A World the Color of Salt (14 page)

“No, sir,” I said, “I sure haven't.” Gear of one sort or another was hanging everywhere in the dark interior, or stacked neatly or not so neatly on metal shelves and on the floor. Cliff swallows had built jugs of mud along the crossbeams overhead. Orange rubber diving suits, headless, the arms and legs stiffed out and fat, with tears and mottled peels in them, hung
on hooks drilled into the beams. Ready-wear for giants, not ordinary men.

Mr. Davis said, “We'll go into the office,” and I followed him into a room that looked like a replica of a ship's quarters—or a San Diego bar trying to look like one. The small room was low and crossed with exposed beams, creosote glistening in stripes where the wood had cracked. Two dried blowfish dangled from fishline at either side of the room, one with a low-watt lightbulb in its belly. A green banker's lamp and a computer sat on the desk, behind which was draped a heavy-duty fish seine carrying colorful shells and one lone starfish. The whole thing cozy. Just give me a whiskey. I was chilly. I almost asked for one.

Mr. Davis stood in front of a chair with a leather-strap bottom. I figured this was where the divers sat; they couldn't hurt it too much. He motioned me to a chair whose seat was once red velvet, the center now bearing a woven straw cushion. “So you have some tools you want me to identify?” he said.

I looked at his lined, tanned face, his widow's peak over the deep forehead wrinkles, the eyes a calm dark brown, and thought, This is a man who's done his work, who's built a business and is happy with it. Who's sold it for enough that he can come down here on his leisure time and walk in like he'd never been away; whose ex-partner would still let him.

“Well, all I've got is sketches. My father would have a hissy if I took them out of the house. He wants to write to some magazine columnist and see if he can tell us what they are, but I figured, gee, you're right here, and you were kind enough to—”

He gave a quick wave of his hand to stop me. I pulled the folded piece of grid paper Trudy had given me from my pocket and leaned out toward him. “This,” I said, pointing to the collet. A smile crossed his face.

Sweet salt air blew in. The blowfish near the door slowly floated and turned, its mouth open now in front of me, its hollow eyes taking it all in.

“That's a torch collet,” Mr. Davis said, leaning close enough for his shirtsleeve to touch my arm.

Just then a young blond man in a yellow tie appeared in the doorway. He glanced over at me, then squinted at the
amber-on-black computer screen that was twisted halfway in his direction. Mr. Davis looked up. He said, “Come on in, Ross.”

“No, I just wondered . . . did the Barranca job come in?” He talked in a soft drawl and seemed pleasant.

“Not yet,” Mr. Davis said. “Ask Harry when he gets back, though. He's gone to the post office.”

“I've got a bunch of calling to do yet, but I hired two more divers and one driver.”

“Good goin',” Mr. Davis said, and the young man moved off. “We have trouble sometimes, rounding up men when we need 'em,” he said to me. Then, his attention returning to the sketch, “That there's a torch collet, and that's a T-wrench.”

“Is there some special use for this T-wrench?” I asked.

“We tighten wing nuts on the brails with it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“C'mere,” he said, and got up. He led me back out into the shop. We went over near a wall and he showed me a diver's helmet, looking like a crouched octopus behind some cardboard boxes. He touched the toe of his shoe to the convex ring at the bottom of the headpiece. “This here's the brail. You fit the helmet on the suit, you tighten the nuts to the rubber so it don't leak.”

“I see,” I said. “This is a special wrench, then?”

“Well, no, I wouldn't say that. You could pick one up at the hardware store.” My heart sank. No special nature to it, no special significance. “What about this other thing?” I said, tapping the grid paper. “Is—”

“Now that's peculiar to the trade.” He walked around the boxes, and I followed him. At some chest-high bins that had small hardware pieces in them, he rummaged till he brought up a thing just like the one I found in the grass outside Dwyer's, only it was shinier.

“That's it,” I said.

He held the collet up close to me and pointed to the white lumpy metal in the center that looked like the corrosion you get on your car battery cables. “See this? This happens when it arcs out.”

“I'm sorry. You'll have to help me a little more here. Arcs out?”

“Your granddad has this?” He meant the white stuff.

“I . . . I think so, yes.”

“This is a collet for an underwater cutting torch.” He was jostling it in his palm now. “Diver sticks a tender in here in the center and heats it to the temp of brimstone. Then he fixes a bridge or cuts a ship apart. Sometimes in so doing it arcs and fuses the tender.” He was poking his long finger into the center to demonstrate, so I could figure out what a tender was. “Melds the tender to the collet. So now he's got to get a new one. A diver carries around six, seven of these things in his pockets. We can't keep them in stock hardly.”

The Dugdales
had
to be there at the Kwik Stop. How many divers loaded down with collets could there be in Orange County? I couldn't wait to tell Svoboda; yah, yah, look what I found.

I asked other questions, as if I had a general interest in diving. I asked if divers were unionized, and if they were paid well, getting a yes and a yes. I asked where the divers mostly came from—the navy?—and Mr. Davis said no, most all from the oil industry out of the South: Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas. And yes, I asked if he knew Roland Dugdale. If Roland worked there.

Mr. Davis turned full-face to me and narrowed his eyes. The light from the shop's open doorway caught the snout of his bolo-tie diving helmet, turning the green glass blank. Mr. Davis said, “Now, you should've told me, honey, who you really are.”

I saw Joe Sanders in the grocery store in Newport Beach, which is a long way from Tustin. I'd just arrived at Farmer's Market in Fashion Island, a spoke-wheeled complex of expensive stores, the whole “island” rimmed by towering white office buildings.

Outside, Christmas music piped from palm trees strung with tiny white lights. A gigantic, decorated spruce, cut for the occasion, dominated the plaza. I was coming down the escalator, intending to get something quick to eat in the food park, and there he was, in one of the grocery aisles off to the side, choosing milk.

If I went over and said hello I'd wind up telling him I'd been to San Pedro, and I wasn't ready yet. When I reached the bottom of the escalator, I wheeled around the far side and went back up. I ate at Wienerschnitzel on Jamboree, wondering about Joe. Something was going on, that he'd be this far from Tustin. Then again, maybe he had relatives here.

The next time I saw Joe, he was stabbing fat. All day Wednesday he'd been in meetings, and I was busy. That morning I'd phoned Detective Felton. The bald one with, as Gary said, the arms. I told him who I was and that I did something a bit out of my work scope but hoped he wouldn't mind. He listened politely. I remembered his demeanor while questioning Phillip Dugdale in the interrogation room: listening for a long time, then quietly asking him questions as if he needed that long time to dream them up. Asking Phillip about painting, and
did he win the Lotto. And then saying, You're pissing on my leg, Phillip. An ace.

Talking to Felton, I was hesitating and repeating myself. At the end I got control. “The important thing here is that Roland Dugdale's a diver and a piece of diver's gear was found at a murder scene.”

He said, “All such information comes to me. First.” He seemed provoked, but not irate. He asked me a few questions about how I knew to go to that particular place, Hannifin, and how I got there. Dry; no emotion, as if taking notes.

What I didn't tell him was that I practically got escorted out of town, Mr. Davis following me in his brown Lincoln all the way back to the main road, though I thought at the time maybe he was just on an errand. Mr. Davis lost it with me but not too much, just turning grim-faced and shutting down and telling me, “You know the way out.” When I'd gotten back in my car and looked up through the windshield, I saw him standing there framed in the large black square of the warehouse door, though he was down at the bottom of the ramp on the asphalt, his blue plaid elbows arrowed out, his hands jammed solid on his hips. I'd put my sunglasses on because of the white glare from the sun trying to break through the overcast, and maybe because the shades feel like a mask. And then the next time I looked in my rearview mirror, about to make a turn, I saw Mr. Davis in his brown Lincoln.

So I didn't tell Detective Felton that, and I didn't tell him I knew that Detective Reddeker, the one in the pink shirt, had called Hannifin Diving Service regarding Roland Dugdale's employment record, that Reddeker had made Mr. Davis's ex-partner look up Roland's time sheets and then call Reddeker back. Roland had worked the day of the murder. He even accrued premium pay for overtime. I didn't tell Felton because Reddeker would or had, and because I wanted to keep the heat on in a case that could quickly get doused with hundreds of other homicides we have in a year.

I asked if he'd had a chance to interview any of Jerry Dwyer's friends yet. Once again he was polite.

“We have. That's all taken care of, nothing out of the ordinary. The boy's friends are confounded,” and I thought that
was an unusual word to use but a good one, and wondered what kind of man this was.

“A robbery gone wrong,” I said.

“That's what it looks like.”

“What you're saying is we're going to have to wait till a suspect is developed. Is that right?” I could hear another phone ringing near him, and hoped he wouldn't say he had to answer it.

He said, “That's about it.”

“Thanks anyway. You're a good man, Felton.” And as soon as I said it I wished I hadn't. He could think I was being condescending. People do. Me being two ticks above thirty and he maybe fifty.

He said, “You cleared up on everything now?”

“Thank you very much for your time, Detective Felton.” I said good-bye and hung up.

Late afternoon, I asked around if anybody'd seen Joe, until I found a serologist who was putting away blood samples in one of the household refrigerators that stand in the middle of the room, back-to-back, with alarm wires attached to them. A little overkill, I'd say, but otherwise people would be tempted to put their lunches in there. “He's in the back killing roast.” The technician clicked the combination lock back on the door then and thumbed the sign that read
EVIDENCE
—
DO NOT FONDLE
, as if the tape were coming loose.

I said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Back there,” he said, nodding toward a room we had used for the freeway killer's investigation, eight desks in there then, nearly empty now. “Stabbing meat.”

And he was. He was in a lab coat, standing near a slab of roast on butcher paper, the paper covering a desk. I knew what he was doing. It just took a second for it to sink in. I knew he had to skewer pork fat onto the roast too, because meat comes trimmed nowadays and the human body's muscle-to-fat ratios have to be matched. But human fat is different, spongier, and yellow. Oh, well. I hadn't seen anybody do it, but I'd heard about it.

I came up from behind. “I think it's tender now.”

“Hi, Smokey,” he said, almost relieved. He glanced at me, then back to the roast.

Are we having a cookout?”

“What we're having here is Sanders's unsuccessful attempt to learn what kind of hole a kitchen knife makes. As opposed to, say, a jackknife.”

“Seems pretty straightforward to me.”

“Not this one. This one happened when you were off.”

I moved in closer to see what damage Joe had performed on the roast. Behind him on the counter was his notepad, and I guessed that every time he made a few furious strikes he'd pause and write something down. Next to the notes was a magnifying glass. He said, “We have the knife, with the victim's blood on it. So we
know
that's the goddamn murder weapon. But the wound doesn't match the characteristics of the knife.” He shook his head.

“Who was the victim?”

“A woman. He was a biter, too.”

At one time I wanted to know everything. On a street in Oakland, in what was, shall we say, the less glamorous part of town, I was watching some undercover policewomen tricking tricks. Down the sidewalk came a man with white sideburns crawling to his chin and the deep chalky-gray skin of African heritage. He wore a tailored gray suit nipped in at the waist, double-breasted. He could have been a retired “supervisor” himself, stopping every once in a while to talk to the women on the streets. When he came up to one of us bad/good guys in a miniskirt and mike, he said this, his voice a polite but steady baritone: “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” He'd go on down the street, talking to the regular girls, talking to one of us, those words about wisdom and sorrow. The girls would say, “Say
what
?” or “Get lost, old man,” or something of the like, and he would stroll on. But the oddity of it stayed with me and came back to me time and time again, the first occasion after examining belt and burn marks on the corpse of a six-year-old boy from the ritzy part of Oakland near Berkeley Hills, his mother a lady who served on the board of a hospital, and his father a scientist out of Lawrence Livermore. Today I know the quest for some kinds of knowledge comes at high price. Joe says all change is loss, and all loss must be mourned.
Sí
, and so must some varieties of gain.