Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “It begins with a young man named Joe, who was one handsome devil and a good tennis player. He served his country in the war, then settled on the coast along with a million hopefuls like him. His family was in Georgia, living on a rather large estate that wasn’t theirs. His father was the groundskeeper, his mother a maid. Young Joe picked up his tennis on the estate courts, made love and proposed marriage to a bitterly ugly daughter, and was ejected from the scene with dispatch. Poor man, it must have been like sitting in a restaurant where you can’t afford anything on the menu.” She drew heavily on the gin.

  “And young Joe was a dreamer. He dreamed of his own estate; of registering the name Datilla on the society pages; of money, class, power. A common enough dream. But Joe knew that to dream is to sleep, and he was no sleeper. He fell in with some rich friends in Newport Beach—Pasadena wealth summering in Orange County. Mostly the women. In Newport Beach you are society if you look society and act it. Joe did, and some friends pulled strings for a nice loan to start a club. A tennis club, ritzy and exclusive. His meager capital required a partner. Call him Burt. And together they bought a hunk of the California coast so cheap you’d laugh if I told you how much. The first courts went up a few months later, with a small clubhouse and a lounge.

  “Everything worked. Burton was an accountant by training, and he knew how to maximize the money. Joe was a hustler and knew how to make rich people feel rich. His years as a servant’s son paid off regally. After the war there was a hell of a rush into Orange County, and they’d bought in just before it started. A rush and a baby-boom, detective, which deposited on our shores a million happy infants like yourself. And for every new member who joined and paid the handsome dues, Joe and Burt took a little money aside and put it back into the Surfside Club. It grew like those babies did. It was strong, healthy, and happy. They incorporated and took thirty percent each for controlling interest.”

  Dorothy took a long drink from her gin and lit another cigarette. Shephard’s beer had scarcely dwindled.

  “But it didn’t take a snake to point out the apple,” she continued. “By 1950, the land value had gone up by half. Members and money seemed to fall from the clouds. Apartments, suites, two restaurants, a dock modestly named A Dock by pedestrian Burton. The sailing contingent was something they hadn’t catered to or banked on, but Joe saw they were naturals for his Surfside. So Joe and Burt began to disagree. They were faced with a fortune that neither one even imagined when they started. Why two people can weather the hard times together and then fight when the sun shines is a question that I’ve never been able to answer. But, hell, it happens to marriages all the time.

  “Joe saw the club as a big but exclusive plantation, like the one he grew up on. A money-maker plain and simple. But Burt began talking about incorporating as a municipality. He was talking about a sprawling little city on the coast, where people might buy in at a reasonable rate. He saw a planned community, with its own shopping centers, private beaches, a progressive school system. He was thinking democratic. He was talking to the papers and getting a bit of the spotlight that had always been Joe’s. All Joe could do was smile and play along. Like any good businessman, he knew the value of sterling public relations.

  “Not falling asleep, are you, detective? The story is just starting to get good.” She drank again from the gin, and though she was nearly finished with her second double, Shephard saw no change in her pale gray eyes.

  “Burt was a married man, but he was in love, too, and it wasn’t with his wife. You might call the other woman Helene. They were not altogether discreet, Burton and his mistress. His wife, Hope, remained in a state of disrespectful shock and made no waves. Helene was a wonderful mistress, I suppose, and a clever woman. I might try to explain to you how she got Burt to will his thirty percent of stock to her, but I never really understood it myself. She was a detestable woman in my view, but she got what she wanted, almost all the time.”

  Dorothy had just pronounced her judgment on Helene when she was rocked by another spasm of coughing. Shephard wondered for a moment if she would get her breath again. Then, as the silence settled around the table, she brought out another cigarette and accepted the light from Shephard.

  “You’re pretty,” she said, as disinterestedly as if she were commenting on the weather, or on a dress. “You looked like a real nervous young man on the tube last night. I flipped channels to compare you to Wade. Well, put it this way, if you’re interested in a broadcasting career, don’t be.” She eyed him lasciviously, which Shephard found unnerving. The wrinkled breasts flattened under her dress as she leaned back for a deep drag on the cigarette.

  “I’m just a cop for right now.”

  “So,” she continued. “When Burton drowned in the bay one night, the Surfside suddenly had a new partner. Helene and Joe were now in control, and they were delighted.”

  Shephard weighed her words against what he knew of human behavior. “Joe and Helene drowned him?”

  Dorothy set her drink on the table, fitting the round bottom into an imaginary circle on the wood. “It’s so nice to talk to someone who understands,” she said.

  Shephard also weighed her smile against what he knew of human behavior, but nothing came out of it. It was a familiar, knowing smile, but beyond that there was something relieved, almost confessional about it. As he looked again into her eyes, he felt himself in the presence of someone whose life was nothing like his own. She seemed to have orbited elsewhere, seen different places, answered to different codes. He wondered if this was the difference experienced by the rich. But he wondered, too, whether Dorothy Edmond had enough money in her purse to pay for the drinks.

  “Joe and Helene drowned him,” she said, repeating his words. Coming from her, they seemed to mean something altogether different. “You see, Helene never really gave a damn about Burton. She and Joe saw the possibility and decided to give it a try. She would pretend love for Burt, and Joe would kill him when the stock was within reach. It wasn’t very imaginative, but it was functional. Joe always had a way with things that worked. That was 1951, if you’re keeping track,” she said. “And it almost didn’t work. You’ll be especially interested in this part, Tom Shephard, both as a man and as a student of murder. That is what you are, right? Burton swam every night, sometimes in the channel in Newport, sometimes south at Diver’s Cove in Laguna.” Shephard imagined the Inside Indicator rough against his hand, the warmth of Jane’s lips as she kissed him there.

  “Yes, I’ve been to the cove,” he said.

  “Nice place to swim. The plan was to bring some of Joe’s not very respectable friends down from L.A. to do the job. And to do it in the Newport waters where Joe’s friends on the department would be slow to consider it as anything more than an accident. But Joe’s L.A. friends didn’t know the Newport Channel from Minneapolis, and they followed Burton to Laguna one evening and held him under at Diver’s. By the time they got halfway back to L.A. and called in their results to Joe, Burt’s body was floating in unfriendly waters. Of course, one phone call was all it took for Joe to get still another friend—isn’t it interesting how many some people can acquire?—to rescue poor Burton from Diver’s Cove and bring him north to the channel rocks. Those rocks did a nice job of ruining any evidence of struggle. And he was a tough little man, Burton. There must have been quite a struggle.”

  She coughed more quietly. Shephard sipped his beer and decided against a cigarette.

  “That’s just a little sidelight I thought you’d be interested in,” she continued. “The papers even had hold of it. A couple of service station men recognized Burton as a customer the night he supposedly drowned in Newport. But the Newport cops closed the case, and the Laguna cops had no reason to open it back up in their own front yard. Would you have?”

  For the first time, Shephard thought that she was playing with him.

  “You might have to,” she said.

  “What happened to Helene? Back to New England?”

  “Y
es. New England. That’s as good a place as any, don’t you think?”

  He weighed her words against his own circumstances, trying desperately to get a foothold on the way she thought. To see the world—if even just one corner of it—the same way Dorothy Edmond saw it. Certain images gathered in Shephard’s imagination. The peaceful smile that Dorothy had offered Joe Datilla on the dock, her subservient role as emissary to the fictional bankers, her inviting attitude, the partially exposed breasts. Had she herself been hopeful of Joe’s attentions? Had she perhaps been in love with Burt? Was everything she had said some massive, choreographed lie? The liquor was enough to twist her, he thought.

  In times of confusion, Shephard resorted to the obvious: “Tim Algernon and Hope Creeley got burned to death in my city last week. What does all this have to do with them?”

  “My, my,” she answered quickly, as if he had just taken a swing at her, “how the young man bucks. I’ll bet you’re a tiger in bed, telling all those little beach girls just where you like it best.”

  He tried to think a way into the mind of the woman who sat next to him, but again he could not.

  Shephard was never sure if he could have prevented what happened next, or if he had caused it, or if it was simply the last act in a script she’d written—one he couldn’t understand. With one hand Dorothy Edmond snapped her fingers in the air, and the dark-suited man at the bar snaked off his stool and moved toward them. With the other she brought a large white envelope from her purse and handed it to Shephard. It was stiff and heavy.

  “A little gift from the personal safe of Joe Datilla,” she said. “Remember the old advice from Plato? ‘Know thyself’?”

  He nodded.

  “Take it.”

  She rose from the booth in a swirl of smoke and lilac perfume, waving an irritated hand at the man who had dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the table and now stood waiting. “Bring the car, David,” she said. “I’m perfectly capable of walking to it myself.”

  Then she disappeared unsteadily into the lobby.

  In the dim candlelight Shephard examined the contents of the envelope. It contained two items, one a current California license plate—IAEA 896—the other a check for twenty thousand dollars from Joe Datilla to Wade Shephard. It was canceled and dated September 20, 1951.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ken Robbins sat amidst the clutter of his forensic lab and grunted off the stool when Shephard walked in. His white smock hung untied around his bulk and was stained with something that Shephard assumed was lunch. Stooped and massive, he looked like a man with scarcely enough energy to hold himself up, but behind his thick glasses Shephard saw the excitement in his eyes.

  “Wouldn’t have called you up here on a Saturday, but I got something that won’t translate over the phone.” He shook his big head dramatically. “Those reporters sure gave you a grilling the other night. Thought you handled it okay. Take my advice, though, once you get on their bad side, just quit talking.”

  Robbins led Shephard across the lab to a long table that lay against a wall of windows overlooking the smoggy city. In one quick glance, he could see the heart of the county’s government and the bowels of its poverty. To the east, the new Federal Building rose above them, and behind that the tall stiff towers of the jail. The Santa Ana Civic Center sprawled from behind the jail, and in the milky smog that seemed to hover everywhere, the County buildings etched their diminishing outlines against the suburbs. But to the west Shephard saw the gutted remnants at the end of what was once Fourth Street—century-old storefronts, hotels, and restaurants built out of brick that had lost its color. Their facades were festooned with construction company signs that announced the beginning of the end. The destruction had already begun at the north end of the street. Piles of rubble, cordoned off and alive with workers, lay where the old heart of the city had once beat. Farther down the street, Shephard could see the next set of businesses that were doomed, their fronts already so lifeless it looked as if they had given up long ago. Pawnshops, Zapaterias, Joyerias, the Palace Hotel, the Norton, where he had met Little Theodore, cafés, bars. End of a chapter, he thought as he turned to Robbins.

  Three microscopes were set up on the table, each with the specimen slides already inserted. Robbins checked the first, then motioned Shephard to do the same. “Some you’ve seen, some you haven’t,” he said, stepping away.

  Shephard gazed into the eyepiece at the rich blue slab under the glass. Robbins’s voice came from behind him, patient but intense.

  “Recognize it?”

  “Cobalt.”

  “Right, or almost right. I got cobalt when I did the scan the day you were here, and the reading was so high I let it slide. Shouldn’t have. What you’re looking at is a cluster of cobalt particles suspended in a base of oil. Try the next one, dick.”

  Shephard moved to his right. The color that hit him as he bent to the eyepiece was as rich as the blue, but brighter. He hadn’t seen such a flagrant yellow since he stared at the sun once as a boy, then closed his eyelids and viewed it through his own skin.

  “What we have here is the element cadmium. I found it connected to a hair on that dead dog’s neck. Routine scan, you know, but that yellow burned my eyes like it’s burning yours right now. You don’t find cadmium very often, about as often as you find cobalt or a beautiful woman who doesn’t know it. So I ran it through the scanner slow and got the same oil trace I found in with the cobalt. Not that it meant shit to me at the time.”

  In the last microscope Shephard found the same truncated branch—camel hair—that he had seen a week ago. It was magnified to show the mounds of tocopherol acetate.

  “Here’s the skinny,” Robbins said as Shephard worked the focus and continued to study the hair. “Last week you bring me a handful of gray hair from the fist of a dead man. I named it killer’s hair. And attached to that hair is a fleck of cobalt you don’t find a helluva lot these days. And a piece of hair from an animal that doesn’t even grow on this continent. A few days later more hair from the same guy. Both the camel hair and the human hair conditioned with the same stuff. This time there’s a piece of cadmium in the hair of the dog this guy has choked.”

  Robbins threw off his lab smock and headed for the door. Shephard followed him to a small alcove filled with coffee and junk food machines. Robbins was silent while his coffee “brewed”; then he sipped and eyed Shephard over the cup.

  “So I go home after the cadmium day and I’m halfway through a martini—a big one—and my wife asks what I did. It isn’t easy to explain what I do. But I was feeling good, so I told her about the cobalt and the cadmium and the camel’s hair dented in the middle. All of it. And she smiles and says, Robbins, you’re a dummy sometimes. All it took was a little art back in college to know that cobalt and cadmium are used in oil paints and camel hair brushes are what you put them on the canvas with.”

  Robbins treated Shephard to coffee, light, then slurped loudly from his own cup and continued.

  “I said that’s great, Carole, but you don’t condition paintbrushes. She tells me sorry, but that’s exactly what a serious painter does. They wash their brushes in shampoo and condition them with the best stuff they can afford. It keeps the filaments clean and supple. And when I pictured that camel’s hair again, I saw that we were just looking at the wrong end when we said it wasn’t from a hairbrush. The straight end goes into the metal that holds it in place with the others. That’s why it’s dented halfway—from the metal. That explains the oil base, too. Cobalt blue and cadmium yellow. I called a local art house this afternoon and they sell it all the time.”

  Robbins trailed slowly back toward the lab, his head bent to the coffee. Inside he shut the door and looked at Shephard with a smile. “You got a killer who paints. An artist. Only in Laguna, young dick. Weird shit.”

  An hour later Shephard entered the Laguna Art Mart with a stack of Identikit sketches in his hand. The clerk was a sweet young man who bore some resemblance to Elvis Costello, but with a po
t belly. His name was Frank and he took the Identikit sketch, holding it close to his plastic-rimmed sunglasses.

  “Oh God no,” he said quickly. “I’m sure I didn’t sell any Winsor and Newtons.”

  “Winsor and Newtons?”

  “Paint,” he said flatly. “If you want paint with real cobalt and real cadmium the only thing I sell is Winsor and Newtons. The best. Five ninety-five big tube three ninety-five small.” Shephard wondered if Frank had dropped commas from his vocabulary. “Aisle one,” Frank said in a blur, then threw back his head and went to help another young man struggling with a large picture frame.

  Shephard found the paint tubes locked in a case on aisle one. He noted that Frank was correct in his prices. Leaning up to the glass, he spotted both Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Yellow among the uniform tubes. On the other side of the aisle were the paintbrushes. The camel hair brushes were moderate in price and came in a wide selection of shapes, sizes, and lengths.

  As Shephard worked his way through the store, showing the Identikit to the clerks, he decided that the Art Mart must be the largest employer in the city. A toothy blond girl said he looked familiar but that she probably would have remembered because you have to unlock the case to sell Winsor and Newtons, and so far as she knew she hadn’t. A wide and serious woman with a head of healthy brown curls told Shephard that she had sold so many Winsor and Newtons in the last week that she couldn’t remember them all.

  “Can you remember who bought them?” he asked earnestly.

  “Come on, man,” she said. “I’m an artist, not a clerk. A face is a face.”

  A red-headed boy with bright green eyes studied the Identikit sketch and pursed his lips grimly, as if wondering whether or not he should take a bet. He finally decided no and told Shephard to try Ella’s Corner because the best artists in town didn’t shop Laguna Art Mart anyway.

  An hour later he merged onto Coast Highway and the slow knot of tourist traffic.