The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller (14 page)

“We can do that,” Boyd said.

“That leaves the first one,” Will said, “and case 00-6272DC, Nellie Gail. Two ID’d, four unsolved.”

“I ran those receipts from the wallet back to the store,” Boyd said, flicking his eyes up at me because it had been my suggestion in the first place. “Nobody remembered him. Zero on this one.”

And so it went.

That noon I took Joe flowers. The nurses wouldn’t put them in his room. I left them at the desk, where he had a view from his room, and just stepped inside the doorway. He looked wan and
tired even in his sleep. A clear plastic tube ran under his nose and another into his left arm. “What am I going to do with you?” I quietly asked his sleeping form.

His son at least now knew Joe was alive and was in fact improving. Jennifer phoned and told me that. Her voice was tight as a bow string. David still would not come home.

I wasn’t done with flowers. On my way to my car I stole two daffodils for Trudy from around the fountain in the common area. I put them on her desk in a plastic sports bottle I found in her wastebasket and wondered if she’d see them before she left.

I saw her in the hallway later. She said, “I got your flowers. Thanks, but you don’t have to keep doing that.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Well, you don’t have to, really. I mean, the thing is, I’m allergic. I gave them to the receptionist.” We laughed.

I said, “Listen, Homicide would like another sketch of the Doe from Nellie Gail. Could you do that?”

She said, “I didn’t do that one very well.”

“Nobody’s criticizing you.”

“I knew it when I did it,” she said.

“You had things on your mind.”

“I’ll have it tomorrow.”

When I left, I patted her arm and later hoped that wasn’t a lame, condescending, or pitying thing to do.

Fifteen minutes before quitting time, Joe called. “Hey,” I said, “are you supposed to be making phone calls?”

“I’m going nuts in here,” he said. “Vega just got off the phone or I’d be ready to call it quits.”

“I’ll be down to keep you company.”

“Better not. I’m going in for more tests in a while.”

“This late? More tests?”

“Nothing serious, don’t worry.”

“What time should I come? Around dinner?”

“Don’t come tonight, babe, if you don’t mind. Dave’s coming. I’d like a little time alone with him.”

“Tell him I said hello.”

“I guess he’s been pretty upset. Guess I’ll have to get my rear in gear and get outta here, huh?”

“How poetic. That rhymes.”

“I been thinking of growing a beard, getting a beret.”

“Today’s poets shave their heads, pierce their nipples, and get tattoos.”

“Guess I’ll skip that, then,” he said.

Saturday morning, when I saw him around nine, he was asleep again. He looked no better than before and now his cheeks were as fiery red as make-up on a daft woman.

When his eyes opened, he said, “Hi, Sourpuss.” I knelt beside him. He stroked my hair. I gave way for a moment with tears.

“Hey, who’s the patient here?” he said.

Seating myself back in the chair, I said, “I’m a jerk,” and wiped away a tear. “You’re looking great,” I lied. “How do you feel?”

“Punctured, pinched, molested, mad as hell.”

“You’re supposed to be calm. Want those blinds open more?”

“Leave them,” he said, and pointed to a partition behind which lay another patient.

“I miss you, you rotter.”

He folded the top edge of his sheet. Smiling, he said, “I had a dream. Like Martin Luther King.”

“A dream?”

“I was free.” He cut his eyes over to me. “I could fly.” The telephones were ringing softly at the nurses’ station. I heard his room companion whose every breath ended with a little whimper, the water dripping in the lavatory, the hum of fluorescent lights, the random clicking of machines next to Joe with green, red, and amber pixels glowing. “I messed up, Smokes,” he said.

“Healthy eating, more exercise from now on,” I said.

“Might as well kill me now.”

I stroked his legs. “I brought you flowers. They’re out at the desk.”

He gave me an imaginary kiss. “How are things at the lab?”

“Peachy keen. You don’t need to know what’s new at work.”

“I suppose everybody’s standing around talking about me and not doing diddly worth of work.”

“Hah. They were bidding for your parking space.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. I looked around to see if any nurse was about to tell me I’d overstayed my time. Then his gaze was on me. “This old man’s screwed up your life, hasn’t he?”

“They need to give you juice for your head in that tube,” I said.

“You should be hanging out with guys zonked on pro football. Not sick old fuckers like me.”

“I should go, let you rest. How ’bout I sneak you in some booze and pizza later?”

“Baby?” He gave two pats on the bed, and I sat. He said, “Don’t change.” I bent to kiss him. “You smell great,” he said.

“You smell like Lysol.”

“Latest fashion aroma. Take care of yourself,” he said.

“Me,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Want water? A cloth? A…a…”

“Nothing. Get outta here.” I stood, wanting to think of something more I could do.

Then he said, “I should’ve ID’ed him right off. I’ve beaten him before. I’ll beat the sucker again.”

A few steps away I turned mid-step to a low wolf-whistle; looked back once more just as Joe edged his chin away and shut his eyes. I could still see the smile.

Jennifer Sanders was outside the elevator when I reached the first floor. She said she’d like to talk, so we went to the basement
cafeteria and had coffee at one of those shiny Formica tables whose legs can never find the floor all at the same time.

She was a brunette with a tender translucence to her skin.

“David says he’s got a new apartment,” she said, “but he didn’t give me his number and I forgot to ask.” She reached beneath the table to get her purse, and pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims. “I know. Nobody smokes anymore. They’ll probably throw me out of here,” she said, looking around.

“We can go outside,” I said.

“Maybe we better.”

She got up, tucking the cigarettes back in her purse but keeping the unlighted one tucked in her palm. “Joe used to hate it, my smoking,” she said, with a nervous smile. “Even though he did at one time.” She offered me one, and I shook my head no.

A tunnel led to the street. Outside, she lit up and drew in a long breath and exhaled upward into the limbs of a bottlebrush tree whose trunk was a raceway for ants.

I saw the Nellie Gail, the ants making their curved way around Juan Doe Number Two.

“I have to go to work pretty soon,” she said. “Real estate is weekends and nights, a hazard of the profession.”

“I remember now, you’re in real estate.” I felt funny talking with the ex-wife of my lover, revealing in even the slightest that she’d been the topic of any conversation between Joe and me.

Perhaps she felt it too, because she said, “Listen, I, uh, know this is awkward. But you don’t have anything to worry about.” She drew in another long hit. “You had nothing to do with Joe and me, I know that. If it wasn’t now, it’d be then. If it wasn’t then, it’d be now. It was a long time coming.”

“Thanks for saying so.”

“I want to ask you a favor.” She massaged her elbows, cigarette intact. “If my son comes to you, do your best for him.”

“Of course. But I can’t see him doing much of that.”

“David and I have been close, closer than he’s been with his father really, except this last year or so. It might be because of college, the need to break away. Each of us has to do it, sometime in our life. Now this, with his father. It might be too much. Maybe now’s the time when David needs to draw to another adult.”

“I’m sure he’ll always need his mother.”

She cut her eyes at me. “Don’t patronize me.”

“I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”

“David likes you,” she said, and took another quick hit off her cigarette. Then she reached forward to stub it out on the tree trunk, not noticing she’d caused a catastrophe on the ant speedway. “The senior and the junior mother figure,” she said. “Is that a cruel thing to do to a boy, or what, two mother figures?”

I smiled, and just as I started toward her to give her a consoling embrace she saw it coming and turned away and tugged open the door against the air conditioner suck.

Mrs. Langston knocked on my door about five. She’d come over to borrow sugar, honest to God, just as neighbors used to in the good old days. She heard my guinea pig whistle and looked in the laundry room and said, “That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“They eat these little guys in South America,” I said.

“No! How could they?” Mary said, now brave enough to lean forward and push a forefinger over its head between the ears. He let his mouth drop open, showing his tiny bucked teeth. “I gave up consuming anything with a face some time back,” Mrs. Langston said. “I thought if I just ate veggies it would change my arthritis. It didn’t, but what the heck. How’s your friend Joe?”

“He’s better.”

Her face drew down, then she said, “I lost one husband to a stroke, another to a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They were good men, too.” Her face brightened. “My third husband, he was a kick in the head. Always kept me laughing.
Kept other women happy, too. Him, I
gave
a heart attack.” Her eyes fairly sparkled. “How’re we coming on the Does?”

Does. Because of me she was using the language.

“Not very far, not very fast,” I said.

“Well now. You all better get with the program, huh?”

“I’ll see to it we do that,” I said as she turned to go.

“You
do
have some fun once in a while, don’t you?” Her head was cocked like Columbo just before he asks the last question that will lead to the killer’s confession. “Because if you don’t,” she said, “you’ll regret it one day. Remember that.” She shook a warning finger. “Listen to one who knows,” she said earnestly before she shut the door.

SEVENTEEN

“H
ow’s that old ticker today?”

“Quiet as a horse-thief after a hanging.”

“Why doesn’t that answer sound as good as it should?”

“Listen, do me a favor tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Get in touch with Harold Raimey. Ask if he can check the trunk of the husband’s car, will you? I know he’d need another warrant, but it’d sure be nice if hubby had some old tennis shoes stuffed in a gym bag back there that match our shoe impressions on the plywood.”

“You’re incorrigible, but I will. Should I drop by today?”

“Know what’s weird?” Joe asked. “They tell you to cool it on the visitors, yet I’m looking at two ugly faces right now, two old colleagues from up north. They’re in town for a trial, so what do they do but come bother
me
,” he said. I could hear them in the background giving him a bad time. “Why don’t you come after work tomorrow night,” Joe said. “We’ll have a game of volleyball on the beach.”

Gil Vanderman. I forgot he was going to call. He told me his mother makes a fabulous asparagus salad and put the sweet-voiced woman on the line. “Hi, Smokey. This is Ivalyn.”

“Nice to meet you, Ivalyn.”

“Gil’s father and I
would
be very pleased to have you over. The herons are something to see.”

Gil was twirling a long-stemmed lily between his fingers when I met him on the sidewalk outside a café on Balboa Island. He handed it to me as he commented on my looks, then said the bouquet of mixed flowers he held in the other hand was for his mother.

“Anyone who’d bring flowers to his mother gets my vote.”

“I told you I was a good guy,” he said.

He wore nutmeg wool pants and a blue chambray shirt open at the neck. A gold watchband showed at his wrist. He seemed a little nervous, and I was surprised at that. He said we’d better get going so we’d still have light.

We were underway across the channel, the water green, the Torrey pines on the island ahead cutting black shapes out of a sky still ripe with gold. Airplane lights drifted inland, while a gull curved oceanward looking for a last morsel. Gil pointed and said, “You can just make out the nests.” And I could. Eight giant ones, three feet across, Gil told me.

He nosed the boat up to a small dock jutting out from a deep, tailored lawn whose grass was sprinkled with tiny white flowers. A red brick pathway ran up its middle. I was impressed. A place where dreams come to settle.

Gil’s parents came out of the house and stood on the deck and waved. His mother’s dark hair was swept white at the sides. She cut an elegant figure in an Indian cotton dress with a silver belt and silver sandals. Gil’s father could have passed for a heavier “Crocodile Dundee.”

“I’ve been holding out on you,” Gil said. “My dad, that nice old guy up there?” he said, motioning with his head. “With the little pot belly and reading glasses? He’s a retired judge. I mentioned you one time, and he recognized your name. He told me you work at the crime lab.”

I felt somehow exposed. I rubbed my arms against the chill.