A World the Color of Salt (17 page)

That took me by surprise. In fact, I was shocked. “You never told me that.”

“Well, you never told me you were a stripper before, now, did you?”

I shut my eyes, didn't say anything.

“Roland let me know his whole history. He even told me he'd been picked up and questioned last week. Now,
that
is honest. God, can you believe?”

“The coincidence of him moving in practically next door?”

“Yes. That you and I were right there, right looking at him through that mirror, and six days later . . .”

Yes, I could believe the coincidence. Coincidence kills. That's what it's all about. You, here, in your parents' house when they're on vacation and a plane drops out of the sky on
their
house and no other; you, there, when one mad Iranian decides to drive his truck into a barracks, and you supposed to leave yesterday. Or even simple things, like you in a strange part of town, crossing the street, seeing your boyfriend eating corn dogs with a girl who makes it clear she knows how to use her lips, him practically falling down her blouse. Or you asking for a job at the very same moment one comes available. Coincidence. It's not all bad. I could believe it. Most of the time. But I also couldn't help wondering whether the Dugdales had seen Patricia's license-plate number down at the station, sure that this whole mess was somehow my fault.

“I told him all about you. He wants to meet you. See, he's trying. Give him the benefit.”

“You told him what about me?”

“That you do police stuff. I didn't tell him about the other, the stripper business, 'cause I figured—”

“Patricia?”

“What?”

“Enough, okay? I've got to go.”

When she said good-bye, she sounded hurt, but I couldn't help that.

I felt a knot in my stomach that a trip to the water cooler couldn't settle. Back at my desk, I dialed the Cozy Inn. I could listen to Rowena Dwyer, and maybe that would be a good thing, not a sufficient thing, but a good thing, to do.

It was three o'clock. Mrs. Dwyer answered. I told her who I was and that I'd gotten her message—and that I was very, very sorry about her son. The voice I heard was not what I expected. The only piece of information I'd had about her was that Jerry had said his mother was a good businessperson. Maybe I expected some corporate heavy, though in the Midwest, where? Chicago, but he didn't say Chicago, and I didn't think it was. The voice was so soft I thought I'd awakened her. She said yes, she wanted to talk to me because her husband—her husband, not her ex-husband, she said—mentioned
me. “You're not on the police force, but you're somehow . . . ?”

“I'm a forensics specialist,” I said. “Do you know what that is?”

“Not exactly.”

“I collect evidence from a crime scene. We process it at the crime lab and try to figure out what happened.”

She thought immediately only of fingerprints. I told her we didn't have much. What I didn't tell her was that even if we collected latents—the fingerprints not in blood, but the hidden ones, like off the magazines—matching up is not a certainty; neither is the process fast. If a print isn't nice and neat, as on a fingerprint card, with each little pinky rolled by a cop and pressed in a square so you know where the top is and where the bottom is, matching them up is hell on wheels. After working six months in Prints, you need glasses, even with the aid of a computer, though the computer is such an improvement it's hard to complain. I'd tried reaching Betty Brankoff in Prints earlier, but she wasn't there and whoever answered her phone sounded like he'd been on codeine too long. I left a message.

Throughout our talk, Mrs. Dwyer would stop, gather herself, and press on, but I got the idea that she was a strong person from what she said soon after our conversation began: “Jerry died seven days ago,” she said. She didn't say, “It happened seven days ago,” or talk about a better place, or ask why it happened to him. She said, “Jerry died seven days ago. That's seven days his killers have been alive that Jerry hasn't.”

I asked her what it was she thought I could do for her, why she wanted to talk to me. She said, “I'm not sure what at the moment. But I want you to know I'm here and I'm going to be here for a while. I may need to get in touch with someone.”

I said that I understood, but that if she wanted a counselor, I could refer her to the Social Services Department. It sounded cold to me even then.

She said, rather brittlely, “That's not what I meant. If I find out anything, I'd like to talk it over with someone close to the case.”

“I'm not really the one—” I began, but she interrupted me
with this: “Could we meet, Miss Brandon? I'd really like to talk to another woman.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'd like to, but you really should be talking to sheriff's investigators. Have you met Sergeant Gary Svoboda or talked to a Detective Felton?”

“I met Detective Felton. I expect to meet Sergeant Svoboda tomorrow. Tomorrow's the memorial service. In the afternoon I talk to your sergeant.” Tough cookie, she'd talk to the sergeant the afternoon of a morning funeral for her
son
. Once more I said I was sorry; that Jerry was a wonderful boy. I started to say: Because I really do understand. But why bring in someone else's grief? “Sorry” is what people said to me when I lost Bill. Other cops, their white dress gloves covering my hands, their eyes red with the emotion they couldn't bring to their lips but for that one inadequate word, said it. Their wives, hugging me with terror in their eyes, said it. You have to go through it in your own way, your own time.

I said, “I could maybe meet with you next week.” I'd give her time to get the service over with.

She said, “I'd like to do it tonight, if possible.”

It was a peculiar place to meet, Gianni's in Crystal Court, beneath the escalator. I never liked the idea of the place. You're dining at formal tables, served by waiters in tuxlike uniforms, while shoppers glide up and down the escalators next to you with their bags from fancy Italian dress shops, observing, if they wish, which fork you choose. Crystal Court's on the
fahncy
side of South Coast Plaza. Mannequins wear world globes for heads and sequined swimsuits with sequined beach capes. Women with red-red lipstick and white-white skin take their time strolling between shops, and men with silk hankies peeking out of their breast pockets glide by with them. The floors are pink marble, the elevators gleaming brass. On weekends someone's playing classical music on a black baby grand at the throat of the escalators, and now that Christmas was nearing, carols were being played. A gigantic fir tree with toy trains humming around it stood in the center.

We were to meet at five-thirty, and I told Mrs. Dwyer I'd be wearing a tan safari shirt, a black skirt, and black stockings.
It still hadn't rained, and the temperature had shot up to the eighties, so I was without a jacket. She said she had blonde hair and would be wearing a turquoise dress.

I sat dragging my fork over the white tablecloth at one of the little tables, making corn-row patterns. The waiter had brought me coffee and now wine, but he was still glaring though there was hardly anyone in the place. Six-ten, and no Mrs. Dwyer. When she was forty minutes late, I decided to leave. Maybe she'd changed her mind. I couldn't see the waiter, of course. A couple of women who came in after I did were looking around too, so I dug in my purse for money, preparing to leave, when I heard an “Excuse me.” A slender blonde woman stood over me. “I'm so sorry,” she said, “I just didn't understand the traffic.” She extended her hand and said, “Rowena Dwyer.”

She was younger than I'd expected. Under her eyes was shiny white stuff to hide circles. Her face was square, pretty. She wore a necklace of tiny white ceramic roses.

As if on cue, the waiter came out. We ordered salads and more wine and wound up mostly not eating them, me getting afraid that one of us, after the wine hit bottom, would get sloppy. I suggested bread, and called the waiter over again. Okay, a side of pasta too.

What Mrs. Dwyer wanted was something I couldn't give: assurance that the hideous thing that happened to her would not happen to some other mother's son. Verification that people did indeed spend the rest of their lives in jail for crimes like these. I couldn't tell her that, either. Sixty percent of all violent crimes are committed by 10 percent of the people that get put in prison, so what does that tell you? It tells you the creeps get out to do more crime, and, in fact, a fifteen-year sentence for murder one is usually completed in seven.

“I left Jerry with his father when he was fifteen,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “You can see his father is a lot older than I am. I needed to get my head straight, and he was a good father, so why not?” She was blaming herself for not having had more time with her son. She asked me if she could smoke in here, and though I didn't think so and didn't care for it myself, I nodded. As she lit up, she tossed her shoulder-length hair back. I could imagine what she'd look like at a bar, this single
lady, making no-nonsense talk with someone eager to take her home.

“What do you do in Wichita, Mrs. Dwyer?”

“Call me Rowena.” I thought she'd be about forty, forty-two. “I'm a creative facilitator,” she said, and smiled for the first time.

“What's that? Art shows or something?”

“No. I put inventors and buyers together. A matchmaker. Only it's business, not love.”

“That sounds very interesting.”

“It can be.”

“Mrs. Dwyer, what kind of friends do you think your son hung out with here?”

“I've talked to my son's friends. That's all I did the first two days. Police talked to them too.”

“You're pretty sure, then, that nothing funny was going on? I mean, even peripherally, with Jerry an innocent bystander?”

She looked at me dead-on. “Kids don't bullshit me.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette and then said rapidly, “Jerry was a handful, yes, when he was younger. But it was because he was big as much as anything, didn't know what to do with all that motor energy. But he never lied to me. He'd come right out and tell me what he did if I asked him. I know the kind of boys he hangs out with. They're all right. I don't think there were drugs. I don't think there was that kind of trouble. But, then, no mother wants to think her kid was into drugs, do they?” She looked at me with an expression of instantaneous doubt and disgust, that maybe she'd been taken in, like thousands, maybe millions, of other mothers.

I said, “I just wanted your opinion. I've met some of his friends too, and they seemed all right.”

“It was a robbery, pure and simple,” she said. “They brought in that one set of suspects, didn't they, people who do this sort of thing? Then they let them go. I'd like to know why. Nobody will tell me anything.”

I told her the Dugdales weren't suspects—officially.

“So they have no leads is what you're saying.”

“The police don't tell us lab people everything either.”

“So they have nothing.”

I couldn't say they did. But what I could give her were the
histories and personalities of people I worked with, their dedication, their cleverness. I told her what I'd said before, what I'd heard others say along the way, in the academy, on the force, and here now, in the lab. That murder is unacceptable. That homicide cases stand open until they're solved. “This one won't get lost,” I said, echoing Joe Sanders. “It may not be today, it may not be next week, but it'll get solved.”

“That's not good enough,” she said.

I said nothing. Waited for her to make the next move.

“Listen,” she said, removing the motel's card from her handbag and writing “Rowena Dwyer—Jan. 2” on it. “I'm staying here a few weeks. Other times I'll be at George's.” She said she tried staying with her ex-husband when she got out here. They'd hold each other and cry. It got too much for her. She had to leave, and took the motel room then.

“I don't mean to be impertinent, Mrs. Dwyer . . .”

“You're not. Say it. What?”

“Why are you staying?”

She took a sudden drag on her cigarette, blew it out, and said, “I don't know. Let's say it's to keep on somebody's ass. You can understand that, can't you?”