home, or hook the band up to his headphones, iPod or car system. But no more concerts in person. Too bad.
He nursed his beer and his thoughts returned to the present. The late news concluded on the television. David Letterman came on. Van Allen channel surfed up to Jay Leno then took a tour around the dial. Some beach volleyball would have fit his mood. Hard bodied babes in bathing suits. The sun. The shore. Yeah! How could any straight guy reject that?
Which reminded him: a trip to the shore was imminent.
Detective Ed Van Allen made a point every week of driving out to Santa Monica or Long Beach or Huntington Beach or even Malibu. The ocean renewed him. Always had. Always would. Just being about to gaze upon it, to reflect upon its vastness and its capacity to always be the same yet never exactly be the same. Sometimes he would sit for hours on a favorite bench in Santa Monica, a stone’s heave from the old pier, and look out toward Asia, often accompanied by music on his iPod. Sometimes he did it when he finished a case. Sometimes it gave him a chance to reflect during a case. But always, once a week at minimum, he went to the ocean. It knocked the cobwebs out of his head. He knew he made a strange picture as a cop, a mellowed out guy in his early fifties, packing a nine millimeter automatic and wired in to ear buds. But he couldn’t have cared less. After walking the earth for more than a half century, at least he knew who he was.
He continued to channel surf.
He had just cleared a case that evening, a bunch of Guatemalan car thieves. Illegals, naturally. After five weeks of work, Van Allen and two undercover cops had managed to book half a dozen of them. They were enjoying free food, free legal advice and free medical care as Van Allen sat channel surfing. There was even a pro bono — or pro-bonehead, as Van Allen liked to call them — ACLU lawyer studying whether the Guatemalans deserved political asylum.
There were two sliding glass doors in the living room of Van Allen’s apartment, doors that led out to a small private balcony. The balcony overlooked a public park.
Van Allen turned off the television, walked to the doors and slid them open. He did this to allow himself to step out into the night air and enjoy the stars. But he did this for a second reason, too. Deep down, he had plenty of suspicions as to the origins of the creepy feeling that was within him:
There was the anniversary of his divorce. Then, with the wife and kids all gone, there was the gnawing loneliness he felt coming home to an empty apartment each night. Then there were the signposts of retirement that faced him. And there were daily reminders now that, although he had passed his personal half century in age, the years were finally starting to catch up with him.
Physically: His muscles weren’t as taut as they used to be. His favorite jeans were too snug. So were some of his shirt collars. To his undying chagrin, he had recently caught himself massaging the flesh under his chin in the hopes of tightening it.
Mentally: He sometimes wondered if he were more forgetful than he used to be. To counter this, he had started writing more notes whenever he came to a new case.
Spiritually: He hadn’t been to church for years, other than Easter, Christmas, and funerals. But then again, he told himself, it didn’t take too much more than that to be a good Protestant. But he also wondered if he might be missing something. He’d been in Southern California for almost all his life and still had a good appreciation of an entertainment industry anecdote.
It was said that W.C. Fields, an outspoken atheist in his lifetime, had begun reading the Bible on his deathbed. When asked why, Fields had explained: “I’m looking for the loop holes.” Van Allen wondered if he felt much the same way.
He grimaced. So what was he? An aging half-hippie with a badge, contemplating the final third of his life? Maybe. But what really tortured him was this deep down, unyielding inexpressible sense of imminence. Van Allen’s instincts were skills he had spent a lifetime developing. His feelings, if the truth were known, were something that he felt bordered on the psychic, though he never would have described it exactly that way.
He was sitting on a big-time premonition, and not a nice one. Never mind his age, and never mind everything else that had ever happened to him. He had a feeling that his life would soon be divided between everything that had gone before and everything that would follow this impending event.
What was going to happen? He wondered. Phrased differently, what could possibly transpire that already hadn’t happened in his twenty-five years as a cop?
His death? Was that it?
In the warm reassuring sunshine of recent daytimes, he scoffed at the notion. At night, sometimes wakeful with a sweat on his brow, the notion wasn’t quite so fumy. At age fifty-two, he had outlived more friends and peers than he cared to count.
He could hardly have described the feeling to even his most intimate friends, this gnawing in his gut, this little blue pilot flame on the other side of his subconscious. But if he had been asked for a metaphor, he would have likened it to standing on the other side of some bizarre door that was just about to open.
He had no idea what was on the other side of the door. He only knew that he was on the side with the sunshine. The other side seethed with darkness. There was no rational logic to what he felt. No demonstrable event to which he could point. But what intuitive man’s feelings were ever stopped by the lack of a logical argument?
He felt. He sensed. He knew! So impatiently, he waited.
And, before all hell broke loose, he longed to go see the ocean again.
Chapter 13
Rebecca walked into the turret room and drew a breath. She stood perfectly still and listened. She heard nothing. She saw nothing. She felt nothing. She stood still again, and with a twinge of anxiety, inhaled deeply through her nose.
The odor in the room? It, too, was gone.
There, she told herself, this was an ordinary room like any other. Nothing wrong with it. Everything had been in her imagination. She moved to the window and opened it half way, looking toward San Angelo Cemetery for a fleeting second.
She put a screen in the window and adjusted it. The screen didn’t fit perfectly, but it would have to do. That was the thing about old houses, she reminded herself. Nothing fit anything perfectly anymore. But the fragrance of a coral tree wafted in with the fresh air. The screen would serve just fine, she concluded. And she was starting to feel comfortable about the task before her: painting the room a bright yellow.
She turned and surveyed the room. Yes, she had conquered her trepidations. Never mind the funny vibrations that Bill had given her. She was pleased with herself.
She went to her bedroom and retrieved a radio. She brought it back and plugged it in. Reception proved difficult in the turret room. But she would have herself a party as she painted. Some good, hard head-pounding rock would keep her jagged up. She had attacked more than one apartment or house with brushes, rollers, and gallons of paint in her life: blasting rock music was an essential ingredient to the experience.
She fussed with the radio. “Darn,” she muttered to herself.
Reception in this room stunk! She tapped the radio. She tried to reposition it. The receiver wasn’t the newest one in the world. Maybe it just wasn’t strong enough to pick up the signals. Not with that big old tree outside.
Then, on the other hand, she had never heard of a tree interfering with radio reception. So maybe there was something in the walls. A sheet of aluminum or old w
iring. Who knew in California? Or in any old house? Anything was possible. She made a note to ask Bill to have a look sometime.
Well, nothing would stop her today, she decided. She went to the den, located her old battery powered CD player and walked it back to the room. There would be no interference with discs.
Guilty pleasures came along with her. A handful of old stuff. Paul Simon. Billy Joel. Heart. John Denver. Some new stuff that her husband hated: The Killers. She got some music going. Nice and boisterous. The music made her feel good. Bill would have loathed music like this.
She swept the empty room. Then she put down drop cloths. She moved the brushes and rollers into the center of the room and positioned the disc player on the other side from where she would start work.
She surveyed the walls. They were white and smooth from the stripping Bill had done and the primer he had applied. The walls were ready for her.
“Lookout walls!” she thought. She shook a gallon can of paint. With a screwdriver she pried open the can. She picked up a wooden stick and stirred. She poured the thick yellow paint into a tin tray, tied back her hair, and donned a painter’s cap. She selected the largest, flattest, least complicated wall and moved the tray to it. She began to paint.
The music filled the room. The paint went on smoothly and evenly. She finished the first wall in thirty minutes, including the trim. She began the wall with the window and knocked off half of it quickly. She carefully edged her way around the window and went to the other side. She finished.
She stepped back and was on a roll. She began painting the third wall, another flat rectangular one with no uneven areas. And she realized she was out of paint. She examined her work. She pondered whether to take a break. No, she decided, she would open the second can and keep going. What a sense of accomplishment she would have if she finished the whole room before lunch!
She clicked off the CD player and switched discs. She pried open the second gallon of yellow paint and poured a third of it into the tray.