The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller (9 page)

For my Juan Does presently being showered down for the final time outside the back doors of the morgue, the strenuous swim was over. They would not go on to wash cars, bus tables, work fields, pound nails, cut lawns, and join in a massive labor force without which the texture of Southern California life would not be the same.

Some of the men on the bus were gazing my way; others stared straight ahead. In a moment I would be in motion, driving away, free, making the most minor of choices they could not, while next to me sat the sacks holding human blood and the small, quick, cruel agent of another human’s destruction.

I felt a surge of futility, as I often do when coming away from an autopsy. No one escapes. Does any demise matter over any other? It’s easy to reach a place where it seems nothing about a
victim’s life has any more meaning than its violent end, as though that person were merely born to be murdered.

I drove, thinking about Lenore Schaeffer struggling toward her Great Escape and wondered if there were such a path for me. I thought of my colleagues sinking under the weight of a workload that seems with passing weeks to only gain the momentum of a landslide. Then there was Joe and the toll this work had taken on his marriage and maybe his son. I wondered what this work might be doing to me unseen, like a destructive cell bent on proliferation.

NINE

F
armer flushed an egret. It sailed through the dank air like a slow-moving white paper airplane. Then the setter came trotting back, grinning as only dogs can do, and with muddy feet clear up to mid-leg. Farmer belonged to my neighbor, Mary Langston. She was a dear old lady who suffered from a connective tissue disorder called fibromyalgia. Now and then I offered a dog-walk. Something about an animal makes you remember it’s good to be alive.

When I brought him back it was dark. I hosed him off good by the side of the building where a light shone over the faucet. At the top of the stairs by Mrs. Langston’s door was a wicker chest for his towels. I dried him off before I rang the bell. Mary asked me to stay.
Jeopardy!
was playing on the TV behind her. I promised another time.

At my condo I fixed something to eat, bringing my guinea pig’s cage into the dining room so he could watch; I was
his
TV. His name was Motorboat, from the long, burring noise he made when I touched him. Honey-blond all over, his consistent coloring causes the type to be known as a “self.” Farmer found him. He’s a blond puff with a round nose and rump, no tail. I had to drive to a vet to ask what it was. Now his home is a brown wire cage in the laundry room. He eats continually and pees constantly, but I am its mama now and it may be the only child-thing I’ll ever have.

While I took care of the dishes I kept thinking I should have stayed longer at work to prepare the Turtle Rock prints. A news
program on the television highlighted an actor’s group calling for more representation in film.

I was late to work the next morning. By my desk I smelled a spicy aftershave: Stu had been there. I went to the coffee room and hauled a full cup back to my desk and drank it while shuffling through the self-generating paper in my IN bin. Parthenogenesis, it’s called: the ability to reproduce without a fertilized egg. Handle a piece of paper once, time managers say. But I put most of the stuff back in my bin, got out my Turtle Rock cards, dropped my empty foam cup in the wastebasket, and headed for Joe’s office.

He was just pulling a ceramic cup out of his drawer and a bottle of water. A packet of antacid discs lay on his desk. He slipped the seltzer disks in his cup, watching it foam. “David is failing school. Wants to quit entirely.” I pulled out the guest chair and sat. “We had dinner last night in Laguna. Nice sunset, a little jazz combo playing. Then this.”

“Get thee to a counselor, Counselor. Think that would work?” He gave a not-very-convincing nod. “I’ve got all these Doe prints to run,” I said. “Unless I can talk you into it.”

“Nice try,” he said, and followed me to the doorway.

Two hours later we were still sitting at the CAL-ID computer monitor. It was slow with its searches that day. The green letters on black were blurring under my gaze. I stood to reach another copy of a fingerprint card when the last one came up nil. “Let’s try this one,” I said, and loaded a print onto the scanner, the one from the cigarette pack at Turtle Rock. Up came the white box labeled SEARCH PRINT IMAGE and the black maze of a fingerprint rendered from my earlier tracing. Next to it, another white square reading CANDIDATE IMAGE filled in with an image that had lain deep within the state’s electronic storehouse.

Joe said, “Check it
out
,” and pointed to the SCORE column, which reflects how many ridges, loops, whorls, arches, tents, radials,
pockets, ulnars, doubles, and “accidentals” on the “unknown” fingerprint match up with the print the state has on file. The top score possible is 9999. Our cigarette pack delivered 8525. Subject’s name, Froylan Marcos Cordillo, age twenty-two. Jacked a year ago for unlawful possession of a vehicle.

We put the card in for the prints rolled at the morgue. It came up Froylan Marcos Cordillo, but I could have made it easily just by eyeballing. Last known address, 34567 Marconi, Irvine. “Marconi,” I said. “That’s familiar.”

“And cheese,” Joe said.

“For that, you run these others alone. I’m going to get my notes.” Before I got ten steps, I came back. “Joe, Marconi’s in Technology Park. There are no residential streets there, no houses at all. That street does not run out of the park.”

“Three-four-five-six-seven. We been had.” Joe’s face grew thoughtful. “This is on the Doe at Turtle Rock,” he said, for confirmation.

“Right.”

“Your Doe on Sunday was at Technology Park.”

“Right.”

“It would seem we have a connection, if we strain hard enough,” he said.

I sat back down. “Let’s do these others.”

The computer was speedier now, for no reason we knew. Prints on the foil condom packets and coffee bag proved to be Cordillo’s also, two others unidentified. I told Joe he could call Linda Givens with the news if he liked. He said, “Ohboy, ohboy.”

We went our separate ways for lunch. About three, Dr. Schaeffer called to say she needed tox results for the Technology Park Doe to complete her report; she couldn’t reach our chief tox guy. I said I’d see if I could send it over and mentioned our fingerprint findings. Along the way in the conversation, her voice fell, and she said, “I have to do a baby.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, and wondered why she was telling me this and why she was reacting that way; she’s an experienced pro. Then she said it was her nephew and the parents begged for her to do it if anyone had to. “Say, Smokey? I’m wondering if you have a few minutes to maybe go have a drink sometime?”

That surprised me. We were friendly acquaintances, not friends, but I guess you have to start somewhere. I had an edgy feeling all the same. It felt like Trudy Kunitz all over again. People in pain, but their trouble, not mine. I’d heard of the concept of OPM: Other People’s Money. You invest funds, build interest that’s paid to you from other people’s money. I came to develop one of my own: OPT, for Other People’s Troubles. Usually I tried to keep their tales in a non-interest-bearing account so they wouldn’t pile onto my own and sink the whole thing at an unexpected moment. But I could afford to be generous.

I was picturing her the way she usually was: a confident woman wearing her tasteful but definite diamonds while tending to the dead. Now here was a fragility so aching it seemed to quiver on the line, and a thought came to me from a book I read once by Nicolas Freeling saying that any woman is four or five women. “Lenore?” I said. “Say the word.”

We met in the bar of an upscale sports bar with green ferns, glowing wood, etched glass, and guys scoping for women.

She said, “I had a case today with a guy’s eyes blown clear out of his head. We think it was one of those Hydra-Shok bullets. Sometimes it kind of gets to you, you know?”

I’d seen the effects of those rounds on a gallon jug of water. “Do me a favor,” I said, “don’t tell me it was a Hispanic Doe.”

“No, a Cauc. They’ve already made an arrest. Are you guys thinking you have a serial killer?”

“Anything’s up for grabs at this point.”

“Well, just remember Jack the Ripper did his jobs on six people in three months and then he was never heard from again. Maybe that will happen on these.”

I laughed and said, “Looks like we’re all getting a little desperate for answers, uh?”

We stayed and ate and gabbed and then, when she was feeling the glow from two good scotches, I took her to a dive not far from Newport that has a small band called Dead Heroes. In a parking lot full of shadows, she asked if I was sure this was the place to be. I grinned and said of course it was. She kept bumping into my shoulder as we walked up the wooden pathway, while looking over hers. We passed 250 pounds of square meat who only said, “Good evening, ladies.”

Inside, Lenore lit up the room with her bright pink suit, while I lay low in my dark jacket over a pale gray top. She drank a Stohle from the bottle and said, “Richard said he’d never date a woman who drank straight out of the bottle.”

“Well, it’s sure a damn good thing Richard’s not here looking to get a date then, isn’t it?”

“Damn right,” she said, and took a slug.

The band was playing a not-bad rendition of “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” In a while she whispered, “Do you think it’s safe to go to the john?”

“I think it’s safe.”

“Where’s it at?” she said, looking around. I pointed to the alcove and she slid off the stool and managed the course across the floor. When she came back she seemed refreshed and even a little more sober. We stayed while she told me about her growing-up years and I told her some about mine. We took girl-guesses about the assistant she liked at the morgue, and we stayed until the bandleader gave his Roy Orbison mimicry of “Pretty Woman,” then Lenore began to feel queasy and I took her home.

I said goodbye after promising to stop by in the morning so we could get her car. Then I went home to my dark house and chirping guinea pig, who scolded me harshly for leaving him again. When I bent close, he ran from the smell of Other People’s Smoke in my hair.

TEN

M
ist hung in the valley as I took Jamboree down to I-5, getting my speed up on a long stretch between fields where beans, cabbage, and every kind of pepper grow. Deep in the fields, white-shirted pickers—
rasperos
—were already bent low in the rows.

Had one of the Does labored there? What about Little Crane? Had she worked the fields before going to the garment factory? Had she looked at the profiles of massive, Spanish-style homes everywhere in this valley and wondered how so many, so very many people, could own them?

In the distance loomed the two largest free-standing wooden structures in the world, hangars built in the Second World War and covered in tin when steel was in short supply. They used to hold as many as six blimps in their bellies. Through their huge open doors clouds sneak in and drop rain inside.

Lenore was with me. We were headed to pick up her car. She asked me if I intended to stay in this work a long time.

“I have to hang around,” I said, “just to piss off my boss.”

She smiled and said, “Well, I guess you could always take up a sideline selling Rubbermaid products.”

“Pardon?”

“You know what they’re calling you, don’t you? The Rubber-maid, darling. They’re calling you The Rubbermaid, because of the condoms you found.”

“I’ll kill ’em!” I said, narrowly missing a car that cut into my lane. I flanked to the third lane and pinned the horn, while the guy stared stonily ahead.

Lenore rolled down her window and shot him the finger, then looked at me with wicked triumph in her eyes.

“Why, Doctor,” I said.

“The jerk,” she said.

I let her off at her car and went on to the lab, passing by a handful of pickets outside sheriff’s headquarters. I couldn’t read the signs because the traffic lights were in my favor.