A Stranger Lies There (5 page)

“Are you finished?” I asked at the first sign of a pause.

Branson sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “You can leave the same way you came in. We're done. For now.”

I'd heard viewpoints like his over and over, and it pissed me off that I'd had to listen to it again. Screw it, I thought, and turned back to him as I opened the door. “Did you know that cops and serial killers have the same psychological profile?”

Branson put his pencil down and watched me leave.

CHAPTER THREE

“You look spooked, Tim. What happened in there?”

We were walking to the car outside, where only a few small puddles remained from the early-morning watering.

“He asked about Turret.”

“Turret. Why?” Deirdre asked, perplexed. “That's ancient history.”

“He was released last week.”

Deirdre gave me a long look before speaking. “Do they know where he is?”

We reached the car at that point, and I unlocked the door and held it open for Deirdre. When she got in I squatted on the sidewalk next to her as she rolled the window down. I rested my arms on the door. It was hot, the metal baking in the sun. Across the street, the bank thermometer clicked from ninety to ninety-one.

“So where is he?” Deirdre repeated.

“We never got to that. Branson started working me over pretty good right about then.”

“What do you mean?”

“His dad got killed in Vietnam. Made it real clear how much he despises people like me.”

“What did he say?”

I recounted the conversation with Branson.

“What's his problem?” Deirdre asked when I was finished.

“I think it's obvious what his problem is,” I said. “His father was military, and he's a cop. He's got that mentality.” That sounded harsh. “I guess he's got a reason,” I admitted.

“He's being a jerk,” Deirdre said, miffed. “And unprofessional. Why don't you get in the car.”

I circled around to the driver's side and slid in next to her. We sat for a moment.

“So they think Turret's after you?” Deirdre asked. “For testifying against him?”

“Apparently.”

Deirdre frowned, shook her head. I waited while she turned it over in her mind. “It doesn't make sense. Why would he kill somebody we don't even know?”

I thought about the first thing Deirdre had said yesterday morning after seeing the body.
He looks like you.
She was right, to a certain extent. What if Turret had been there for me, chanced upon the boy outside and mistaken him for a son I didn't have? What if Deirdre was next?

“What are you thinking?” Deirdre prodded.

I told her. Deirdre nodded in mute agreement, a silent surrender, as if she'd been expecting something like this for a long time. A final domino falling into place.

“There was this guy I used to hear about,” she finally said. “Back in New York. A bookie.” Someone walked by on the sidewalk, and Deirdre let him pass before continuing. “Never bothered with the welshers. He'd go after their friends or family instead. Started with pictures of their kids at school or something like that.” She paused. “He always got his money.”

Across the street the bank guard, an overweight rent-a-cop, paced back and forth in front of the building. I told myself Turret had nothing to do with it. Wasn't convincing. Maybe I'd always suspected that I'd gotten off too easy for what I'd done.

I turned to Deirdre. “How'd it go with you in there?”

“My clients came up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tidwell asked if I knew of any drug activity that could've led to this.”

“There's nothing, right?”

“Not that I know about.”

“What else?”

“I told him everything. Why I came out here.”

“And?”

“Tidwell wanted to know about Triumph.”

“It's a work camp in the middle of the desert. What does that have to do with anything?”

“They're ex-cons, Tim.”

“Shoulda guessed,” I said, shaking my head. “They let you out, but you get a knock on your door every time something goes wrong.”

“You know how it works.”

“Doesn't mean I have to like it.”

We sat a little bit more. A patrol car left the parking lot in front of us, the driver giving us a quick glance before heading up the street. I adjusted the rearview mirror that didn't need adjusting and turned to Deirdre. “I don't want to be thinking about this all day,” I told her. “You should take the day off. We could—”

Deirdre stopped me with a hand on my arm. “I can't. I have to—”

“Yeah, okay,” I interrupted. “No problem.” Thought about it a second. “Probably Patrick again, isn't it?” A new client of hers. They'd found him splashing around in the City Hall fountain a few weeks ago, all his clothes piled on the sidewalk next to it. Apparently, in a drug-induced schizophrenic frenzy, he'd been trying to wash off the bugs he thought the CIA had attached to his skin.

Deirdre got defensive. “So?”

“He's not done spilling his guts to you yet?” I said before I could stop myself.

Deirdre's mouth dropped open; probably the same look I'd given Branson earlier. “I can't believe you just said that.” She huffed, shook her head. “The one time I tell you anything about one of my clients and you shovel it back at me?”

I couldn't answer. Truth was, I didn't know what had gotten into me—I was used to people needing Deirdre. All the late night phone calls from desperate clients. Leaving the house in the middle of the night to help a wavering addict. Deirdre never talked about the people she served; a privacy thing. But Patrick was different. Deirdre seemed to have formed a special attachment to him. And now, when
I
needed her …

“I'm sorry. I'll drop you off at work.”

“No. Not like this. What's going on with you?”

I felt like a kid demanding more attention. But Deirdre deserved an answer. “It's just … maybe enough is enough.” This client had been homeless for a while, according to Deirdre. He'd gotten raped one night in an abandoned building in L.A., a few months before the fountain episode. “All that stuff he's told you … I mean, is that really necessary?”

“Yeah, Tim, it is. I would think you'd know that better than anybody.”

“Okay,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck against an oncoming headache. “Talk about shoveling it back.”

“Hey. I didn't start this … whatever this is.”

I was about to respond but thought better of it. Started the car instead, and Deirdre let it go.

The clinic was just a few minutes away, a small storefront closer to downtown. I drove slowly, tried not to think about how stupid I'd just been. We got to Palm Canyon Drive, the city's main drag. The fashionable boutiques and umbrella-tabled eateries drifted past, the looming San Jacintos advancing in slow motion above the city to our left. Here and there, pockets of spring breakers caroused. Fewer and fewer every year as the college kids discovered new hot spots. Still, some residents got out of town before the yearly ritual began.

Deirdre remained quiet, her hands in her lap. I wanted to ask about her friends at Triumph Outreach, if she'd had any recent contact with them. Instead, I turned on the radio.

“—highly volatile chemicals caused a massive explosion on a remote ranch in Yucca Valley this morning, at what turned out to be an illegal methamphetamine lab. Two bodies were found when the fire was put out, burned beyond recognition. Last week, sheriff's deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, arrested four people in Brawley operating a similar lab. The two events are most likely related, police say, though a connection to the unidentified body found yesterday morning in North Palm Springs, on the property of a local substance abuse counselor, has not been established. Coming up—”

Deirdre switched off the radio, a cloud crossing her features. The sun reflected blindingly off the shop windows and the cars parked along the street, and I wondered again what had drawn us both here. You could barely catch your breath when the sun flamed full in the white-hot sky. Reptiles and rodents made for the desert ducked under rocks, burrowed deep.

In her teens, Deirdre helped care for her younger sister, who'd eventually died of leukemia, and the instinct never left. She loved working at the clinic; her coworkers and clients were like a second family. Deirdre was that hand in the darkness when everything else had failed. Turning people around, literally saving their lives sometimes, satisfied some deep part of her in a way she could never describe. I suppose it was the closest she could get to bringing her sister back.

As for me, maybe deep down I believed all the Old Testament stories about the desert I'd been taught growing up.

Traffic was light but slow through the shopping district, and my attention wandered. Up on the mountainside, I found the Desert Angel, a geological accident shaped like an angel in flight. Some days it was brighter than others, depending on the light. Today it was barely visible, or maybe it was just the angle from where I was. It brought back the day I'd proposed to Deirdre. Sitting out there near Windy Point, the car rocking and shaking in the wind. Gazing up at that landmark, praying she'd say yes.

I made a right and stopped at the curb in front of Jericho Health. Deirdre opened her door and left it there, making no move to get out of the car.

“All I meant was that if you really trust someone, you should be able to tell them anything,” she said, by way of apology. A searching look in her eyes, as if she were trying to read something not quite in focus. Was she beginning to wonder if I'd given her the whole story about my past?

“Yeah. I know.” I watched a few cars pass by in the street, the people inside them ignoring us. “You never told me about seeing a dead body before,” I said turning back to Deirdre, just as she opened her mouth to say something. She held whatever it was, pursing her lips, and I tried to clean it up. “I didn't fault you for that.”

“That was big of you,” Deirdre retorted before getting out of the car and shutting the door. “I'll call you when you can come pick me up,” she told me, leaning in. “It'll be late.” Then she went into the clinic without looking back. I wanted to follow her inside, tell her I was sorry. Instead, I hit the steering wheel in frustration and pulled away.

*   *   *

Thirty minutes later I was in Beaumont, where I spent the day looking at antiques, trying to get some ideas for a project I was working on. But questions about the murder kept circling around in my head.

Mid-day I stopped at a fast food joint. Sat there and barely ate, going over it all again and again. A young woman came in with two young boys, her son and his friend from the look of them. They were giggling and teasing each other, while the mother admonished them to hurry up and order. But you could tell they were all having a good time.

Moments like those were few and far between when I was growing up. That's what happened when you had a mother who threw in the towel before you hit puberty and a father who became distant and short-tempered trying to raise you alone. Mom wasn't cut out for marriage or motherhood. She didn't have the dedication or stamina that my friends' mothers had. As a kid I didn't realize all this, I just knew she was different. A “free spirit,” Dad said. One day towards the end, Mom forgot to pick me up from school. This was in second grade. She'd spent the day with her single friends and lost track of time. I broke into a donation box in my parochial school church for bus fare. I was caught immediately by one of the parish priests and driven home. My parents argued deep into the night about that. Dad cursing my mother's irresponsibility. Mom responding that he shouldn't have knocked her up so young. When she left a few weeks later Dad told me it wasn't my fault and that maybe she'd come back someday. But I knew better. Even without the note from my mother saying she loved me but didn't deserve to have me, and I was better off without her. A note I never showed my father because he lived on his hope.

That hope faded over the years, along with my dad's interest in me—I was a daily reminder of the woman who'd left him. Yearly fishing trips were the only time we ever spent together. With no one to really talk to, no family except an aunt and uncle on my mother's side I'd only met once, I retreated inward. By high school I was a loner. I found it difficult to connect with anybody. At graduation, I heard one of my classmates ask who I was when my name was called. He didn't recognize me even after I stood up to get my diploma.

College was different. The war and all the unrest brought my generation together. It felt good to finally be a part of something. I was tired of being dismissed, overlooked. I wanted to do something that mattered, show my dad and all the rest of them that I could be reckoned with. Turret offered a way to do that. A robbery to help finance the political campaigns we believed in. Something to effect real change, not just symbolic destruction, he said. Which made sense. Except everything went to hell, and it turned out that Turret was just using me and the others—college students who thought we could change the world. The Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical militant group founded by an escaped convict and several ex-Berkeley students, pulled the same thing—three times in fact—a few years later. Ours had the dubious distinction of being the first. A prison psychologist had gone on and on about social conformity theory, and how I'd been caught up in something bigger than me. But I wasn't interested in excuses. No second visit with that shrink.

Back in the here and now, I'd suddenly lost my appetite. Food only half-finished and cold. I threw it away and tried again doing what I'd come here to do. I wandered from shop to shop, unable to shut down, the fog I was in getting thicker and thicker. Finally gave up when I almost knocked over a Tiffany lamp in one of the stores. I got in the car and drove home, watched TV until Deirdre called a few hours later. She was standing outside the clinic when I arrived. Her hair was shining under the streetlamps just starting to come on, and she smiled when she got in.