Red Light (35 page)

"I
don't think it's Bailey, or the evidence itself. I think it's Brighton making
sure the crime lab stays under his fist."

"It was never
under his fist."

"Gilliam would
disagree," said Evan.

"Gilliam doesn't
always see the big picture."

"Hmmm. I guess
I'd
disagree with that."

"Bailey,"
she said again.

Evan
shrugged. "Thirty-two years is a long time. What I heard was nobody cared
about her then, so why should anybody care about her now?"

"That's
what everybody says. Let's go over to your father's. Maybe he'll tell me what
he remembers."

O'Brien smiled, something
impish in his face. "Yeah. I'm sure Dad 'll help you out all he can."

James and Margaret
O'Brien's graves were under a big sycamore at the north end of the plots. The
tree was naked now, but there were still some big brown leaves splayed out on
the grass, big as dinner plates, pressed into the grass by the rain.

Evan
reached down and swept a soggy leaf off the headstone. "I got the black
granite, too, because the sun's not supposed to fade it as fast."

"That's what
they say."

Merci
read the inscription on the stone.

James
and Margaret O'Brien

Death
Cannot Part-------- One Love in
Two
Hearts

"That's
a good saying," Merci said.

"I made it
up."

"Nice. What was
it like back then, Evan? I mean, when you were growing up out in the
desert?"

"I liked it. It
was different. We had a swimming pool that collected scorpions all summer and
stinkbugs all winter. Lots of land to run around on. Room to run and
think."

"What
about your parents? Happy, pretty much?"

"Oh,
Hell,
no. Fights. Lots of fights. Mom going after Dad. ' Dad defending. Ever see two
drunks fight?"

"No."

"Don't."

"Fights
about what?"

He looked at her
askance, then seemed to reach an agreement with himself. "Usually about
the desert. How it was Dad's fault they were there. She always said—yelled—that
Dad got kicked out of a good job in a good place, then dragged her out to the
desert, which she hated, upshot was Dad was a coward for leaving. What he was
afraid, I don't know. Was she just busting his balls because she missed beach?
I don't know. Mom thought that if Dad had stood up for himself and been a real
man, she wouldn't be stuck in that dust bucket town, finally drank herself to
death in seventy-six. Then Dad did what he did five years ago. The old house is
mine now. That was part of his last and testament. I figured I'd sell it, but I
haven't. It's one of those things that remind me of them. How do you sell a
house your parents killed themselves in? Doesn't seem altogether fitting."

Merci thought back to
her conversations with Clark and Thornton. “I thought Jim got a good job—pay
raise, promotion."

"He did. He went
straight to full sergeant. That wasn't good enough for her."

Merci heard the
disdain in his voice. Evan reached out and touched the stone again. "I
took his side most of those fights. I mean, just to myself. If I said anything,
Mom would swat me around as hard as Dad, so I just kept quiet. I remember the
first seizure I ever had. I was five, six years old. They were fighting and I
had my hands up over my ears and I was screaming to myself, know, screaming
inside your head so nobody can hear you and you can’t hear anybody? Mom and Dad
were going at it out by the pool. Same old miserable argument about going back
to a real life. Next thing I knew I was on my back looking up through a bunch
of blood and they were kneeling over me. I thought one of them had hit me
again. Turns out, I just spazzed and cut myself on the coffee table."

"That's
a lot of pressure on a kid."

Evan shrugged.
"Yeah, but you know, they loved me. I knew they loved me. They were kind
of fucked up, all wrong for each other probably, but they loved me and I knew
that. They really weren't such bad parents. I'm not repudiating them. I don't
whine about that. They stood by me when it counted."

Merci thought about
her next words, decided to let them out. "I'm told Jim had a reputation
with the ladies."

Evan looked up at
her, held her gaze, held it longer. His eyes got narrower and duller. "He
was in the hospital room holding her hand when she died. I was holding the
other one. He outlived her by almost twenty years and he never had a girlfriend
or a date. Not one. Not one that I ever knew about. And I saw him a lot. We were
close. We talked. Who said that about him?"

Not for the first
time in her life Merci Rayborn wished she had just kept her mouth shut. Over
the man's grave of all the damned places to open her stupid trap. She figured
there was a special place in hell for people who never learned. Maybe she could
run
that
department by the time she was fifty-eight.

"It
doesn't matter, Evan."

"Yeah, well, it
does to me. So tell your stoolie to go sit on a red-hot poker. And if he
doesn't like that idea, tell him to come see me. I'll kick enough piss out of
him to fill a bathtub."

"All
right. I'll do that."

Evan stood and
sighed. "Nobody sticks up for the dead. We got to do at least that much
for them."

"At
least."

She listened to the
breeze in the trees again. Secrets in code, she thought, if you could just
crack it you'd have the world boxed.

You got to put it all in a box and throw the box away.

Do
you?

"Did
your father ever talk about the Bailey case?" she asked. He looked at her,
a little surprised, then sighed quietly. "Not much. Dad didn't talk shop.
Up to the day he died, he didn't talk shop."

"Was
Patti Bailey part of those fights?"

"Somebody
Bailey was mentioned. Yeah."

"Did
he know her?"

"I
can't remember. That whole story is vague, Merci. A long,
long
time ago.
I mean, I've had a lot to think about since he did it. That was five years ago,
almost. I think about him a lot, my mother a lot. I don’t think for even one
second about Patti Bailey. Know what I'm saying

She
looked at him, studied the sharp Irish face that was so difficult make serious.
But it was serious now.

"Why
did he do it, Evan?"

O'Brien
raised his eyebrows and sighed. "Something ate him away. I don't know what
it was. There was a big part of him I could never get to. I don't think anyone
could."

This
tracked with what Merci had learned about human beings through people like the
Purse Snatcher: You could never know every part of one. Parts. Most of a
person. But not all.

"I dream about
him," he said. "All the time. In the dreams he's alive and healthy and
we're doing things together. Things we never even in real life. Fishing. Flying
a plane. Playing catch with a baseball. I don't even like doing those things,
but I dream about doing them with him."

• • •

She spent another
half an hour back at Hess's grave, alone, standing in the damp turf with her
coat collar pulled up against the cool breeze. Two years, three months,
twenty-nine days. She thought of Hess and her heart ached; she thought of Mike
and it ached in a different way; thought of Aubrey Whittaker and Patti Bailey
and it ached in another. She felt like there were black vines growing inside
her, trying to choke that heart once and for all. Her mother had always called
it "your little wooden heart." No explanation. She thought of her mother
and then she thought of something her mother had told her once: When you're
feeling blue, honey, do something nice for someone else.

It was one of the few
things Marcella had ever told her that seemed to work. Merci had tried it.

Walking back toward
her car she called Paul Zamorra on his cell phone. His voice was very quiet.
She said she wanted to talk to him, face-to-face.

"Come
on over," he said. "I'm at home, moving furniture."

He gave her the
address.

Zamorra lived up in the
Fullerton hills, above the suburbs, in a Spanish style home tucked back behind
a long driveway. Merci parked and looked at the towering palm trees next to the
garage, the courtyard with the fountain and benches around it, the big
three-car garage with the doors swung open on Zamorra's work car, a late-model
van and a bright red BMW convertible.

She opened the gate
and walked into the courtyard: pots of flowers and plants placed artfully upon
the pavers, the fountain trickling into itself, bromeliads latched to one wall
and at least ten big bird-of-paradise plants in spectacular winter bloom. The
bright orange-blue heads seemed to watch her as she went to the door.

Zamorra
opened it before she knocked, let her in.

"Nice
place," she said.

"Janine
kept it up," he said. "Keeps it up."

Zamorra looked pale
and hungry. He was shaven and dressed as usual—suit pants and white shirt—but
the shirt was untucked and heavily marked with brown dirt.

"Did
you come to tell me you've requested another partner?"

"Not
really. I came to see if I could help. Do anything."

"Well,
you can help me get this hospital bed set up."

Zamorra led her down
an entryway, then past a living room with big windows that opened up to the
backyard: pool, barbecue area, a lawn green as an emerald. To her left was the
kitchen—about the size of Merci's whole house. What struck her was the silence.
No music. No birds chirping. No traffic outside.

"This
is quite a place, Paul."

"Janine's
got money. In the family."

"It looks loved."

"We bought it
cheap and remodeled. It was old enough to have asbestos in the ceilings so we
had it torn out. I wondered if some those slivers got into her brain somehow,
started things growing. The doctor said probably not. I asked him what
did
start it growing, and said bad luck."

"How is
she?"

Zamorra didn't
answer. He led Merci into a big suite at the far end of the house. The walls
were white and the carpet was cream and the celling seemed twenty feet high. A
sliding glass door opened outside to a trellised patio, a hot tub, and the
swimming pool.

Merci saw the big
mattress and box springs leaning against one the walls. The stand with its
rollers was propped up against them. Opposite, placed up next to a big wooden
headboard, was a very narrow bed with metal railings and a heavy electrical
cord running to the wall. There was a control pad with a cord, tied around one
railing so wouldn't slip down.

Zamorra pushed
something on the control and the head of the bed began to rise. He stopped it
and elevated the foot. Then he put them both back down. He watched the mattress
move with a questioning intensity and Merci wondered what he was seeing there.

"Great, isn't
it?"

"It'll help
her," said Merci.

"I figured I'd
sleep in the big bed, since you can only solo in this contraption. I figured if
she slept here, where she always slept, it would be good."

"Sure, make her
feel like normal."

"Yeah, normal.
Can you help me get the old stand over here?"

She balanced the big
wobbly thing, followed him toward the glass door, then set it down. The box
springs were easy, but the mattress weighed about a thousand pounds and didn't
have any handles. She grunted it atop the springs and shoved it square with her
knees.

Zamorra looked at the
old bed with the same interrogatory expression he'd had for the new one.

"They
cut her in half," he said. "The part of her that thinks and smiles
still works."

Merci
said nothing because what she imagined was not speakable.

She tried to take her
mother's advice, tried to come up with something nice. Something helpful,
fortifying, optimistic. For another of the few times in her life, Merci Rayborn
couldn’t think of nothing to say.

"Look, Merci.
I'm not going to dwell on this. I don't want your sympathy or your horror. I
don't want you to even think about all this. It's our thing. We'll handle it.
But you're my partner, and you need to know the score. That's the score."

"All
right."

"I got the
shrink's number. I'll call her when I'm ready to call her. You did your part.
The fact you gave it to me means something. Noted."

She nodded in
agreement, a little pissed off that Zamorra could flatten her so easily with
regard to Joan Cash's QPR counseling. But what was she supposed to do, argue
with him while he rearranged the furniture for his dying wife? And when it
came down to it, she behaved the same way when anyone mentioned EMDR to her.
The difference was, she knew in her heart that she wasn't going to kill
herself. But could she know the same about Zamorra?