Good Morning, Killer ag-2

by April Smith

  The big clock had begun to tick again as I sat in that plastic chair, half smothered by the heavy bouquet of sugar and coffee and yeast, in the heat of the sun intensified by the plate glass window. If I can make it through this second, I can make it through the next; the duty weapon sat on my hip like a living thing.

  All I wanted was to be beside him, inside that coffin.

  My foot was tapping to an inaudible tune like the bagpipes beyond the glass I could not hear. Margaret Forrester and Officer Sylvia Oberbeck were at the grave site, dressed in black, and I did not begrudge them. It was not that Andrew Berringer had been heartless or insatiable — he had needed us, all three. Margaret was the hellcat, Oberbeck his friend — and I? I was Andrew’s mirror, we were mirrors for each other, like twins, who simply know. I just had to look inside myself to see what Andrew wanted and why he’d set it up the way in which he had, but as I explained to him from the doughnut shop, he had to understand the ball was in my court now. It was his game and he had left me with the goddamn ball.

  The pillbox had belonged to my mother. There was a rose enameled on the lid. She used it to carry saccharine tablets to sweeten her coffee, and I associate the box with the waxy scent of red lipstick that would spiral out of its mysterious cylinder, that could transform her worn face into that of a movie star. Funny, isn’t it? Now we know saccharine causes cancer, and my mother died of cancer, but she would drop those minuscule pills into the wide black pool of her coffee with such élan — and sometimes I would do it for her, fascinated by the miniature tongs that came with the box for that purpose. The tongs were lost now and the box filled with dirt, and I held it in my pocket on the drive through the desert.

  Jason Ripley was in the back with me and the prisoner, Todd Hanley was up front with the driver. Nobody talked much during the two-hour ride. I did not think it would ever get easier with Jason, but it didn’t matter. Neither of us needed the other anymore.

  We made a pit stop at a gas station that was the only service for fifty miles. It was part general store — racks of white bread, huge bags of ice — and part tourist trap, with bins of quartz crystal and fossils and skeletons of small desert animals in plastic bags. There were real scorpions inside crystal paperweights.

  I headed for the ladies’ room, thinking about the kind of person who would catch those nasty scorpions, took down my khakis and heard the unmistakable sound of stainless steel on porcelain. My handcuffs had fallen into the rest stop toilet bowl. Well, that clinched it. Fishing them out, I knew I would soon be over and done with it all.

  We went half a mile down an unmarked road to a place where two boulders met, for no reason, at a right angle. They did nothing to block the wind and scree, which blasted from every direction so our hair whipped madly and we had to shout, and the cold cut through our parkas, as if Brennan had brought us to the cauldron source of all winds.

  The dogs squinted against the blow and their ears were up and they trotted the area, pawing the sand where it had been dug before. Brennan pointed here and there and stood with shoulders hunched, a stream of snot running from his nose. Motorists doing ninety with their windshield wipers on might have gambled one or two seconds on a glance at the small circle of vehicles; we were out there while the rain came and went, while lightning raked the charcoal clouds moving in from Arizona, while six more holes two feet deep were dug by the sheriff’s men, and Brennan went down on his knees weeping and saying he was sorry that we could not find his stash.

  Finally the rain was pelting hard enough that we retreated to the car, wet as the dogs. Brennan sat between me and Jason, quiet, his head sagging, shoulders stooped.

  “What’s up, Ray?”

  He did not respond.

  “Disappointed? We’re disappointed, too,” I said. “We thought we could trust you, Ray. After driving out this far. You know, you don’t show us some results, we’re not taking you out for an airing anymore. Is that the game?” “It’s not a game,” he said. “I just don’t know exactly where it is. Could I lie down? I’m feeling very stressed right now,” and laid his head in my lap.

  Brennan’s hands were still cuffed and he was in ankle irons. His face was turned away so all I could see was oily hair, dark at the roots, spiked in all directions, and a small perfectly formed reddened ear.

  “Sit up, pal,” said Jason, reaching for his collar.

  Brennan dug his teeth into my thigh and hung on like a pit bull.

  I screamed and pulled him off and slammed his forehead against the back of the front seat. In a moment Brennan was out of the car, facedown in the sand with two deputies kneeling on his back.

  “The son of a bitch tried to bite her,” Jason gasped breathlessly.

  “I’m okay.”

  His teeth had not penetrated the heavy khakis.

  Jason was peering at me from underneath his whipping hair. He wanted me to find his eyes and mark the message there.

  “Get him up,” Jason said.

  They hoisted Brennan to his feet. He was spitting mealy-colored gunk and shouting hoarsely that we were all spying for the CIA.

  Jason spun from the hips and while they held him, smashed a fist full-force into the side of Brennan’s nose, and blood and teeth spurted out as if from a squirt bottle.

  Then the young agent turned to see what I thought of this action. His breath was coming hard, and his face was red and shiny with rain. He wanted to know if it were done now, if his initiation were complete.

  I would have answered that there was no beginning or end to this. The intimate desperation I had shared with Brennan in the house had meant nothing but a tactic in an arrest. He and I and Jason and Todd Hanley were just interchangeable parts and would encounter one another in different guises again and again. I would have told him that, sooner or later, everything you care about ends up in the crapper.

  “Over here!” someone yelled, and we slogged to where one of the shovels had overturned a black nylon strap. Lifting carefully, we found it was attached to an old discolored day pack, barely recognizable as yellow.

  “That belongs to Willie!” I shouted.

  “Willie who?”

  “The transient we interviewed on the Promenade! He knew Brennan!” I was pointing, using sign language over the scream of the wind.

  I thought of Willie’s stained white beard, how he had painfully lowered himself in the doorway of the old bookstore. The sad, lost look in his flat eyes. With icy fumbling fingers I unbuckled one of the pockets. Inside was a handful of sparkly girlie hair clips and ponytail scrunchies, cheap beaded bracelets and dime-store rings.

  “This stuff isn’t Willie’s!” I shouted. “It’s Brennan’s trophies. From his victims, like he said!”

  “Where is Willie?” Jason shouted back. “Is he out here? Did Brennan kill him, too? Is he dead?”

  I did not answer but watched as Jason, carrying the pack, lumbered through the blustery sandstorm to the van where Brennan was receiving first aid for the injury he had suffered by falling down on a rock.

  I turned to the open desert, its monotone mauves blurred by rain.

  “Willie!” I bellowed. “Wil-lie!”

  And lifted my arms and stood up on my toes and felt the wind under me.

  The house was near the Venice canals, in a funky working-class pocket. It was, amongst Spanish shacks and Victorian clapboards, a two-story remodel painted blue, with all sorts of adornments hanging off the eaves — whales and wind chimes and snowflakes and a whole school of angelfish. Carved into a wooden oar were the words Welcome to the Forresters. A boat was still hitched to a trailer in the drive. On the porch a table was laden with young plants in flats from a nursery; above them, an American flag. On top of a pole, like a totem, sat a pelican with head tucked. I wondered how they’d gotten a sculpture up there, but then the wind ruffled its feathers and I saw that it was a real bird.

  “Who’s there?” Margaret Forrester demanded, impulsively opening the door before hearing a reply.

  The air h
ad a swampy, cabbage smell, which must have carried from the languid, slow-moving channels that ran beneath arched bridges to the sea. People who lived in the expensive houses on the canals kept rowboats and canoes. But that upscale neighborhood was several blocks away.

  “Ana Grey, with the FBI.”

  “I know who you are.” She stepped out. “What are you doing here?” Then she saw the police.

  “We have a warrant for your arrest.”

  She folded her arms and laid her weight back on one hip.

  “Is this about the guava trees?”

  “It’s not about the guava trees.”

  “—Because I’ve had it up to here. Have you met my neighbors? Obviously you have. I’ve told them if the fruit falls on their side, keep it, what is the problem? These are the oldest continually producing guava trees in Venice!” “You are under arrest as an accessory in the murder of your husband.”

  The eyelids began to flutter, the eyeballs circling uselessly as if cut loose from their stalks. She whimpered like a child.

  The police captain said, “Ma’am?”

  Now there were sharp intakes of breath as if she had found herself in a gas chamber.

  “I’m sorry. I was up until five a.m., working in my garden.”

  The captain said, “What is it, a moon garden?”

  “She has guava trees,” I explained.

  “I’m going to read you your rights,” he began.

  Margaret cried, “Andrew is the one who killed my husband. But he’s dead, too, so what is the purpose? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “What did Detective Andrew Berringer have to do with the death of your husband?” I asked, although I knew.

  I knew because during preparation for the trial, my attorney had obtained the coroner’s report on the death of Wes (the Hat) Forrester. He’d had it reviewed by an expert in tool and weapon marks, who found significant discrepancies in the stated cause of death. Lividity showed the body had been killed in one place and moved to another. Also, there were two kinds of wounds. One was consistent with a whack from a baseball bat to the back of the head; the second looked more like a hit from the riser of a stairs. The riser had caused a subdural hematoma, which had killed him. The baseball bat came later. The expert stated there was no bleeding in the margins of that wound, which meant Margaret or Andrew had hit him over the head to make it look like gang revenge after the heart had stopped pumping.

  “Your husband came home and found you two together.”

  “We were together.” She nodded, unaware of what she was confessing. “The detective and I—”

  “In bed.”

  “—And they got into an argument, two big angry men. Their faces were this far apart, I couldn’t stop them, it was terrible.” Her voice twisted up and she grabbed her own hair. “Stop that, Margaret!” she scolded herself. “I don’t want to be like this anymore!” During the fight the Hat had fallen down the stairs, hit his head and died. Andrew and Margaret panicked, covered it up, but made a mistake. They did not pay close enough attention to the time. They waited too long to move the body. What went on between them — arguments, declarations, deals — during those minutes or hours cannot be known. But afterward, even after he gave her all the money from the bank job, the Thunder Queen was not assuaged. She wanted Andrew, and he wanted out. He thought a million bucks in cash would buy his freedom, but things did not work out that way, and when Margaret was threatening to come apart all over the map, he tried to appease her with more money. My money.

  “Mom!” called a voice, and a little boy was at the door staring at us with resentful impatience. He had a faint milk mustache and buzzed hair and was eating a croissant. A TV was going in the background and the sounds of a video game. He wore a soccer uniform and had strong legs. “Mom!” he demanded. “When are we going?” The captain had finished his recitation. “Please turn around, ma’am,” he said.

  “Please, please, don’t do this to me.”

  The boy ducked back inside the house.

  The captain and I exchanged a look. “Do you own any firearms?” he asked.

  “I’m a widow,” Margaret wailed. “My husband was a policeman, just like you. It was an accident. It was an accident.”

  “What was an accident, ma’am? Your husband falling down the stairs, or his skull being smashed with a baseball bat?”

  The sharp inhales had become vocal sounds, like braying. She stepped back from our approach, and her body went stiff and her eyes went wide with the most God-awful desperation.

  “You’re going to jail, lady.”

  “No!”

  “I’m going to ask you to cooperate, ma’am,” said the captain. “Out of deference to your deceased husband, we’d rather not drag you from the house in front of the neighbors, do you hear me? But we will if we have to. Think about your children, okay, Mrs. Forrester? Who is going to stay with them? You got a family member we can call?” “Ana,” she said. “Help me.”

  Two officers were coming up the steps.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen.” I put myself in her face. “Andrew never gave you up.”

  “What is the purpose?” she said, and her legs buckled.

  “He never gave you up.”

  They held her upright.

  “No please,” I said to the officers, “let me.”

  I unhooked my handcuffs off the back of my pants and felt their weight and the smooth familiar heft of a useful and reliable tool and put them on the woman’s wrists and listened as they ratcheted shut with a delicate sound, like the winding of a clock.

  “Remember,” I told the captain, “I want those back.”

  Bright plastic flags strung over the entrance to the pool snapped and pulled in the canyon breeze. I was used to getting there by 7 a.m. for the workout anyway, but by seven-fifteen on the morning of the swim meet there was no place to park within half a mile, and you had to walk all the way up from the beach. I was shocked to find the pool deck jammed with four or five hundred children and adults on blankets and beach chairs cheek-to-jowl, extended families from as far away as La Canada who had moved in for the day and brought all the comforts, from thermos jars of steaming rice to beading projects for the younger siblings doomed to remain bored and dry the rest of the day.

  It was disorienting to find my comfort zone overrun, like walking into the wrong apartment identical to yours. Added to the reassuring scent of wet concrete, for example, was the splatter of sausage from an open grill, where the dads were turning out big fat pancakes.

  It was becoming futile to keep searching for Juliana in the milling crowd of shivering children and grim adults who crowded the event schedules as they were posted. The swimmers were indistinguishable in their caps and goggles and there were so many of them warming up, the pool looked like a frothing overpacked aquarium. The PA system cut in and out and the chaos of high-pitched voices was torturous. The odds, I had known starting out that morning, were that Juliana was not ready and would not show.

  Since I had been back on the job there had been only one or two calls. It seemed she no longer needed to talk. She was in school and her parents were still split; yes, she had new friends — but her tone was guarded, as if she finally had stuff going important enough to keep safe in a private treasure box. The fear, however, could not always be contained. Sometimes, she admitted, the nightmares could still be so bad she would find herself out of bed and writhing on the floor.

  I did not share my own nightmares with Juliana. I did not tell her how every day I looked into the mirror that was Andrew and me, and every day I was surprised. I had not guessed that either one of us was capable of what we had done, but every day I saw that same reflection. “Good morning, killer,” I would say, and in that way, we would always be joined.

  The national anthem blared, and the meet began. The sun had risen, and people were taking off the heavy jackets. The deck had begun to steam. Somehow every part of my body had already gotten wet — pants legs, soft lambskin boots — and th
ere were meltdowns amongst the contestants. A petite blonde girl about eight, wearing a navy team suit with a bolt of lightning on the chest, was curled up in a towel on a beach chair, sobbing.

  “She just doesn’t want to,” shrugged the embarrassed mom.

  It was itchy to be wearing street clothes with the water so close and beckoning. Only a few weeks ago I had started to swim with the team again.

  “Welcome back, Ana Banana,” said my lifeguard friend, standing up in the next lane. In goggles and white cap, he had looked like a grandma who had somehow been endowed with broad glistening male shoulders.

  “Been a while,” I said, breathing hard.

  He nodded. “The water senses it.”

  I laughed harshly.

  But he was serious. “When you’re flailing, the water senses it,” he said, and dove neatly under.

  Girls twelve years old and older were being called for the one-hundred-yard freestyle, and out of the mob of competitors that had gathered at the west side of the pool for their starts, I noticed something interesting. Two swimmers were helping a third to the blocks. They were all wearing glossy violet suits, and other members of the same violet team were pushing past the judges seated at lane one to shout encouragement. The girl who was going to swim the race held on to the arms of her mates and very carefully, one foot at a time, climbed up onto the tilting platform, from which she stared down at the water with knees locked. You could almost see them quaking. I knew that body.

  Shoving through the crowd to the edge of the pool I shouted, “Go, Juliana!” She couldn’t hear me, but I kept on shouting, “Go, baby, go!”

  Her skin was mottled white and blue. She bent over and pulled the cap down, and pressed the goggles firmly to her face, and the whole team of teenage girls — lumpy, long-legged, talented or not — was screaming, “Go, Juliana! Juliana, you can do it!” A lot of folks had come out here to cheer for Juliana.

  “Swimmers, take your mark,” came the announcement.

  In the tense space between the silence and the buzzer a few excited shrieks erupted from the team, and then there were shushes, and Juliana’s whole body was trembling, her fingers stretched behind her like fluttering wingtips, in a crouch so tenuous it looked as if she might simply fall over. The distance before her was unbroken; the water still, and knowing.