Trauma (3 page)

“Duke, sweetheart, will you please just stop shouting? I have to get up early tomorrow and Ray has school.”

“Who
gives
a shit?” Duke screamed at her. “I don't have to get up for anything! I could lie in bed all day and it wouldn't make any difference!”

“Duke—”

Without warning, he dragged back the sheet, climbed on top of her, and pulled up her nightgown. The clock faintly illuminated her big, rounded breasts and her big, rounded stomach. She said, “Duke—no—” and tried to pull her nightgown down again, but Duke forced her thighs apart.

“You and that goddamned Ralph Kosherick. You and that—
goddamned
—Ralph—Kosherick.”

She felt him between her legs, as soft as a baby mouse. He put his hand down and tried to squish himself into her, but he couldn't. He pushed his hips forward, grunting with effort. Bonnie lay patiently and waited for him to stop trying, which he eventually did. He dropped on top of her and sobbed into her ear, his stubble scratching her neck and his tears dripping over her shoulder.

She gave him little pecking kisses and stroked his pompadour. It was so much thinner these days.

Bonnie kept a small Ninja Turtles notebook in her purse, which Ray had given her when he was twelve. There were only a few pages left, and she was going to hint that she needed a new one soon. She took out her red ballpoint pen and made a list of everything she had to do today.

Collect dry cleaning from Star-Tex
Remind Ralph about Moist-Your-Eyes promotion
Meet Susan for lunch 1:30
Collect truck tire
Buy pork chops, ice cream, bathroom tissue
Call Mike Paretti re insecticide

She had heard from Pfizer that there was a powerful new chemical for clearing out screwworms and
she was interested to know if Mike had tried it. She was disgusted by maggots and blowflies and other parasitical insects, but at the same time she found them fascinating. An expert entomological pathologist could often tell from the parasites in a person's body just when they had died, and how, and even where they had been killed. There was something else about parasites, too. It was their total disregard for human beauty and human tragedy. They were blind to everything but their own appetites.

Ray came into the kitchen, yawning, his hair sticking up like Stan Laurel's. He opened the fridge and stared into it for almost half a minute. Then he closed it again.

Bonnie finished off her list, folded it and tucked it into her purse. “You're up early.”

“Urgghhh … I have to finish my math homework.”

“Your father didn't keep you awake, did he?”

“Only me and half of greater Los Angeles.”

He took a loaf of bread out of the larder and spread three slices with peanut butter, almost a half inch thick. Then he cut up two bananas and arranged them on top of each slice. He switched on the television, folded up the first slice of bread and started to eat it. He ate the same thing every morning. He had
read in some men's health magazine that bananas and peanut butter helped you to put on weight.

The kitchen was painted bright yellow, with bright yellow checkered curtains. In the morning sunshine, it looked like the set for a 1960s cornflakes commercial. Sydney Omarr, the psychic, had once told Bonnie that yellow was her lucky color. He had also told her that she would see more death than most people see in thirteen lifetimes. She hadn't believed him, but that was four years before she had started Bonnie's Trauma Scene Clean.

She said, “Your father'll get over this. You wait and see.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ray was absorbed in watching
Scooby Doo
.

“He's a good man, really. He finds life …
confusing
, that's all.”

She stood by the sink, finishing her decaf. She looked at Ray, expecting him to turn around and say something, but he didn't. After a while she tipped away the rest of her coffee, rinsed her mug and gave him a kiss on top of his chaotic, sweaty hair. “I'll see you at six. I shouldn't be later than that. Pork chops tonight.”

“‘Kay, Mom.”

There was a pause. Then she said, “Ray.”

He didn't answer. He knew what she was going to say, and she knew he knew.

She said it all the same. “I love you, Ray. Things are going to get better.”

Outside the house, the driveway was only just wide enough to accommodate their two vehicles:
Bonnie's Dodge truck and Duke's eleven-year-old Buick Electra. When they had first moved in, Bonnie had imagined that they would live here for two or three years and then buy someplace much more spacious, with a pool that you could swim more than two-and-a-half strokes in before you hit the concrete edge on the other side, and the neighbors' barbecue smoke didn't billow in through your kitchen window. She had imagined four or five orange trees, a hot tub, and maybe even a view.

That was thirteen years ago, when Ray was only four years old. She didn't think about the four or five orange trees or the hot tub anymore, and she didn't expect a better view than a gray-painted fence. But she kept on selling Glamorex cosmetics and she kept on scrubbing away the stains of other people's traumas, and she knew that she had to be working so doggedly for
some
reason, although she would never allow herself to face up to what it was.

She liked Barbra Streisand. She liked “Evergreen” so much that she played it over and over. Not when Duke was around, though.

She drove over to Venice Boulevard in Duke's Electra. The air-conditioning didn't work, and the seats were patched with silver duct tape. By the time she reached Venice Boulevard, her blouse was sticking to her back. She found a parking space only half a block away from the Glamorex offices. As she hurried along the sidewalk, an elderly man in a white golfing cap gave her a wide, denture-crowded smile. A real geriatric, about eighty-five years old. “Say there. Nice gazongas.”

At first her brain didn't register what he had said.
But then she stopped and turned around and called out, “Hey!” The sidewalk was empty. She almost thought that she must have imagined it. She hesitated for a moment, frowning, but then she pushed her way through the revolving doors into the ice-cold lobby and click-clacked her way across the polished marble floor to the elevators.

Up on the fourteenth floor, headquarters of Glamorex of Hollywood, Inc., dozens of cardboard boxes were stacked all over the reception area and along the corridor. Joyce Bach, the distribution manager, was standing in the middle of all this chaos with her frizzy black hair looking even more disorganized than ever. A half-smoked cigarette dangled from her glossy red lips (Scarlet Siesta), and every time she spoke she dropped ash on her royal-blue suit.

“Would you believe it? They've delivered less than half of the fall hail-color range. And they've printed the Millennium Face-Glow packaging upside-down. Like, who's running this operation, orangutans?”

Ralph Kosherick came out, holding a clipboard and looking harassed. He was a tall man with slightly stooping shoulders and a big, rumpled Fred Mac-Murray kind of face. Every time she talked to him, Bonnie felt an overwhelming urge to take out her nail scissors and trim his shaggy black eyebrows. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and purple suspenders that kept the cuffs of his pants flapping an inch above his polished black Oxfords.

“You're late, Bonnie,” he said, without checking his watch. “But … since you look so ravishing this morning, I'll forgive you.”

“I hope you say things like that to your wife.”

“Of course I say things like that to my wife. I just make sure that she's out of earshot. Don't want her getting big-headed.”

“You're a terrible man, Ralph. Where am I scheduled today?”

He flapped his way through the papers on his clipboard. “I want you to make a call to Marshall's first, and then go over to Hoffman Drugs to see what new stock they need. I've moved your Millennium promotion to three o'clock.”

“Okay, that suits me better. I have a lunch date at one-thirty.”

“Cancel it. Let me take you. I've found this new place on Melrose where they do stuffed vine leaves to die for. Meet me back here when you've finished at Hoffman.”

“Ralph, that's very generous of you. But like I've said before, I think we ought to keep our relationship on a strict professional basis.”

“I like the sound of strict. I'm not too sure about professional.”

“Won't your wife ever beat you?”

“Vanessa? Are you kidding? She can't even beat me at Scrabble.”

Bonnie collected her boxes of samples, and LeRoy, the mail boy, helped her carry them down to the street. He had a personal stereo in his ears and he moonwalked toward her car in time to his faintly heard music. Bonnie had to slam the trunk of Duke's car three times to shut it, and then she said, “What's that you're listening to?”

LeRoy lifted one earphone and frowned at her as if he didn't know who she was. “Say what?”

“I said, what's that you're listening to?”

He handed the earphones over and Bonnie listened for a while. Techno dance-beat drumming, endless repetitive riffs, and somebody singing over and over again, “Wake up the dayyudd … you kill me bruvva … wake up the dayyudd …”

She gave the earphones back. “That's very nice. I think I'll stick to Billy Ray Cyrus.”

The buyer at Marshall's was a small woman called Doris Feinman, who wore a black suit and so much foundation that she looked like an understudy for a Noh play. She scattered Bonnie's lipstick samples over her desk and took all the caps off and muddled them up.

“What's this one called? Blood Orange? It's an interesting shade, but don't you think it sounds a little
menstrual
?”

“We can change the names. Absolutely no problem.”

“Well, that's good news. I don't care for Cranberry Climax either. Who thinks these up?”

Bonnie didn't answer, but kept her mouth fixed in a tight approximation of a smile. Just because Glamorex was one of her smaller suppliers, Doris Feinman always had to go through the same ritual of messing up Bonnie's samples and making scathing comments.

“This eyelash thickener … it comes out way too blobby. Women these days don't want to look like Goldie Hawn. It's too mindless, too submissive, don't you think?”

Bonnie was having a difficult time even pretending
to smile. Jesus, she thought. Submissive eyelash thickener?

It took Doris Feinman an hour and a half to choose what she wanted and to place an order. Ralph would be reasonably pleased, over $13,500's worth. But she hadn't taken any of the Millennium Face-Glow. She had tried it on one of her assistants and said it made her look as if she were dead.

She was driving over to Hoffman Drugs when her pager bleeped. It read MEET MUNOZ 8210 DE LONGPRE SOONEST. “Dammit,” she said. She took a left on Spaulding Avenue, and then a right, and five blocks farther along De Longpre she saw two police squad cars and a silver Oldsmobile with a red gumball on the roof. A straggle of neighbors and passersby were hanging around outside—the hyenas, Bonnie called them—sniffing out tattered scraps of excitement from somebody else's tragedy.

She climbed out of the car, and one of the officers lifted the police tape so that she could duck underneath. “The cleanup lady, right? Rather you than me, sweet buns.” Bonnie gave him the finger.

A sharply sloping concrete forecourt led down to the basement garage. The building itself was a three-
story block of apartments, stucco-fronted and painted a rusty ocher. A flight of red tiled steps led up to the front entrance, where Lieutenant Dan Munoz was leaning against the railing, smoking a bright green cigar and talking to Bill Clift from the coroner's department.

Dan saluted Bonnie as she climbed the steps. “Hi, Bonnie. You got here quick.” For a police detective, Dan was almost laughably handsome, with curly chestnut hair and a clean-cut, movie-star jawline. It was his eyes, though, that Bonnie tried to avoid. They were brown and liquid, and she always felt that he knew everything about her just by looking at her—from the recipe she was planning to cook that night right down to the washing instructions on the label of her panties.

Today Dan wore a blue silk suit and a splashy red-and-yellow necktie, and he smelled of Giorgio aftershave. He could have been going out to a swanky dinner instead of examining a crime scene. Bill Clift, on the other hand, was freckled and scruffy with a sagging gray linen coat and eyeglasses that had been glued and reglued and finally taped around the bridge with a grubby Band-Aid.

Dan put his arm around Bonnie's shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. “If you get on the scene any faster than this, you'll be able to roll up the rugs before they start murdering each other.”

Bonnie nodded toward the half-open front door. “What's the deal?”

“Come inside and I'll show you.”

“I don't know. I'm real tied up at the moment. I
only stopped by because I was on my way to Hoffman's.”

“Well, it's a shocker, believe me. Three kids—four, seven and nine. The scenario is, the mother's away, seeing her elderly folks in San Clemente. The nanny's been given the night off. The father goes to the kids' bedroom and shoots them at point-blank range with a pump-action shotgun. Then he goes back to the living room, puts the gun in his mouth and redecorates the wall with the back of his head.”

“Jesus,” said Bonnie. “Any idea why he did it?”

“Just flipped, I guess. Didn't leave a note or nothing.”

“Where's the mother now?”

“Still here.” He flipped open his notebook. “Mrs. Bernice Goodman, age thirty-six. That's why I called you. She'll be staying with friends this afternoon, but she's pretty anxious to get the place cleaned up as soon as she can.”