Pacific Beat, page 22
Dear sweet God
“Don’t fuck with us. You know who we are.”
“Ever.”
“Anymore.”
“Got it?”
“Enjoy your new look, Weir.”
He could hear them leaving, but he couldn’t open his eyes. And he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out why the pain was not excruciating—just a cool stinging patch that felt open and foreign. His head throbbed with each wild heartbeat.
Then he felt someone grab him by the shirt and lift him up, followed by a sawing sounding above. Suddenly, his feet broke free and he dropped to the floor in a backbreaking flop cushioned only by his hands.
He lay there on the cool linoleum for a long moment, listening to the footsteps departing, then the cars starting up outside, then only to the racing gallop of his heart against the floor.
Then he was strangely, insanely, profoundly happy. He could feel it there beneath him, and he knew they hadn’t taken it. He rolled over and parted his trousers, hoisting himself up on one elbow. There it was, in all its terrified, recessed glory, lying on a plain of white flesh. He lay back, turned his head to the side, and saw the clump of hair a few feet away. The barbershop sound, he thought: electric clippers—the lopping shears were strictly for show. He managed to get his zipper up. Then he rolled over to the wall and scrunched himself up against it and peered out the window to the dark sky outside. His heart wouldn’t stop racing. It sent the blood rushing into his face, into his ears and eyes, into his hands and fingers, into his legs and his feet, and he lay there a long while thanking God for the blood that still pumped inside him, every precious, eager, frantic drop.
The moon came into the window. When his heart finally began to slow, the pain came to take its place. It was mostly surface now: his back and stomach and ribs, but he knew it would sink down deeper over the hours, settling into the bone and tendons.
He stood slowly, bracing against the wall. By the time he got to the living room, he had found a tremulous balance that threatened to give out at any second. He fell once going down the steps, and once more standing beside his truck, trying to get a trembling hand into his pocket for the keys.
CHAPTER 20
ON THE DAY OF ANN’S FUNERAL, THE OCEAN DIED, THE FIRST victims were the small fish that washed up before sunrise— anchovies, smelt, grunion, young bass. By nine, there were halibut, mullet, mackerel, bonita, stingrays, skates, mud sharks, sand sharks, blue sharks, and thresher, carried by the tide to shore, where, bloated, eyes protruding, bladders ejected from their mouths, they lay either dead or in final twitching demise. Half a dozen sea lions were beached, too, but still alive at first. They lolled in the shallows near Poon’s Locker, entangling themselves in mooring lines and issuing their last agonized groans before turning belly-up and silent in the dismal, fog-clenched afternoon. Last to go were the seabirds—the ducks, the gulls and pelicans, a few heron deep in the Back Bay—which floated, limp-necked and feet folded, onto the beaches around noon. By 2:00 P.M., the smell was getting strong.
The old-timers of the peninsula mumbled about a red tide—a deadly buildup of plankton that robs the fish of oxygen—but none of them had ever seen a sea gull die of too much air. Besides, the water wasn’t the telltale orange-brown of a plankton surge, but its usual gray and unassuming self. Charter trips were canceled and the harbor tours were postponed, but the Newport-to-Catalina ship weighed anchor at the usual 8 A.M., dividing with its prow the thousands of bobbing bodies that littered the bay. The ferryboat continued its runs, pushing through the carnage with the glum efficiency of a slow plow in winter. By noon, the EPA, the California Department of Fish and Game, the Coastal Commission, the Coast Guard, the County Sheriff’s, the city Marine Department, the mayor, an aid to the governor, and the press had all arrived to evaluate the problem.
Jim saw it from the window of his old upstairs room in the big house. He had spent an aching night tossing on his bed, sweating, plagued by visions of lopping shears and, later in a state of light sleep, again by the dream of someone holding a single purple rose up to Ann’s trusting, lovely face. Before first light, he got up and read the files on Kearns and Blodgett, searching for something that had gotten through, something he hadn’t seen, something he hadn’t understood. The words danced on the paper in front of him, cloying and ineffable. When he finally looked up from the files, he saw the hundreds of pale, shining shapes lining the curve of shore to the south. In the first light of day, they looked like coins spilled from a treasure chest. To the north, he could see a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk, just past Ann’s Kids. Becky Flynn stood off to the side, talking on a portable telephone. Some of the people were still in their robes. Downstairs, the phone started ringing.
And through it all, the hunt for Horton Goins continued. When he went down to the Locker for coffee, Jim saw a team of uniforms working the motels around the El Mar. When he sat in the window of the café and drank it, Tillis and Oswitz walked by with copies of Goins’s photograph in their hands. The morning paper said that south-county sporting-goods stores were reporting brisk gun sales; Goins’s picture ran again; a front-page article recounted the death of a fifteen-year-old Newport boy who was shot by his own father while trying to sneak back into his house— through his sister’s room—after a night away. Later when he drove Virginia and Raymond and Becky off the island toward the cemetery, they had to stop at the roadblock— with about a thousand other cars, it seemed—set up to find Goins. Officer Hoch, with a swollen purple nose and two black eyes, waved them through. Ray commented on it, but Weir said nothing. He was feeding his anger on silence. The Newport cops had taken him down a notch. So what? He’d quit their world and gotten a less-than-welcome back. The shoulder holster and Poon’s old .45 felt strange against his ribs, troublesome allies.
The helicopter hovered noisily, in and out of sight through the windshield, always audible, always there. An OCTD bus groaned ahead of them and cut straight into the cortege, Dennison’s face smiling back at them through clouds of black exhaust. Two young motor officers provided escort alongside his truck. They never once looked over.
From the chapel in the hills, Weir could see the city below them, the Pacific beyond that, a faint horizon dotted with sails. The aroma of flowers was so heavy that he had trouble drawing breath. Everything seemed to be happening slowly and every movement brought him a rush of pain. The Cruz clan sat across from them, shapes in black, many already sobbing. Ernesto and Irena sat in the first pew on the left, motionless and reduced. Raymond remained erect in a black suit, his face locked safely around something terrible. When Irena turned to look at him, Jim was met by a sadness too complete to behold. He looked away, sat down beside Virginia, and took her big knotted hand in his.
The obituary was offered by the Rev. Matthew Martell, then eulogies by friends. Jim sat, sunk by the ballast of mourning, and considered the black-clad figure of Becky as she stood at the podium, looked out from behind a veil, and cleared her throat.
“One of the blessings of my life,” she said, “was to know Ann Cruz.” A blessing she counted as a great one. Her voice to Jim sounded brittle as glass, ready to crack. But he knew she wouldn’t: Becky was always toughest in a clinch. Behind the black netted veil, her eyes were a dark, wet brown, and her lips below were red as apples. To Jim’s mind, assaulted by the cruelty of reminiscence, staggered by the heavy smell of the flowers, surrounded by the people with whom he had grown up in this crowded small-town neighborhood, she seemed to be talking only to him. He lost himself in her.
“We were girls, then women together. When I was confused, Ann was clear. When I had doubt, Ann had certainty. When I was undecided and afraid, Ann had judgment and courage. And when there was something I had to do, and right and wrong weren’t clear, I could always ask myself what Ann would do, and know that that would be right. She loved me with generosity and good humor; she felt my sadness and shared my joy. There was something at the center of her that I came to realize was in her blood, the blood of Virginia and Poon, the blood that runs … that ran through all their children. If I had to say what it was, I’d say it was dignity, the refusal to be diminished by the things in life that try to diminish us all.” Becky looked out to the mourners, her eyes pausing on Jim. “That, and a willingness to put herself on the line, to commit herself to what she believed and act accordingly. In the time I knew her, Ann was never cruel for the sake of cruelty. She never laughed at someone who didn’t have what she had. She never assumed that she deserved what she had—there was no arrogance in her, no pride. The one person she could always laugh at was herself, and she did that often. You …” Becky wiped a tear away with a slender finger slid up under the veil. She took a deep breath. “You all know what an honor it was just to hear her laugh, to see the sparkle of her eyes and the sparkle of her soul coming through. I think that … I think that where Ann goes will be a better place for her presence, and that what she leaves us is a place much lessened by her loss. To say that there are no words for all of this would be a lie. There are words, too many of them, too many thousands of words used over and over to express what we feel. They are not designed to carry such weight. That burden is left to us. I will just say one more thing, that I hope God in heaven will treat her with the gentleness and respect that is due to Ann, that He didn’t … offer her on this earth. That is my hope and my comfort In honor of Ann, I will love and smile and laugh, and consider her, forever and in perpetuity, among us.”
Jim sat, asking himself the usual huge questions: Was there something he could have done or should have noticed; why was there such misery for the people whom God is supposed to care about as much as He does the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; is Ann really going to a better place or is that a fiction told by the living for themselves?
Irena and Nesto Cruz were sobbing openly as Becky stepped down. She fixed her eyes on Jim’s, as if they were the sole known coordinates in a storm, following them to her seat.
Raymond’s head was bowed; he was so still that he seemed to be a statue of himself. Weir felt the tremoring of grief inside, the tectonic shelves of one emotion shifting against another. Becky wrapped an arm through his. He put his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees and felt the tears welling into his eyes from a part of him that seemed filled with them.
Then everyone filed out and watched as Ann was put into the ground. The fresh dirt was covered by a black tarp. The grave was neat, precise, deep. Through the flowers and perfume and sweat, Jim could smell the city below, the smell of death and sea and muted sun.
Somehow he got them back to the big house for the gathering. Three different radio stations reported that toxic levels of the solvent 1,1,1-trichloroethane had been found in Newport Harbor. Beaches were closed until further notice.
Weir, Virginia, and Ray greeted the mourners at the door. Jim clasped hands, returned embraces and kisses, mumbled his appreciation of whatever was said. Each condolence seemed to take something out of him, open up a new grief. The odd, slow motion of the funeral service was still upon him, as if the afternoon were taking its rhythm from a time signature he’d never heard. Everyone looked bigger when he met them at the door—the solemn faces, the moist eyes, the unsure chins. Raymond stood straight beside him, his voice calm but somehow disembodied. His smile was withered; his usual animation and quickness were gone. Of all the people in the room, thought Weir, Ray’s the only one who hates this more than I do. When most of the people had arrived, he joined them, went to the bar, poured himself a double shot of scotch, downed it, and took a beer from the cooler.
As he looked around the room, the world seemed to divide into two camps—them and us. Us was himself, Virginia, Raymond and his family, Becky. Them was everybody else. There they were, standing in his home, Ann’s home. There they were, drinking Virginia’s booze, eating her food. There they were, dressed up, talking of who knew what, advancing their own private ambitions, seductions, concealments, and betrayals under the same roof that had protected the child Ann. There they were, all doing what Ann would never do again, all honoring her in death in a way that they would never honor her in life. You hypocrites, he thought, you latecomers, you fakes. You dispensable, minor, alien fucks. It was a sacrilege. He caught the eye of every cop he could and sent his clearest message: You changed the game last night; you will pay. He was not exactly sure how: He finished off the beer and poured another scotch. Mayhem was calling.
He watched Dale Blodgett come through the door, find the law-enforcement contingent in a far corner, then head in the other direction. Dennison’s droop-eyed Judas, thought Jim, odd man out. Was he one of the six from last night? There was no certain way to tell. Clever to have brought along a Jaguar. He took another drink, watching Virginia trail across the room to meet Blodgett, where they hugged for a long, almost motionless moment. Blodgett’s big, thick-featured body somehow complimented the wiry, wind-burned Virginia.
Becky took his arm. “Watch that stuff,” she said, tapping his glass. “You’ve got that expression—all wound up and nowhere to go. Hang on to it, though. You’re going to need it.”
From across the room, Virginia gave him an odd look. He was about to head over when he realized it was for Becky, who excused herself and worked through the crowd toward her. Jim watched as Blodgett hugged her, his big hands open against the black back of her dress. Brian Dennison, Jim noted, was watching, too. Then Becky broke away and followed Virginia down the hallway and into Ann’s old room, where they shut the door. Politicos, thought Weir: They never stop.
Phil Kearns and Crystal from Oklahoma edged over to Jim. Kearns looked like a model—hair gelled back, face tan, a black linen suit with a black shirt buttoned to the top, no tie. Crystal was small, pretty, pink from her morning sun on Kearns’s deck. She gave Jim a small, somehow inviting smile.
Kearns talked on about Ann, and Weir sensed a genuine sadness in him. But Kearns wouldn’t use her name, as if he felt obliged to hold something he didn’t want to touch. When Crystal went for drinks, Weir stepped in front of Kearns, sealing him off from the rest of the room.
“You didn’t answer four calls from Dispatch that night, Phil. Between twelve-thirty and twelve-fifty. Explain.”
Kearns blushed, even though his eyes narrowed—A contradictory response, thought Weir.
“Not true. Dispatch calls my squad, I answer. If I was quiet for twenty minutes, that means she was quiet for twenty minutes. Jesus, Weir, this is a funeral.”
“The trouble is, I got a copy of the Dispatch tape. Carol tried to rouse you four times. What she got back from you was nothing. It’s all right there, on record.” He was bluffing. “I’ll play it for you anytime you want to hear.”
“Chief might like to hear his Dispatch tape is floating around Newport,” he said. “Unless he already knows.”
“Fuck the chief,” said Jim.
Kearns eyed him with a look of amusement.
“I want some answers, Kearns. If I don’t get them from you, Dennison will. If he listens to that tape, he’s going to haul your ass onto the carpet.”
Kearns’s face lost its self-satisfied glow for a moment. Without it, he had a hollow, hard expression. The expression, thought Weir, of someone capable of going through with things. “I’ll talk about that on two conditions. One, if you believe me, you won’t go to Dennison with it. Two, if you believe me, you’ll stay the hell out of my life.”
“Agreed.”
“You look like a guy who’d agree to just about anything to get what he wants.”
“That’s what I am. Talk, Kearns.”
The expression of amusement on Phil Kearns’s face turned to contempt. “I gave a citizen a ride home.”
Weir imagined said citizen, said ride. Would it jibe with Blodgett’s story of an out-of-beat squad car coming off the peninsula that night? “Did you use the bridge at midnight, come onto the mainland?”
“No. It was eleven-thirty and I didn’t stop off at the Back Bay. But don’t believe me, Weir. You want to talk to my alibi, she’ll tell you herself what happened. I’ll pick you up outside the Whale’s Tale tonight at ten. I want you to listen to her and listen good. Then I want you out of my face.”
“When did you make your play for Ann?”
A cool, predatory look came to Kearns’s face. “Never.”
Jim drank again, studying Kearns. “Why not? I think if I were you, I might have. I think you liked her a lot. I think it drove you crazy that she looked like an animal in a cage—your words—and you could let her out so easily. ’Cause you know what you saw when you looked at her? You saw a woman you could stand five of her next to”—Jim nodded toward Crystal—“and Ann would still add up to more. You saw a woman, not a girl. You saw someone in the same boat as yourself.”
The sergeant studied Jim’s face, then looked away toward Crystal. “You’re right. That’s what I saw. But I didn’t act on it, not once, not consciously.”
“Why not?”
“Ray.”
Kearns locked eyes with Jim. In the calm strength of Kearns’s expression, Weir believed he saw a man telling the truth.
“Tell me what you thought of her, Kearns. Just for me. I want to know what you thought of Ann.”
Kearns looked away. “I thought Ann Cruz was the most desirable woman I’d ever met.”
“But you never told her that.”
“Never.”
“What about Ray?”
Kearns sighed quietly. “No. God, Weir, what’s it fucking matter?” He watched Crystal coming back toward them, this pale lovely girl from Oklahoma willing to make him happy, two glasses of champagne in her red-nailed hands. He stared at her, a long moment of assessment, then at Weir. “I don’t know about you, but I’m here to mourn your sister.”
Kearns took the glass from Crystal and aimed her toward the cop corner. Weir caught Dennison watching. Doesn’t miss a trick, he thought.
He drank again, then worked his way over to Dale Blodgett, standing alone by the bar. Blodgett shook his hand and apologized for missing the service. His scarred, sun-lined face was all the more pronounced above the collar of his ill-fitting suit jacket. His heavy left eye bore into Weir. “I was with the EPA and Fish and Game people, trying to figure out how five hundred gallons of TCE got into the bay.”
“Don’t fuck with us. You know who we are.”
“Ever.”
“Anymore.”
“Got it?”
“Enjoy your new look, Weir.”
He could hear them leaving, but he couldn’t open his eyes. And he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out why the pain was not excruciating—just a cool stinging patch that felt open and foreign. His head throbbed with each wild heartbeat.
Then he felt someone grab him by the shirt and lift him up, followed by a sawing sounding above. Suddenly, his feet broke free and he dropped to the floor in a backbreaking flop cushioned only by his hands.
He lay there on the cool linoleum for a long moment, listening to the footsteps departing, then the cars starting up outside, then only to the racing gallop of his heart against the floor.
Then he was strangely, insanely, profoundly happy. He could feel it there beneath him, and he knew they hadn’t taken it. He rolled over and parted his trousers, hoisting himself up on one elbow. There it was, in all its terrified, recessed glory, lying on a plain of white flesh. He lay back, turned his head to the side, and saw the clump of hair a few feet away. The barbershop sound, he thought: electric clippers—the lopping shears were strictly for show. He managed to get his zipper up. Then he rolled over to the wall and scrunched himself up against it and peered out the window to the dark sky outside. His heart wouldn’t stop racing. It sent the blood rushing into his face, into his ears and eyes, into his hands and fingers, into his legs and his feet, and he lay there a long while thanking God for the blood that still pumped inside him, every precious, eager, frantic drop.
The moon came into the window. When his heart finally began to slow, the pain came to take its place. It was mostly surface now: his back and stomach and ribs, but he knew it would sink down deeper over the hours, settling into the bone and tendons.
He stood slowly, bracing against the wall. By the time he got to the living room, he had found a tremulous balance that threatened to give out at any second. He fell once going down the steps, and once more standing beside his truck, trying to get a trembling hand into his pocket for the keys.
CHAPTER 20
ON THE DAY OF ANN’S FUNERAL, THE OCEAN DIED, THE FIRST victims were the small fish that washed up before sunrise— anchovies, smelt, grunion, young bass. By nine, there were halibut, mullet, mackerel, bonita, stingrays, skates, mud sharks, sand sharks, blue sharks, and thresher, carried by the tide to shore, where, bloated, eyes protruding, bladders ejected from their mouths, they lay either dead or in final twitching demise. Half a dozen sea lions were beached, too, but still alive at first. They lolled in the shallows near Poon’s Locker, entangling themselves in mooring lines and issuing their last agonized groans before turning belly-up and silent in the dismal, fog-clenched afternoon. Last to go were the seabirds—the ducks, the gulls and pelicans, a few heron deep in the Back Bay—which floated, limp-necked and feet folded, onto the beaches around noon. By 2:00 P.M., the smell was getting strong.
The old-timers of the peninsula mumbled about a red tide—a deadly buildup of plankton that robs the fish of oxygen—but none of them had ever seen a sea gull die of too much air. Besides, the water wasn’t the telltale orange-brown of a plankton surge, but its usual gray and unassuming self. Charter trips were canceled and the harbor tours were postponed, but the Newport-to-Catalina ship weighed anchor at the usual 8 A.M., dividing with its prow the thousands of bobbing bodies that littered the bay. The ferryboat continued its runs, pushing through the carnage with the glum efficiency of a slow plow in winter. By noon, the EPA, the California Department of Fish and Game, the Coastal Commission, the Coast Guard, the County Sheriff’s, the city Marine Department, the mayor, an aid to the governor, and the press had all arrived to evaluate the problem.
Jim saw it from the window of his old upstairs room in the big house. He had spent an aching night tossing on his bed, sweating, plagued by visions of lopping shears and, later in a state of light sleep, again by the dream of someone holding a single purple rose up to Ann’s trusting, lovely face. Before first light, he got up and read the files on Kearns and Blodgett, searching for something that had gotten through, something he hadn’t seen, something he hadn’t understood. The words danced on the paper in front of him, cloying and ineffable. When he finally looked up from the files, he saw the hundreds of pale, shining shapes lining the curve of shore to the south. In the first light of day, they looked like coins spilled from a treasure chest. To the north, he could see a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk, just past Ann’s Kids. Becky Flynn stood off to the side, talking on a portable telephone. Some of the people were still in their robes. Downstairs, the phone started ringing.
And through it all, the hunt for Horton Goins continued. When he went down to the Locker for coffee, Jim saw a team of uniforms working the motels around the El Mar. When he sat in the window of the café and drank it, Tillis and Oswitz walked by with copies of Goins’s photograph in their hands. The morning paper said that south-county sporting-goods stores were reporting brisk gun sales; Goins’s picture ran again; a front-page article recounted the death of a fifteen-year-old Newport boy who was shot by his own father while trying to sneak back into his house— through his sister’s room—after a night away. Later when he drove Virginia and Raymond and Becky off the island toward the cemetery, they had to stop at the roadblock— with about a thousand other cars, it seemed—set up to find Goins. Officer Hoch, with a swollen purple nose and two black eyes, waved them through. Ray commented on it, but Weir said nothing. He was feeding his anger on silence. The Newport cops had taken him down a notch. So what? He’d quit their world and gotten a less-than-welcome back. The shoulder holster and Poon’s old .45 felt strange against his ribs, troublesome allies.
The helicopter hovered noisily, in and out of sight through the windshield, always audible, always there. An OCTD bus groaned ahead of them and cut straight into the cortege, Dennison’s face smiling back at them through clouds of black exhaust. Two young motor officers provided escort alongside his truck. They never once looked over.
From the chapel in the hills, Weir could see the city below them, the Pacific beyond that, a faint horizon dotted with sails. The aroma of flowers was so heavy that he had trouble drawing breath. Everything seemed to be happening slowly and every movement brought him a rush of pain. The Cruz clan sat across from them, shapes in black, many already sobbing. Ernesto and Irena sat in the first pew on the left, motionless and reduced. Raymond remained erect in a black suit, his face locked safely around something terrible. When Irena turned to look at him, Jim was met by a sadness too complete to behold. He looked away, sat down beside Virginia, and took her big knotted hand in his.
The obituary was offered by the Rev. Matthew Martell, then eulogies by friends. Jim sat, sunk by the ballast of mourning, and considered the black-clad figure of Becky as she stood at the podium, looked out from behind a veil, and cleared her throat.
“One of the blessings of my life,” she said, “was to know Ann Cruz.” A blessing she counted as a great one. Her voice to Jim sounded brittle as glass, ready to crack. But he knew she wouldn’t: Becky was always toughest in a clinch. Behind the black netted veil, her eyes were a dark, wet brown, and her lips below were red as apples. To Jim’s mind, assaulted by the cruelty of reminiscence, staggered by the heavy smell of the flowers, surrounded by the people with whom he had grown up in this crowded small-town neighborhood, she seemed to be talking only to him. He lost himself in her.
“We were girls, then women together. When I was confused, Ann was clear. When I had doubt, Ann had certainty. When I was undecided and afraid, Ann had judgment and courage. And when there was something I had to do, and right and wrong weren’t clear, I could always ask myself what Ann would do, and know that that would be right. She loved me with generosity and good humor; she felt my sadness and shared my joy. There was something at the center of her that I came to realize was in her blood, the blood of Virginia and Poon, the blood that runs … that ran through all their children. If I had to say what it was, I’d say it was dignity, the refusal to be diminished by the things in life that try to diminish us all.” Becky looked out to the mourners, her eyes pausing on Jim. “That, and a willingness to put herself on the line, to commit herself to what she believed and act accordingly. In the time I knew her, Ann was never cruel for the sake of cruelty. She never laughed at someone who didn’t have what she had. She never assumed that she deserved what she had—there was no arrogance in her, no pride. The one person she could always laugh at was herself, and she did that often. You …” Becky wiped a tear away with a slender finger slid up under the veil. She took a deep breath. “You all know what an honor it was just to hear her laugh, to see the sparkle of her eyes and the sparkle of her soul coming through. I think that … I think that where Ann goes will be a better place for her presence, and that what she leaves us is a place much lessened by her loss. To say that there are no words for all of this would be a lie. There are words, too many of them, too many thousands of words used over and over to express what we feel. They are not designed to carry such weight. That burden is left to us. I will just say one more thing, that I hope God in heaven will treat her with the gentleness and respect that is due to Ann, that He didn’t … offer her on this earth. That is my hope and my comfort In honor of Ann, I will love and smile and laugh, and consider her, forever and in perpetuity, among us.”
Jim sat, asking himself the usual huge questions: Was there something he could have done or should have noticed; why was there such misery for the people whom God is supposed to care about as much as He does the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; is Ann really going to a better place or is that a fiction told by the living for themselves?
Irena and Nesto Cruz were sobbing openly as Becky stepped down. She fixed her eyes on Jim’s, as if they were the sole known coordinates in a storm, following them to her seat.
Raymond’s head was bowed; he was so still that he seemed to be a statue of himself. Weir felt the tremoring of grief inside, the tectonic shelves of one emotion shifting against another. Becky wrapped an arm through his. He put his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees and felt the tears welling into his eyes from a part of him that seemed filled with them.
Then everyone filed out and watched as Ann was put into the ground. The fresh dirt was covered by a black tarp. The grave was neat, precise, deep. Through the flowers and perfume and sweat, Jim could smell the city below, the smell of death and sea and muted sun.
Somehow he got them back to the big house for the gathering. Three different radio stations reported that toxic levels of the solvent 1,1,1-trichloroethane had been found in Newport Harbor. Beaches were closed until further notice.
Weir, Virginia, and Ray greeted the mourners at the door. Jim clasped hands, returned embraces and kisses, mumbled his appreciation of whatever was said. Each condolence seemed to take something out of him, open up a new grief. The odd, slow motion of the funeral service was still upon him, as if the afternoon were taking its rhythm from a time signature he’d never heard. Everyone looked bigger when he met them at the door—the solemn faces, the moist eyes, the unsure chins. Raymond stood straight beside him, his voice calm but somehow disembodied. His smile was withered; his usual animation and quickness were gone. Of all the people in the room, thought Weir, Ray’s the only one who hates this more than I do. When most of the people had arrived, he joined them, went to the bar, poured himself a double shot of scotch, downed it, and took a beer from the cooler.
As he looked around the room, the world seemed to divide into two camps—them and us. Us was himself, Virginia, Raymond and his family, Becky. Them was everybody else. There they were, standing in his home, Ann’s home. There they were, drinking Virginia’s booze, eating her food. There they were, dressed up, talking of who knew what, advancing their own private ambitions, seductions, concealments, and betrayals under the same roof that had protected the child Ann. There they were, all doing what Ann would never do again, all honoring her in death in a way that they would never honor her in life. You hypocrites, he thought, you latecomers, you fakes. You dispensable, minor, alien fucks. It was a sacrilege. He caught the eye of every cop he could and sent his clearest message: You changed the game last night; you will pay. He was not exactly sure how: He finished off the beer and poured another scotch. Mayhem was calling.
He watched Dale Blodgett come through the door, find the law-enforcement contingent in a far corner, then head in the other direction. Dennison’s droop-eyed Judas, thought Jim, odd man out. Was he one of the six from last night? There was no certain way to tell. Clever to have brought along a Jaguar. He took another drink, watching Virginia trail across the room to meet Blodgett, where they hugged for a long, almost motionless moment. Blodgett’s big, thick-featured body somehow complimented the wiry, wind-burned Virginia.
Becky took his arm. “Watch that stuff,” she said, tapping his glass. “You’ve got that expression—all wound up and nowhere to go. Hang on to it, though. You’re going to need it.”
From across the room, Virginia gave him an odd look. He was about to head over when he realized it was for Becky, who excused herself and worked through the crowd toward her. Jim watched as Blodgett hugged her, his big hands open against the black back of her dress. Brian Dennison, Jim noted, was watching, too. Then Becky broke away and followed Virginia down the hallway and into Ann’s old room, where they shut the door. Politicos, thought Weir: They never stop.
Phil Kearns and Crystal from Oklahoma edged over to Jim. Kearns looked like a model—hair gelled back, face tan, a black linen suit with a black shirt buttoned to the top, no tie. Crystal was small, pretty, pink from her morning sun on Kearns’s deck. She gave Jim a small, somehow inviting smile.
Kearns talked on about Ann, and Weir sensed a genuine sadness in him. But Kearns wouldn’t use her name, as if he felt obliged to hold something he didn’t want to touch. When Crystal went for drinks, Weir stepped in front of Kearns, sealing him off from the rest of the room.
“You didn’t answer four calls from Dispatch that night, Phil. Between twelve-thirty and twelve-fifty. Explain.”
Kearns blushed, even though his eyes narrowed—A contradictory response, thought Weir.
“Not true. Dispatch calls my squad, I answer. If I was quiet for twenty minutes, that means she was quiet for twenty minutes. Jesus, Weir, this is a funeral.”
“The trouble is, I got a copy of the Dispatch tape. Carol tried to rouse you four times. What she got back from you was nothing. It’s all right there, on record.” He was bluffing. “I’ll play it for you anytime you want to hear.”
“Chief might like to hear his Dispatch tape is floating around Newport,” he said. “Unless he already knows.”
“Fuck the chief,” said Jim.
Kearns eyed him with a look of amusement.
“I want some answers, Kearns. If I don’t get them from you, Dennison will. If he listens to that tape, he’s going to haul your ass onto the carpet.”
Kearns’s face lost its self-satisfied glow for a moment. Without it, he had a hollow, hard expression. The expression, thought Weir, of someone capable of going through with things. “I’ll talk about that on two conditions. One, if you believe me, you won’t go to Dennison with it. Two, if you believe me, you’ll stay the hell out of my life.”
“Agreed.”
“You look like a guy who’d agree to just about anything to get what he wants.”
“That’s what I am. Talk, Kearns.”
The expression of amusement on Phil Kearns’s face turned to contempt. “I gave a citizen a ride home.”
Weir imagined said citizen, said ride. Would it jibe with Blodgett’s story of an out-of-beat squad car coming off the peninsula that night? “Did you use the bridge at midnight, come onto the mainland?”
“No. It was eleven-thirty and I didn’t stop off at the Back Bay. But don’t believe me, Weir. You want to talk to my alibi, she’ll tell you herself what happened. I’ll pick you up outside the Whale’s Tale tonight at ten. I want you to listen to her and listen good. Then I want you out of my face.”
“When did you make your play for Ann?”
A cool, predatory look came to Kearns’s face. “Never.”
Jim drank again, studying Kearns. “Why not? I think if I were you, I might have. I think you liked her a lot. I think it drove you crazy that she looked like an animal in a cage—your words—and you could let her out so easily. ’Cause you know what you saw when you looked at her? You saw a woman you could stand five of her next to”—Jim nodded toward Crystal—“and Ann would still add up to more. You saw a woman, not a girl. You saw someone in the same boat as yourself.”
The sergeant studied Jim’s face, then looked away toward Crystal. “You’re right. That’s what I saw. But I didn’t act on it, not once, not consciously.”
“Why not?”
“Ray.”
Kearns locked eyes with Jim. In the calm strength of Kearns’s expression, Weir believed he saw a man telling the truth.
“Tell me what you thought of her, Kearns. Just for me. I want to know what you thought of Ann.”
Kearns looked away. “I thought Ann Cruz was the most desirable woman I’d ever met.”
“But you never told her that.”
“Never.”
“What about Ray?”
Kearns sighed quietly. “No. God, Weir, what’s it fucking matter?” He watched Crystal coming back toward them, this pale lovely girl from Oklahoma willing to make him happy, two glasses of champagne in her red-nailed hands. He stared at her, a long moment of assessment, then at Weir. “I don’t know about you, but I’m here to mourn your sister.”
Kearns took the glass from Crystal and aimed her toward the cop corner. Weir caught Dennison watching. Doesn’t miss a trick, he thought.
He drank again, then worked his way over to Dale Blodgett, standing alone by the bar. Blodgett shook his hand and apologized for missing the service. His scarred, sun-lined face was all the more pronounced above the collar of his ill-fitting suit jacket. His heavy left eye bore into Weir. “I was with the EPA and Fish and Game people, trying to figure out how five hundred gallons of TCE got into the bay.”
