Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Dr. Zahara was a conspicuously pretty woman in her early forties, Shephard guessed, who was behind a large desk when he walked in. The room was comfortable and lit by a lamp that rested on the desk. Dr. Zahara smiled and slipped a pair of glasses over her green eyes.

  “Sit down, Tom. Be comfortable.”

  Shephard sat and searched for a cigarette.

  “Of all the damn things, our Dr. Abrams quitting like that,” she said, shaking a shock of black hair and lighting a cigarette of her own. “I apologize. I’ll be glad to administer this last session if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m eager to be finished, doc.” He felt slightly ungrateful.

  “Counseling not to your liking?”

  “Not really. Not this in particular, I mean. Just any.” He finally found the cigarette.

  She opened a manila folder and scanned the contents. “You’ve been with us for nearly a year. Thirty-two years old, born in Laguna Beach, graduated near the top of the Academy. Youngest officer to work detectives here, very impressive. Mayor’s Plaque, Outstanding Rookie, Officer of the Year, City Council Commendation. Married at nineteen to Louise Childress, divorced at thirty-one.” She lifted the cigarette to her lips and continued to read. “June of last year, Tom, you shot a man in the line of duty. A boy, to be precise, Morris Mumford, age sixteen. Resigned LAPD November, headed back to the hometown, and took work just about two months ago. Well, how do you like it?”

  Shephard’s mind flitted back to that drizzly summer night in Los Angeles, and to the face of the young man he’d killed.

  “Oh. It was too quiet for a while. Today we had a homicide. I look forward to working it.” Looking forward was excessive, he knew. Having to do it, the forced activity of a job was all it was. Still, he needed it.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s what I do best. ‘Bathe oneself in the healing waters of action,’ someone once said.”

  “That’s true. You find your work rewarding?”

  “It keeps me busy.”

  “Then what you find isn’t necessarily more important than what it keeps you from looking at?”

  Shephard searched her face as she searched his. “Keep reading,” he said. “Abrams told me more than once that obsession with work is nothing more than ‘an elaborate network of action to divert oneself from the pain of self-awareness.’ ”

  “You’ve got a good memory. And what is it that you think needs healing?”

  Here it goes again, he thought. Probing with their well-trained shovels. She put out her cigarette and folded her hands under her chin. Shephard took a final drag and crunched his out, chasing the last of the embers around the ashtray.

  “I think the healing is more metaphorical than literal, doc,” he said. Play the game, he thought, you’re almost done with it.

  Dr. Zahara smiled. “Why immerse yourself in work merely to ‘keep busy’? A nice-looking young man like you must require a little more from his life than business. Metaphorical or not, it was your phrase.”

  Shephard began to feel claustrophobic, as if his shirt were made of steel, shrinking in around him. His back was sweating. Hold on, he thought. Exude confidence.

  “You’ve got the goods in front of you, doctor. I killed a boy. But some of the guys I worked with thought I did it too late, so they named me ‘Too-long Tom.’ My wife left me for a movie guy. My boss suggested I quit when the press and the ACLU came down. Last summer that was quite in vogue. These things all tend to make a man feel a tad lousy. When he works, he forgets them and pays the rent. When he comes to a doctor once a week to stroke the bureaucracy’s guilt, he wonders why he has to sit still and talk about it. He starts to wish that his life was a secret, you know, doc? He believes he deserves a little privacy, just like anybody else. I know what needs healing. And I think the best way to do it is to forget myself. Not to dwell. You can drink things under, or screw them under. I work them under. Work is a vacation, doctor.” Shut up, he told himself. Be healed.

  “I hear anger in you. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this with you, but … a note here from Dr. Abrams. May fifteenth: ‘Getting response from patient nearly impossible. Cannot be provoked to talk, let alone to anger.’ You just told me more in ten minutes than you did Dr. Abrams in a year. Why?”

  “You’re prettier.”

  Dr. Zahara fastened her calm green eyes on Shephard and nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, I am.” She flipped back the pages of his file. “You realize that this program was set up to help police officers cope with the trauma of a killing. I’ve seen lives ruined over shootings, no matter how clear it was to everybody that the shooting was necessary and unavoidable. I’ve seen the drinking you talk about, and the ‘screwing,’ as you call it. And I’ve seen a few men who keep things inside and deal with them on their own. Those types usually go one of two ways.”

  “Oh?”

  “They either come through the episode strong and healthy, or they kill themselves. It’s hard to tell which is going to happen. I lost a patient once whom I felt was making progress. This counseling might not mean much to you, Mr. Shephard, but it does to me. I don’t want you to become my Morris Mumford.”

  “Sorry, doc. I won’t kill myself. I don’t have time.”

  She smiled and closed the file, letting her glasses dangle by a chain around her neck. “I see here that your mother died when you were very young.”

  “She was murdered. A man broke into the house when she was alone. I was a few months old.” Shephard felt anger rising inside, the flippancy draining from his voice. “So I never knew her, and I don’t see what that has to do with this counseling, if it’s for a shooting trauma. The ACLU seemed to think that made me shoot the boy.” He felt heated, clumsy, violated. Colleen Shephard was not to be disturbed. He watched the doctor shake her head slowly, wave a hand, and for the first time, blush.

  “This counseling is to help make you a healthy person,” she said quietly. She lit another cigarette. “Do you feel healthy?”

  “I smoke too much, like you. I don’t sleep enough, but besides that, I feel fine.”

  There was a long silence while Dr. Zahara studied Shephard and Shephard stared back.

  “Have you seen other women since the divorce?”

  “A few.” He felt a shameful slide in his stomach as he reviewed his lack of contact over the last year. His one “date” had ended in the humiliation of trying to disprove what he had known anyway, that his desire had vanished. Since then it had been easier to be alone—a common reaction, according to Dr. Abrams. The silence of Dr. Zahara demanded that he go on. “Nothing steady,” he said.

  “Is that to your liking?”

  “Sure. Play the field. I’ve never felt the need to be connected,” he lied.

  “But you enjoyed ten years of marriage?”

  Enjoyed most of the time, he thought. Louise said he suffocated her, that she couldn’t grow, couldn’t breathe. And something about the difference between love and need. Don’t need me, don’t need me so much. And the harder he held on, the faster it fell apart.

  “Since that, I mean,” he said, a partial retreat.

  “It’s healthy to acclimate oneself to the opposite sex after the end of a long relationship. I would encourage anyone in your position to enjoy himself. Sometimes, the simple enjoying of oneself and another person can be tarnished by the end of a marriage. We have to learn to enjoy, if you will. That sounds contrary to nature, but it really isn’t. It is one of the purest delights of being human, I think.”

  Shephard imagined Dr. Zahara pushing back her chair, standing and stretching languorously, coming toward him from around the desk, kneeling beside him to kiss his hand. Her skirt fell away as she stood up and his hand slipped into warmth and dampness. But when he stood to kiss her, her face cracked and blistered into Tim Algernon’s and she erupted, laughing, into flames.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he said. Had Pavlik gotten good latents from the turpentine can? Was the stakeout man awake, or napping
behind his sunglasses? This Bible Property of whom? Why had the killer left nearly fifteen hundred dollars behind, then checked into a cheap hotel? Could the bills have been his to begin with? If little liars burn first, who second?

  “Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Then you’re released from our care as scheduled,” she said. “I think you are dealing with your life in a, well, a quietly positive way. Please feel free to call me any time you wish; we can set up another session if you feel the need. You have a new life ahead of you, Tom, and I wish you all the good luck in the world.” She stood and offered her hand. “Don’t be afraid to look at yourself. It can only do good. Those secrets you feel the need of having, they’re common to us all. Go ahead, work. Sometimes when we lose ourselves, we find ourselves, too.”

  Shephard’s dog, Cal, welcomed him home with minimal interest and a guilty slink. Flipping on the kitchen light, Shephard discovered one of his shoes had been thoroughly chewed and slobbered upon, its leather lace masticated to pulp. Cal offered an unrepentant glance, then waddled off to the patio to be fed. Shephard avenged himself by carrying a box of doggie treats to the patio, commanding Cal to sit, then dropping a banana peel from the trash into his eager jaws. The mutt spit up the peel with distaste but attacked his dinner gratefully, Shephard making it extra large out of a sense of guilt.

  After dinner they were friends again, Shephard pouring himself a large Scotch, Cal yawning, then falling asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  His evening project was to unpack the dozen boxes still stacked in the living room, but it had been his evening project for nearly two months. So much for the healing waters of action, he thought. He pulled open the top of one, confronted a framed photograph of himself and Louise dressed up Roaring Twenties style for a Halloween party, and lost heart again. Would Dr. Zahara be a good fuck? He pondered the question, but the exercise was cerebral rather than hormonal, and he got no answer. He replaced the picture face down and poured another drink.

  Suddenly, the dazzling fleck of cobalt under Ken Robbins’s microscope positioned itself square in his mind’s eye, as if to blot out introspection. Shephard closed his eyes. The cobalt rotated of its own will, offering him rich blue facets and begging the question: What was I doing in the killer’s hair? Then the blue gave way to the camel’s hair. It displayed itself similarly and begged the same question. Had it come from the collar of a coat perhaps, or a hat? No one washes coats or hats in hair conditioner, he thought. The image dispersed and he opened his eyes.

  Shephard recognized the process as what his father called a “Dick Probe.” He was fourteen when he had asked Wade what made a good detective. Wade was sitting at the kitchen table, halfway through a quart of bourbon. A good detective works behind his eyes, he had said. When you look at something, don’t think about it. See it. Think it later. Close your eyes and let it come back. Then you can hold it as long as you want and give your brain a chance to catch up. Especially with people; first impressions are usually wrong. Your mind knows more about what you see than it lets on, so you have to be able to bring things back. Some people call it imagination; the quacks at the Academy called it meditation on evidence. Me? He had smiled drunkenly. I call it a Dick Probe.

  Shephard, old enough to get the joke, blushed, then laughed heartily to cover his embarrassment. Wade had retired to his room a short time later, bottle in hand, and when the door to the bedroom closed, Shephard did his first Dick Probe—on his father. When he closed his eyes, he saw not Wade but a bourbon-colored stallion galloping through the desert, dragging a lifeless body behind it.

  Shephard lit a cigarette, stepped over Cal, and went into the living room, where he dug out a dictionary from a box of books.

  cobalt, n [G kobalt, goblin, demon of the mines; term applied to cobalt by miners from ignorance of its value or because it was troublesome], a hard, lustrous, ductile, metallic chemical element, found in various ores: it is used in the production of alloys; its compounds are used in the production of inks, paints, and varnishes: symbol, Co.

  cobalt blue, n: 1. a dark-blue pigment made from cobalt. 2. a dark blue.

  Cal lifted a sleepy head when the phone rang. Shephard reread the cobalt entry as he lifted the receiver.

  “Tom, it’s Carl here.” Pavlik sounded breathless. “The prints on the turpentine can match the ones on the glass at Algernon’s. Whoever drank with him last night left that can in the Sebastian. I picked up some soil trace from the bedspread and got ferrous earth, the same as around the stables. The water under the drain had blood in it, type O, same as Algernon’s. I called Yee. Robbins is working two hairs I got from the pillow and told me that the material fragments from the body haven’t told us anything we didn’t know at noon. The cobalt isn’t radioactive to any degree that would matter, but it’s the kind of thing someone might pick up if he worked with metal alloys. Some kind of light industry, maybe. Or, of course, if he mined the stuff. Robbins kept saying it was real weird shit here in Laguna.”

  Pavlik stopped, breathed rapidly, then continued. “Now get this. Sacramento says that Edward Steinhelper is an ex-con. He’s done time for burglary, assault, embezzlement. He’s been clean for three years but his wife told me he disappeared two nights ago with the car. Still gone. He worked for a shop in Sacramento until last month. His job was finishing furniture. Mr. and Mrs. Hylkama say the guy who checked in isn’t the guy on the license, but maybe they’re wrong. Steinhelper stinks.”

  Shephard considered the cobalt, its use in varnishes. “You lift any prints from the kitchen, near the window?”

  “Nothing to lift, but I shot the boot marks. They eyeball like the tracks we found this morning. Right down to the broken heel. You found the sonofabitch, Shephard.”

  “Who’s working the stakeout?” he asked.

  “Grimes. Said he needed the overtime.”

  “The whole night?”

  “He said no problem. Slobin is meeting with the Hylkamas at nine tomorrow to do the Identikit.”

  “Good work, Carl, chum.”

  “Same back. I’m dead. See you tomorrow.”

  The idea of Grimes working the stakeout irritated him. He poured another Scotch and stared again at the unpacked boxes that constituted his new life. He smoked and paced the apartment, went to the patio to view the lights of the city below, and paced some more. Finally, just after midnight, he went downstairs to the garage.

  He eased the Mustang onto Thalia Street and followed Thalia down the hillside to Glenneyre. The night breeze cooled his face, and he noted that the moon was nearly full. The tree-lined streets of Laguna seemed strange to him after years of working in the bright lights of L.A. Was there anywhere in L.A. as dark as this at night, he wondered? As he approached Serra Street, the smell of the eucalyptus engulfed the car and Shephard realized for the thousandth time just what it was that had brought the painters to Laguna at the turn of the century. Peace and quiet and a place to work. Even now, he thought, with the millions of tourists who swarm the town in summer, it was still the best place in the world to retreat, regroup, start again. He thought of the boxes stacked in his living room as he pulled into the courtyard of the Hotel Sebastian.

  He cut the headlights and U-turned in front of a white sedan parked diagonally across from cottage five. Slowly he completed the turn and dipped back out of the courtyard to park on the street. Retracing his way on foot, he approached the sedan and had his worst fears confirmed. Even through the closed windows he could hear Grimes snoring. The rearview mirror had been angled for a clean line of sight to the cottage door, but Grimes’s big head was wedged comfortably between the window and the headrest. Shephard stooped to the glass and studied the bulldog face, babylike now, at rest. He noted that the windows were filthy and wondered what Grimes could hope to see, anyway. What a way to earn your overtime, he thought. There were no lights on in the cottage, and no sounds except the occasional hiss of cars down on Coast Hi
ghway. Steinhelper could have come back any time, he thought. Be asleep inside right now. Might have been for hours.

  He trod lightly across the gravel to the back side of the cottages. And as he rounded the corner of the first, he stopped short at the figure of a man, outlined in moonlight, standing behind the back window of cottage five. A beam of light appeared in front of the figure, then climbed to the window. Whoever it was took a step closer and pressed his head to the lilting curtains. The beam vanished.

  Shephard marched toward the cottage, eucalyptus leaves crunching underfoot, and shouted, “Hey, bud. Out for a midnight stroll? Stay put a second, will ya?”

  In the clear moonlight he saw the man pull away from the window and freeze. Shephard could make out a head of curly hair, rounded in outline. He looked big. Then he turned and lumbered across the backlot toward the sloping hillside that rose behind the cottages.

  “Hey, don’t go away! Laguna cops here! Hold it, sonofabitch.” Shephard pursued, reaching cottage five and angling up the hillside. Eucalyptus loomed around him, and as he peered into the dark, he could see the big man’s body zigzagging through the trees, his arms pushing off the cream-white trunks.

  The hillside was covered with iceplant. Shephard sprinted, slipped to one knee, rose, and slipped again. Down the second time, he saw that the man ahead of him had gone down, too. A muffled curse trailed back to him in the darkness. Up again, Shephard hugged the tree trunks for balance, launching himself from one to the next. Ahead he could see the man on all fours now, clawing up a steep embankment. Shephard dashed toward him and found himself on his face. He righted himself, churning his legs deep into the iceplant for footing. Somehow the man was widening the distance. Shephard was twenty yards behind him, down on all fours himself, pulling with his hands as his feet slipped and skidded. Everything seemed slick, as if drenched in oil. He saw the man disappear over the rise. Shephard reached the top a moment later and stopped to get his bearings.

  The hillside rose steadily before him, and as he listened he could hear no movement in the dense cluster of trees. His breathing was deep and frantic, his vision poor in the murky shadows of the eucalyptus. He could feel his heart thumping in his ribs, his head, his ears. A quirk in the shadows ahead, then the snapping of a branch. “Hey! You! Stop right there.…” His attempted shout trailed off feebly into breathlessness and he started running again. As the man ahead darted into a clearing, Shephard saw him turn his head and look back. Then he lunged forward and disappeared into the trees again.