Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I can tell you’re getting better,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Your lips aren’t numb anymore, are they?”

  “Not when you kiss me like that.” He traced her thin scar, wishing it, and all the full-color, wide-screen horror behind it, would go away. Then he gently kissed her chin beside the scar. “I appreciate what you’re doing for Theresa.”

  “Teaching her to drive?” Kate shrugged. “She tries not to let it show, but the last couple of months have been damned hard on her. It’s about time something terrific happened for her.”

  “I don’t know if I want her driving,” he said. “It’s a sick world out there.”

  She looked up at him, acutely perceptive as usual. “What’s happened?”

  “I ran into Eddie Green and Vic Spago on the beach.”

  “Getting ready for the marathon?”

  “No. Working,” he said. “They found a head floating in the bay.”

  “A head?” Kate pulled away from him, both repulsed and intrigued. “A human head?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whose?”

  “Don’t know yet. A young man with a short haircut.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yep.”

  “It doesn’t belong here, though, right? It just floated in from somewhere else.”

  “Yeah. Trespasser. Doesn’t belong to us. You can call Eddie for the details.”

  “No, thanks.”

  The back door clicked softly and Trinh, Kate’s housekeeper, tiptoed into the kitchen.

  “Hello,” Kate said before Trinh could make a shy retreat. “How was your class?”

  “Very nice,” Trinh said. She hugged her books close to her chest and kept her eyes averted. Tejeda had found that her quietude was a cultural thing, that behind her sweet, passive exterior was one tough cookie. Kate had told him what she knew of Trinh’s story, how because she had been a university student she had been locked in a reeducation center outside Saigon and taught how to plant rice. Trinh herself rarely said anything about her life before she was rescued from a leaky fishing boat by Australian sailors. Occasionally she would let something slip—that her parents had died in a Thai refugee camp, that she had had a child. He wanted to ask her more, but the deep sadness in her eyes always stopped him.

  “What was your class today?” he asked Trinh instead. “English as a Second Language?”

  “Today is Monday. I have cooking.”

  Kate and Tejeda exchanged smiles. Trinh received room, board, a decent salary, and help with her English homework in exchange for housekeeping and cooking one ghastly meal a day.

  “What did you cook?” Kate asked her.

  “We learn to make Thanks for Giving dinner,” Trinh said proudly.

  “Wonderful,” Kate said. “Turkey, cranberries, the whole thing?”

  “Teacher say ‘from soap to knots.’”

  Kate jabbed Tejeda before he could say anything. He shrugged; Trinh never got his jokes anyway.

  Kate smiled at Trinh. “Would you like to try something for our Thanksgiving dinner?”

  “I don’t know about these foods,” Trinh said, her brow furrowed in a worried line. “You put some kind berries on the meat and something else.” She looked at Kate for help. “Gravelly on whipped-up potatoes.”

  “Giblet gravy,” Kate said.

  “Okay. I think it’s not very good.” Then Trinh smiled. “I can make pumpkins pie and Jello-O.”

  “Great,” Tejeda said, knowing his mother always insisted on making the pies. “It isn’t Thanksgiving without Jello-O and pumpkins pie.”

  “Write what you need on the shopping list,” Kate told her.

  “I learn one more item today.” Trinh opened her little silk wallet and took out a letter-folded paper. “Maybe you like to see.”

  Kate took the proffered paper and opened it. “Trinh, this is wonderful. Look, Roger. Trinh has passed her English proficiency exam. She can start classes at the university in January.”

  “I can still do my work here,” Trinh said.

  “You won’t have time to study and work full-time. We’ll have to hire a new housekeeper,” Kate said. When Trinh’s chin started to quiver, Kate gave her a quick hug. “You can move in upstairs with the rest of the family.”

  “I can’t pay.”

  “Sure you can. Your choice, once-a-week laundry or floor polishing?”

  “Laundry.” Trinh smiled.

  Theresa pushed open the door from the dining room. “Phone, Dad,” she said, looking first at Kate, then at her father. “It’s Mom.”

  When he didn’t move toward the telephone right away, Kate patted him on the arm. “Excuse me,” she said, “I have a briefcase full of midterms to read. Trinh, I’m proud of you.”

  Roger always looked a bit shell-shocked to Kate when he talked to Cassie, his ex-wife. Where marriage and family were concerned, she knew, Tejeda was a traditionalist; people got married forever and raised their kids together. Even though his marriage had bombed with enough fury to set Mr. Richter’s needles moving, he still felt uneasy about the breakup. Increasingly frequent long-distance conversations with Cassie only reminded him that beyond the gates of this refuge there was an earlier life that still straggled a number of untidy loose ends.

  Kate paused in the door long enough to make sure Tejeda was going to pick up the kitchen extension. She heard him say “Hello, Cassie” before the kitchen door closed behind her.

  Kate caught up with Theresa in the long passageway that led toward the front of the house.

  “So, how’s your mother?” Kate asked, hoping the question sounded more casual than its intent.

  “Mom’s okay.” Theresa shrugged. “I called to tell her I got my learner’s permit.” Theresa watched the Rolls key dangle from her hand for a moment. When she looked up at Kate, her eyes were full of confusion. “She asked me if my birthday present got here yet.”

  “Your birthday was in May.”

  “I think she forgot she hadn’t sent a present until I called her.”

  “Maybe not.” Kate slipped her arm through Theresa’s. “Living where she does, it might be difficult for her to get things out.”

  “There’s a Hallmark store in Taos,” Theresa said. “And a post office.”

  Kate gave Theresa’s slender arm a squeeze. “This is not a perfect world.”

  “I know.”

  The tap-dance patter of their heels as they crossed the marble-tiled foyer filled the silence between them. Kate paused at the bottom of the long, curving stairway.

  “We thought we’d go out for dinner tonight,” Kate said. “Can you be ready by six-thirty?”

  Theresa nodded, then looked up from under her eyelashes. “May I drive?”

  “It’ll be dark,” Kate warned. “And your dad will be in the back seat.”

  A nervous smile flashed across Theresa’s face. “I’m not ready for Dad to watch me yet.”

  “Maybe in a week or two we’ll be ready to show off for him,” Kate said. “Are you coming upstairs?”

  “I have to put the key away.”

  But when she didn’t move, Kate asked, “Something you want to talk about?”

  “Are you driving the Rolls to work tomorrow?”

  “No,” Kate said. “Probably get stripped if I left it in the faculty lot. Why?”

  “I thought we could go out driving, and maybe you could pick me up at school.”

  “In the Rolls?” Kate ran through her schedule for the next day: classes until two, then a curriculum meeting that could last a couple of hours. She understood that Theresa wanted her friends to see her in the luxurious old car, which meant driving home for the Rolls, then getting back across town to the high school around three, when Theresa finished her last class.

  “Never mind,” Theresa said. Kate watched her fold the key into her palm before she turned to cross the foyer to put the key into the Chinese vase.

  “I’ll meet you in front of th
e administration building at three-ten,” Kate said.

  “You mean it?”

  “Yes,” Kate assured her, smiling. “Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t skip a dry old curriculum-committee meeting to tempt death with you?”

  Theresa laughed. “No, really, I’ll pay attention.”

  As Kate mounted the stairs, she heard a near-silent, jubilant “yesss” just before the car key hit the bottom of the Chinese vase. Then the sound of quick footsteps crossing the marble floor caught Kate off-guard. She found herself listening expectantly for the next sound in a once-familiar sequence, the way an audience might if a conductor suddenly stopped the orchestra in the middle of a piece. But nothing followed—no ice cubes dropped into crystal with a splash of Scotch. Kate shook off the strong feeling of déjà vu. She had to go back down a few steps, to look, just to make sure. But her father wasn’t there. Hadn’t been for twenty-five years.

  She turned and continued up the stairs. She’d been feeling her father close by all afternoon. Probably, she thought, because of the car and Theresa’s pleasure with it. It was so right, Kate thought, that the car, a relic from her father’s brief passage here, should be the instrument of such joy.

  Kate had once heard her grandfather proudly declare that Cornell, her father and his youngest son, was like Falstaff, born for no reason other than to give pleasure. That was his work, and he had done it magnificently. For everyone except maybe her mother, Kate thought. But Kate had been too young then to understand that being pleasant and holding his liquor well were perhaps not enough for his marriage to thrive on. And she didn’t know which had come first, her mother’s bitterness or the escalation of her father’s drinking. She only knew how wonderful it was to be with him. And how much she had missed him when he wasn’t here anymore.

  Without turning on the lights, Kate crossed the room she now shared with Tejeda and opened the bay window. The evening air was chilly, fresh with the fishy smell of the ocean. Someone down on the beach was setting up a portable floodlight, and she wondered why until she remembered about the head. These were either police or ghouls; she shuddered, trying to block any image of that grim attraction. Then she realized that the picture in her mind’s eye was of her father’s handsome face; his body had turned up in the bay below the house, snagged on an outcropping of Byrd Rock. Even after three weeks in the water, his maroon necktie had still been fastened in a perfect four-in-hand knot.

  A sudden gust off the ocean ruffled through the room like a sad whisper. Kate picked up a cardigan Tejeda had left on the window seat and pressed it against her face, breathing in his scent as she tried to hold back the surge of terror that more and more often threatened to break through the barriers she had erected.

  She and Tejeda had been through so much together already, she thought. Then Tejeda was suddenly behind her, his arms folding around her, pulling her close. She turned her back to the spotlight on the beach and buried her face against his hard chest, putting aside everything except him and the safety of that moment.

  4

  “Nice, clean-cut kid,” Eddie Green said. “Except he had semen in his mouth.”

  “Yeah?” Tejeda put down the plastic squeeze bottle of mustard. “Before or after?”

  “Coroner says he blew some guy, type A positive. Got his throat severed before he could swallow all the spume.”

  “I thought this was a social call.” Tejeda picked up a slab of sourdough and held it up to Trinh, who hovered by the door to the kitchen. Then he dropped the bread on top of his stack of cold cuts and cheese. “See, Trinh? You put everything inside the bread. Except rice. No rice in the sandwich.”

  “Not difficult.” Trinh shrugged. She wiped her hands on a damp tea towel as if she’d touched something distasteful. “I can go back to kitchen now?”

  “Sure. Lesson’s over.” Tejeda looked across the mahogany table at Eddie Green, not ready to buy what he was offering. He pushed the plate of cold cuts closer to his partner. “Try the salami, Spud. Homemade. Kate gets it from a little deli down by the marina. Costs more than filet.”

  Eddie leaned closer to Tejeda, the reflection of the underside of his face on the polished table exaggerating his heavy jaw. “Spago said to tell you he thinks you were right about the kid being military. Government-issue stainless-steel crowns on four molars.”

  “Great. Case is solved. Just go find a mother who never taught her boy how to brush his teeth.”

  “The head was in water twenty-four to thirty-six hours,” Eddie said, eyeing Tejeda as if he had an ace in his pocket. “But not in salt water.”

  “Okay,” Tejeda conceded, “that’s weird. But don’t let it distract you. I think you have a fairly ordinary sex killing. There are two possibilities. One, the kid died during rough sex and his lover panicked and dumped the body in pieces. Two, the killing itself was the thrill. Maybe the head was the object.”

  “Why the fresh water?”

  “Get rid of the blood and keep the body cool.” Tejeda shrugged. “Maybe the head was a trophy, kept in a goldfish bowl like a pet.”

  “Spago’s in till four this afternoon,” Eddie said. “Why don’t you come talk to him?”

  Tejeda picked up the salami knife and bisected his sandwich with more force than he’d intended. Damn Spud, he thought, checking to see if he’d cracked the plate. So persistent. Obsessive even. Made him a good detective, but not a lot of fun to be around when he had a bug under his collar. He saw his own reflection in the table, and found a lot of Spud in it.

  “I can’t remember a lot of things,” Tejeda said, “but it seems to me we used to talk about sex and football during lunch, not this forensics shit.”

  “You’re right,” Eddie said, flipping the cap off his Corona beer with a church key. “You don’t remember a lot.”

  Tejeda sighed. “Okay, Spud, what’s the rest of it?”

  “Arty Silver.”

  “Arty Silver?” Tejeda took a bite of his sandwich.

  “Arthur Ronald Silver.”

  “Arthur Radley Silver,” Tejeda corrected. “The Surfside Slasher.”

  “You do remember?”

  “Who could forget?” Tejeda heard the defensiveness in his own voice.

  “The similarities got to me. Silver would pick up a Marine, preferably very young and goofy-looking, who was hitching a ride up to L.A. from Pendleton on a weekend pass. Arty would give him some beers from a cooler he kept on the back seat. Then some pills. Then, when the kid was out of it, Arty would go to perform his rituals, taking pictures of his handiwork along the way. When he was finished, Arty would hack off the kid’s head and take it home for a souvenir.”

  “Not hack off,” Tejeda said. “Slice off. Very tidy. Worked in his uncle’s butcher shop off and on.”

  “What did Spago say? Not a pro, maybe Biology I?”

  “What’s the point?” Tejeda said. “Arty Silver has been in jail for the last five years.”

  “Believe it or not, he finally comes to trial Monday morning,” Eddie said. “And he still has friends.”

  “What was that kid’s name?” Tejeda asked, feeling an old pain grip his stomach.

  “William Tyler. Little Willie Tyler has a private cell on Death Row for the help he tried to give Arty.”

  “Shit.” Tejeda pushed his plate away and stood up, putting a little distance between himself and Spud’s intensity. Five years ago he had run Arthur Radley Silver to ground. Arty had enjoyed the chase, taunting Tejeda, manipulating the press. By the time he was caught, Arty Silver had dipped his corrupt finger into the peaceful waters of Tejeda’s personal life and stirred until nothing could ever be the same for him or his family again. Cassie, Tejeda’s wife then, had been the worst casualty, left feeling so scared and vulnerable that she had literally taken to the hills. Now she was teaching Hopis how to make pots or something and staying as far away from family involvements as she could.

  What had made Arty so scary, and so hard to find, was that he seemed absolutely ordinary. U
ntil he tripped himself up, there was no way to identify him. He displayed neither the cranked-up charm of a sociopath like Kenneth Bianchi nor the charismatic bizarreness of Charles Manson. During the eight years of his killing binge, Arty had led a quiet life with the same lover, gained professional respect as an industrial architect, bought and maintained a little beach cottage. An exemplary life, except that on holiday weekends he went cruising for well-muscled young men, drugged them, raped them, beheaded them, then threw their emasculated bodies from his moving car.

  And still his friends loved him, believed in his innocence. Friends like William Tyler, who had tried to get Arty off by pulling a copycat murder. But not many people have the stomach it takes to mutilate human flesh in the pattern of Arty Silver. And now William Tyler, convicted by his own confession three years before his friend Arty Silver could be brought to trial, had about even odds to be the first man executed in California under the new death-penalty law.

  Tejeda had the feeling there was something else, something he couldn’t quite remember. It seemed to flash close to the surface, then slip away; one of those dust motes flitting through his memory bank.

  “Arty still write to you?” Eddie asked.

  “Occasionally.”

  Eddie picked at something between his teeth and grinned at Tejeda. “You two made the big time together—mass murderer taunts photogenic detective.”

  “Photogenic?”

  “You looked great in Time.”

  “No.” Tejeda smiled. “I looked boyish in Time. I looked great in Newsweek.”

  “Shit,” Eddie said. “Seems to me that when Arty Silver had to compete with you for press coverage, he got awfully personal about where he left his heads.”

  “So?”

  “That head yesterday?” Eddie said. “I think it was meant for you, dumped in your own backyard.”

  “My backyard is the Pacific Ocean.”

  “You jog that strip of beach every afternoon between four and four-fifteen.” Eddie pointed a stubby finger at Tejeda accusingly. “Yesterday you were late.”

  Tejeda remembered yesterday, going up to put on his running shorts and finding Kate home early from her meeting with Carl. He leaned back and smiled to himself; matinee sex was one of the bonuses of being both in love and home on disability at the same time.