Moonbird Boy (5 page)

"What about his doctor?" Bo asked, wondering why they'd left the relative cool of the office.

"One of our volunteer doctors has been monitoring Mort's meds and watching the bloodwork," Dura explained. "But Mort was brought here from Los Angeles by his agent, Billy Reno."

"Nobody's named Billy Reno," Bo snorted. "But it sounds like he's the one who'll know how to reach Mort's family. Let's call him."

In seconds Bo heard the efficient voice of a woman who identified herself as "Mr. Reno's administrative assistant." After hearing the shocking news of Mort Wagman's death she was happy to contact Mr. Reno by cell phone in his car.

Billy Reno, genuinely affected by what he heard, parked his Lexus in a yellow zone on Beverly Hills's trendy Rodeo Drive and wept. Then he told Bo he was pretty sure Mort Wagman had no family. Bird's mother was a girlfriend Mort had never married, and she'd died years ago. Billy Reno said he didn't know Bird's real name, that Mort had just called the boy by pet names on the few occasions Reno had seen them together. Bird had gone to a private school in Pasadena called the Tafel School, he told Bo. He was sorry he didn't know anything else, but he'd phone Mort's lawyer and see what could be done to help the boy. There was plenty of money, he said. Mort Wagman had just been paid close to a million dollars to go crazy over a gym shoe.

From the lodge's driveway in front Bo heard the crunch of tires on gravel, businesslike voices. Sheriff’s deputies. It was too late to keep Mort's son out of the government bureaucracy she worked for. And too early to plan what a thrumming anger in her heart demanded—the capture of Mort's killer. For now she'd just do what the County of San Diego had trained her to do. Watch. Listen. Investigate.

Walking back through the lodge, she was aware of the high desert framed by window arches, the landscape where she'd found a friend in a man half her age. A brother. "There are sharks in the desert," she whispered to the ghost of Mort Wagman. "And I'm going to find the one that made your son an orphan."

After gulping a cup of coffee in the deserted kitchen Bo forced herself to go outside and approach Bird, try to explain the inevitable sequence of events. She wished she felt affection for the little boy, but she didn't. A nervous, restless child, Bird had often been merely an annoyance. Bo was particularly unimpressed with his short attention span and habit of catapulting himself into chairs and couches when she was occupying them. But Mort had said the boy's IQ tested close to the genius range. And he was cute, Bo admitted, with his flashing blue eyes and penchant for dramatic posturing. The Indians called him Moonbird for his pale and prone-to-sunburn skin, but Bo had thought more than once that Roadrunner would be a more appropriate sobriquet.

Often he burst into spontaneous recitations of the nonsense children's poetry he and his father both loved. The favorite, which Bo had heard several times more than her fragile mental state could bear, had given him his nickname and was called "The High Barbaree." It involved a Crumpet Cat and a Muffin Bird.

"When you see a Crumpet Cat," she hummed the poem's final stanza as she headed out into the desert glare, "Let your shout be heard; For you may save the life of... A pretty Muffin Bird!"

Zach was directing the sheriff’s deputies to an obscure little canyon where Mort Wagman's body lay as Bo approached. Bird ran back and forth between Zach and the Backcountry Sheriffs Department's green and tan four-wheel drive.

"Bird!" she called in the no-nonsense voice she'd heard Mort use. "I want to tell you what's going to happen now."

The child ran toward her, flailing his arms in a windmill pattern.

"Let's walk," she said.

Bird would never sit still for the detailed explanation of Child Protective Services he needed to hear. Bird rarely sat still for anything. Bo placed a firm hand on the boy's thin shoulder under his biker-style black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

"I know you've already been told about what happened to your dad," she began. "It's terrible for you."

That's it in a nutshell, Bradley. But don't plan on getting any awards for diplomacy.

A month away from work, she thought, and already she'd forgotten how to talk with children. Bird merely grabbed a rock from the ground and threw it angrily in the direction of a small cholla cactus.

"Daddy's dead," he pronounced, kneeling to gather more rocks. "Like your dog, Mildred. Do I have to cut my hair off like you did?"

Bo winced as the boy's bare knees pressed against the rocky ground. The sharp stones would hurt, but Bird appeared to feel no discomfort. In seconds he'd filled both front pockets of his baggy tan shorts with rocks. Bo wished she were on Mars.

"I don't think you need to do that," she replied, failing to address the real issue. "Your hair's already pretty short."

Bird ran a hand over his prep-school crew cut.

"Yeah," he said, dodging to one side of the paved walkway around the lodge and throwing another rock at the cholla. The rock missed its mark by a yard.

"Until we can find your relatives and they can come get you, you'll be cared for in San Diego," Bo pushed on. "First you'll go to a place where there are lots of other children, and then you'll probably go right away to a family who are called 'foster parents.' It'll be okay. Right now I need for you to tell me the names of your relatives—grandmas, grandpas, aunts, or uncles—and where they live. Can you do that, Bird?"

The boy's blue eyes narrowed.

"I don't have any relatives," he said, dashing ahead of Bo on the walkway. "I know Billy Reno, though. He's a friend of my daddy. Why don't you call Billy Reno?"

"I've already..." Bo began.

But Bird had doubled back and sped past her into the group surrounding the sheriff’s deputies. One of the deputies was talking on a shortwave radio in the Jeep while the other wrote on a form attached to a clipboard. Zach, his chocolate-colored skin ashen in the morning light, was moving through the group, talking to each person. Bo could see the deep furrow in his forehead as she ambled back, thinking.

Mort might have been shot by some random drunk roaming the desert at night with a gun, Bo conjectured glumly, but it wasn't likely. Things like that didn't happen. So who had been out there on an Indian reservation sixty miles east of San Diego in the middle of the night? Who could have known how to find Yucca Canyon, accessible only on foot? And why would anyone want to kill Mort Wagman, anyway? It occurred to Bo that she really knew absolutely nothing about the raven-haired young man she'd imagined was like a brother.

"Zach, why is everybody outside?" she asked a few minutes later. "It's getting hot."

"The Kumeyaay believe that a house where death comes has to be destroyed," he said. "Burned. There is a fear that the soul in the loneliness of death will try to take a companion from among the living. We don't want to burn the lodge, so we keep the awareness of the dead one outside. And no one can talk about him or mention his name. It's to free his spirit, not keep pulling his spirit back here by saying his name. It is to be kind to the spirit of the dead that we do this, and to protect ourselves. But ..." he paused to gesture at the deputies, "we have to talk about Mort to these people. So we will stay outside to do it. Inside the lodge nobody will mention his name again."

That explained why Dura had taken the phone outside for the call to Billy Reno, Bo thought. She wished the Indians would occasionally just explain things instead of telling symbolic stories, but that wasn't their way. "And a Kurok," she asked, "the ceremony like you did for me or, well, for Mildred last night. Will there be a Kurok for Mort?"

Zach glared irritably at the sky as though it, and not he, should be providing explanations. She could see that the whites of his eyes were bloodshot.

"A Kurok is traditionally done one year after the death. In the old days only certain people could make the dolls, the effigies that were used. Now it's just clothes on a stick frame. We might do one next year if..." His voice trailed away as he stared at the distant ocotillo.

"If what?" Bo asked.

"I don't know," Zach said, distracted.

"Mildred hasn't been dead for a year and she had a Kurok."

"We sometimes stretch the rules for our guests if we think it might help," Zach admitted. "We thought that might help you."

Bo nodded. "It did."

Behind Zach she could see one of the deputies approaching. A young woman with sandy hair held off her face by a red bandanna tied Indian-style around her head. On a plastic rectangle over her left shirt pocket was the name "W. Barlow."

"Hello, W. Barlow," Bo said, noticing a stiff bulkiness under the woman's tan uniform shirt. Body armor, the cops called it now. The thick undershirt they used to call a bulletproof vest. Bo guessed the deputies had all felt like wearing them into what they probably thought was a nest of psychotic killers.

"Wick," the young woman answered, nervous. "Wick Barlow. It's really Victoria, but I couldn't pronounce Vs as a kid. Uh, Mr. Crooked Owl here said, uh, said his wife told him you heard something, a shot maybe, during the night?"

Bo couldn't help smiling at the clipboard visibly trembling in the woman's hands.

"Let's go sit in the shade and I'll tell you everything I know," she said, indicating a picnic table under a large live oak near the lodge gate. "And don't worry, I haven't massacred anybody since that group of retired nuns who—"

"Bo..." Zach's voice rumbled ominously.

"Right," she answered.

Once seated at the picnic table, Wick Barlow smiled as if she were interviewing a convicted murderer additionally burdened with leprosy.

"I'm sorry I'm acting weird," she began. "It's just that your hair ..."

Bo had forgotten about that. "An Indian ceremony last night," she explained. "See, my dog died, and..."

The young woman's wide hazel eyes softened as she impulsively touched Bo's hand.

"Oh, no, I'm so sorry," she said. "I know what that's like. Our family's schnauzer died three years ago—his name was Max—and we still miss him every day. But I didn't know people came up here for, you know, things like that."

Wick Barlow seemed even younger than Mort Wagman. It occurred to Bo that the exponentially increasing youth of cops, doctors, and Hollywood comedians might suggest an alarming maturity in the eyes of the beholder.

"I'm here because I have manic-depressive illness and I'm just crawling out of a depressive episode," she explained. "And yes, I did hear a loud sort of cracking sound sometime during the night that could well have been a gunshot. It came from the south, from the direction of Yucca Canyon. I'd guess it was sometime between three and four a.m."

The words gave reality to what lay at the lip of a desert canyon less than a mile away. Just a still form on the ground, Bo imagined. And an Indian boy with a rifle on some nearby rock. Already two more cars had pulled into the lodge driveway. There would be photographs of the body, a chalk outline on the gritty, baked desert dirt. Then Mort Wagman's body would be gone.

"Have you called Child Protective Services about Bird, Mort's son?" she asked the young deputy.

"First thing. We called just as soon as Mr. Crooked Owl told us the little boy was here. There's a social worker on the way to get him right now."

Bo looked at the lodge with its massive walls, the people who had cared for her during the doomful exhaustion of depression. She didn't want to leave, but it was time. There were things to do. The social worker would be somebody from one of the CPS Immediate Response units. He or she would transport Bird to the receiving home, complete a preliminary file documenting the circumstances, and then transfer the case over for legal investigation. By this afternoon Bird's case would be assigned to a Court Investigation unit, one of which employed Bo. She knew all the investigators. She'd have no trouble tracking Bird through the system.

Giving Wick Barlow her office phone number, Bo walked through the Kumeyaay staff and other guests back to the lodge. Everybody was still outside except Old Ayma, who no longer lurked on the fringes of the group.

From the lodge phone Bo called her own office in the heart of San Diego. Estrella Benedict answered on the second ring.

"Es," Bo said, "can you drive up here and get me as soon as possible? And would you mind calling Maria at Hair & There in Ocean Beach? See if I can get in for a haircut this afternoon.

Yeah, I'm coming down the hill. I'll be back at work tomorrow.

Bob Thompson woke with the grandfather of all hangovers and a hotel bedsheet roped across his chest. Somebody had thrown the heavy quilted bedspread over his lower half, making him sweat like a racehorse. Probably Tamara, he assumed. Or was her name Tabitha? Tamika? Something that began with a T. Whatever her name was, if she didn't stop flipping TV channels with the damned remote control he was going to vomit. The kaleidoscoping screen only increased the nauseating spin of the room.

"Stop," he managed to say, lurching to his feet and pointing at the remote. She'd opened the drapes and a slice of yellow sunlight caught him in the throat like the side of a board. Bathroom. Fast.

It wasn't the first time he'd tossed his cookies in a hotel crapper, he smiled to himself five minutes later. And it wouldn't be the last. He felt better already as a hot shower washed the night's residue from his well-maintained body. No point in letting yourself go to seed just because you were fifty-something. Flab was bad business.

Whatever-her-name-was had already showered, he noticed. And left that woman-smell of lotion and makeup in the air. He loved the smells that women had, both the tantalizing promise of their perfume and the salty pungency that came later. He'd fallen in love with it at fifteen when his uncle took him to a pricey whorehouse for his birthday. He never tired of it. But it was expensive. Women were expensive.

In the magnifying mirror he shaved carefully and arched his chin to both sides. Nobody could see the hairline scars from the facelift. He couldn't even see them himself without his contacts. And the surgery had removed the neck folds and jowls that made him look like his father. He'd told Darcy, his wife, that the surgery was a necessity of his business. His investors expected an image, he said. And it was true.