Stories (2011) (16 page)

I filled the bath tub with water and put Billie Sue in there
and watched her float. I turned her in the water so that she could watch me
undress. I stripped off my clothes slowly and got in the tub with her. She
floated and bobbed toward me, and I picked her up and squeezed her and dirt
puffed from the noise maker in her beak and the sound she made was not quite a
squeak or a quack.

I laughed. I squeezed her hard, the way she likes it, the
way she’s always liked it since the first time my mother gave her to me when I
was a child. I squeezed her many times. I floated her in the tub with me, moved
her around my erection, which stuck up out of the water like a stick in a pond,
and I knew then what I should have always known. Billie Sue was the love of my
life.

Perhaps we were not too unlike that silly couple next door.
We fought too. We fought often. We had broken up before. I had buried her under
the rose bushes before, though never for this long. But now, holding her,
squeezing her hard, listening to her quack, I knew never again. I began to
laugh and laugh and laugh at what she was saying. She could be like that when
she wanted. So funny. So forgiving.

Oh, Billie Sue. Billie Sue. My little rubber duckie poo.

Deep in the
alley, lit by the beam of the patrolman’s flashlight, she looked like a naked
angel in midflight, sky-swimming toward a dark heaven.

One arm reached
up as if to pull air. Her head was lifted and her shoulder-length blond hair
was as solid as a helmet. Her face was smooth and snow white. Her eyes were
blue ice. Her body was well shaped. One sweet knee was lifted like she had just
pushed off from the earth. There was a birthmark on it that looked like a dog
paw. She was frozen in a large block of ice, a thin pool of water spreading out
below it. At the bottom of the block, the ice was cut in a serrated manner.

Patrolman Adam
Coats pushed his cop hat back on his head and looked at her and moved the light
around. He could hear the boy beside him breathing heavily.

“She’s so
pretty,” the boy said. “And she ain’t got no clothes on.”

Coats looked
down at the boy. Ten, twelve at the most, wearing a cap and ragged clothes,
shoes that looked as if they were one scuff short of coming apart.

“What’s your
name, son?” Coats asked.

“Tim,” said the
boy.

“Whole name.”

“Tim Trevor.”

“You found her
like this? No one else was around?”

“I come through
here on my way home.”

Coats flicked
off the light and turned to talk to the boy in the dark. “It’s a dead-end
alley.”

“There’s a
ladder.”

Coats popped the
light on again, poked it in the direction the boy was pointing. There was a
wall of red brick there, and, indeed, there was a metal ladder fastened up the
side of it, all the way to the top.

“You go across
the roof?”

“Yes, sir,
there’s a ladder on the other side, too, goes down to the street. I come
through here and saw her.”

“Your parents
know you’re out this late?”

“Don’t have any.
My sister takes care of me. She’s got to work, though, so, you know—”

“You run around
some?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You stay with
me. I’ve got to get to a call box, then you got to get home.”

____________________

Detective
Galloway came down the alley with Coats, who led the way, his flashlight
bouncing its beam ahead of them. Coats thought it was pretty odd they were
about to look at a lady in ice and they were sweating. It was hot in Los
Angeles. The Santa Ana winds were blowing down from the mountains like dog
breath. It made everything sticky, made you want to strip out of your clothes,
find the ocean, and take a dip.

When they came
to the frozen woman, Galloway said, “She’s in ice, all right.”

“You didn’t
believe me?”

“I believed you,
but I thought you were wrong,” Galloway said. “Something crazy as this, I
thought maybe you had gone to drinking.”

Coats laughed a
little.

“Odd birthmark,”
Galloway said.

Coats nodded. “I
couldn’t figure if this was murder, vice, or God dropped an ice cube.”

“Lot of guys
would have liked to have put this baby in their tea,” Galloway said.

The ice had
begun to melt a little, and the angel had shifted slightly.

Galloway studied
the body and said, “She probably didn’t climb in that ice all by herself, so I
think murder will cover it.”

When he finished
up his paperwork at the precinct, Coats walked home and up a creaky flight of
stairs to his apartment. Apartment. The word did more justice to the place than
it deserved. Inside, Coats stripped down to his underwear, and, out of habit,
carried his holstered gun with him to the bathroom.

A few years back
a doped-up goon had broken into the apartment while Coats lay sleeping on the
couch. There was a struggle. The intruder got the gun, and though Coats
disarmed him and beat him down with it, he carried it with him from room to
room ever since. He did this based on experience and what his ex-wife called
trust issues.

Sitting on the
toilet, which rocked precariously, Coats thought about the woman. It wasn’t his
problem. He wasn’t a detective. He didn’t solve murders. But still, he thought
about her through his toilet and through his shower, and he thought about her
after he climbed into bed. How in the world had she come to that? And who had
thought of such a thing, freezing her body in a block of ice and leaving it in
a dark alley? Then there was the paw print. It worried him, like an itchy scar.

It was too hot
to sleep. He got up and poured water in a glass and came back and splashed it
around on the bedsheet. He opened a couple of windows over the street. It was
louder but cooler that way. He lay back down.

And then it hit
him.

The dog paw.

He sat up in bed
and reached for his pants.

____________________

Downtown at the
morgue the night attendant, Bowen, greeted him with a little wave from behind
his desk. Bowen was wearing a white smock covered in red splotches that looked
like blood but weren’t. There was a messy meatball sandwich on a brown paper
wrapper in front of him, half eaten. He had a pulp-Western magazine in his
hands. He laid it on the desk and showed Coats some teeth.

“Hey, Coats, you
got some late hours, don’t you? No uniform? You make detective?”

“Not hardly,”
Coats said, pushing his hat up on his forehead. “I’m off the clock. How’s the
reading?”

“The cowboys are
winning. You got nothing better to do this time of morning than come down to
look at the meat?”

“The lady in
ice.”

Bowen nodded.
“Yeah. Damnedest thing ever.”

“Kid found her.
Came and got me,” Coats said, and he gave Bowen the general story.

“How the hell
did she get there?” Bowen said. “And why?”

“I knew that,”
Coats said, “I might be a detective. May I see the body?”

Bowen slipped
out from behind the desk and Coats followed. They went through another set of
double doors and into a room lined with big drawers in the wall. The air had a
tang of disinfectant about it. Bowen stopped at a drawer with the number 28 on
it and rolled it out.

“Me and another
guy, we had to chop her out with ice picks. They could have set her out front
on the sidewalk and it would have melted quick enough. Even a back room with a
drain. But no, they had us get her out right away. I got a sore arm from all
that chopping.”

“That’s the
excuse you use,” Coats said. “But I bet the sore arm is from something else.”

“Oh, that’s
funny,” Bowen said, and patted the sheet-covered body on the head. The sheet
was damp. Where her head and breasts and pubic area and feet pushed against it
there were dark spots.

Bowen pulled
down the sheet, said, “Only time I get to see something like that and she’s
dead. That don’t seem right.”

Coats looked at
her face, so serene. “Roll it on back,” he said.

Bowen pulled the
sheet down below her knees. Coats looked at the birthmark. The dog paw. It had
struck a chord when he saw it, but he didn’t know what it was right then. Now
he was certain.

“Looks like a
puppy with a muddy foot stepped on her,” Bowen said.

“Got an identity
on her yet?” Coats asked.

“Not yet.”

“Then I can help
you out. Her name is Megdaline Jackson, unless she got married, changed her
last name. She’s somewhere around twenty-four.”

“You know her?”

“When she was a
kid, kind of,” Coats said. “It was her older sister I knew. That birthmark,
where I had seen it, came to me after I got home. Her sister had a much smaller
one like it, higher up on the leg. It threw me because I knew she wasn’t the
older sister, Ali. Too young. But then I remembered the kid, and that she’d be
about twenty-four now. She was just a snot-nosed little brat then, but it makes
sense she would have inherited that mark same as Ali.”

“Considering you
seem to have done some leg work in the past, that saves some leg work of another
kind.”

“That ice
block,” Coats said. “Seen anything like it?”

“Nope. Closest
thing to it was we had a couple of naked dead babes in alleys lately. But not
in blocks of ice.”

“All right,”
Coats said. “That’ll do.”

Bowen pulled the
sheet back, said, “Okay I turn in who this is, now that you’ve identified her?”

Coats studied
the girl’s pale, smooth face. “Sure. Any idea how she died?”

“No wounds on
her that I can see, but we got to cut her up a bit to know more.”

“Let me know
what you find?”

“Sure,” Bowen said.
“But that five dollars I owe you for poker—”

“Forget about
it.”

____________________

Coats drove to
an all-night diner and had coffee and breakfast about the time the sun was
crawling up. He bought a paper off the rack in the diner, sat in a booth, and
read it and drank more coffee until it was firm daylight; by that time he had
drank enough so he thought he could feel his hair crawling across his scalp. He
drove over where Ali lived.

Last time he had
seen Ali she had lived in a nice part of town on a quiet street in a tall house
with a lot of fine trees out front. The house was still there and so were the
trees, but the trees were tired this morning, crinkled, and darkened by the hot
Santa Ana winds.

Coats parked at
the curb and strolled up the long walk. The air was stiff, so much so you could
have buttered it like toast. Coats looked at his pocket watch. It was still
pretty early, but he leaned on the doorbell anyway. After a long time a big man
in a too-tight jacket came and answered the door. He looked like he could tie a
knot in a fire poker, eat it, and crap it out straight.

Coats reached in
his pants pocket, pulled out his patrol badge, and showed it to him. The big
man looked at it like he had just seen something foul, went away, and after
what seemed like enough time for a crippled mouse to have built a nest the size
of the Taj Mahal, he came back.

Coats made it
about three feet inside the door with his hat in his hand before the big man
said, “You got to wait right there.”

“All right,”
Coats said.

“Right there and
don’t go nowhere else.”

“Wouldn’t think
of it.”

The big man
nodded, walked off, and the wait was started all over again. The crippled mouse
was probably halfway into a more ambitious project bythe time Ali showed up.
She was wearing white silk pajamas and her blond hair looked like stirred
honey. She had on white house slippers. She was so gorgeous for a moment Coats
thought he might weep.

“I’ll be
damned,” she said, and smiled. “You.”

“Yeah,” Coats
said. “Me.”

She came over
smiling and took his hand and led him along the corridor until they came to a
room with a table and chairs. He put his hat on the table. They sat in chairs
next to one another and she reached out and clung to his hand.

“That’s some
butler you got,” Coats said.

“Warren. He’s
butler, bodyguard, and makes a hell of a martini. He said it was the police.”

“It is the
police,” Coats said. He took out his badge and showed it to her.

“So you did
become a cop,” she said. “Always said you wanted to.”

She reached up
and touched his face. “I should have stuck with you. Look at you, you look
great.”

“So do you,” he
said.