Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  When the fire on the floor seemed dead, he moved to the bed and looked down on the man whose quivering legs and arms were tied snugly to the railings with the strings built into his pajamas. The white feet continued to thud against the mattress. His arms were tied in place, but his hands clutched at the side of the bed, the knuckles purple with blood. And above the wide strips of tape that mummified the lower half of his face, two terrified eyes stared upward. Droplets of water splattered onto his head. Shephard moved his hands over the body, and his voice sounded high and foreign as he told the man that he was all right, buddy, chum, you’re going to be all right, Mr. Rubio, you’re going to be all right. Under his hands, Rubio’s withered body was miraculously cool.

  Heads appeared in the doorway. Shephard stripped open the pajamas and looked down with almost tearful relief at the unburned chest and stomach of Francis Rubio.

  Murmuring from the doorway was a small crowd of old people—one man adjusting his hearing aid, a woman in curlers, the horrified face of Claire Bailey as she struggled to get in. Water pelted down from the sprinkler. Through it all, Rubio’s eyes never strayed from Shephard.

  Claire Bailey stood beside him. She had already called the fire department and the police, she said. In the quiet that followed, the sprinkler overhead shut off and Claire Bailey started weeping. She helped Shephard peel the tape from Rubio’s face. When they lifted the first wide white strip from his mouth, the man’s heels began pounding the bed again, his hands opened and closed around nothing, and he bellowed into the silence of Ross Manor.

  Shephard eased his way through the people outside the door, looking them in the eyes and telling them that everything was okay now, just a little trouble with Mr. Rubio’s new lawyer. One man said that attorneys were always a pain. He broke into a run when he reached the hall, and headed for the stairs. As he clambered down the stairway, two sounds echoed in his ears, even through the din of Rubio’s wailing. One was the sound of footsteps going down the stairs when he had first climbed them, the other was the slamming door he had heard as he stood outside room 206. He reached the lobby, panting. On the porch, both of the men had risen from their rockers to stare at the overstuffed chair that had landed, as if dropped from heaven, on the lawn. Shephard ran to the LaVerda and was about to jump onto the seat—the key already in his hand—when he saw the spark plug cables, neatly severed, lying across the leather. He cursed and looked up Ross Street, where less than a block away a convertible red Cadillac and its gray-haired driver lurched around a corner and out of sight.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The cops were waiting for him when he finally came home that night, as he knew they would be. Benson from Newport Beach and Hudson from Santa Ana. They stared at him appraisingly as Little Theodore delivered him on the back of his Harley-Davidson.

  “Little trouble in Newport I’d like to talk to you about,” Benson said with a crooked smile. He was short, with a combative face, and looked younger than Shephard.

  Hudson was bulky and unshaven, and apparently not a talker. “Ditto in Santa Ana,” he said, as if it were an effort. “At Ross Manor.”

  They came upstairs, surveyed his stripped apartment, and asked their questions. He modified the truth for Benson, saying only that he had waited for Helene Lang to meet him, then gone upstairs to find the door open, and let himself in.

  It was news to Benson that her name wasn’t Dorothy Edmond. He made a note of this, then sat stroking Cal. “If the door was open when you found her, how come it was locked when we got there?” he asked.

  “Just thinking of you,” Shephard said. “Didn’t want anybody tampering with your scene.”

  Benson seemed to ponder this for a moment. “The next time you want to help me, stay the hell out of Newport, okay?”

  “Ditto in Santa Ana,” Hudson managed again.

  After an hour of questions, Benson and Hudson closed their notebooks as if on cue, took a last look around the inhospitable apartment, and left.

  Later that night, as he studied the face of Azul Mercante in the pale light of his living room, Shephard could feel something foreign inside himself, a barely recognizable emotion, like an unwatered seed only now beginning to grow. He considered Mercante’s haughty smile, the superiority in his eyes, the way he had forced himself into Shephard’s own home and tried to drag his mother down. Images flickered through his mind. Looking at the sketch, Shephard saw in the man everything he had learned to despise: arrogance, violence, recklessness, and a belief—most difficult of all for Shephard to understand—that everything is legitimized by one’s own passion. He recognized the crude emotion growing inside him. It was rage.

  And he realized, as he listened to the sound of someone coming up his stairway, that Azul Mercante had yet to understand the full rage of revenge. That rage must have been written on his face when he opened the door and beheld the windswept beauty of the young woman in front of him.

  “Hi, Tom,” she said finally. “You look like hell.” Jane handed him the Identikit he’d given her. “You said this was an excuse to see me again. Well, now it’s mine to see you. I’ve never seen this guy before.”

  He stepped aside to let her in. “This is it.”

  “Your apartment … well …” She looked around at the bleak living room. Shephard watched her, wondering at the perfect match between the blue of her eyes and the blue of her blouse. Really, he thought, is she any of my business? Then she brought her lips to his mouth, and they stood there so long, wrapped silently together, that Cal finally came in from the patio to investigate. “He’s cute,” Jane said.

  “If you think Cal’s cute, you need a drink. If I had some wine I’d offer you a glass, if I had a glass. It’ll have to be vodka. Rocks or neat?”

  “Rocks. It’s a blazer tonight again.”

  “So you’re thawing out? No more fires on August nights?”

  “Guess so.”

  They sat on the floor, Cal working his way between them in sly jealousy. He seemed taken with the guest and panted up close to her face; a charmer in all respects, Shephard thought. Cal had never been shy with the ladies.

  “You were right about animals being easy to love,” she said. “And safe. Dad and Becky, you and Cal, Buster and I.” She smiled and stroked Cal’s head. The dog wiggled appreciatively, then snuck in a sloppy kiss.

  “You asked for it,” Shephard said. “Get away, Cal. She’s not yours.” But Cal had teamed up, and he turned to Shephard with a look of immunity.

  “Sorry about the other night. I didn’t mean to come off like the ice bitch. Make me another drink, would you? Then I’ll try to explain myself.”

  She lay back and talked to the ceiling, Shephard beside her. Her first love, she said, had been in high school, and she still thought of the boy, who was now somewhere up north and married. He had proposed to her the night they graduated and she had refused out of principle. And it was the right thing to do, she said, because the boy had found a girl to marry not long after, and Jane had fallen in love with an older man her second year out of school. She was working as a waitress in New Orleans, had gone there on a whim, with a friend. Charlie. It was easy to fall for his dark good looks and his quiet attentiveness. “Besides, he wouldn’t come around all the time,” she said. “You know how it is when you can’t always have what you want. So I loved him all the more.”

  But Charlie was a philanderer—the more she suspected it, the more she wanted him—and he finally left her in a bitter Southern winter, with nothing but syphilis as a goodbye. “I was young, dumb,” she said, tilting the vodka to her lips. “But I wised up a little that winter.”

  She came back to California. She was twenty-one, broke, and didn’t have an idea of what to do with herself. Shephard tried to picture her, stepping off the bus with her bags, a California beauty returned to the motherland. Charlie blew it, he thought. If he ever ran across him he would tell him so, and perhaps break his nose.

  “I was pretty low,” Jane was saying, “but as soon as
I met Raymond, that all changed. He was a year younger than I was, a pretty, pretty boy. Strong face, a good heart, full of art. He wanted to be a painter. Met him here in town, at the Festival. We got an apartment and moved in together, got engaged, planned everything for the wedding. Two days before the big one, Ray just disappeared. He left a little note saying he couldn’t do it, had to be free to find himself, or something. I really loved him. I still see him around, but he gave up the art and starting dealing cocaine. Makes a lot of money, too. Don’t bust him, Shephard. He’s an alright guy. I guess.”

  “Can I break his nose?”

  She slapped him gently on the arm, then turned to face him. “After that, I just said fuck it, Tom. I traveled Europe and South America, a bit of the East. I did what I wanted, when I wanted. I took some men, mostly the ones who were most sincere about me, and spit ’em back up fast as I could. It was a way to get free, you know, a way not to fall. I kept it up for a couple of years after I got back. That’s how I learned about that cold something inside of me—that thing I can use if I need to—and I made an art form out of it. Then I just quit. I’d proved whatever the point was and I wasn’t very happy. I realized the one thing I’d always loved, even at the worst times, were the beasts. Like him.” Jane rubbed Cal’s belly. “So I enrolled at UCI in biology, and I’m going on to veterinary when I get out. To tell you the truth, I haven’t really felt much of anything for a long time. Then along comes this lanky detective who won’t take the hard line for an answer. You spoiled the whole program, Tom.” She ran her fingers through his hair, gently across the stitches.

  “Well, you’re a couple of years ahead of me in the pain and heartache school. Though I’ve learned a few lessons, I guess.” Shephard tipped back his vodka, mostly water by now.

  “Tell me about them.”

  “No. Some other time. Enough for tonight.”

  “All that make you think I’m not exactly the woman you had at Diver’s Cove?”

  “No, Jane. It just makes me want to take you in the bedroom and love you for a long slow time.”

  “Would you do that now? Please?”

  Two hours later they were still there, Jane resting peacefully with her dark hair spread against a pillow, Shephard staring at the clock. Their lovemaking had been desperate, almost frightening to him, and mixed with the haunting face of Azul Mercante, which invaded the room each time he closed his eyes. It had left him overloaded with possibilities, premonitions. The alternating current of love and hatred was a voltage he could scarcely stand.

  “Time won’t stop just because you stare at a clock, Tom.”

  Shephard ran his hand over her forehead, through her hair. “Sorry.”

  “You want to tell me now, just what’s going on?”

  He lay back and started at the beginning, the summer of bad luck at the Surfside. Burton and Hope, Joe and Helene, Tim and Margie, Wade and Colleen. Azul Mercante. Jane leaned against the wall, drawing the sheet over herself, listening silently through the rest of his story: the Bibles, the cobalt and cadmium, Mercante’s transfer from Folsom and release from Lompoc. When Shephard finished, Jane was looking at the clock too. “So Rubio is hidden, and Wade? Where’s your father?”

  “On Isla Arenillas by now. Joe sent him down on his jet.”

  She turned to Shephard and kissed him, then settled her head on his chest. “You know, Tom, I’ve got one more question to add to all this. All those bills that dad ran up when mom had the cancer? The forty thousand? He never paid them. There’s not a single canceled check to the hospital for all those years. And he kept canceled checks too, all of them.”

  “Maybe the insurance covered it.”

  “He didn’t have any. He’d always lecture me on getting good insurance, because of how much that treatment cost him.”

  Shephard added this riddle to the bagful that already seemed to be weighing down his mind. Take a number, he thought, stand in line. “What year was it she first started treatment?”

  “Nineteen fifty-one.”

  Of course, he thought. When else?

  Just before two in the morning, the phone rang. Jane flinched at the sound. Shephard pulled his robe from the bathroom door and lit a cigarette on his way to the living room. The voice that greeted him was shaky, the music in the background was new wave.

  “Tom Shephard?”

  He recognized the voice, but couldn’t place the agitated, nasal tone. “Speaking, chum.”

  “This is Ricky Hyams. At Valentine’s, you know?”

  “Rick, buddy. Sounds like a rockin’ scene down there.”

  “Tom, uh, I think there’s …” The phone was lowered. Shephard heard two men talking quickly, some decision being reached. Then Hyams was back. “Tom, I think there’s something here you should see. In regard to, uh, what we talked about last week.”

  “What is it, Ricky? And why should I see it when I’ve got a lovely woman in my bed?” Shephard heard the muffled movements of Jane in his bedroom, then the closing of his bathroom door.

  “I can’t talk. But come here, I, uh, think you should come here right away if I were you.” It struck Shephard that Hyams was drunk, high, or both. “I’ll meet you outside the front door, okay?”

  The wind had dissipated, leaving the city clean. A sparse trail of taillights glittered ahead of him down Coast Highway like the red scales on a winding snake. The oncoming headlights bore into his eyes with a new intensity.

  The gay corner of town bustled with people, men arm-in-arm filling the crosswalk at Crest Street, and the liquor store seemingly crammed with bodies. A white convertible slowed in front of him as the driver considered a young hitchhiker. Shephard swerved around it onto the narrow Crest Street cul-de-sac and parked the Mustang along a red curb.

  The door to Valentine’s was hidden by a crowd of men waiting to get in. They sprawled around the entrance, some dancing to the music that was loud even outside the bar. Ricky Hyams broke away from the jam and waited at the bottom of the steps. Behind him was a large man, dressed in full leather regalia, who nodded officiously at Shephard and parted the bodies as they made their way to the door.

  Inside, the Valentine’s lobby was a cramped stampede of men, bunched, talking, laughing, drinking—an animated cast. Hyams nodded and chatted briefly with his constituency, guiding Shephard by the arm until they broke through the knotted bodies and into a short hallway marked by a Do Not Enter sign. The music was so loud Shephard could feel it in his bones. It receded to a series of muffled thuds when Hyams closed the door to his office after them. He had looked at Shephard once, and said nothing. When he sat down and lit a cigarette, Shephard noted the way it trembled in his hand. Ricky Hyams, Shephard thought, looked dead in the eyes.

  “He was here,” he said finally. “The man in the papers. I think it was him.” He looked up at Shephard as if he expected to be hit. “It wasn’t until, uh, just a few hours ago that I realized it might be him. Then, again, Tommy, it might not be, so if it isn’t don’t get down on me too hard about tonight, but better than not calling at all, isn’t it?” He looked down at the blotter on his desk. “Oh hell.” The bottle of gin that he took out of a drawer was a pint, and still half-full. “Been at this bottle all night,” he said, holding it in front of his face. “I don’t drink very often.”

  “When did you see him?”

  Hyams gulped, but not much gin seemed to disappear. “First time last week. Monday, I think it was. Off and on since then. But he’s gone now. Left late tonight with a suitcase, and took a taxi. I know because I can see the courtyard from my apartment.”

  “He had a room here?”

  “Checked in Monday afternoon. Older guy with gray hair and beard, and blue eyes that you don’t feel good looking at.” Hyams attacked the bottle again, slurping. He lit another cigarette even though the first one was half alive. “Shit. Dammit to hell. Tom, you’re not the first one interested in this guy. Monday night, a man showed up at the desk and asked to see me alone. He said he was interested
in getting a key to the apartment that John Dixon had just rented. Dixon is your man, Tom.” Hyams scanned the room, as if looking for something he had lost. “That isn’t such an unusual request around here. Our clients tend to become familiar with each other rather quickly, and sometimes, uh, well, a room is a room, right?”

  “So you gave him a key?”

  “He insisted on leaving me a hundred for my graciousness, as he put it. And he said that due to some rather tender circumstances, he’d appreciate it if I forgot his face.” Hyams drew sharply on his cigarette, then flicked his fingernails against the bottle. “I didn’t think much of it until this envelope arrived on Wednesday.”

  From the bottom drawer of his desk, Ricky produced a plain white envelope with his name typewritten across it. He handed it to Shephard with a woeful look on his face.

  “When I opened it, I knew that something wasn’t right.”

  Shephard lifted the flap and drew out five one-thousand-dollar bills. They were so new they stuck together.

  “How do you know it came from … ?”

  “Russell Dulak, that’s what his name is. Tom, around here you get used to a certain kind of man. I thought at first that Dulak might have been, uh, finding himself sexually. Coming out, as they say. But the hundred was strange, and the thousands, well, I just knew they were from him. No doubt. And the way he started coming and going around Dixon’s place, well, it wasn’t a personal kind of thing. I thought drugs, and I don’t like big drugs, but I wasn’t sure. Dulak came late at night, parked on the red where you did—I, uh, saw you from my apartment. And he only came when Dixon wasn’t there. He knew because he’d call and ask me. That’s how I knew the money was from him, too.”