The Wave (6 page)

15

“It is a crime to disturb a crime scene, Mr. Porter,” Detective Lehman Burke said to me a few days later.

I was sitting in the third-floor interrogation room of the Wilshire Precinct.

I had called the police the day after finding the letter and the corpse. At first I thought that I could just let it go. It was a crime of passion, committed over twenty years ago. The murderer was dead, had been for nine years.

I couldn’t sleep at all that night. I kept remembering my father’s brief reference to Bobby Bliss’s family. His mother or sister or maybe even his children who never knew what became of him.

The next morning I went to my mother after a brief visit with Nella.

My mom read the letter once and handed it back to me.

“That boy told you about this?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call the police,” she told me.

And I did.

“I know that, Officer Burke,” I said. “But you have to understand. The person who told me about the letter was very irresponsible, and I had no reason to believe that Mr. Bliss was actually dead. As a matter of fact, I had never heard of him before a few days ago.”

“You should have called the police,” he insisted.

“Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I looked where the letter said to look.”

“And you didn’t call us for twenty-four hours,” Burke added.

“I know. I didn’t see where it mattered. That man was my mother’s lover, and he was murdered by my father. You can see where I might have had some conflict at bringing up so much pain.”

“The law is the law, Mr. Porter.”

Burke was a Negro, as am I. The same tone but not the same color, exactly. Where my skin has a maple-brown hue, he had more of an ashen undertone. He had a slender build and a thick mustache like Bobby Bliss had. He smoked one cigarette after another directly under a
NO SMOKING
sign, but I didn’t complain.

“Did you find anything in the grave with him?” Burke asked. “Other than the gun, I mean.”

“No. Like what?”

“I don’t know. He said in the note that he put all the evidence in the grave with Bliss. Sounds to me like he could have meant the money.”

“I don’t know what he did with the money,” I said. “I have no idea.”

Burke stared hard at me.

I tried not to look guilty.

Finally he said, “Tell me more about this young man you call GT.”

I went through the story again, telling him about the late-night calls and the meeting at the graveyard. I told him about all the things GT seemed to know concerning our family and my suspicion that he was the son of a second family in Georgia.

“And he was the one who told you about this letter?” Burke asked for the twentieth time.

“Yes. He told me about it the night before he left.”

“On his mission?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds crazy,” Burke said. Then he paused to see if I wanted to change any part of my story.

“It sure does,” I agreed.

“And you didn’t find any money in the grave?”

“No, sir.”

“And you knew nothing about the murder before you read the letter?”

“I was a child when that letter was written.”

“And you have no idea who this GT is?”

“He told me that he was my father,” I said. “He said that he rose up out of the grave.”

“And you say he stayed at your apartment for a few days?”

“Two,” I said. “Two days.”

“Mr. Porter,” Burke said rather formally, “would you give a team of my men permission to search your house?”

“My house? The body was at my mother’s place. He’s been dead twenty years. What could you possibly find at my house?”

“So you refuse?” Detective Burke inquired.

“No,” I said. “I can even tell you there’s a tumbler on my sink that GT was the last one to touch. I haven’t been to my house much since the body was found. My mom, you know. She needs the company.”

And that was that. The police took my keys and searched the house, looking for GT’s fingerprints and maybe the cash my father mentioned. My mother, who had always been removed and aloof, entered a period of grief that made her seem like a completely different woman. She’d read my father’s confession many times over. She even went out to see the body before the police came.

“What did you think happened to him?” I asked her on the first night after she learned about the murder.

“I thought he’d left me. That’s what the note said.”

“And you never suspected anything?”

“No,” she said.

“Did you love him?”

She was silent for many long minutes before answering. “Bobby was a wild man. He carried a straight razor in his pocket and sometimes a gun. He was working as a janitor at the hospital where Uncle Mortie had gone for open-heart surgery. He was nice to me, and after Mortie got better, Bobby called one day. He said that he was in the neighborhood and wanted to drop by. For some reason, I just couldn’t say no.”

“He was so wild that you thought he might just have run away one day?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was so sad, and your father was very kind to me.” My mother had a broken look. “Now I suppose that was all guilt. But I’m sure those pictures cut him way down deep.”

“Why didn’t you and Dad break up?”

“We loved each other in our own way,” she said. “And . . .

and . . . there was you and Angie. Our problems didn’t have to be yours, too.”

I took the twenty-five thousand dollars to Nella’s house right after I decided to tell my mother about the crime. I told Nella that she could have three thousand just to hold on to it for me.

“I’ll hold
all
of it,” Nella told me. “I only take what money I have earned.”

I don’t know why I took the money. Maybe I was afraid the police would have kept it, or maybe I thought that seeing the money Bobby Bliss agreed to take would break my mother’s heart. But looking back on it, I guess it was because I was so broke, and in some way it felt like a gift from my father to keep me from sinking too low.

Except for the past mayhem, things weren’t too bad. GT was gone. The world was looking better. I had a line of gold-and-green celadon-glazed mugs thrown on the wheel and then altered to look something like fat Chinese ducks. I’d thrown and fired over six hundred mugs and planned to sell them at the street fair for twelve dollars each. It wasn’t a lot of money, after expenses, but at least it was a start.

I visited Angie a little more often, and about every other night I spent wining and dining the lovely Ms. Bombury with money I’d stolen from a murdered man’s grave.

16

The phone rang at two-thirty the morning before the crafts sale. I was up wrapping and boxing mugs for the show. The bell at that hour gave me a chill. As the days had gone by, I’d begun to be afraid of GT. He was obviously crazy; mentally unstable and physically very strong—a bad combination. He had information about me and my family that I’d never suspected. And even though I knew he couldn’t have had anything to do with Bobby Bliss’s death, I still associated him with that violent act.

I let the phone go to the answering machine so as not to have to speak if it was GT on the line.

“Errol, this is Lon. If you’re there, pick up.”

There was noise in the background that made it plain my sister’s husband wasn’t calling from their home.

“What is it, Lon?”

“It’s Anj. She’s real sick.”

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital. Temple. They admitted her through the emergency room.”

“I’ll be right there.”

By the time I got to the admissions desk of the emergency room, it was almost three-thirty. Lon was nodding in a chair between a nauseated-looking woman and a man with a bloody gauze bandage wrapped around his forearm.

“She got these terrible pains and started bleeding,” Lon said. “I brought her here, and they took her right in. The doctors haven’t said a thing.”

“What are they doing for her?” I asked.

“I think they’re operating. That’s what the nurse said.”

“When did she start bleeding?”

“It started about nine. I brought her in because we thought it might be some kind of rough labor or something, but they said that the bleeding was bad.”

Lon was tall and prematurely gray. He had a young face, though, and an athletic physique. We never liked each other much. It didn’t have anything to do with race or even with my sister. We were just very different people. But he was my brother-in-law, so I treated him as well as I could.

“Who’s in charge of the operation?” I asked.

“I don’t know anything else, Errol,” Lon said. “They just put me off whenever I go up to the desk.”

I went up. They put me off, too.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Porter,” a young Latina in a white uniform told me. “Your sister is very sick, and Dr. Valeria is operating on her now. We won’t know anything until she comes out of surgery. We might not know anything certain for a few days.”

“What about the baby?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

Lon and I waited until six-thirty. After the doctor had a brief conference with us, I called Nella.

I told her what happened and then asked, “Could you go by my house and pick up a few of my boxes? I’m stuck at the hospital, waiting to see what’s happening. The key is in the iron lamp up over the left side of the door.”

“Is she going to be all right?” Nella asked.

“They say she has a pretty good chance, but they’re not sure about the baby. They removed her from Angie’s womb. She’s only two and a quarter pounds. They put her in an incubator.”

“I’ll pick up your boxes, Errol. But after this, I t’ink you better t’ink about goin’ to church.”

“I promise,” I said.

I really meant it, too. My life up to the age of twenty-seven had gone off without a hitch, except for the death of my father. I’d gotten good grades at school and college. I’d married my high school sweetheart, fallen into a great job . . . Then all of a sudden things started going wrong.

Maybe it was time to get into a fold.

At 8:05, Dr. Valeria came out to meet with us for the second time.

“She’s very sick,” the olive-skinned European said. “But she’s stable now. The bleeding has stopped, and the baby is breathing on life support. All we can do now is to give their bodies the chance to work their magic.”

“Isn’t there some medicine?” Lon asked. “Something you can do?”

The doctor shook his head. His wiry copper-colored hair shimmered as he moved.

“No,” he said. “They are both very weak. We will keep them warm, keep them quiet and clean. Wait twenty-four hours and then we will see how to proceed.”

Valeria told us that we wouldn’t be able to see Angie or the baby for at least forty-eight hours, so Lon went back to the waiting room, and I left for the street fair.

I had shared the cost of the booth with Nella. It was a big one, costing four hundred and fifty dollars for the two days. Nella had all the materials. It looked pretty cool. Like a big tent with shelves and freestanding displays.

Nella’s work was large. Handmade mythical animals designed with complex pastel patterns. She also made oversize stoneware platters that had been thrown and then reworked into large ovals and other, more complex shapes like whales and undulating rivers.

Nella’s work took up most of the space, so she paid for most of it. My mugs were on a few shelves along the side.

“How is your sister?” she asked me when I arrived.

“Alive,” I said. “The doctors don’t know what will happen. They have her in the ICU for the next forty-eight hours, at least.”

“And her baby?”

“On life support, too.”

Nella put her arms around me. I think she expected me to cry, but I couldn’t. I was just taking steps one after another. I couldn’t imagine anything happening to Angie. That just wasn’t a possibility.

“She’s going to be fine,” I said. “Don’t you worry.”

The words were dead on my tongue, but I don’t think Nella realized that.

“Let’s get to work,” she said, putting away the pain she felt for me. “I already sold four of your ugly mugs.”

“Really? Damn.”

The day went along quite well. By two I’d sold over 130 mugs, and Nella had moved five platters. We’d made about the same amount of money, because Nella’s plates cost three hundred dollars each.

Every hour I called the hospital, but Angelique’s condition had remained the same.

Nella had just gone out to walk around the fair “to scope out the competition,” when the three men in suits came into the tent. I realized later that they must have been watching, waiting for Nella or me to walk away.

Two of them seemed to be cast from the same mold. Dark suits. Tall and white with every hair and crease in place. The last man was tall also, but his light-colored suit was ill-fitting—loose in the chest and tight at the waist.

The twins wandered around a bit and then settled near the entrance. There they pulled the canvas flap across the front, closing off the space to the public. I was about to ask them to move the fabric door back, when the man in the bad suit came up to me. He had one of my mugs in his hand.

“Mr. Porter?” he said.

“Yes?”

“My name is Werner.”

He had robin’s-egg-blue eyes and a craggy face that if it had been on a marble facade, you might have said got only the first treatment of sandblasting. The skin was pocked and mottled.

“We have a problem,” Werner said.

“What’s that?”

“We’re looking for your father. Do you know where he is?”

“In the grave,” I said. The cold in my gut almost doubled me over.

The ugly stone face smiled.

“This is no time for artifice, young man.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, mister. My father died nine years ago.”

“Then why, may I ask, were his fingerprints found on a water glass in your house just recently?”

17

They identified themselves as government agents but demurred when I asked what agency they worked for. They used a plastic tie to secure my wrists behind my back, then hurried me out of the street fair and into a black Lincoln Town Car. The dark-suited twins got in the front seat, while the lumpy agent sat next to me in back.

“Can I see your identification again, Agent Werner?” I asked him.

“You don’t need to see my identification,” he said. “You need to get your story straight.”

“But—”

“Wait until we get there,” he said.

It was a very long drive. Because the men refused to answer my questions, I leaned my temple against the cold door-glass and closed my eyes. I imagined a vast blue sky with two great clouds. One was in the shape of a white rhinoceros, and the other was a feral snow hare. The winds blew the clouds together at an excruciatingly sluggish rate. Slowly, as they came together, the animals became a great blue-on-blue dragon.

I couldn’t shake the vision. It wasn’t a dream or a mental construction. I thought at the time that it was a symptom of the great stress I was under, a way to escape my helplessness.

At last we arrived at a house near the outskirts of Ventura, in a rural town called Fillmore. It had once been a working orange farm. There were still hundreds of citrus trees surrounding the house. The property was immense for a single dwelling, almost the size of a plantation. There were certainly no next-door neighbors to peek over the fence and ask what was going on.

I was dragged into the adobe-style mansion and deposited on a large, shaggy sofa. It was white and smelled of cured wool.

Werner sat on a hassock in front of me. I was leaning on my side because it was hard to sit upright with my hands restricted.

“This is no joke,” he said.

“What’s your first name?” I asked him.

“Jim.”

“Well, Agent Jim, I have no jokes to tell.”

“Then let’s drop this shit about your father being dead, shall we?” he suggested.

“There was a man at my house,” I said as calmly as I could. “He claimed to be my father. But he was no more than twenty.”

“Where’d you meet this guy?” James Werner asked me.

“He called me,” I said. “Crazy, hopeless kinds of calls. I went out and found him in the graveyard.”

“What was he doing there?”

“I don’t know. Sleeping on my father’s grave.”

“You say that he looked like he was a young man?”

“Absolutely. Almost a boy. But strong.”

“How do you know that?”

I related the experience of GT throwing me at the beach.

“Why was he eating sand?” Agent Jim asked.

“He was crazy,” I said. “Like I told you.”

The rock-faced government agent stared hard at me. He seemed to come to some kind of conclusion and nodded. He stood up, snipped the tie holding my wrists, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

The room he left me in had five doors, all of which were closed, and a big window looking out on a pair of weeping willows. The doors were locked. The windows were all barred by ornate cast-iron gratings that were painted pink. I wandered over to the shelf above the fireplace. There was a line of about twenty books between bookends made from bronze replicas of Remington cowboys atop bucking steeds.

Most of the books were male-oriented adventures. Books about submarines at war, World War II battles, and Civil War strategies. There was one book that was different. It was a slender tome on astrophysics entitled
The Effect of Celestial Events on the Biosphere.
The subject was the impact of meteorites that have struck the earth and altered the environment and life.

I remembered GT’s claim about an explosion, probably a meteorite, and felt a sudden chill. Despite all the evidence that had been presented to me up until that moment, it was seeing that book that made me wonder if what GT had been saying might really be true.

I didn’t understand most of what I read of the introduction, but I got enough to glean a postulation about a meteorite that had struck Earth one and a half billion years ago. This rock was four times the size of the one they thought wiped out the dinosaurs. There were no large animals at that time, only single-celled, bacteria-like creatures. Dr. Zellman, the author, speculated that such life would both survive and be deeply altered by such a dramatic change in environment—

“Good evening, Mr. Porter,” a man’s voice said.

When I looked up, I realized that the sun had gone down. I had been on the sheepskin couch reading for some time.

The man standing before me was tall and slender with a rather elevated forehead. He was over forty but not yet fifty. His eyes were dark, maybe green, and intense.

“Who are you?”

“David Wheeler,” he said with no hint of humor. “I will be your host for the next few days.”

“I can’t stay here,” I said. “My sister’s sick, and I’m running a pottery sale with a friend.”

“The sale has been going quite well,” Wheeler said. “And your sister is still in the ICU with her child. As soon as we know anything about their condition, you will be informed.”

“You can’t just hold me here,” I said.

“The man you say claimed to be your father stayed with you for a couple of days?” Wheeler asked.

“Yeah.”

“Was he ever wounded during that time period?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was he cut, bruised, lacerated?”

“Why would something like that happen to him?”

“I’m not blaming you for anything, Mr. Porter,” my interlocutor assured me. “I was just wondering if he healed quickly.”

I thought about my finger.
I
had healed at an incredible rate.

“No,” I said. “No, uh-uh. I mean, I can’t say if he healed quickly, because nothing ever happened to him. Why do you ask?”

“Did your father—”

“GT,” I said. “I called him GT.”

“Why did you call him that?”

“When I met him, he kept saying that good times were coming.”

Wheeler frowned.

“Did this GT tell you where he came from?”

“He said that he was my father,” I said. “That he’d risen from the grave. He called me from the graveyard.”

“How did he have your number?”

“I’m listed. He probably called information. But let me ask you something, Mr. Wheeler—”

“Dr. Wheeler,” he corrected.

“Let me ask you something, Doctor.”

“What is that?”

“Agent Werner said that the fingerprints on the glass on my sink belonged to my father. Is that true?”

“Did this GT resemble your father?” he asked instead of answering me.

“A little bit. I figured that he was the illegitimate son of my old man.”

“Do you honestly believe that your father would have maintained a separate family outside of your own?”

“Ask me if I believe that my father would have murdered my mother’s lover and then buried him in the garage.”

Wheeler had been standing all this time. He wore soft, dark maroon trousers and a square-cut yellow shirt meant to hang out of the pants. His shoes were alligator, and there was a thick and cloudy crystal ring on his left pinky.

“May I sit, Mr. Porter?”

“It’s your house, man.”

He sat on a stuffed chair across from me.

“You don’t believe that men can rise up out of the grave?” he asked.

“No.”

“But didn’t this GT tell you things that only your father could have known?”

“Yes,” I said. “But my father could have told GT or GT’s mother those stories.”

“You think that he would have admitted committing a murder to a woman who may very well have wanted him for her own?”

He was fondling the opaque crystal ring with the fingers of his right hand.

“People do all kinds of crazy things,” I said.

Wheeler shook his extra-long head. “You’re too bright to believe that,” he said. “Top of your class in computer science at UCLA. An excellent chess player.”

“Then why don’t you believe me?” I asked.

Wheeler sat up straight and put his hands on his knees. He fixed me with his maybe-green eyes and said, “Those were your father’s fingerprints on that glass. We’ve exhumed his grave, and all that’s left in the coffin is fine white sand.”

Images of my father, the old man, flooded my mind. Along with these images were flashes of GT with all of his boyish exuberance. There were those phone calls from the graveyard and the insults I had piled upon him.

Wheeler was handing me a handkerchief.

I hadn’t even known that tears were streaming down my face.

“Come with me, Errol,” Dr. Wheeler said. “I want to show you some things that will surprise you.”