A World the Color of Salt (29 page)

I nodded, knew it was necessary for her to tell me about this life. I glanced at the window of the store next door, a plaster-of-Paris store where you buy chunky objects bare and paint them ugly colors. Rust rabbits with turquoise ribbons were clustered in a corner, their beady, hard eyes looking our way, and in front of them, a green chipmunk with a tiny Christmas wreath on its tail looked poised to run.

I said, “So Annie isn't here today?”

“I'm afraid she vanished last Friday. I don't think she liked having to keep house,” she said, and smiled for the first time. “She had kitchen duty for over a month, but that's because one of the girls had bad dermatitis and couldn't get her hands in water
or
rubber gloves, and the other women had had their turn. She managed to wangle out of it the month before, so I stuck her on it. That seemed fair to me, doesn't it to you?”

No argument from me. “What does she look like, would you say,” I asked.

“Oh, kind of heavy. Her hair won't do much anymore, she keeps dyeing it. She's . . . let's see if I can remember . . . about fifty-five. Yes. She's fifty-five August sixth. You can come in, see my records, if you like.”

She nodded over her shoulder, and in the hallway behind her, I saw a woman—a dim silhouette, actually—start to cross the hallway, then stop and look our way, two holes where the eyes would be, a short line of nose, a scallop of chin. She moved on as I stepped in, and then a burst of laughter came
from the room she entered, and I heard other women's voices, and caught the heavy scent of what was probably a Christmas bottle of perfume.

Carolyn led me into a waiting room, a sun room, my mother used to call it when we lived in a house in Northern California for a short while. But that was where you'd face an acre of mountain laurel and sage, not a grimy, too-long-between-rains Hollywood, U.S.A., street.

I sat on a brown couch and studied the philodendron tendrils that dangled from a green plastic pot over the window, the roots spidering out of the holes in the bottom. Under my feet was a faded Indian rug, fringed on the ends. A press-board coffee table sat in front of me.

What Carolyn brought me was semiuseful. She handed me a folder and said she'd be right back.

Annie had been there two months this time. Three years before, she'd spent six weeks in Debut. Twice before that she'd been in halfways: one in Oklahoma City in 1972 and one in Reno, 1983. This was all information volunteered, in her own handwriting, on the paperwork. After the printed words, “Substance abuse?” she had written, “Booz and Speedballs.”

Carolyn came back in with a tray of coffee and cinnamon rolls. “There's plenty, and I'm glad to have the company,” she said, almost whispering. Then she sat beside me and cranked her head to read the file along with me.

I said, “Seems she's had problems quite a while.”

“She goes on binges.” Carolyn was tearing at her cinnamon roll, eating as she talked. “I think it's harder for Annie's type. They can go
years
without taking a single drink, but when they slip, they slip big,” she said. “Annie said she wasn't really an addict.” Carolyn raised an eyebrow. “We were working on that.”

“She wrote down speedballs,” I said.

“What's that again, exactly? I have a hard time keeping them straight.” Her face was scrunching up. In another life we could've been talking about kids and PTA and husbands who don't appreciate us.

“Coke and heroin, cooked. How was Annie with the other women? I mean, how did she get along?”

“She accused people of taking her stuff two or three times.
Say, you wouldn't like to come back for Christmas later? Haven House, over in Brentwood, invited us over. It should be
real
nice. Two twenty-five-pound turkeys and I think a ham. You're welcome.”

I said, No, thanks, I had to be going. Her face fell, and I thanked her again for her time and graciousness.

Walking back to my car, I looked up at the tinsel decorations strung across the street, the red and silver strands winking as they rippled, no one but me and a raptor-looking man behind the steering wheel of an older Rolls-Royce, stopped at a light, to appreciate them.

It wasn't till I'd passed Wilshire on the 405 that I thought about Phillip Dugdale again, how he had sat with his slicked-back hair in the interview room, glaring at the detective, not giving him any more than he wanted to.

I popped in the bird tape again. I kept having to rewind it and relisten, losing track of which song was which, thinking about the faceless man announcing the burrs and croaks and trills in his monotone voice. Who was it who'd go wading in a marsh, or pushing back tick-ridden branches, microphone in hand, to record this gab of nature for posterity?

Gary had mentioned that Phillip lived in Carson. Carson was next to Long Beach and sort of next to San Pedro, where Roland worked. I pulled off the freeway at Wilmington near Spire's, “The Pinnacle of Eating.” There were phone booths outside, but I went in to call Patricia's number again, it being cheaper than from my car phone, and I could get another cup of coffee. I dialed; no luck.

I borrowed the phone book and went to the counter to sit, opening it to “Taverns.” Asked the waitress for coffee and three dollars' worth of change. Said to myself, Here goes nothin'.

The Goodyear airship floated in the distance ahead like a whale quietly intent on warm waters. A man in the restaurant told me I could take Wilmington Boulevard south to Sepulveda, and Sepulveda east to Long Beach if I didn't want to get back on the freeway. I'd spent thirty minutes dialing the numbers of drinking establishments in the Carson/Long Beach/Wilmington area, found several open, and asked if anyone who worked there was named Judy or Jubey. I didn't complete the list, though, because my coins kept not wanting to stick in the machine, rolling on through to the coin-return slot so that I had to try three or four times to make just one call. “The ones outside are worse,” the waitress told me as she rushed past to take a bathroom break. So I decided to travel.

I was now in an industrial area, surrounded by mute and towering constructs I knew had to have been designed by human beings, built by them, presumably tended by them, yet inhabited by none. Rusted trucks were parked in gravel lots, but nothing moved. Here I could go see Dark Man, mutilated and on the run within the channels and walkways of these abandoned hulks, see him slipping under the colored pipework: blue where the boiler steam travels, orange where the effluent flows, white where encapsulated electrical cables join with yet other conduit to form geometrical mazes, and say, Hey, Bud, how about a game of poker and a beer? We could sit there in the shadows together, one across from the other; and he would like that because I would show respect, and would not ask to see his face.

I drove along Wilmington like the man said, then onto Sepulveda
Boulevard, where my car rattled over asphalt ribbed from the weight of hundreds of tanker trucks, and saw one coming at me jiggling too, despite its weight, and wondered if it would stop at the stop sign like I had. The driver had a beard, and I could see his jaw moving and his white teeth as he chewed gum, but I could not see his eyes for a dark baseball hat he had pulled down low on his forehead. I rolled down my window and moved through the intersection as he made a right turn, and heard
boo-boo-boo-BOOM
, the sound of classical music thundering from the cab.

There was a long stretch of chain-link fence corralling tank farms, metal windbreaker slats woven in the link, and on top, three-stranded barbed wire to keep out anyone who decided, for whatever reason, a tank farm is a good place to be. The barbed wire was supposed to angle
out
, toward the street, but on one side of the road the wire angled in toward the yard, maybe to contain the workers, but at any rate I hoped the supervisor on that one didn't get a raise.

Sepulveda became Willow when I wasn't looking, and I was in civilization again. I passed a cemetery right there in town, with real headstones, upright, not flat for mowers. I passed a twenty-one-minute Laundromat, a war-games shop, and then a joint with a woman's nude silhouette in red and the words
HARDBODIES
—
GIRLS
,
POOL
,
FOOD
,
BEER
, but today it Was closed.

Graffiti coated the
WELCOME TO LONG BEACH
sign. Good, I thought—I'm in the right territory. I knew about the troubles Long Beach was having, with a small number of police and a massive and rapid increase in crime. This year in Orange County we had 170-odd homicides, the most in our history, and I could not even imagine the chore L.A. County cops faced, some 700 or so homicides to investigate. To top it off, the coroner's office was receiving young Cambodian men of the Hmong tribe, dead of mysterious causes. They'd go to bed at night, wake up dead in the morning; and trying to trace their medical backgrounds was impossible because the Hmong have no written language.

While I waited at a signal, two men, one black and one Mexican, rolled a white dented VW up an incline to my left to reach the intersection. Ahead I could see a few people drifting in and out of doorways, and as I slowed at one corner, an
older boppin' black man, silver watch chain draped across his vest, black beret shading half his face, and an earphone wire running into his shirt pocket, stood waiting to cross at the light. His beard was swept neatly with gray, and as our gazes met, he nodded deeply. I nodded back, some acknowledgment passing between us, he and I alone in our irrevocably separate worlds.

I turned onto Tenth, not wanting to get too close to the Queen Mary and Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose, places where Roland and Phillip Dugdale would surely never be, and I got lucky. In my rearview mirror I saw a woman with dark hair walking down the sidewalk, wearing a pink blouse, black shorts that pinched her plump legs, a black cowboy hat, and high heels. There must be a bar around here somewhere. I circled and parked in front of a closed restaurant with Oriental writing on it, looked around, got out, locked my door.

The bar was there all right, in the direction the woman had come from. There was no name above the open door, a door that looked like my father's padded and buttoned office chair, but locals wouldn't need a name; it would be called Freddie's or The Club, or some such, and that's all you'd need to know.

It had been a long time since I'd been in a place like that, a bar-bar, not a watering hole for cop-a-roozies. Peanut shells covered the floor. There was a silent jukebox in the middle of the back wall, a wall made of huge dark beams like telephone poles. I walked past three customers seated at the bar and stood waiting for the woman behind it, who was kneeling down on the duckboards trying to stuff bags of chips into a cabinet under the counter. I heard her swear when they wouldn't all fit in, the slippery little devils plunking down by her feet. She then picked up the bags and shoved them at an angle deep into the recesses behind another door. When she stood up, I said, “Merry Christmas.”

“What'll make it merrier?” she said, lifting her head so she could see through her glasses, which had slipped a little down her nose. She wore a man's white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and her graying hair was done up in a bun on top of her head.

“How 'bout a Coors?”

“You got it.”

Behind her, fake snow was blown onto the mirrors in waves just above the bottle necks. I hoisted onto a stool, glancing down to where the men sat, and found them watching me; but then they turned their heads back into profiles and began to sip their drinks.

I said when she came back, “Your name wouldn't be Judy, would it?”

“I hope not,” she said, and smiled. “The last Judy I knew had five kids and another in the oven.” Her teeth were the color of weak tea, but her lips were pretty and her skin was perfect. She went down to the three men and pincered some empties, then came back my way.

“Would you happen to know of a bartender around named Judy? Or maybe Jubey?” I said.

“If you're lookin' for a job, honey, this don't look like the place for you.”

Three times I asked the question that afternoon, in three bars along Alamitos Street and Anaheim Street. I told myself it was pointless, but I couldn't stop; told myself you get a lot of information just nosing around. As a cop, you see things that don't look right, so you stop and ask a question and find an arrestable situation or people needing help. But it was seven years since I was a sworn and had a
duty
to go nosing. Maybe I had too much time on my hands. After bar number four, I did give up, and headed back toward the freeway, past the few remaining oil rigs that at one time numbered in the thousands along the Pacific coastline.

Almost to the on-ramp, I checked my gas gauge and got a chill: The needle was on “E.” I never let my car drain that close to empty. In college I drove a clunker to night classes, and one time I read about a woman who ran out of gas at night, so she trudged off for a gallon. On the way back two men poured her own gasoline over her and set her on fire. The only reason anyone knew what happened was that this creature from the black lagoon came walking into a liquor store, went up to the clerk, told her story, collapsed, and died. That was when I bought my first gun.

I pulled into a Unocal station. After paying, I asked the attendant in the glass booth if I was still in Long Beach.

“Signal Hill,” he said. The whites of his eyes glowed in a nest of dark lashes.

“Signal Hill? I didn't even know we had a Signal Hill. Do you know if there are any restaurants around open?”

“Take Cherry,” he said, and waved an arm eastward.

“Do any of them have bars, do you know?”

His eyes shifted left a moment, thinking, My, these American women are something else, I guess, and I found myself giving the guy a stupid story, saying I had an uncle who worked at a bar around here someplace I was trying to find. By this time I was really feeling dopey and discouraged, thinking, You do not know what you're doing, Smokey, get the fuck home; nobody's working but the poor immigrants who don't know how to stop—and you. Instead, I passed over the 405 again and drove north along Cherry. One more try.