A World the Color of Salt (18 page)

Climbing the stairs when I got home, I felt jittery, maybe from too much coffee, and when I saw my screen door propped open with something, a wash of dread coursed over me, and almost satisfaction, as if I'd been expecting something to be amiss, and now it was. In the door was a rolled, throwaway newspaper; that's all. But mine had come already this morning, and I had tossed it in as I was leaving for work. The paper was tilted up on its end in definite purpose. I picked it up and went in, and when I threw it on the counter above the garbage can, I noticed a long weed fall from it; and when I went to pick them both up to chuck them, I had a strange feeling, and unrolled the paper, and saw a handful of buckwheat, its clusters of pink flowers mashed, and a torn branch of lemonade berry, the red berries from it bled onto the newsprint. Fuck this! Was this funny? Somebody's idea of a gift? I wondered if some new cowboy had moved in downstairs—I
recognized the flowers from the marsh below the bluff west of my house.

The next morning I tried to see Joe. “Gone on a trip,” somebody said. Gone. I should have made a point to see him more during the week, learn what the progress was on the case. The kiss threw me off. As much as I cared for him, that strange kiss made me wonder if I'd estimated him correctly. I'd tried hard not to give the incident more than fleeting moments of thought, and didn't drop by as often as I might have had it not happened. It was just too overwhelming, trying to figure what a sudden, aggressive, even desperate kiss meant. I didn't have
time
to think of what I was going to do about it, or frame whatever it was I should say when the subject came up. Maybe, I thought, it would never come up. We'd just go on like nothing happened, two people who enjoyed working together. But it had also occurred to me that he was from the old school, a generation away from mine, in which if a woman fell victim to her own bad judgment and to unforgiving office gossip, she became, in some people's minds, open prey. After all, I'd misjudged Patricia. Why not Joe?

I went to talk to Trudy. “Who's in charge of the Dwyer case while Joe S. is gone?” I asked her. She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me blankly, a pencil still in her hand.

“Talk to Stu, I guess.” The distance seemed to be there again. She returned to her drawing. Under Trudy's wrist a woman's face was taking shape.

“A Doe?” I asked. She said yes.

In the course of a year, the coroner's office would see approximately 2,500 bodies, maybe 150 of them murder victims. Of those 2,500, maybe 100 will have no ID for a while. Then the coroner's people go to work trying to identify them, bringing in specialists who reconstruct faces—by sticking match sticks in the bones at certain heights and then blanketing over the whole thing with clay—and running restored fingerprints through the sheriff's computer system, and then the state's, and the FBI's. People want to
know
when their loved ones die.

I told Trudy about my concern, the magazines. She didn't know. I went back to my desk and phoned Gary, left a message,
then called Bud Peterson. He told me the magazines had been sprayed with ninhydrin to bring up the latents.

Joe Sanders came through the doorway of my office and stopped as soon as he saw me on the phone, turning as if to go back out, but waiting. So he
was
here. He hadn't left.

Maybe he'd thought it through and decided I deserved an apology. I held his look but had to talk to Peterson.

“All of them?” I said.

“We can't do every magazine, every page.”

“Well, then, you
didn't
dust them.”

“I said we did.”

Joe waved a hand at me and left.

Peterson was going on: “We do our job in a conscientious manner. Just like you. We got lifts off plenty other places.”

“But none turned out a positive.”

“Yet,” he said.

I was getting nowhere. I had a lot of work to do. After I hung up, I started in on just getting paper off my desk again. It piles up like you wouldn't believe. Somebody wanted to start a softball team—the first and the third sheets in my “In” bin. A missive misdirected to me: a report on an infant SID case that turned out to be botulism. Then a reminder from Joe, in memo form, that we shouldn't use the term
perimortem
to convey the approximate time of death; it won't hold up in court.

I got a call from Joe one minute before lunch. Still here. “Smokey, I have to tell you: I'm sorry.”

It took me by surprise he'd bring it up first. “What's going on, Joe? You've been different lately.”

“Smokey, I can't talk now. I just want to apologize and tell you it won't happen again.”

What came out was, “That's cool.” Put some distance between us, even generational. It brought silence on the other end, and then I felt pity. He really shouldn't be in such a spot.

“We'll talk, Smokey.”

“It's okay, Joe—I
said
. Really.”

“No. We'll talk.”

“Wait, Joe. I'm a little bugged right now. I found something on my doorstep that kind of unnerved me. Just flowers rolled up in a newspaper, but it kind of bothers me.”

“You've got an admirer.”

“They were crushed. Wrung, is a better word for it.”

‘I've really got to run, Smoke.”

“Have a good trip.”

I put the phone down, realized I was tired. No, I was hungry, the smell of popcorn wafting my way from the direction of the microwave. Trudy Kunitz came walking down the hallway with a paper bag of popcorn. “Trudy,” I called. “Spare some of that?”

“Sure.”

As she marched in, I opened my drawer and took out a folded paper towel from the ladies' room. She spilled out about two handfuls onto it. “You're a lifesaver,” I said.

“The old stomach complaining, huh?”

“Say, you want to go to lunch?”

“I've got a big backlog. The DA's office is on my back for some stuff too. That biker case? The third victim in the biker case died this morning, so we got a triple.” She was referring to two, now three, execution-type murders that occurred in Anaheim, the place where kiddie kitsch meets violent crime.

She said, “Do you know there's a word for stomach rumbling?” She was going to tell me. “
Borborygmus
,” she said.

“It's that obvious?”

“I could hear you out in the
hall
.” She was being positively friendly. She looked me directly in the eye and leaned one haunch against the end of the desk while she munched her popcorn. Maybe all she needs is a prop like popcorn.

I said, “I like your blouse.”

“Oh, yeah, I bought it off my brother.” It was black and had lightning strikes across it in rainbow colors. “My brother's eleven. I can wear his clothes. The shirts, anyway.”

“Whatever works,” I said, smiling at her.

“Hey,” she said casually, shoving three fingers' worth of popcorn in her mouth, “you hear Sanders left his wife?”

So Joe L. Sanders left his wife, huh? That really pissed me off. How could he leave Jennifer and move, apparently, to my neck of the woods, and not tell me? Feel so sorry for himself he grabs me as if I'm his property and plants one on me that even hurt my lip? At the same time I wanted to tell him I'm sorry, that I know it hurts to lose someone, even when it's long overdue. I'd loved before and I'd love again, and one thing I know is that love don't come without price, pardon the lack of grammar. And then I'd tell him not to come within fifty feet of me till he gets over his divorce-dotty-blues, wherein everybody's nuts for at least a year and a half.

Friday afternoon I got in touch with the woman in CAL-ID about the magazines. She said on magazines in store racks there could be billions of fingerprints. Billions and billions. And then she said she never saw any magazines from the Dwyer case.

I called Gary's number. A deputy I didn't know answered and took my message asking about the photo array.

An hour and a half later I stepped away from my desk for five minutes, and, wouldn't you know, Gary called back. Kathleen answered it at the front desk. She left a pink slip that said, “Gary Boda. No luck on mugs,” and then “K.K.,” her initials, and the eyes and mouth of a happy face. She was lousy about taking messages; I was glad she got that much. But she was definitely cheery. The lab director liked cheery.

The “No luck on mugs” disheartened me. Gary wasn't supposed to take the six-pack to Emilio until tomorrow, but he must've squeezed out an hour.

That night I got home and walked my old-lady neighbor's dog, even though it was really too dark to take him safely down to the bay. Mrs. Lambert gets along fine most of the time, but sometimes arthritis prevents her from letting that beautiful thing out, and I feel sorry for him. She named the setter after the redheaded boyfriend who gave the pup to her for her sixty-third birthday. The dog stayed longer than the man. Farmer whimpers and slobbers when he sees me, knowing what I'm there for. Down on the path, he strains to investigate. If I think a park ranger isn't bound to come by, I let him off leash and he plays games with whatever croaks or whistles under the brush, then comes running back, tongue dangling out one side and a smile on his face. He gets locked in the mud sometimes, comes clogging out with black rubber balls glued to his feet. More than once I've nearly landed on my fanny in that mud-and-plankton biomass. Back at the condo, out on the front lawn, I have to hose him off. I keep a small bottle of dishwashing detergent in the bushes near the faucet. He whimpers, but he loves it, I know he does.

This evening it was colder than I liked, a wind cutting in off the farther waters, though it had been hot all day. My ears began to ache soon after we went out. I wouldn't let Farmer go far. I felt grouchy, and sorry I took him out in the first place, and, after about fifteen minutes, took him home. Climbing the stairs, I thought about the silence in my apartment, and that there was nothing on TV Friday nights anymore since
Miami Vice
went off. My favorite had been
Crime Story
, its endings bitter or unresolved as in real life. They moved
America's Most Wanted
to this night, but I got tired of watching it and always felt a little prurient doing so anyway, I wasn't sure why. So I went out for roasted chicken and a salad from Albertson's before I picked up my groceries.

When I got home, I wondered who might still be at the lab. Before I unloaded the groceries, I dialed. Billy answered.

“You're always there,” I said. “Or somewhere.”

“Everybody's gotta be somewhere. Actually, I was waiting for you to call,” he said.

“Listen, Billy? Hearken back to the Kwik Stop murder in Costa Mesa. Did you see anybody collect any magazines?”

“Wouldn't Joe be able to tell you that?”

“He's on a trip somewhere.”

“You call Prints?”

“Yes. I get conflicting stories.”

“Check with Property.”

“I'm asking you, Billy.”

“I have no idea. My job is taking pictures. You figure the killers thought they were in the library?”

“I think the assailants were in that store a long time before commission, and they might've been looking at magazines, you know, to eyeball the place awhile.”

“Can't help ya, doll.”

“What could we have missed? Think, Billy. I know you just do photos, but brainstorm with me here.”

“You make it sound like I
just
do photos. I'll have you know some people value me for other expertise.”

I was silent, thinking about what other avenue I could push somebody to pursue. Billy was trying to be funny, and I wasn't cooperating.

He said, “Hey, it's Friday night.”

“I know it's Friday night.”

“You got a date?”

I was quiet again.

“Obviously not, or you wouldn't be on the phone to me. How about it? Let's you and me go out. Maybe to Dove Street. Been there?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, maybe to . . . I know: Crackers. It's a great place. They got singers, dancers, a guy in a gorilla suit who'll dance with you better than me. Well, I take that back. But you can eat good ribs and sing along to the dirty lyrics.”

“
No
, Billy.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not going out with you. I told you that.”

“All work and no play . . .”

“Stop wooing me with clichés.
Stop wooing me.
”

He cooed and whined a little bit, but he knew it was a losing game. I couldn't get mad at him. I finally even had to laugh when he asked me, “You don't like people of Armenian descent, do you?”

“Who was the patrol cop on that case, Billy? You remember?”

“Senior Patrol Collis Banks.”

“Hm. You're good, Katch.”

“That means you've changed your mind? No. Sigh. But talking to Banks won't do you any good. Why don'tcha just read the file?”