Carcass Trade (7 page)

“I'm just being snotty. That's my job as a kid sister.”

We were approaching the ferry dock that would cross to the peninsula where there were shops and restaurants and an amusement center complete with a ferris wheel. Twin red VW Jettas were on the ferry's deck, the drivers out and leaning over the rails.

I said, “Maybe Miranda decided to call it off.”

“Not possible,” he said, shaking his head.

“What happened between you and her—to your marriage?” Out in the channel a sailboat drifted by. Behind the sailboat came a slow-moving yacht trailed by a canoe with eight paddlers in white jerseys, pulling flashing yellow oars.

“She came home one day and told me she was in love with somebody else. I thought it would be someone younger, closer to her age. Shit, I didn't know who it would be. But not a doctor. He's almost as old as me. I said, ‘Is this guy your gynecologist?'”

“That made her cooperative, I'll bet.”

“She threw a pineapple at me.”

“Fond memories.”

“Maybe that was part of the attraction. The unpredictability. Me, well . . .” He shrugged. “They met on the golf course, Ladies' Day. A neurologist. A doctor who rides Harleys. Feature that.”

“I have friends who say bikes are no worse than cars if you know what you're doing. It depends on the person, the training, and the charity of luck.”

“Bridget volunteers at a convalescent hospital—yes, Bridget.”

“I liked Mary Lee.”

“You were too young. You liked her because she made you brownies.”

“Yeah man, why didn't you keep
her
?”

“Convalescent hospitals, they're not what people think. They have a lot of young people in there, too. Accident victims. Bikers. Pardon me, let me revise that. Squashes. That's what they call them, squashes. Nobody home. They're all kinked up”—Nathan made claws of his hands, opened his eyes wide, and lolled his tongue—“and people have to come in and put casts on their limbs so their bones don't break from spasms. This prick doctor must know that.” He arced his soda can into a trash barrel ahead of us. A woman's laughter pierced the air above the periodic explosions of nail guns, gull calls, and the talk of people passing by. We stepped off the walk and onto the sand.

In Nathan's brow and eyes was my father, and in the cheekbones and full lips, our mother. Creases at the eyes said he smiled more than I knew. He took a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lit it, saying, “You're thinking I should leave well enough alone. But that's not going to happen. I can't do anything about Bridget right now. I'll handle that when the time comes.”

By the side of a beached boat two male mallards were butting chests. Mating season should be over and territories already established, but these two, I guessed, bore old grudges. We crossed the sand again to the sidewalk and mounted steps made of cut-down telephone poles to reach the sidewalk. As we did, a teenager with headphones handed us a flier advertising Rollerblades and surfboards and a free drawing for tickets to see Dire Straits at Irvine Meadows.

Nathan said, “She wouldn't say so, but I think she's staying in her marriage because she's afraid. Afraid of the world. See, I never gave her anything when we divorced. We weren't married that long. I should have. God, she's only a kid, really.”

“She's just a few years younger than I.”

“But you're different.”

“Yeah. I have a job.”

“She never trained for anything.”

“You just have to be out there. You get a measly job, you quit it, go on to the next one until you find something that will work.”

“See? You're so judgmental.”

“She could go to school. I did.”

Nathan blinked his eyes and shook his head as if telling himself, yeah, but it's different for her.

“Now there's the baby to think about,” he said. “I should have given her something at the divorce, but I was mad. Out screwing around while I'm busting my ass. I sound mad now, but I'm not. I'm not a saint either. I just hold with the double standard.”

It was the second time he showed a sense of humor about himself, and in that one moment I gained an insight into him I hadn't had, and forgave him half a dozen things in our past.

“I hate to say this, but maybe she had a sudden attack of conscience. After all, this is the second time she's fooled around in a marriage.”

“I'm telling you she wouldn't. Not the way it's been with us. I had someone call her house, one of the girls in my office. That shows you how loose my screws are. A maid answered the phone. She said, ‘Mrs. Robertson's on vacation in Europe.'”

“What?”

“What?” he echoed.

“Her last name.”

“Robertson.”

The name rang through. Miranda Robertson: the name on the canyon car registration.

Nathan was still talking. “Miranda isn't out of the country. She just returned from Italy last month. Why would she go back right away? I know she would've told me if she was going back.”

“That was her new name? Robertson?”

He nodded, and crossed the sidewalk to a snack stand to get another Coke.

The birth date on the registration, what was it? Something, something fifty-three? Ray Vega had made a joke of it. Or was it sixty-three? Didn't the doctor say the body was in her forties? Thirty-five or forty. That's what he said. Miranda was, as I remembered, not yet thirty. The corpse had breast implants. Miranda wouldn't have had breast implants. She already had a good figure. Miranda was pregnant. The woman from the canyon burn wasn't pregnant. I saw the uterus put in the scale. Would I know a mildly pregnant uterus if I saw it? No. But the doctor didn't say. . . .

I realized I hadn't asked my brother where Miranda lived. Maybe because I knew what he'd say. Maybe because in my heart I knew the pretty girl with the auburn braid and the golden skin was gone.

When he came back, I said, “Nathan, I've got to ask you a question you may not like or may not know the answer to, but try to keep it in perspective, okay?”

We stared out over the gently rippled water to the pitch of Balboa Pavilion, the grand 1905 building that when lit with stringers of lights at night takes on an aura of nostalgic innocence.

“Let's have it,” he said.

“Do you know if Miranda ever had breast surgery?”

“Why would you ask such a thing?”

“Nathan, did Miranda . . . does Miranda live in Beverly Hills?”

His eyes searched my face, fear and anger at war with each other.

“Does she?”

“Yes.” His breath was corning hard. The embroidered alligator on his shirt rose and fell.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you know?”

“There was a car found Thursday. A woman was in it. The name on the registration . . . but I didn't connect—”

“You knew! You knew all along something happened and you didn't tell me.” He let go of the can, which rolled against the wall, and a moan came out from somewhere in the deep bend of his body. I went to him and tried to hold him, but he wouldn't let me.

“Nathan, no positive ID has been made. How would I put it together? I didn't know Miranda's last name. The address on the registration said L.A. We're down here. It's almost like two different worlds. Who would put it together?”

He walked between an opening in the seawall onto the sand, his face fiery, his body a board.

I looked around for help, but what kind of help I didn't know.

I put Nathan back on the road an hour after the walk around the island. He had clammed up. No matter how I talked to him, or about what, he was a million miles away. In my apartment, he washed his face and called a friend he was going to play tennis with, to cancel. When I asked him if he was all right, he said he was just going home to sleep. I told him I was sure there was some mistake about Miranda, that I'd phone her husband myself if that's what he wanted. He said, “No, wait, I'll think of something,” and left me feeling irrelevant, superfluous, as he often did.

My mind needed a rest. I went to see a movie with John Goodman in it, because John Goodman was in it, and spoke to no one except the woman in the ticket booth. Afterward I wandered in a department store in Triangle Square without knowing what I was looking for. I ignored the sales associates, as they like to call themselves, and hoped they thought I was a mean and shifty shoplifter.

Later, I walked a couple blocks down the street, headed for a coffeehouse with pretensions of hippiebeatdom. Alongside me, slick-looking cars swept along the boulevard, their cloth tops down, the music up, the drivers busy with gum and lush with new spring tans and expensive sunglasses.

The walls in the coffeehouse were painted black and jazz was playing. I ordered a blend of something African with a dollop of whipped cream and went to sit at one of the round blue tables. Across the room a single, skinny, morose man with a gold ear cuff and a pointy beard turned pages in a worn
New Yorker
. He humped the pages over with a long finger, whish-pause, whish-pause, regular in the rhythm, as though he were a speed reader with the knack down pat.

On the chair next to me was a thin book with ornate letters on front:
SCPJ
. I opened it and saw it was the literary journal from Cal State Fullerton, and it was all poems. I read a few. I don't know much about poetry, but it seemed good, and I read about deer and candles and things I hadn't thought about in a long time. The caffeine and silence eventually brought me around.

“I tried phoning you earlier,” I said to Joe, reaching him about ten that night.

“I was out with Jennifer.”

“Oh.”

“She needed to talk about David. His college, like that. We hadn't made plans, you and me.”

“Where'd you go?” I asked.

“Are you jealous?”

“Of course not.”

“You are.”

“I understand you have to talk to her about stuff. Where'd you go to eat? New place?”

“I tried
you
at four,” he said.

“Nobody's ever home.”

“It seems that way, doesn't it?”

“I didn't see a message,” I said.

“There's a strain in your voice.”

“I just wanted to tell you something. My brother came to see me. Nathan. He's living here now.”

“You didn't know that?”

“Our family's a little different.”

“Are you all right? You sound depressed.”

“I think the victim in Carbon Canyon could be my ex-sister-in-law.”

“No way.”

“Bullshit, no way. Listen to this,” I said, and then I told him about Nathan seeing Miranda while he was still married, while
she
was still married, and when I did, it felt like a betrayal to them both. But I pressed on. I told him about the discrepancies in what the pathologist said and with what I knew about Miranda: the pregnancy, the presumed age. For some reason, I held back about the breast implants. Nathan hadn't directly answered yes, that she had had them, but I thought I read it in his eyes. I held back because I didn't like to talk to men about women having surgery on themselves. It's too easy to joke. And who knows, I may have a lift and tuck someday myself, even though I currently disapproved. I wondered if it was Nathan who encouraged her to do it.

“You just said it doesn't add up.”

“But what's her car doing out there, then? Joe, I'm sure that body in the canyon is Miranda Robertson. It's got to be.”

“You want me to come over?”

“No. What good would that do?”

“I just thought . . . I don't know. We could get coffee, something.”

“I don't need taking care of. I need answers.”

“You're sure I can't come over?”

“Go to bed, Joe.”

“‘American Gladiators' is on. We could watch together. They've got new games.”

I said, crankily, “They keep changing the male gladiators. I liked that older black man, what was his name?”

“I know who you mean, but I don't remember.”

“All those women have implants, you know.” Implants. I said it.

“Whatever they've got, it's all right by me.”

“You
like
all those muscles? You like that look?”

“Whatever they've got, it's all right with me. What about tomorrow?”

“I have to do stuff.”

“So do I. But you're coming here for dinner.”

“I am?”

“That's better. Glad you agree.”

Early Sunday I phoned the morgue. I learned that a deputy coroner had reached Miranda Robertson's physician husband to ask if he was missing a wife.

Miranda was on vacation in Italy, Dr. Robertson said, and, no, he didn't know who would have been driving her car. His wife was in the habit of loaning her car to people, even the help.

Afterward, I left a message on Nathan's answering machine repeating all this and saying I'd let him know the minute I knew anything else. The rest of the day I did bills and laundry, read the paper, and at dusk took my neighbor's dog, Farmer, for a run. Someone told me there's a fictional P.I. from Chicago who takes her landlord's dog for runs. Mystery loves company.

Later, showering, I genuinely looked forward to the evening with Joe. While dressing, I heard on the radio an old song called “Me and Mrs. Jones.” It was a pain-racked tune about infidelity. My brother's pained face came to mind, and then his calmer face, the way he looked when the girl carpenter on the island gave him the long once-over.

I put on a green silk shirt, green jeans, gold bracelet and earrings, and a touch of one of those expensive perfumes you get as a free sample while fleeing through the makeup section of a department store. A song by Nat King Cole came on, one of romance with fewer complications than the one with Mrs. Jones.