by Noreen Ayres
The walls in the coffeehouse were painted black and jazz was playing. I ordered a blend of something African with a dollop of whipped cream and went to sit at one of the round blue tables. Across the room a single, skinny, morose man with a gold ear cuff and a pointy beard turned pages in a worn New Yorker. He humped the pages over with a long finger, whish-pause, whish-pause, regular in the rhythm, as though he were a speed reader with the knack down pat.
On the chair next to me was a thin book with ornate letters on front: SCPJ. I opened it and saw it was the literary journal from Cal State Fullerton, and it was all poems. I read a few. I don’t know much about poetry, but it seemed good, and I read about deer and candles and things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. The caffeine and silence eventually brought me around.
“I tried phoning you earlier,” I said to Joe, reaching him about ten that night.
“I was out with Jennifer.”
“Oh.”
“She needed to talk about David. His college, like that. We hadn’t made plans, you and me.”
“Where’d you go?” I asked.
“Are you jealous?”
“Of course not.”
“You are.”
“I understand you have to talk to her about stuff. Where’d you go to eat? New place?”
“I tried you at four,” he said.
“Nobody’s ever home.”
“It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t see a message,” I said.
“There’s a strain in your voice.”
“I just wanted to tell you something. My brother came to see me. Nathan. He’s living here now.”
“You didn’t know that?”
“Our family’s a little different.”
“Are you all right? You sound depressed.”
“I think the victim in Carbon Canyon could be my ex-sister-in-law.”
“No way.”
“Bullshit, no way. Listen to this,” I said, and then I told him about Nathan seeing Miranda while he was still married, while she was still married, and when I did, it felt like a betrayal to them both. But I pressed on. I told him about the discrepancies in what the pathologist said and with what I knew about Miranda: the pregnancy, the presumed age. For some reason, I held back about the breast implants. Nathan hadn’t directly answered yes, that she had had them, but I thought I read it in his eyes. I held back because I didn’t like to talk to men about women having surgery on themselves. It’s too easy to joke. And who knows, I may have a lift and tuck someday myself, even though I currently disapproved. I wondered if it was Nathan who encouraged her to do it.
“You just said it doesn’t add up.”
“But what’s her car doing out there, then? Joe, I’m sure that body in the canyon is Miranda Robertson. It’s got to be.”
“You want me to come over?”
“No. What good would that do?”
“I just thought . . . I don’t know. We could get coffee, something.”
“I don’t need taking care of. I need answers.”
“You’re sure I can’t come over?”
“Go to bed, Joe.”
“‘American Gladiators’ is on. We could watch together. They’ve got new games.”
I said, crankily, “They keep changing the male gladiators. I liked that older black man, what was his name?”
“I know who you mean, but I don’t remember.”
“All those women have implants, you know.” Implants. I said it.
“Whatever they’ve got, it’s all right by me.”
“You like all those muscles? You like that look?”
“Whatever they’ve got, it’s all right with me. What about tomorrow?”
“I have to do stuff.”
“So do I. But you’re coming here for dinner.”
“I am?”
“That’s better. Glad you agree.”
Early Sunday I phoned the morgue. I learned that a deputy coroner had reached Miranda Robertson’s physician husband to ask if he was missing a wife.
Miranda was on vacation in Italy, Dr. Robertson said, and, no, he didn’t know who would have been driving her car. His wife was in the habit of loaning her car to people, even the help.
Afterward, I left a message on Nathan’s answering machine repeating all this and saying I’d let him know the minute I knew anything else. The rest of the day I did bills and laundry, read the paper, and at dusk took my neighbor’s dog, Farmer, for a run. Someone told me there’s a fictional P.I. from Chicago who takes her landlord’s dog for runs. Mystery loves company.
Later, showering, I genuinely looked forward to the evening with Joe. While dressing, I heard on the radio an old song called “Me and Mrs. Jones.” It was a pain-racked tune about infidelity. My brother’s pained face came to mind, and then his calmer face, the way he looked when the girl carpenter on the island gave him the long once-over.
I put on a green silk shirt, green jeans, gold bracelet and earrings, and a touch of one of those expensive perfumes you get as a free sample while fleeing through the makeup section of a department store. A song by Nat King Cole came on, one of romance with fewer complications than the one with Mrs. Jones.
When I got to Joe’s, he had wine waiting. He fed me grilled shrimp in lemon sauce, nutty rice, tangerine salad, and a chocolate truffle, the last an after-dinner aphrodisiac, he said. My kind of man.
8
Joe told me about a nasty one off Ortega Highway in South County. It was Monday morning and I was in my car and Joe in his, but he was sitting in the Cleveland National Forest and I was on the freeway headed back to the lab from a scene in Laguna Hills, a meth death easy to conclude. “I phoned your boss and requested you,” Joe said, “because I know you were down this way.”
“You keep pretty good tabs on me.”
“Absolutely.”
I thought about the scene I’d just left. Deputies had staged an early-morning raid on a modest stucco house off Moulton Parkway and Alicia that fronted for a speed lab. They seized firearms, cash, cars, and enough methamphetamine oil to make forty pounds of crank, the addict’s answer to fast food, worth half a million dollars.
Worse news was that one of the amateur chemists took a breakfast snort of crystal intended to last all day. Instead of the usual euphoria and excitation of the brain, the magic diet pill shorted out her cardiac circuits and she keeled over onto the flagstone patio while still in her robe and nightie. It was not clear how long she’d lain there while her brother and husband were cooking up in the lab, but the dog was looking depressed and soulful under a canopy of trumpet vine as though he’d already surmised there’d be no ball today.
In a bedroom upstairs, decorated with stenciled Dutch girls and boys holding hands around a ceiling border, her fifteen-month-old son stood in his crib smiling and babbling to us when we walked in. I’d taken off my gloves, and when I went to shake a small blue rattle at him, his fat legs danced, and when I brought his diapered bottom to my body lifting him out, the sog drenched and warmed me, and I felt the quick vibrations of his heart.
When Joe called from his car, I was coming up on Alton Parkway, so I took the off ramp and curled around to head south.
“Who’s out from the coroner’s?” I asked.
“A guy named Oskar.”
“Don’t know him.”
“You know how to get here?”
“Blue Jay? Isn’t that past San Juan Hot Springs?”
“Eight miles,” he said.
“Want to noodle around naked out there after?”
“It’s closed. They went under, so to speak.”
“Damn.”
“I don’t think I’d want to get naked out here under any circumstances, anyway,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Well, right now there’s a vulture looking at me from the top branch of a digger pine.”
“Are you dead?”
“Not the last time I looked.”
“Then don’t
sweat it.”
“They’re sure ugly sonsabitches.”
“Ugly’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“You’ll see a sign for Riverside, but it turns to Orange County again. Once you make the turnoff to Blue Jay, the road goes to washboard. There’s fallen rock everywhere. Be careful.”
“I just don’t know how I made it in this life before you, hon, I really don’t.”
He grumbled, then said, “Well, be careful anyway.”
Famed for its spectacular vehicle flights off cliffsides, the thirty-two-mile narrow stretch of treachery through the Santa Ana Mountains inspires bumper stickers that boast of surviving it. Like Carbon Canyon, it’s also a favorite place for body dumps. Our crew would be mulling around the mountains scaring off carrion eaters for the second time in five days.
The phone began to crackle and Joe’s words break up as I entered a phone cell that didn’t want to cooperate. “You there?” I heard him say. “Smoke?”
“I’m here. Wait.”
I turned off the freeway onto the highway named for Sergeant Jose Francisco Ortega, a scout for the Portola Expedition in 1769. His adventure started a chain of land grab beginning with the king of Spain and ending with the Bank of America and finally the county of Orange. Passing through an intersection, I waved at a highway patrol car waiting in the other direction, whose driver wasn’t my pal Ray but easily could have been, his substation being not far away. “I’m on Ortega,” I said. “I’m going to lose you.”
“Okay. Be—”
“Right.”
When I hung up, my free hand brushed the diaper dampness still on my clothes. I deliberately brought my hand to my face to sniff, remembering the blue-eyed baby I’d kissed on his fragrant temple twice and handed over to the female deputy to take to the county shelter. I thought of his mother, how her hands, arms, and face were covered with numerous small scabs and “picks” from fighting off imaginary bugs. She was bony, her pallor extreme, and the froth at the nose and mouth indicated overdose. Now I wished her up, free of monkeys, preparing her baby for a walk in the sun.
Signs along the road announced the way to the county dump, these days called “landfill.” Farther on was a long crest of hill with a row of transplanted palm trees, their tops still neatly tied into upswept hairdos to protect the heart of the palm for six months until the twine rots and they come tumbling down. I quickly counted groups of five. The fifty trees made the dune look like a spined fish heading for sea. I knew the palms marked the property of a builder wanting to put up a castle for himself, newsworthy because various interest groups were saying no way.
I lowered my windows and felt the warm air rush in, and enjoyed a moment of spring. Over the acres of dried grasses, blackbirds twitted and flitted. The sky was knit with faint curtains of contrails left by jets out of El Toro Marine Base. A peaceful day. A tranquil day. I thought how when a baby reaches for you, he grabs you with all four limbs.
Joe walked with me to where the corpse lay on hardpack twenty feet away from a campground trash barrel. A coroner’s assistant standing by a stretcher kept bringing the V of his elbow to his face to breathe through the fabric of his shirt. For every ten degrees of ambient temperature, the chemical reaction causing decomposition doubles. It had been hot the last two days. The heavy, repulsive smell reached me.
Joe pulled a Hav-A-Tampa out of his pocket and gave it to me. I peeled off the wrapper, and he leaned near with a colored lighter and lit me. I took a couple of puffs off the small cigar, then bit into a shred of leaf, and went forward with my camera. “Where’s Homicide?” I asked.
“No soft shoes but you guys,” the deputy standing near Joe said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been yelling in a bar all night.
“He’ll be here, but late,” Joe said. “Frank Rubio. His girl’s been in an accident on the freeway.”
“Bummer. Is she hurt?”
“Just mad because she can’t get to her job, is what he said.”
Camera in hand, I focused on the body and snapped off two shots. I moved in close and knelt over Mr. Doe as he lay on his side, the left arm a fat plank of faded tattoos extending from his sleeveless shirt. Near the shoulder was a fierce eagle carrying a submachine gun in his talons; below that, a dripping heart wrapped in blue barbed wire. The dead man’s eyes were blackened and puffed like a toad’s. His nose, lips, teeth, and chin were covered with a dark issue that carried down to the dirt. “He was killed here,” I said, pointing downward. “Blood was still flowing.”
Joe said, “Look in his eyes.”
He motioned in the direction of his evidence kit where I could get some gloves, and I left my camera with Joe and returned to the corpse. With my thumb I pried open one spongy eyelid. My breath was held, and the silence as I peered into that brown, dead orb was like none other. There was a ringing in my head and a whiteness at the edges of my vision as though the void between the man and me was seen and heard in a high pitch through thick Plexiglas.
I stood up immediately, and Joe said, “Are you all right? You look a little green.”
“It’s hot. I was rushing. Maybe it’s the cigar.”
“What’d you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Look again.”
Joe knelt with me. As the other eyelid went up under my thumb, I noted the dark pink spots on the cornea. “Petechial hemorrhaging,” I said, referring to a condition caused by the increase in blood pressure because of compression of the airway. “He suffocated. Maybe strangled.”
I didn’t see a ligature, and no fingernail wounds appeared on the neck, the victim’s attempt to be rid of a rope or whatever instrument of death he would have had to fight. But there couldn’t be, for his arms had been bound behind him with silver duct tape. The tape had loosened and gone wavy in the heat, so that the swollen-eyed man looked as though he was about to break free from a nap anytime. One leg was at the wrong angle. I said, “Looks like they broke a kneecap.”
“He must have been a very bad boy,” the deputy said in his loosely strung voice. His rusty, freckly arms at my eye level were a farm of golden hair. He squatted then, too, and told me he thought the creeps had kicked the body around some by the look of the scuffs and shiny digs in the hardpack. As he added notes to his field report sheet, I saw him write in block letters: KACKY PANTS, GRAY MUSCLE SHIRT, KACKY SOX, BLACK SHOSE, and I wondered what his sergeant had to say about his spelling. The deputy’s nose twitched frequently.
I kept looking at the victim’s neck, the way the flesh piled out and the color waned at a fold, while the rest of the flesh had progressed to the colors of decomp, beginning with the measleslike Tardieu spots from ruptured capillaries, and progressing to the deeper lividity at the downward position where the draining blood had collected.
“I think under that fat, we’ve got a ligature,” I said. I pressed the flesh at the neck. It blanched. My finger touched something hard embedded in the folds, but I reflexively drew back when what looked like a living mole moved at the crease, a whitish wart that wiggled. I flicked the maggot aside and spread the folds again. One of the flies that feed on corpses is aptly named Calliphora vomitoria.
“Wire,” I said.
The deputy coroner, who stood off Joe’s right and who looked more like a girl’s soccer coach than a body snatcher, nodded. His name, Oskar, showed over the right pocket of his jumpsuit. He was checking air temperature and recording the barometric reading.
Through the victim’s sparse hair, I saw a crusty stain, and I figured he’d been hit on the head as well. A rove beetle ran across his cheek. Beetles favor the outside, flies the orifices.
I said, “Cripes.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. We should carry Raid,” Oskar said, and barely were the words out when a larva emerged from the victim’s downside earlobe. At the lab there’s a man who insists on calling the ear canal the external auditory meatus, but instead of pronouncing meatus in three syllables, he says “meet us,” and every time I hear the
innocent phrase of people joining one another, I see instead a landscape of convoluted gristle.
With fat-ended tweezers, I gathered the insect specimens, put them in a small paper envelope, folded the top, and stapled it.
“Killer,” Joe whispered in my ear. “No air.”
“Shut up,” I said.
Other insect casings would be collected at the morgue from the water used to wash the corpse. They’d be air-dried and placed on cotton. The length of the insects’ life cycles can determine time of death.
Our guess now was that the victim had been dead about thirty hours. Rigor mortis, a phenomenon caused by the release of lactic acid, had come and gone. Rigidity begins in the shortest muscles of the face and progresses throughout the rest of the muscles within eight to twelve hours; then the muscles begin to relax in the same order they contracted, and the body becomes limp again.
I stood and walked over to a pipe bench near a wooden sign that said BLUEJAY CAMPGROUND. There, I tamped out my cigar and put the stub in the Velcro loop of my camera case.
Joe was walking around carefully, keeping eyes out. He spotted three small-caliber shell casings, but they seemed old. Nonetheless, we put them in one of my empty film roll canisters and labeled them. At every crime scene, something is taken, something is left—it’s called the theory of transfer.
Turning away, I walked to where I could see out over a plateau on which yellow flowers big as biscuits were growing in the shadow of an oak. Joe came up to stand beside me, his jacket still on in the eighty-plus heat. “It’s pretty here, huh?” I said.
“In some directions.”
I asked, “Where you headed now?”
“Probably to hell.”
“Can I come too?”
“Probably you will,” he said. We walked past the trash barrel. Joe looked in. “It’s empty,” he said. We crossed to the edge of the campground and looked beyond into a valley. “Hear any more from Nathan?”
“I’ve been working all morning.”
“And I kept you busy last night.”
“You did indeed. But thanks for asking. The whole thing feels like a duck in the desert. Last night I was sure she was gone. Now I’m sure she’s not. Sometimes, you know, you just have a notion.”