Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “What time?”

  “Winnie called here maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago. I don’t know when she got the message.” Her breath caught as she glanced at the arm. “Is it Wally Morrow?”

  “Could be.” He flipped the blanket back over it, leaving only one retracted finger showing. “Look, someone has to stay here with Junior, and someone has to go inside and call Eddie Green. Your pick.”

  “How’s your head?”

  “Fine.”

  “Then, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll go.”

  He walked with her out into the fresh air, but the heavy odor clung to the inside of his nose and throat. He had a sudden craving for one of Vic Spago’s cigars. “Was Winnie going away for the weekend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask Eddie to track her down in a hurry. I don’t want to wait until Monday to talk to her.”

  “All right.”

  “Kate.” He reached out for her but didn’t want to touch her; his hands felt polluted. “You’re a brick.”

  “No I’m not. I’m scared to death.”

  He smiled. “Me too.”

  “Liar.” She wrapped her arms around him. “Can you let Eddie take over?”

  “It’s his case.”

  “So you say. There are a few things I have to tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll go call Eddie first.” She kissed his cheek before she disengaged herself. “We can talk later.”

  “Tell Eddie to hurry,” he called after her. “It’ll be dark in another hour.”

  She started down the walk, but turned and called back to him. “Cassie. Your ex-wife’s name is Cassie.”

  “Thanks.” “Cassie” didn’t quite register, but it would do. He probably had some sort of pet name for her that was better forgotten.

  Watching Kate jog across the lawn toward the house, he thought how much worse this scene would have been if Cassie had been sent to the gazebo instead of Kate. To make sure she was still down on the beach with the kids, he walked to the edge of the bluff and squatted out of sight in a stand of eucalyptus trees. If they saw him, they might come up. He didn’t want them anywhere near here until Eddie Green had taken charge of the remains.

  He crushed a handful of dry eucalyptus leaves between his palms and held them up to his face, using their pungent oil as an antidote to the smell of rotting corpse, and watched his family like a voyeur. The scene on the beach held no nostalgia. Richie and Theresa had grown so much since he had last seen them with their mother that what he saw was three adults in conversation rather than a mother and two children.

  They were sitting out of the wind now, sheltered behind an outcropping of Byrd Rock. Cassie had her skirt fanned out around her as if she needed a lot of personal space. Richie and Theresa sat close together; such a change from all the years when any touch between them inevitably led to a slugfest.

  The kids seemed okay, he thought. Theresa didn’t have her head bowed, so she wasn’t crying. Richie wasn’t pacing. And Cassie was still there. Miracle of all miracles, the reunion hadn’t knocked anyone flat. Yet.

  He put a couple of leaves in his shirt pocket and left them, feeling relatively comfortable that they would stay put for a while longer.

  There was a variety of footprints on the gazebo’s wooden floor, and he tried to step only where he could see the prints of his own shoes. Much of the case against Arty Silver had come from the forensic laboratory—hair, fibers, dirt samples—and he wanted extra care taken here. The first order of business, he felt, was proving conclusively, and quickly, whether or not what was going on here had any possible connection to Arty.

  Tejeda folded the blanket away from the plastic-covered arm and bent for a closer look.

  The coroner’s report had listed Wally Morrow’s height as five-feet-eleven. Tejeda didn’t know where that measurement had come from: the Marines, his mother, or the gaps between the few vertebrae Vic had to work with. Whatever Morrow’s actual height, there was general agreement that he was somewhat taller than average and fairly slender.

  Tejeda measured the forearm against his own, and it came up both shorter and thicker. This was hardly scientific method. But until the forensic pathologist had stretched this human fragment across her osteometric board and made a pronouncement about its owner’s height, he would tell anyone who asked his opinion that this man had been significantly shorter than young Morrow, maybe by as much as five or six inches, and was heavily built.

  The cut end of the arm was difficult to see because the plastic was bunched into the wire twist. Didn’t matter too much, he thought, because what he didn’t see told him plenty.

  First, there was no apparent blood, not even pink ooze. He guessed from the condition of the plastic bag that the arm had only recently been wrapped: the plastic looked clean, there was no film on the inside from the outgassing of decomposition, and no discoloration. The skin didn’t seem to stick to the plastic as it would if the arm had been inside for very long, the way rotting chicken sticks to supermarket wrap.

  There were other details that would help identify the corpse if fingerprints failed. The nails were clean and unchipped, freshly manicured. He couldn’t see how callused the palm was because of the way the fingers curled over it, but he suspected that the bulky brachioradiahs muscle owed more to stevedoring than weight lifting.

  He examined the blanket and had to chuckle. Maybe the one professional benefit of having been abandoned by his wife was that now, just by looking, he could tell that the blanket had been laundered a number of times. Yet that small fact meant the origins of the blanket would be harder to trace, since it could have come out of an attic box, a thrift store in Cleveland, or been stolen from a dryer in a laundromat at any time during the last ten or fifteen years. And who would remember one faded little yellow blanket?

  “Whew! That your stink, Roger?” Vic Spago lumbered down the gazebo path with a heavy black case in each hand, trailing a plume of smoke from his cheroot.

  “You got here fast,” Tejeda said. “Where’s Spud?”

  “Up at the house getting an earful from the girlfriend.”

  “What is she telling him?”

  “Dunno. They sent me out here.” Spago put his cases down and made an elaborate survey of the gazebo. “What’s this, a bandstand?”

  “No. It’s a summerhouse. A gazebo.”

  “I don’t know much about the arrangements up here in high-class heaven, ’cuz I’ve been invited to visit you exactly two times.” Spago inhaled a lungful of smoke and leaned over the plastic-wrapped arm. “Two bodies, two visits.”

  Tejeda smiled. “What are you doing for dinner tomorrow?”

  “Going to my mother-in-law’s.” He put his glasses on and talked while he studied the arm. “But I’m free Tuesday.”

  “So come.”

  “Okay if I bring Spud and Otis and a deck of cards?”

  “Sure.”

  “About seven?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.” Otis had taken a lighted magnifying glass from one of his cases and held it over the fingernails. “How long has this been here?”

  “I don’t know. Kate found it about twenty, twenty-five minutes ago.”

  “And it was here in the window?”

  “No. She found it in the rocker and carried it over here.”

  “Bad girl.” Spago didn’t look up from his glass. “If this goes on much longer, we’ll have to give her a basic course in police procedure. Hand me that camera, will you?”

  Tejeda played assistant while Vic Spago spent three rolls of film on the arm, the rocker, and every inch of the gazebo. They were marking the area off with police-line tape when the white mobile forensics laboratory van came bouncing across the lawn toward them.

  Eddie Green bounded from the front seat and cut Tejeda out of the massing crowd of technicians. “We have to talk.”

  “Something Kate told you?”

  “No. She’ll tell you all that herself
. Let’s go into my private office.”

  While Spago’s forensic team set up mobile floodlights and began dusting for prints, vacuuming for fibers, Eddie gripped Tejeda by the arm and marched him out of the circle of activity.

  “How far we going, Spud?” Tejeda asked when they had reached the top of the beach stairs. “Maybe I should have packed a bag.”

  Eddie stopped. “Tell me the truth—how are you?”

  “I’m okay. Why? Did Kate say something?”

  “What, you two have a fight or something? You keep asking about Kate.”

  “Spud,” Tejeda said slowly, “you have ten seconds to tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “The Police Commission met this afternoon.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So they voted to cut off your disability pay unless you stay off the case.”

  “We have more than one case going here. They mention any case in particular?”

  “Yeah. Any case.” Eddie jammed his hands in his pockets and slouched as if he had an elephant on his back. “They said that if you’re well enough to make press statements for the coroner, you should be well enough to come back to work.”

  “Or I should shut up, right?” Tejeda asked softly as he clapped Eddie on the back. “They may be right.”

  “It’s my fault. I asked you to chime in at the inquest this morning to help Otis finagle more budget. And maybe that worked for us—the City Council’s been fielding calls and wires all day from taxpayers demanding that more be done about the killing. But for you I think it backfired. Couple of councilmen are really pissed because giving more to us means pulling back some of the gang and drug task force. And Thanksgiving is a heavy media weekend.”

  “So what are my options?” Tejeda asked.

  “All these politicos really want is some attention. Their problem with you is that whatever you do anymore is heavy media,” Eddie said. “So I think you have two choices. One, you take Kate on a trip around the world and stay away until the dust settles. Two, you come back to work full-time, jump into the investigation with both feet, and invite certain councilmen to stand with you at the photo opportunities.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.” Tejeda chuckled. “Of course, I might come back if I could get Richie and Theresa to stand in front of the cameras with us. We need a good picture for the family Christmas cards.”

  “You’re incorrigible.” Cassie’s voice cut through the general buzz of activity and unnerved him. She had been eavesdropping from the stair landing. “Any sensible person would have had enough.”

  “Hi, Cassie.” Tejeda ignored her scolding and opened his arms to her. “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh, Roger.” She came to him for a hug. He ran his hands down her back, taking a sort of inventory, or looking for the on switch. He couldn’t seem to find it. He was surprised how little residual feeling he had. He remembered, too clearly sometimes, their tender moments together, that he had loved her. But this woman in his arms was difficult to connect with the Cassie in his memory. Now she was just another woman. The scent of her wasn’t even familiar.

  Cassie took a step back. “You’ve no right to look so good.”

  “Hey, Cassie.” Eddie seemed nonplussed but he composed himself enough to stick his hand out to her. “Didn’t know you were back.”

  “Just arrived. How’s Libby?”

  “We split up last year,” Eddie said. He seemed as embarrassed as she did. “Excuse me, I have to get back. Hope to see you before you leave, Cass.”

  “You’ll see her at dinner tomorrow,” Tejeda said.

  “Will I?” she asked.

  “Of course. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, then.” Eddie shuffled his feet a bit more. “Until tomorrow.”

  “Nice to see you again, Spud,” she said.

  “Yeah. See you tomorrow.” He punched Tejeda’s shoulder. “Until you decide, staying away means don’t even help Kate serve coffee to the crew over there.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  Eddie turned and walked away into the circle of bright lights around the gazebo.

  It was nearly dusk, but there was enough light coming from Spago’s portable floodlights for Tejeda to get a good look at Cassie. He didn’t like what she had done to her hair, it was an uncontrolled mane of permed kinks, but he liked that what she had done was none of his business. Otherwise, she looked fine, a little older, but fit, healthy. If she seemed nervous, he thought, it was only because of the uncertainty of the moment and not because she was ready for another emotional collapse.

  “Where are Richie and Theresa?” he asked.

  “They went for a walk. Richie said his girlfriend lives down by the marina.”

  “You talked to the kids for a long time. Everything okay?”

  “They’re great, Roger. You’ve done a good job.”

  “So have they.”

  “I know.” She looked away. “I expected them to be angry with me. But they seem … They seem very mature and accepting.”

  “Cassie, they’re mad as hell at you. Just give them time to get used to you again and they’ll tell you all about it.” He gazed off down the beach, looking for some sign of them. After what had happened in the gazebo, he didn’t want Richie and Theresa out in the dark, even together. When he turned back, he caught Cassie staring at him.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked.

  “I have some time off from work, but I had forgotten how expensive everything is in California.”

  “Save your money. Our old house is vacant. You might as well stay there.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The house is half yours, Cass.”

  “I guess I still have a lot to sort out.”

  “Yeah.” He had noticed how many times she said “I.” Maybe it had always been that way; he couldn’t remember.

  “Does Theresa get along well with Kate?”

  “They’re good friends.”

  “I wondered. Theresa didn’t seem to know anything about the party tonight.”

  “What party?” he asked.

  “We were watching the caterers set up from the beach.”

  “What caterers?”

  Cassie shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Maybe I made a mistake coming back like this. I think I’m in the way.”

  “Dammit, Cassie.” He wheeled on her. “Did you hear what Eddie said to me about going back to work?”

  She nodded. “Most of it.”

  “As I see it, you have the same two choices Eddie gave me. You can either hop it back to New Mexico and stay there. Or you can jump back into this family with both feet. You call it. If you’re ready, you can be Mom again. Or you can go back to being a stranger. But no more hovering around the edges, grilling them over the telephone like some long-distance voyeur. It’s too confusing for the kids.”

  “What about you?” she said.

  “I don’t figure in this except as a sideline coach. You call it. Are you in? Or out?”

  She was looking off toward Kate’s house. “What time is dinner tomorrow?”

  “Three.”

  “I need to think. Tell the kids I’ll see them tomorrow. Now, you go tend to your guests before Kate comes looking for you.”

  “What guests?” He turned to see what she was looking at. The portable floodlights and yellow garlands of police tape made the gazebo and the lawn around it look very festive. There was quite a crowd now, loud voices, some laughter. But the trays coming out of the white van didn’t carry fancy hors d’oeuvres or cocktails.

  “Look again, Cassie,” he said. “There’s no caterer. Just the coroner. And his guest of honor is in no shape for a lawn party.”

  11

  “You said, ‘Let’s take a little drive down the coast, clear our heads.’” Kate slid her hand from the gearshift knob to Tejeda’s knee. “I was thinking maybe Laguna. This is Oceanside.”

  Tejeda put his hand over hers and moved it further up hi
s thigh. “Two blocks ahead on the right. There’s a parking lot in back.”

  “You said, ‘Let’s get a drink.’ I’m thinking candlelight, groping under the table.” The Jag purred to about 3500 rpm before she took her hand from his to shift into third. “But a gay bar?”

  He laughed softly. “We’ll grope later. And talk. I heard you gave Spud an earful. Anyway, you’ll like Clyde’s. Be a new experience for you.”

  “I’ve been to a gay bar before,” she said defensively.

  “Finocchio’s doesn’t count,” he said.

  “No, a real gay bar.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  She slowed for the light. “Berlin.”

  “Berlin?” he mocked. “East or West?”

  “You know, that’s the third crack you’ve made about my sheltered past since we left the freeway.”

  “Third crack, huh?” he said. “But who’s counting?”

  She pushed his shoulder. “You want to take a taxi home?”

  “No. I only have twenty bucks in my pocket.”

  “Keep that in mind,” she said as she pulled into traffic.

  Traffic was heavy for a Wednesday night, especially in the off-season. Though there were sprinklings of civilians, the sidewalk traffic for the most part seemed to be very young men with very thick necks and very little hair. She had to keep her eyes open: a surprising number of pedestrians careened out into the street from between parked cars or tilted into walls as if they had only a tenuous relationship with either gravity or the sidewalk. The yellow sodium lights made them all look jaundiced.

  Kate had found Oceanside to be an odd combination of beach resort and military town. California Highway 1, which did duty as Main Street, split at the north end of town. One branch turned into a state-beach parking lot, the other ended abruptly at the guarded entrance gates to the vast Camp Pendleton Marine Base.

  Kate drove past Beach Mania Custom Surfboards, tucked into a slot between a karate studio and an enormous all-night laundry advertising military alterations, and wondered how peacefully this coexistence worked.

  “Eddie told me about the Police Commission hearing,” she said, interrupting Tejeda’s silence. “Does this trip to Clyde’s mean you’ve made a decision about going back to work?”