Pacific Beat, page 5
What he felt most strongly right now—besides the grief, guilt, and anger that continued to multiply silently inside him—was that Robbins and Innelman were trying to make something fit that wouldn’t. A vague, shapeless idea coalesced inside him, too unformed yet to hold, vaporous enough to hide itself in the looming geography of sadness. But the longer he watched the gray water of the bay, the more embodied and specific the notion became. It formed, wavered, darted away. Then it was back again, quick as a hummingbird, taunting. Weir nailed it.
Ann knew him, he thought. She came down here without a struggle because she trusted him. All the crime stats on this planet would bear out that probability.
Weir’s mind rewound quickly: Ann’s friends, coworkers, acquaintances, relatives—any male she’d trust enough to follow down here on a fog-heavy night. The list was short and obvious: Raymond, Nesto, Jim himself, a couple of Poon’s rickety old friends who’d doted on her almost as much as Poon had. Ann wouldn’t just hustle down here with anyone. Ann was private. Ann was wary. On the obvious level, she knew everyone, from the clerks at Balboa Grocery to the boys who ran the ferry—she’d lived here for thirty-nine years, gone to high school and two years of junior college, had two jobs—both of which brought the public to her. She was bright, friendly, likable, pretty. Jim thought back to a surprise party Raymond had thrown for her last year. A couple of hundred people had packed into the Eight Peso to celebrate, half of them male, many of them knowing her well enough to offer a kiss, a present, ask for a dance. Would she follow one down here to the Back Bay on a fog-heavy night? No. Not unless they were lovers. Would she take a man on the side? It didn’t seem like Ann, but neither did the lifeless form lying upon the damp earth that morning.
She didn’t even have a coat.
She changed her clothes after work, Jim thought, but she didn’t put on a coat. No coat because she wasn’t planning on going out. Maybe coming down here was the last thing on her mind. Maybe he had the knife to her throat, under her beautiful long hair. Maybe a gun to her back, like Robbins had said.
He turned to the picture of the murder weapon—an unremarkable kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a gently curving one-sided blade. The handle was in good condition and had the words KENTUCKY HOMESTEAD branded into it, along with a little logo of a kettle in a fireplace. JAPAN was etched onto the steel, just above the handle. The darkened juncture between blade and wood could have been blood, sludge, stain—or any combination. He closed the file.
As Jim climbed the embankment toward Morning Star Lane, an obvious possibility presented itself: There was so little evidence left because someone had cleaned it up and taken it away.
Like a cop would.
The cop that Mackie Ruff had said he saw.
That’s what he was doing during those minutes when Ann lay on the ground, full of someone’s brutal seed, staring up at the fog and praying that he would leave, just leave us, just walk into the night forever, and let me keep alive inside me the one miracle I thought I never could have.
He was cleaning things up.
CHAPTER 6
JIM STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE BECKY FLYNN’S BAY-front cottage and gazed through the oleander that walled her property from the rest of the world. He passed through the gate, bell chiming, a certain pressure gathering in his head. Moving toward Becky’s house was for Weir like walking into yesterday, only knowing how the days ahead would end. Each step echoed with the thousand memories of others so much like it, of the thousand peninsula nights they’d spent here in the varying stages of love, disillusion, abandonment. His stomach fluttered as he climbed onto the porch and looked through the screen door.
She was sitting on the couch, her head cocked to one side to hold the telephone, a yellow legal pad propped on her crossed knees. Becky was always making notes on something. He watched her nod in profile, bring a yellow pencil to her mouth, and touch the eraser to her lips. She had cut her hair into a loose fall of light brown curls that ended abruptly above her shoulders. Becky’s hair had always been a primary vanity—the longer the better—but this new do spoke of adjusted priorities. We’re getting older, thought Weir, his fist poised to knock. He watched her for another surreptitious moment, beholding the perpendicular curves of thigh and calf as she raised her bare feet to the coffee table and wrote something on the pad. She nodded, took a deep breath, and hung up. For a second, she stared off into space, smile cracks forming at the edge of her lips.
She got up, came to the door, and swung it open.
She met him inside with a measuring look that turned into a hug. The top of her head smelled the way it had for the three decades Jim had known her. Over her shoulder, he looked at the old place for the first time in—what, he wondered—almost two years? There were some new things: a Pegge Hopper print on the tongue-in-groove wall above the hearth, a big gray torchiere in the far corner, a Persian rug on the hardwood floor before the fireplace, a new coat of paint. The rest was the same, though, right down to the heavy old dining set that took up too much space at the far end of the room, the deep soft couch, the curtains that Becky had made all those years ago of chintz now faded by sun, the cut flowers she bought each Friday from the stand down by Poon’s Locker. There was a FLYNN FOR MAYOR banner—green on white—tacked across one wall, a smaller SLOW THE GROWTH poster on another, boxes of campaign fliers and mailing envelopes on the floor by the fireplace.
Becky herself had added a few things, too: Her skin was paler, her hips and breasts a little larger, and there was a deepening network of lines at the corners of her dark brown eyes. Mileage was implied, not all of it smooth. All in all, to Weir, she just looked beautiful. He had held her image all those hours in the Zihuat jail, comforted by memory but tormented by her distance and the fact that they had messed it up so badly.
“God, Jim. I don’t know what to say to you.”
“No.”
“I’ve been so worried about you. God, I’m sorry.” She held him again and sighed—a declared need.
They stood in silence for a moment, then Becky turned and walked toward the kitchen. Weir followed—a seemingly ancient habit—took down two heavy glasses and filled them with ice. Becky poured in some good gin, a dribble of vermouth, shaved off a lemon peel, and swept one around each rim before dropping them in. Through her kitchen window, Jim could see the fog floating down like a lowered blanket. His hands were shaking again as he picked up the drink. He felt as if his heart were made of wood, beating slowly and begrudgingly toward the moment when it could just stop.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I left messages.”
“Thanks. This has been bad.”
They settled into the couch, the standard positions, Weir’s feet already yearning for the boots to be off, to be warming from the fire. The answering machine picked up an incoming call: a Proposition A proofreader at the print shop had just discovered fliers with the word public misspelled as pubic.
“I saw her early that night at the Whale,” said Jim. “Ray came by and Mom was there. She looked good and strong—a little thin, maybe.”
“I hadn’t talked to her for a few days.”
“How had she been, Beck?”
“I’ve been asking myself that question ever since I heard. It’s not as easy to answer as I thought it would be. Okay, Ann and I have been friends for what, thirty-plus years? We did everything from roller-skate together in pigtails to borrow each other’s doll clothes, to share our diaries, to take the same classes, have crushes on the same boys, to … everything. We were girls, then we were women, and we went through all of it together. Except for the few months she spent in France—what, fifteen years old or whatever it was—we’ve been like this.” Becky twisted her fingers in the wish-me-luck sign and stared from behind it into Jim’s face. “But back in November, something started to change. It was just before you left for Mexico.”
“I didn’t see it.”
Weir heard Becky’s silence accuse him: If you’d been paying attention to your family instead of getting ready to chase rainbows, you might have.
“It was subtle, Jim. I thought it was something just between us, so I didn’t really worry too much. Now, well, after what happened, everything has its own terrible resonance.” She drank, then set the glass down on the coffee table. “Ann was pulling back. She was putting something between herself and me and it bugged me.”
“What was it about her?”
“Smiles, mostly. Sometimes she was so … polite. It was like the smile was there to deflect me. She’d be so sunny, so comprehensively positive, so … fucking vague.”
“About what?”
“Everything. I’d call and ask her how she was and it sounded like a state-of-the person address, something she’d planned out and rehearsed. You know Ann. You could always rely on Ann for straight answers, straight talk. If Ann thought what you were doing was wrong, she’d say so. If she didn’t feel good that day, you’d hear about it. She was never evasive. But back in January, that’s what I felt. I ran into her at the market late one night—eleven say—and she’s picking up her groceries for the week. We’re standing in front of the soup and she actually stared through me for a second, then, she clicked in—big smile, this strained grimace she’s trying to pass off as a smile. I ask what’s wrong and she says, ‘Not a thing! I’m just tired out a bit tonight; that’s what I get for shopping without my make-up on!’ She pulls off a can of something and the whole stack falls over, all these red cans banging down to the floor. So I play along like I believe her, but I make a note of it. I called her a couple of nights later, and she sounded so giddy, so up. I swear to God, Jim, I wondered for a second if she was into the blow or something. We made a lunch date for the next Sunday and she seemed … not there. She held up her end of the conversation but she really didn’t bring anything to it. She left most of her food. Her mind was somewhere else.”
“You call her on it?”
“Of course I did. Annie laughed it off, turned it back around on me, like I was projecting my own usual neurotic character onto her. I almost bought it; I’m always ready to buy that one. We’d just gotten Prop A on the ballot, there was the march in Laguna Canyon to organize, I was trying to get my candidate’s apps finished up. So, well, you had your treasure and I had mine. But it just wasn’t her. I saw her a lot this winter, ran into her here and there, went by the Whale and had dinner in her station. Sometimes she seemed just like Ann. The other times—and there were several of them—she was somewhere else.”
Jim groped back to November to corroborate Becky’s story, but he couldn’t. Ann had seemed like Ann. He had been lost in getting ready for the Black Pearl off of Zihuat: dive gear and compressor, the air lance and water dredge, the winches and cables, the grid stakes and surface buoys, everything from a rebuild on the engine to spare regulator gaskets. I missed it, he thought, plain and simple.
“Did you talk to anyone about her? Ray, Mom?”
Becky shook her head. “With Ann, I always went straight to the source. Like I said, I thought this was all just between her and me. Friends fall out, waver, get back together. Sometimes you have to hold a match to the bridge just to remind yourself how strong and needed it is.”
They exchanged glances, mutual acknowledgement that such matches were held—all too often and by both parties— to their own bridge, but the result was not a warming reminder of value, but fire itself.
Becky drained her glass. “What can you share with me?”
“What do you want?”
“I got a copy of Bristol’s report, so I know the basics.”
“Small town.”
“It wasn’t hard—a former public defender has her networks.”
“I can’t add much. I saw where they brought her up, and I was at the crime scene this evening.”
“Innelman and Deak?”
Jim nodded. “Innelman’s a good man. I don’t know about Deak.”
“He’s young and cocky, but he’s thorough, too.”
“If you’ve seen the report, you know as much as I do.”
“Do I?” Becky looked at him sharply, then smiled. “Dennison must be twitching. If things played out just right, this could sway the election. Now he’ll really avoid a debate.”
Becky squinted her dark brown eyes, and offered up a satisfied little smile. It was a look far less impish than cunning. Weir had always hated it.
“What did Dennison want to see you and Ray about today?” she asked.
Jim made up a story about him getting the dive job for another search of the bay. It was fairly solid for a quick he, something Poon would have been proud of.
“That’s Sheriff’s jurisdiction.”
“That’s what I tried to tell Brian. Anyway, Harbor Patrol divers found a kitchen knife just a hundred feet from where Ann died. Six-inch blade, no hilt, unexceptional.”
“Then why would Brian want you to dive again?”
“He’s just being careful.”
“Make on the knife?”
“I didn’t see one,” he lied again.
“You’re getting rusty, Weir. And your hands are shaking.”
“I know.”
The telephone rang again, this time an invitation for Becky to speak to the Newport Beach Chapter of Women in Business. Becky made a note on the yellow pad. “They’ll try to skewer me. Know something? I liked life better when it was simple.”
Jim was quiet for a moment. Becky’s last statement had the ring of a can of worms about to be opened. Maybe that’s what we needed all along, he thought—get the bad things out so we could figure out what to do with them. One of Becky’s primary faults—which she was always the first to confess—was her penchant for doing a dozen things at once, but not necessarily right. He tried not to sound accusatory. “Well, looks like you have plenty of campaign work.”
She looked at him, then away. “It seems … appropriate. I decided not too long ago that liking your life isn’t everything. You’ve got to bring something to the party, make a difference … maybe that sounds naïve. But I had the feeling I had to contribute rather than just take. Anyway, I was always impatient when I was with you, toward the end. Working as a PD got old fast. I’m just that way—I like to move on. Greener pastures maybe, I don’t know.”
“Like you said, we all have our own treasures.”
She shot him a hard glance. “You weren’t just looking for treasure, you were looking for a way out … of everything.”
Same old scratchy record, he thought. Becky had never understood why he quit the Sheriff’s. To an ambitious young woman dedicated to the grindstone, his jump from full-time employment into the speculative waters of salvage and treasure hunting was the very pinnacle of whimsy, reeking of adolescence and insolvency. Becky’s family had been poor—not dirt poor, but lower-middle-class poor—always on the edge of a utility shutoff, a car repo, an insurance cancellation. Becky’s first deal with herself as an adult was to keep that from happening to her. The more Jim had talked about things like his freedom and his time, the tighter-mouthed Becky had become. She had made him doubt himself, when doubt was a luxury he couldn’t afford. To Becky, doubt was something you live with every day, something you listen to with respect—the point scout of conscience. Her marriage to a hotshot Newport lawyer had lasted less than a year. Becky, he had always thought, was a more complicated animal.
“I was looking for the same thing you were,” he said finally. “You were wrong to think any different, and you still are. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never know me better than I do, Becky.”
She studied him, retreating invisibly. Her eyes said, I don’t know about that, but her words were, “I guess we’ve been through all this before.”
“I thought about you a lot in Mexico.” He placed his shaking hands on his knees and looked into the fireplace.
“I thought about you, too.”
“Did you come up with any answers?”
Becky’s hand found the back of his neck and her fingers twisted a lock of his hair. A warming surge came up through him.
“No answers. Just questions. Sometimes I think it’s all behind us, then I think about something and it feels like it never ended. It’s like looking back on a battlefield, wondering if you’ve got the balls to jump in again. Come to think of it, I did come up with one answer. The answer is, I want someone who’s going to stay, stick it out.”
Jim nodded, realizing how little the description fit him.
“Tell me about Mexico,” she said.
He did, from the promising blue-water dives to the frustration of trying to cover so much bottom alone, to the surprise of being found with marijuana that wasn’t his, stuffed conspicuously in the engine compartment of Lady Luck, to his thirty-four days of hell in the Zihuatanejo jail, then his sudden and unexplained release.
For a while, they talked about Becky’s run for mayor of Newport Beach, the practice, the Slow Growth proposition on the coming June ballot. It was a walk through. Becky sighed, took a deep drink, and stared into the black fireplace.
Weir stood, took another look at the big FLYNN FOR MAYOR banner on the far wall.
She walked him to the door, the polished hardwood floor creaking in the same places it always had. “I want to leave you with something, though. I saw Ann about five-thirty that … last day. I was walking down the bayfront, taking a break from the mailers, and she drove through the alley. She was going to work. Why did she drive it when she could walk?”
Weir had been wondering the same thing himself. He could think of only one earthly reason for Ann to get in her old car and drive the three blocks to work, then spend ten minutes looking for a parking space when it would take two minutes to just walk. She was wearing street clothes when they found her. Provocative street clothes. Had she changed at work? In the car? Somewhere else?
