Time Bomb (21 page)

Neither of us answered. Dinwiddie kept talking, in a low, deliberate tone, as if unaware of our presence. “One time I was driving home, doing a delivery that took me past the Burden house, and saw the two of them out in front. Ike was holding a bunch of books and Holly was looking up at him as if he were some kind of big brother. She and Howard had never been close. Ike looked more brotherly with her than Howard ever had. I remember thinking how strange it looked—a white kid and a black kid actually communicating. In Ocean Heights. It could have been a poster for tolerance. Then I thought how stupid it was that something as simple as that
would
be strange.”

He punched a button on his calculator, studied the number that came up as if it were a puzzle.

“They were just a couple of kids,” he said. “Trying to get through life. And now they’re both gone. And I’ve got a special on asparagus.”

16

He walked us out through the market. Business had slowed and the chubby cashier stood idle. I lifted a large yellow apple from its crepe bed and handed it to her along with a dollar bill. Before she could open her register, Dinwiddie said, “Forget it, Karen,” and removed the bill from between her fingers. Handing it back to me, he said, “On the house, Dr. Delaware. And here’s one for you, Detective.”

“Can’t take gifts,” said Milo. “Thanks anyway.”

“Then here’s two for Dr. Delaware.” Smiling but intense. I thanked him and took the fruit. He held the door open for us and stood on the sidewalk, next to a ficus mushroom, gazing after us as we drove away.

I cruised down Abundancia and came to a stop sign. There was a small golden sticker on each apple. Milo removed his, read it, and said, “Fiji. Hoo-hah, watch out, Gauguin.”

I said, “That was Tahiti.”

He said, “Don’t nitpick,” bit, chewed, swallowed. “A bit presumptuous, but fine nose and texture. These Ocean Heights folks sure know how to live.”

I said, “Let’s hear it for the good life,” lifted my own apple like a toast glass, and took a bite. Crisp and sweet, but I kept expecting a worm to wiggle out.

I drove through the empty, picture-perfect streets. At the next stop sign Milo said, “So. What’d you think of El Grocero?”

“Frustrated. Likes to think of himself as a fish out of water but feels guilty about keeping his gills wet.”

“Know the feeling,” said Milo, and I regretted the flippancy of my remark.

He knew what I was thinking, laughed, and cuffed my arm. “Don’t worry, pal. It’s a privileged position, being on the outside looking in.”

I turned onto Esperanza, and the conformist magnolias came into view. “Apparently the boyfriend wasn’t a boy-friend.”

“Maybe, maybe not. If this Novato kid did have a romance thing going with Holly, he wouldn’t have told the boss.”

“True,” I said. “So all we really know about him is that he and Holly talked a few times. And that he’s dead. Which in terms of—pardon the expression—understanding Holly could be relevant. If Ike meant a lot to her, his death could have tipped her over the edge.”

“Trauma leads to rifle games?”

“Sure. The loss could have been especially traumatic for someone with her history—the early death of her mother. She closed herself off from the world. Withdrew. I’ve worked with patients who lost a parent at a young age and didn’t get help. When you don’t grieve, the sorrow just sits there and festers. You stop trusting, learn to hate the world. Holly was a loner. If Ike was the first person who really tried to relate to her, he could have become a substitute parent—Dinwiddie said she was looking up at him as if he were a big brother. Let’s say he got her trusting again, brought her out of her shell. Then
he
dies. Violently. It triggers all the garbage she’d been sitting on for fifteen years. She explodes. Make sense so far?”

“As much sense as anything,” he said. “You know better than I do.”

I drove past another block of green lawns. A few people were out, walking dogs, washing cars. I thought of Linda’s car, remembered the fog and dread that had settled over Ocean Heights last night. The broken glass, the hooked cross.

What other demons hid themselves, crouching and sniggering behind the diamond-paned windows?

Milo stared out his window and munched. Cop-surveilling, force of habit. Pictures kept floating through my mind. Ugly possibilities.

When he turned away for a moment, I said, “What if Holly and Ike did more than just chat? What if they got into philosophical raps—the rotten state of the world, injustice, poverty, racism. Given Holly’s sheltered life, the experiences of someone like Ike would have been a real eye-opener for her—could have really changed her. That’s what happened in the sixties when white kids from suburbia went to college and encountered minority students for the first time. Instant radicalization. Someone else might have channeled it constructively—volunteer work, altruism. But Holly was vulnerable because of all that loneliness and anger and distrust. It’s the classic lone assassin profile, Milo. She could have seen herself as Ike’s avenger. Vanquishing Massengil—a
symbol
of racism—could have seemed noble.”

“Vanquishing,” Milo said. “Sounds pretty medieval. Maybe she just wanted to shoot kids.”

“What would be her motive for that?” I said. “We’ve no indication she resented their presence.”

“Look, Alex, you’re talking about a probable nutcase. Who knows what she would have had
reason
to do? Who knows what kind of crazy things actually ran through her head? When you get down to it, how much do you really know about her, anyway?”

“Not much at all,” I said, feeling suddenly like one of the pontificating TV experts.

I exited Ocean Heights, headed back on the winding canyon road toward Sunset. Milo said, “Don’t sulk,” and went back to looking out the window.

At the boulevard, I said, “Still entertaining questions, or is the cop-shop closed for the day?”

“Questions about what?”

“Novato’s murder. The way Dinwiddie talked about him. Any of that intrigue you?”

He turned and faced me. “What about it is supposed to intrigue me?”

“It just seemed as if Dinwiddie developed a lot of . . . passion when he discussed Ike. Really tensed up, got emotional. He got really defensive when denying that Holly and Ike had been lovers. Could have been jealousy. Maybe there was something more than a working relationship between him and Ike.”

Milo closed his eyes and gave a short, weary laugh.

“It happens,” he said, with a wicked smile. Then he ran his hand over his face. “Yeah, I was thinking that myself—the guy did get awfully righteous. But if there was something sexual, don’t you think he would be careful not to let on to us? I mean, how many Fiji apples do you think he’d sell if the good folks of Ocean Heights suspected him of
that
?”

“True,” I said. “So maybe his emotionality was a result of exactly what he said it was—liberal guilt. Still, the picture he painted of Novato was kind of odd, don’t you think? Black kid with a Latin name, comes from somewhere “back east” but doesn’t tell anyone where. Settles in Venice, enrolls in college in Santa Monica, gets a job in Whitebread Heaven, performs excellently in that job, inspires
some
kind of passion in his employer, makes friends with the girl no one talks to, then gets blown away in Watts. Not too long after, that girl goes for
her
gun and gets blown away herself.”

Milo was silent.

I said, “Of course, I’m just a rank amateur civilian. Theorizing. The pros . . . that guy from Southeast—Smith—didn’t think it was weird at all.”

Milo said, “What’d I say about sulking?” But he looked bothered.

I said, “Do you really know Smith?”

“Casually.”

“And?”

“Not the worst investigator in the world.”

“But not the best.”

Milo moved his bulk around, trying to get comfortable, frowning when he couldn’t. “Maury Smith is average,” he said. “Like most people in most jobs. Putting in time and dreaming about Winnebago Heaven. In all fairness to him, a place like Southeast Division’ll do that to you even if you start out determined to be Super Cop. More bodies in one hot week than we see in six months. No matter what anyone says, those kinds of numbers will change your attitude about the sanctity of life—the same way war does.”

“NAACP’s been saying that for a long time.”

“Nah, it’s not racism. Okay, maybe some of it is. But what it really boils down to is
context
: One DB out of a hundred thou just ain’t the same as one out of a hundred—I don’t care how pure your heart is. And a DB in Crack Alley just ain’t gonna merit the same care as one in Stone Canyon.”

“Meaning Smith’s investigation might have been cur-sory.”

“Meaning a black kid gets gunned down in a bad black neighborhood with a Baggie of rock clutched in his hot little hands doesn’t exactly shout high intrigue.”

“We don’t know Novato was carrying.”

“Yeah. Well, I guess I can make a few calls and find that out.”

He folded his arms over his chest.

I said, “Ready for lunch?”

“Nah, the goddam apple filled me. Complex carbohydrates. Who needs more?”

I kept my mouth shut.

A minute later he said: “Tell you what I’d really like. A tall, frosty, liver-eating Johnny Black or reasonable facsimile. In lieu of that, I’ll make those phone calls and do the goddam laundry. What do you guys call that—repression?”

“Sublimation.”

“Sublimation. Yeah. Drop me back at your place. Gotta go home and sublimate.”

I didn’t like the edge in his voice, but his expression warned off debate.

Besides, I had a call of my own to make.

17

Mahlon Burden’s answering machine message was ten seconds of chamber music followed by a clipped “Leave your message,” and three short beeps.

I said, “This is Alex Dela—”

Click. “Hello, Doctor. What have you decided?”

“I’m willing to explore the possibilities, Mr. Burden.”

“When?”

“I’ve got time today.”

“Doctor, I’ve got nothing but time. Name the place and the time.”

“An hour. Your house.”

“Perfect.” Strange word considering his circumstances.

He gave me an address I already knew and followed it up with precisely detailed directions.

“An hour,” he said. “Looking forward to it.”

No pride of ownership. I’d expected something flagrantly deviant—slovenly—at 1723 Jubilo. But at first glance the house was like all the others on the block. Single-story ranch, the walls sided with aluminum designed to resemble wood, painted the green-gray of a stormy sea. The window casements and front door were the same gray—ah, the first bit of deviance, a monochrome statement when viewed alongside the neighboring houses with their carefully contrasting color schemes.

I parked, began noticing other misdemeanors. The small lawn, mowed and neatly edged but a half-shade paler than the sprinkler-fed emerald of all the others on the block. A few thin spots in the grass that threatened to raise the offense to felony level.

No flower beds. Just a girdle of creeping juniper separating grass from house. No trees, either—none of the dwarf citrus, avocados, or birch triplets that graced the lawns of the other homes.

The gestalt: austere, but hardly quirky. Ocean Heights was easily offended.

The front door had been left slightly ajar. I rang the bell anyway, waited, then walked into an entry hall carpeted with a disc of mock-Persian. Before me was a compact, square living room, white-walled, flat-ceilinged, and rimmed with an obtrusively ornate band of egg-and-dart crown molding. The carpeting was green wool, spotless but thin as the lawn, and looked to be about thirty years old. The furniture was of similar vintage, the wood stained oxblood, the chairs and sofas quilted and upholstered in a chrysanthemum print that shouted
spring
, pleat-skirted and sheathed in condom-snug dear plastic. Everything matched, every piece arranged with showroom precision. An
ensemble.
I was certain all of it had been bought at the same time.

I cleared my throat. No one responded. I waited and gave myself over to fantasy. A young couple Sunday shopping in some suburban department store—Sears or a counterpart. The smell of popcorn, the ding of elevator bells. One child in tow—a boy. The parents anxious, budget-conscious, but intent on acquisition. Furniture, appliances, soft rolls of carpeting. Cookware, dishes, all the brand-new, optimistic words it took to fill a proper 50’s populuxe home: Pyrex, stainless, vinyl, Formica, rayon, nylon. Sheaves of receipts. Warranties. More promises. A shopping spree worthy of a game-show winner . . .

All these dreams reduced to an ensemble, static as a museum exhibit.

I said, “Hello?”

A white-painted brick mantel framed a fireplace that was too clean ever to have been used. No screen, andirons, or tools. The top of the mantel was as bare as the walls. White walls, blank as giant sheets of virgin notepaper.

The
tabula rasa
approach to domestic life . . .

Across the living room was a dining room two thirds its size. Crenelated molding. More green carpet, more notepaper walls. Pecan-finish china cabinet, matching buffet. A couple of souvenir plates on one of the cabinet shelves. Grand Coulee Dam. Disneyland. The rest of the shelves empty. An oval table surrounded by eight straight-backed, plastic-sheathed chairs and topped with a brown pad filled most of the floor space. A pass-through with sliding wooden doors was cut into the wall behind the head of the table, offering a view of a yellow kitchen.

I went over and peeked in. Thirty-year-old refrigerator and stove glazed with yellow porcelain. No magnets or reminders on the fridge. No cooking smells.

There was a doorway leading to the rear of the house. A note was tacked onto the threshold.

DR. D.: IN THE BACK. M.B.

Beyond the note, an unlit hallway lined with closed doors. White space deepening to gray. I stepped closer, made out the sound of music. A string quartet. Haydn.

I walked toward it, followed the right turn of the hallway, and came to a final door. The music was loud and clear enough to be live.