Carcass Trade (15 page)

The kid was handcuffed now but giving the deputy a hard time. I could tell by the way the kid was shifting his shoulders, and the expression on his face.

I kept talking, since Ray wasn't. “I remember her saying some kind words to me once on the phone when I was having some ‘female trouble' and Nathan knew about it from my mom. It surprised me.”

Ray wasn't listening, and I didn't care. I fished for aspirin in my purse. If I found any, I'd down them dry. I looked up just in time to see the kid spit at the officer, the gob catching light as it flew into mid-air; watched the cop jump back and then slam forward, bouncing the kid off the car, boosting him on the buttocks with his knee four times as another patrol car pulled up.

“I hope he L.A.'s the little shit,” Ray said.

“L.A.'s him? As in Rodney King?” I asked, referring to the amateur video heard 'round the world.

“You bet. L.A. his ass, the buttwipe spit on
me
.”

“You mean,” I said, “like a
personal
thing?”

“Yeah, yeah, like a personal thing. One time I—” And then he stopped, looked at me, and said, “You trying to make a point or what?”

“Who, me?”

“What'd you say the name was you gave Blackman?”

“Brandy Brandon. Kinda cute, huh?”

He leaned way forward to rest his arm on the wheel, put his chin on top of his hand; then, with his right, reached back to grab mine again, and said, “You ever want to get serious, don't forget I'm in line, okay?”

“Okay, Raymond. That's a deal.”

Les Fedders pulled his shoulders back as he came out of Joe Sanders's office, spying me and asking, “How's tricks, Trixie?”

Behind him, Joe was bent over work on his desk. He looked up and gave me a wink and grin, then burrowed back into his papers. I walked down the hallway, Les following.

“That your costume in there?” Les said. He knew by the tag and the color of the tape that whatever I had in the evidence bag was on its way back to Property.

Hefting the sack as if it held dog doo, I answered, “Men's pants. Guy had a truck lowered on him while he was putting on rear shock absorbers.”

Les said, “Only he was the shock absorber.”

“Aren't human beings wonderful?”

Without a change of expression, Les said, “The Prince of Darkness is a powerful foe.”

I looked to see if he was smiling, but he wasn't.

“They sprayed liquid Drāno on him, in the crotch.”

“There's a message there.”

“He's not dead. He's in IC with a collapsed lung and a runky case of pneumonia, not to mention the damage to his unmentionables. But he won't tell anybody who did it. Give him a few weeks. His posse will pop 'em, and so it goes.”

I stopped for a drink of water at the fountain and half expected Les to be gone. But he was still there, his scalp between the reddish hairs shining brightly and his pork chop ears fiery and translucent. He said, “How's the new job going? Planning on leaving us for tips yet?”

“Oh right. I bought a house in Brentwood.” I'd worked at Monty's the night before, Thursday, from seven to ten.

“He make a pass at you yet, that guy?”

“It's probably a little early for that.”

We walked by the Print room, Trudy Kunitz at the ready to collect a sheet off the fingerprint-image printer. On the glass separating her from us were new stick-on letters that read
HOMICIDES
'
R
'
US
. I laughed.

Les was saying, “Are we wastin' our time here, or what? Should we just go jump this guy Blackman?”

“I can handle it, don't worry. I have to run now, Les. Busy, busy.”

He nodded, put a hand on his chin while the other clutched his elbow, as if to keep his long jaw from smiling too much. “It would be good if you can get something for us out there, Smokey.” But bless his heart, old Les can give hives just by breathing. He said, “I may come check out that titty bar myself.”

“You're such a smoothie, Lester. I'll bet your date book's just
all
filled up.”

“I do my best.”

“By the way, how's the dental going?”

“The Jane? Dr. Robertson sent charts for his wife. Perfect teeth. She goes in for cleanings, that's it. I think you're barking up the wrong tree myself, Smokey.”

“What do we have from Meyer Singer?”

Les shook his head. “He just converted to an HMO. He has so much business he don't know what to do. He's coming in to work on it tonight.”

“That's a problem with contract people.”

“Remember one burned up in a trunk last year, that hooker with dentures?”

“What about her?”

“He ID'ed that one in six weeks, even out of state. ‘Course she had something funny with her palate, but we'll get this one too. You know your canyon crispy critter had fake maracas, don't you?”

“What, Les?”

“Phony begonias. Your sister-in-law have phony begonias?”

“I don't know, Les.”

“Mm,” he said.

Each day, I spend my best, fresh hours studying the awful continuum of human failure; and in so doing, it is easy to believe that people under any pressure succumb to the dark side of choice. But now and again I have an opportunity to set myself right. I go to the fields to glean.

It was Saturday, and it was lima beans. By eight-thirty I was in a field off Sand Canyon Avenue a few miles from my house. Limas can live on nearly nothing but fog. Bean fields used to spread for fifty miles up the coast, a part of it near here called Beanville. Today there is barely room for a bean. Silos have become motel rooms; outfitting sheds, restaurants. In the few remaining fields, vintage harvesters can still be seen trolling the rows against the skyline, speaking of a different time, not easier, perhaps, but simpler. What the harvesters miss, we gleaners gather for the food kitchens. The practice comes from an instruction in Leviticus: “. . .
when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field . . . thou shalt leave them for the poor and for the stranger.
” And so, on this morning already too warm, I stooped and picked, and hoped to find a mooring.

In the row next to me, a woman with a square face and ski-jump nose was singing a hymn, “Beulah Land.” She told me she normally gleans with a church group on Sundays, a day I specifically avoid because I don't want people “the Lord”-ing me this and “the Lord”-ing me that. At the end of her song, she held up her plastic grocery store bag loaded with pods. “These I think I'll bring home to my daughter. She cooks 'em up with a ham bone, mm-um. You know you can take some home, honey, don't you?” She brushed sweat away under her ashy bangs with the hump of her wrist, then plucked at her lavender shirt to unstick it from her sides.

“I don't care much for them, but thanks.” When I lifted a spray of leggy stems, a yellow moth flew onto the cusp of my glove and stayed there.

“Last year this program fed half a million people,” the woman said. “Thank the Lord it wasn't all lima beans, or the whole county'd die of methane poisoning, you know what I mean?” She got the laugh from me she wanted, then went lumping over the rows to the roadside to dump her sack in a cardboard box.

I straightened to release the pull in my spine, realizing I'd been bending over the leaves stiff-legged the way you're not supposed to. At the inner thighs was an ache from straddling a row too long.

The church woman yelled back, “Hey, you know what my daughter gave me for my birthday? A pin that says ‘I'm a natural blonde. Speak v-e-r-y slowly.'” Smiling broadly, she launched again into “Beulah Land.”

I grabbed a handful of pods. Hearing the knock of fetal bean against fetal bean, and enjoying the air and relative silence, I felt a wonderful peace. Only two or three times did I think of the canyon case, or Nathan, or my new job in competitive underthings.

Again the moth lit on me, audacious on my arm. “I must resemble a lima bean,” I said, standing up straight, showing my prize. “This butterfly likes me.”

“Moth,” she said. “Butterflies by day, moths by night.”

“There's day moths, too,” a man three rows over said.

“Wings folded: butterfly. Wings flat: moth,” the woman in lavender said. “I heard about this scientist wanted money for a grant. So what does he do? He paints spots on a butterfly and calls it a new breed.”

“Butterfly fraud,” I said.

“Can you beat that? I tell you,” the Beulah Land lady said, “it takes all kinds. It surely does.”

Saturday night about ten, Monty came up to me in the alcove and said to quit for the night.

“Why? What I'd do wrong?”

“Don't be so skittish,” he said. “I want to take you somewhere.”

A sure unease washed over me. “Where?”

“Dancin'. How'd you like that?”

“Who else is going?”

“Just you 'n' me.”

I told him I didn't think that would be a good idea. “Employer-employee. That never works.”

“Relax. I just want to get acquainted. I do that with all the new girls. Ask Sharon there,” he said, nodding toward the main floor where two models were drifting. “You'll find out I'm a gentleman, too,” he said in his soft gentleman voice.

“I never had any doubt,” I said, delivering it like a warning. “What'd you have in mind?”

“Country Western. Been to Denim and Diamonds?”

“No way. I can't do that. I don't have the mind for it.” I said it without much conviction, because I wanted to go with him, wanted to have time alone when I could talk to him about his personal life, but didn't want to sound too eager. And it was mostly true about me and that kind of dancing. It would give me a chance, though, to learn who his friends were. Ask, By the way, do you happen to know anyone named Miranda?

“You're goin',” he said, the way a man does who never gets told no. He reached out and traced the neckline of my zip-front cat suit that was supposed, somehow, to qualify for lingerie. “Get dressed.” And then he told me that in his office closet was a pair of boots, that I should see if they fit when I go in to change.

We were at Denim and Diamonds off Beach Boulevard, an upscale boot-scootin' place no real cowboy would drop reins for. Monty was getting my drink at the bar.

Next to me, a server in white lace stockings and white cowboy boots bent over to give a man his change, and a hand from another table patted her at the puff below her blue denim shorts. She reeled around and said, smiling, “I'll bounce you on your head you don't behave.”

A man with a white goatee said, “That sounds like fun,” and plucked a twenty off the table and held it out to her in two fingers while his diamond-studded watchband winked. She took it with a phony “thanks,” and sashayed off. When the man's gaze fell to mine and I didn't glance away, his happy expression disappeared. Maybe my hard-ass look spoiled his fun.

The DJ put on a song by a woman looking for something in red, something for certain to knock a man dead, and a dozen couples began to glide around the room in a cowboy waltz. A man sitting on a bench that looked like a horizontal Coors can smiled at me.

By the time Monty came back with the mugs, the air seemed warm as flannel. I drew down the cool beer gratefully. He watched, said, “I'll have you a changed woman in no time.”

“You know, Monty? I'm thinking maybe I don't need that job as much as I thought.”

His mouth came close to my ear. “Don't you know when somebody likes you?” He wore a musky scent.

I shifted away. “You know, this really isn't my kind of music. I like Eric Clapton. Cocker. Bob Seger. Old guys.”

“You want to leave?” He leaned away from me and I watched his nostrils go into a wider flare than usual, and maybe that meant he was mad.

“Well, sometime,” I said.

“You nervous? I make you nervous?”

He was smiling, drawing pictures with his finger in the wet mark on the table, cocking his head at me.

I said, “It's just I've got a life, you know, before Monty. Things to do.”

He came close again and whispered, “Before Monty. Nothin' was before Monty.”

I needed to change the subject. I needed to get him warmed up to tell me about his life and friends. Maybe I was helped along by the beer, but I began to look at him as a man. A man, not a felon. My mother used to sing a certain song every time she ironed, about how when she was not near the man she loved, she loved the man she was near. Sometime in my early twenties I got the gist of it, and afterward that song rang a truth that delivered my mother to me in a new light. Monty had an appearance that would've appealed to me in an earlier time when my veins carried a bit of wild brew; when I was young enough to believe people just wanted to be different, individual, but they didn't really want to hurt anyone. I tried to get back to that moment. Undercover, you become the part, didn't Ray say?

I let my eyes follow the handsome men around the room moving their pretty-girl partners, heros all. I let Monty see it, this interest, and drank a little harder. I asked, “Do you know the actor Sam Elliott?”

“Don't think so.”

“He was in
Roadhouse
, with Patrick Swayze.”

“Who's Patrick Swayze?” He drank from his beer, grabbing off foam on his mustache with his lower lip.

“Never mind.”

“No, come on.” When I just shook my head, he said, “You gonna dance with me or not?” lightly grabbing my wrist.

“Later. Give me some time.” He let go of my wrist, but I saw a cloud cover his face. “Don't you have a lady friend?” I asked. “I mean, to take out?”

He leaned toward me again. “Sure I got a lady friend. I've got a lot of lady friends. Now I got one more.” When he smiled, his eyes looked both suspicious and kind.