Home Free (6 page)

I grabbed my purse and a cup of coffee,
stepped over the panther on the porch and locked the door. I slid
myself into the Element, spilling a little coffee on the seat as I
did. I swore mentally and creatively, then remembered the seats are
made of some special space-age fabric that repels everything.
Probably made in Pittsburgh.

I found a spot in the Wal-Mart parking lot
and went in search of shelf paper. My mother tricked me yesterday
into admitting that I hadn’t put down shelf paper yet. She had
looked aghast.

“You’ve been here a week already? And you
haven’t put down shelf paper -- what have you been doing?” The
implication being that if I had neglected to call my family for
over a week because I was busy with shelf paper, all might be
forgiven. But since such was not the case, I better have a damn
good excuse. I didn’t really want to tell her that I’d spent two
days cleaning up the drug paraphernalia left behind by the previous
occupants, and another two patching the holes in the walls where
they’d tried to punch each other and missed, and then it took three
days to hack down the overgrowth of weeds in the front and back
yards so the fire department wouldn’t leave another warning. And I
had actually unpacked a lot of stuff, just not the bathroom and
kitchen stuff because I hadn’t wanted to deal with the goddamn
shelf paper.

So now I was on a quest. It was hard to
choose, because all the designs were beyond hideous, but I finally
selected a blue and white chicken pattern. I stuffed five rolls
into my cart and went to wait in what I hoped would be a
butt-crack-free line. It was, and since it was still early and most
folks were either in bed or in church, there wasn’t a wait. The
half-asleep cashier rang up my purchase and counted out my change
as if the concept was still new to her.

“One last thing,” I added, pocketing around
thirty dimes. “Do you know what Alexis Jordan’s prognosis is?”

“Oh, I heard it’s not good. Apparently she
only has about three months to live, and you know the husband isn’t
in the picture anymore, so I don’t know what’s to become of her
little boys.” She shook her head in sympathy. I nodded solemnly and
left.

I drove home and poured myself into the
housework with renewed vigor. Now that I knew Jack would take care
of the hard stuff, I had no reason not to finish up the unpacking.
I started in the master bathroom, measuring and cutting and peeling
and laying shelf paper in the drawers and under the sink and in the
shelves of the linen closet. I ruined one entire roll when I stuck
it to my leg and then to itself and finally to the floor. But after
awhile, I got into a routine and it went pretty well. I finished
both bathrooms and half the kitchen by lunchtime. I needed a break.
Sweat was running in little rivulets down my back and chest and
pooling in my bra, my hair was plastered flat to my scalp and there
were little bits of shelf paper stuck to my left leg. I opened the
fridge and pulled a barstool up to sit in front of it and cool off,
and that’s when I spied the casserole. I had forgotten all about
it. I got out a spoon and dug in. I didn’t recognize it cold, but I
think it may have been a tuna thing of some sort. I didn’t care. I
was still sitting in the refrigerator, shoveling cold casserole
into my face when I was startled by a movement to my right. I
hesitated, afraid of what I was going to see when I turned my head,
then went ahead and turned anyway. Jack was standing in the dining
room doorway with a ladder over his shoulder, doubled over, shaking
with laughter.

“I rang the doorbell, but obviously it needs
to be fixed, too. I added it to the list. Anyway, I guess I’d
better get to work on that air conditioner.” He walked through the
kitchen towards the back door and hesitated, turning to me.

“If you’re trying to dispel the rumors of
your impending death, you’re doing a damn poor job.” His grin was
so wide, I could count his molars. “On the other hand, no one would
believe I’m sleeping with you, in an orchard or otherwise.”

“Fuck you, Murphy. Fix my damn air
conditioner or this is as good as it’s gonna get.” He laughed and
took his ladder outside.

I finished the casserole.

A while later, I ran out of shelf paper so I
made another trip to Wal-Mart. I didn’t bother to disguise myself,
since people thought I was dying anyway. I figured they’d be
impressed that a dying woman would think to install shelf paper. I
paid for five more rolls of chickens, detoured through the mall to
get an ice cream from Baskin Robbins, and headed back home without
having been spotted once. I walked in the door and was met by the
coolest air I’d felt in days. There was a note on the hall table
from Jack saying it wasn’t the compressor, it was some other
doo-dad and that he’d gone home.

I worked through the rest of the day and
collapsed into bed at a little after midnight. The house was done.
Shelves were papered, belongings were unpacked and put away, boxes
were broken down out in the garage, towels were hanging in the
bathrooms, and I had even done my laundry. I wasn’t sure where
everything was exactly, and I still couldn’t fit my car in the
two-car garage, but I felt like I was home. And I felt, for the
first time since I filed for divorce, that maybe I wasn’t a
complete failure and that maybe, just maybe, things were turning
around. The house was livable, I’d dealt with my mother, I wasn’t
actually dying and I’d even had a date. It wasn’t with the right
guy, but at least he was straight.

I read the paper while I waited for my toast
to brown. I was relieved not to have seen the massive cat. I
assumed it realized that the kibble factory was next door.

According to the article, arson investigators
immediately determined that the body shop fire had been
deliberately set, with sophisticated accelerants used. The remains
of a human body were found in the charred debris. Dental records
would be needed to make a positive identification, but it was
assumed to be the body of Lonnie Chambers, the night watchman.
Lonnie also had a rather conspicuous bullet hole in the middle of
his forehead. Not a good night for Lonnie.

Also not a good night for my brother and
Danny. They were the prime suspects, although Junior Salazar’s name
was being mentioned as well. Danny’s fingerprints had been found in
what was left of the office, he was a fireman with a master’s
degree in fire science and knowledge of how to set fires, and he
and Kevin were found at the scene of the crime. Kevin, the
mechanic, had access to certain chemicals, including commercial
solvents, that had apparently been used. There was no motive that
anyone could come up with, and Tom Jenkins and the gun that had
made the hole in the watchman’s head were nowhere to be found, so
for now at least, no arrests had been made.

I tried to catch up on work, but it was
difficult with the phone ringing off the hook. I screened, letting
voice mail handle all the calls from my mother and Brian and
numbers I didn’t recognize. I figured Kevin was being bombarded
with calls at work as well, so I didn’t phone him. I answered when
Pauline called wondering if there was anything she could do to
help. Unless she knew who
had
started the fire, I didn’t
know what that would be.

Kevin showed up around dinnertime Monday
night, still looking like hell. I was on the phone when he came in.
I had finally caved in and answered. I mouthed the word Mom, and he
shook his head no and went in search of food.

Twenty minutes later, I joined him on the
patio.

“That was painful.”

“Sorry, I’ve been avoiding her all day.
What’d she say?”

“Well, the upshot was that it was really
inconsiderate of you to get yourself implicated in a murder
investigation in the middle of Brian’s election campaign.”

He rolled his eyes and sipped his beer.

I woke up the next morning and threw myself
into work again, trying to take my mind off of the obvious. The
phone calls had subsided but my concentration hadn’t improved. It
had only been a couple days since the fire, and already the police
investigation seemed to have stalled. The paper reported that Kevin
and Danny were still the only suspects. I was frustrated that the
cops seemed content with that idea without any concrete evidence. I
doodled on scratch paper, scanned some images into Photoshop and
played with some lettering. I looked at the computer screen after
awhile and saw that, for the Harbor Area’s Garden Tour poster I had
designed a cemetery with flames shooting out of a newly-dug grave.
I sighed. Probably not the look they were going for. Murphy came by
about that time and asked how I was doing.

“Shitty, you?”

“Fair to middlin’. Weird stuff going on
around here lately.” The master of understatement. He asked if I
wanted to have dinner later and I accepted, and he lumbered away to
do something handy.

I could see I wasn’t going to be able to work
until I had some answers, so I called Pauline at work. She was an
account supervisor at the telephone company. Until the end of the
cold war, there had been an Air Force Base about seven miles from
Minter. When the government downsized defense and the base was
closed, a federal prison and the west coast regional office of the
telephone company had moved onto the property. Pauline had been
transferred from San Francisco two years ago when the move took
place, despite vows similar to mine of self-mutilation rather than
ever returning to Minter. Her office was now where the officer’s
club used to be, and she complained that at the end of her workday,
she smelled of beer and cigars.

“Pauline Horowitz.”

“If I wanted to find out if somebody called
somebody else at a certain time, what would I have to do?”

“Hello. First of all, have a warrant. Then,
the phone number of the person who was called. With that, you could
get a list of incoming calls for a particular time period. You
could cross-check those numbers to come up with the name of the
person who the account is registered to, but of course, that
doesn’t necessarily mean that’s who placed the call.”

“Okay, thanks. Hey, I’m having dinner with
Murphy tonight. That okay with you?” They had dated, after all,
even if it was over a decade ago. It seemed polite to ask. I
figured the first date was more of a business meeting and hadn’t
required explicit permission.

“Fine by me. You know that giant truck he
drives?”

Oh boy. “Yeah?”

“He’s not compensating.”

Oh boy.

I minimized the Photoshop screen and clicked
the internet explorer icon and went to Google. I found an online
white pages directory, typed in
Salazar, Daniel
in the name
box and
Minter, California
in the location box. A few
seconds later, I had the listing, showing two phone numbers and an
email address, but no street or mailing addresses. I copied down
the phone numbers and logged off. I called Pauline’s cell phone and
left a message on her voice mail. You can’t trust those phone
company people.

“Pauline, it’s me. I need you to check these
numbers for calls made Saturday night between nine and eleven
o’clock.” I gave both numbers and hung up. I assumed she wouldn’t
listen to her messages until her lunch break, but that would give
me time to check out something else. I wondered if I knew anybody
on the police force.

I got up and went over to the bookshelf that
occupied one wall of the office. I scanned through the books. I
hadn’t arranged them in any particular order when I unpacked them,
so it was slow going, but I finally found my high school yearbooks.
I took out the one from my senior year and opened it up to the
senior portraits, scrutinizing the faces and trying to remember the
names before checking my work against the listing at the bottom of
each page.

I hit pay dirt when I got to the Cs. I’d gone
to school with Jimmy Chang since first grade. That year, there’d
been four Jimmy’s in my class, and the teacher had called them by
their first names and the first initial of their last names to
differentiate between them. After that year, three of them went on
to be Jim, Jimmy and James. But Jimmy C had remained Jimmy C. He’d
been in my trig class in twelfth grade, and I remembered how
excited he was when he found out he’d been accepted to the Police
Academy for the following fall.

I thought this seemed like a face-to-face
kind of conversation, so I showered and did my makeup and hair and
put on a pair of jeans and a stretchy t-shirt. I hadn’t seen Jack
in awhile, but his truck was parked in my driveway when I left the
house. The black cat was in the front yard, crouched in the crunchy
grass, ears forward and tail twitching, ready to devour something.
I got in the car. It was already heading towards the hundreds, so I
flipped the AC up to max and made my way across town.

The police station is on McKinley Street
between Twenty-first and Twenty-second, across from Mercy Hospital.
It’s a blocky white concrete building that would scream
government
even if it didn’t have big blue letters that
screamed
Police
. The jail is in an adjacent building, and
the courts are about a block away. I parked in the parking lot and
walked inside, wiping the sweat and much of the makeup off my face
with a napkin I’d found in the glove box of the SUV.

It’s funny, but in the eighteen-odd years I’d
lived in Minter, I had never been inside the police station. Come
to think of it, I’d never been in any police station, ever. There
was a counter with a little bell on it, and some wooden benches
bolted to the walls that served as a waiting area. A uniformed cop
was behind the counter, and there were phones and computers and fax
machines around him. The walls were pale, institutional-green
cinder blocks. There was a half-door that led to the area behind
the counter and a closed door behind that leading, I assumed, to
the offices and men’s rooms and interrogation rooms.