The Blue Hour (8 page)

Hess read the Macy's shoe
clerk's description of Janet Kane as she left his store, the last known person
to see her alive: "Average height and weight, dark hair worn up, a black
skirt and white blouse and two-inch heels." He would know the height of
the heels, wouldn't he? That was 8:43
P.M.
She was dressed nicely. She was alone. The clerk saw a thousand women walk
through his store that night but he identified her from a picture.

He found a description of
Lael Jillson supplied by her husband, who had been at home with the children
when Lael went to South Coast Plaza for hosiery. She had been wearing a blue
woolen dress from Nordstrom. White shoes and the white purse. Hair up in a
white plastic clip, a white woolen jacket with her but not on her when she got
in the car.

Her hair was up, too,
thought
Hess.

He replaced the bills and
checks and put the accordion file back where he'd found it. He put her mail on
the kitchen table, beside a stack of
Publishers Weekly
and a black-and- white ceramic cow creamer, a cow
sugar bowl and cow salt and pepper shakers.

Kitsch.

Art.

Bulk beauty aids.

High heels and her
hair up.

Hess went into the living
room and sat down on the big red sofa. He put his head in his hands and thought
about Janet Kane, then dozed a moment, then thought about Janet Kane again. The
fact that she had black-and-white checked linoleum made him feel irrationally
bad.

For a moment he thought
about himself, picturing the dead cells dying, the good ones multiplying by the
millions. The doctor had said he was in a battle for his life and that's how it
felt.

A few minutes later he got
up and locked the door behind him. He turned off the garden water and walked
past the white and purple flowers to his car.

• • •

"We were
closing," said the Macy's men's shoes clerk. His name was Drew Allen and
he was twenty-two years old, a student at a local junior college. "And
I'd pretty much finished up, just had to run the vacuum. She came down the
center of the store there, because it leads to the exit. She was just beautiful.
A beautiful face. She looked over and she knew I was watching her and she
smiled. That doesn't happen much. Most women catch you looking they don't like
it. Anyway, when someone that beautiful smiles at you, you remember. At least I
remember. I looked at my watch and it was exactly 8:43. Tuesday. You make kind
of an event out of some things. On a job like this. I remember thinking I'd
watch that walkway at 8:42 every night from then on out. I started dreaming up
ways to find out if she was married, maybe ask her out, but I couldn't come up
with anything good. No point in that now, right?"

No suspicious men.

Nothing unusual.

Except for Janet
Kane, just another boring night.

• • •

Robbie Jillson answered
the door in shorts and a T-shirt and acknowledged Hess with a tired nod. He was
a handsome young man with a surfer's bowlish haircut and the first touches of
gray appearing just above his sideburns. Hess noted the big knots built up on
the tops of his feet by years of lying on a surfboard. Part owner of a
beachwear company, Hess remembered, "Pure Risk" or "Risk
All" or something like that. Had the brains to leave his wife's car
undisturbed because he knew she'd been taken.

"The kids are at
camp until six," he said.

Hess was pleased but not
surprised that Robbie Jillson had gotten together the things he'd asked him to.
Robbie showed him into the library. It had a view of the hillsides to the east.
There were high bookshelves with ladders to get to them and a very large
burnished desk. On the desk were pictures of Robbie and Lael Jillson and their
children. It was the prettiest family Hess had ever seen. He thought they were
just the kind of people you'd expect to find in this house. It was a good
family until the mother got careless and thought she could go shopping alone.

Robbie brought Hess a
fruit drink and closed the door behind him. Hess could feel the waft of the air
conditioner on his scalp, and the drink made his teeth feel like they were
being squeezed. He ran through the cleared checks and listed the same kinds of
parties he'd listed in Janet Kane's house. He'd hoped for some connection
between the two cars, but there was none he could find. Nothing popped. There
was an overlap in bottled water service—Mountain High Springs— but a call to
the company confirmed that the delivery routes were different. Yes, Hess
elicited from the district delivery manager, it was possible that a fill-in
driver could have delivered at both residences. Yes, all new drivers started
as fillins, to get experience. But the manager said it was impossible to check
back for a year, even six months, because every quarter the weekly route
schedules went back to corporate. Hess would have to take it up with them and
she gave him the number. He thanked her because patience was the linchpin of
any investigation and of Hess's soul.

He was surprised to find
Lael Jillson's diary included in the box full of personal, medical and
financial information that he had requested. There was a gummed yellow tag on
it that said, "I've never looked at this, but you can if it will
help—RJ."

He opened to the last
entry and read in Lael's graceful hand:

June
2—A
rare afternoon alone in the
house here. Robbie and the kids gone surfing at Old Man's but I didn't want to
go this time. Too much sun these days, feel like I'm drying up. Sometimes I
like it just like this: me and the mansion and the air conditioner off and the
windows open and a giant G&T or two, and just me. No talk, no noise, no
nothing. For about an hour, maybe, then I start missing them. Sometimes I think
there's not quite enough of me to entertain me for long. It's a problem, I
know, but I've chosen to raise children rather than develop myself. Robbie says
children shouldn't be an excuse. But then Robbie has never complained about my
lack of a me, either. Sometimes I don't know why he loves me. Sometimes, like
today, when I look around me I see all this bounty I don't deserve and I wonder
if it's Ike they say—what goes around comes around and karma and all that
stuff—and someday everything you don't deserve in the first place will be taken
away and then some. Because if you have so much more than you deserve to have
what's to keep you from losing more than you deserve to lose1 Oh well, too much
G&T and quality skunk weed. One more puff
on
the pipe and I'll sign off.
'Til next time, thank you Lord for this embarrassment of riches I call my life.
I love it!

Hess closed
the book and tapped his thick fingers on the leather cover. His desire for a
cigarette was suddenly strong, but he'd had to stop them when they took out the
upper two-thirds of his lung. The first
two weeks without the smokes had been almost intolerable but he'd been pretty
much alone so he hadn't taken it out on anyone. Every time he wanted a smoke he
touched the scar running from the back of his shoulder to the bottom of his
ribs. Fifty years of cigarettes were enough—Hess had started when he was
fifteen because his older brothers did. He knew that if he'd stopped thirty
years ago it might have saved him some considerable pain and maybe some years
of life, but there was no profit in this knowledge, no one to pass it along to.

Hess felt the scar through
his shirt and looked at Lael Jillson's picture in front of him. He saw her
hanging upside down from a rope slung over the branch of the Ortega oak. He saw
the slow twist of her body. At first her arms dangled down, then he saw them
tied up behind the small of her back. He saw the blood running from her neck
and pooling on the ground. Hess wondered if they had been chosen with their
hair up to save someone the trouble of doing it himself. No, he wanted these
particular women more than that He wanted them very badly. The hair up meant
something else. Hess saw a similar scene with Janet Kane. He saw the scenes
again.

Terrible sights. Hess had
learned to forgive himself for them. Sometimes it made him sad to know he was
like this. It was part of what made him good at what he did—the detective's
version of the athlete's positive imaging. But he never got to see home runs or
three-pointers. And he could never unimagine what he saw. The memory was part
of the price he paid for a skill he had purposefully worked to develop, a useful
part of his portfolio. In the larger sense Hess believed that most of life's
givens were just that—given. He had yet to meet a man who had created himself,
and this is why he thought he understood the nature of evil.

Robbie showed Hess into
his bedroom. It was half the upper floor, with magnificent views to the west
and south. The wall opposite the windows was mirrored glass, which offered the
same view, inverted. Hess saw Catalina Island far offshore caught on Robbie Jillson's
wall.

"You want to know
her, don't your asked Robbie. "But I can't contain her for you. I can't,
like, present her in a few words or with a few pictures and give you an idea of
what she is."

Is,
thought Hess: her husband still hasn't accepted it.
Hess supposed that if he were in Robbie Jillson's position he wouldn't either.
He would love to be wrong about her and Janet Kane.

They stood outside on a
deck off the bedroom. Hess felt the afternoon breeze in his bones.

"I'm trying to see
how your wife's life might overlap with the Laguna woman. Janet Kane. Why they
were chosen."

"It's because
they're beautiful."

"How,
specifically?"

"Her face. Her
posture."

"What about insider?”

"Her happiness. She .
. . was a happy person, and it showed. She was a happy woman, Lieutenant. I
mean I was really lucky. She was like that when I met her. It's just the way
she ...
was. She loved her life, and if you
were around her it made you appreciate your life, too. She always knew it would
end, though. She wasn't shallow or stupid. But she wasn't morbid and she wasn't
cynical and she didn't look for the dark side of things. If there was something
good or joyful to be found, she'd find it."

Hess thought about this.
He watched Robbie looking out the window. Six months and the man still couldn't
decide whether to speak of his wife in the past or present tense. It was the
uncertainty that broke people down, he thought, and he'd seen it happen a lot.
When you had a body you had the end, and people could work with endings. But without
a body all you have is a mystery that eats the soul like acid.

Jillson turned and looked
at Hess. The expression on his face didn't match the face—it was like a guy in
a surfboard ad ready to shoot somebody.

"I smelled
him."

Hess's heart seemed
to speed up a beat.

"I didn't tell the
other cops because the other cops didn't ask. Some guy named Kemp? He's the
reason some people hate cops. Anyway, Lael disappeared on a Thursday night.
Friday morning her car was found and towed I was called to get it out of hock.
When I let myself in to drive it away, I could smell him."

"And?"

"Faint. Cologne or
aftershave maybe. Real faint. But I smelled him. If I ever see him I'll kill
him."

Hess nodded. There wasn't
much you could say to that, except to be practical. "I'd like to, too. But
don't. You wouldn't like prison very much."

"It would be worth
it, just to punch a few holes in his face with my magnum."

"It's a better
thing to dream about than do. "Hess looked out to the west. There were other
mansions, acres of rolling yellow foothills, clean asphalt roads and the sharp
blue Pacific rising up to the sky. Robbie was still stuck in paradise, his Eve
departed.

Hess could say it wasn't
fair but he'd already said it a million times in his life. In spite of its
truth, the idea counted far less than it should.

Colesceau sat on his stool behind the
counter and looked out the dusty window. He read the words
aviJomoiuA jjei
off
the glass for the billionth time in his life and looked at his watch.
Twenty minutes. He could hear Pratt and Garry out back with the Shelby Cobra,
and the occasional cackle of Pratt's wife, Lydia. Every day, half an hour
before closing they'd start drinking beer and Colesceau would hear the rising pitch
of their conversation punctuated by the
cchht, cchht, cchht
of the cans popping open. All Pratt and Garry
talked about was cars and the body parts of women.

His job was to count and bag the money at closing, so he
counted and bagged it. There was $14 in cash and $220 in checks. He noted the
amounts and check numbers on the deposit slip and added the subtotals twice
before writing down the total.

"Hey, hey, Matty."

It was Lydia, sneaking up behind him again, hanging her hand over his
shoulder like they were on the same football team or something. She took
liberties with his first name, which he had clearly explained was M
atamoros
or Moros for short. But Lydia
was always playing with words and had called him
Matamata
for a while. According to a library encyclopedia
that Colesceau had consulted, the matamata was a "grotesque" river
turtle of South America that caught prey by distending its huge lower jaw and
sucking unwary animals down its gullet along with the water. He had asked her
not to call him that any longer and she had not.