Pacific Beat, page 8
“Neither of us would be sitting here if I knew the answer to that. What about that piece of jewelry that Deak found— prints, make, anything?”
“A couple of jewelers told Innelman it’s probably the back of a tie tack. A custom piece—irregular and expensive. Twenty-four-carat stuff.”
They stood and shook hands. “The world’s a funny place, Jim. You’re investigating my own goddamned police force and I’m making a speech at noon to the Kiwanis, about what a good mayor I’d make.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“I’d expect your vote to go to Becky.”
“We go back a ways.”
“She’s a good lawyer,” said Dennison. He turned to leave, then hesitated, looking toward the back door. “You know, Jim, you could do me a favor. It’s obvious your mother doesn’t like me and she’s doing what she can for Becky in this campaign. That’s okay; that’s what makes this country great. But tell her something for me. Tell her if she’s got worries about the water in our bay, she can come to me. There’s no reason to run to the EPA or the state. If she’s onto something, I’d like to know about it. I care about this city, too, in spite of what she says.”
“What is it you think she’s found?”
Dennison shrugged. “She sure as hell won’t tell me. Maybe you can find out.”
Jim got Dr. Robert Gold’s number and took it upstairs to his old room. Gold was a soft-spoken man who even fifteen years ago when Jim took his classes in criminal psychology seemed aged and eroded by his study of violent crime. He was a statistician at heart, a collector of data, a theorist who based his ideas on a combination of immutable facts and unpredictable behavior. Jim did a rough calculation: Gold must be pushing eighty years old now.
Mrs. Gold said her husband would be right with Jim, but Weir waited at least two minutes.
“Many years, Jim,” he said in greeting. His voice was overloud, that of a man who no longer hears well.
“Too many, Doctor.”
“Can you speak up? I’m sorry you had to wait. I’m stuck in a wheelchair now and it can take incredible amounts of time to roll across a room. That’s because my right arm doesn’t work anymore and neither does my right leg. So the effect, of course, is pretty slow going. Stroke, summer of ’eighty-nine.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor.”
“What?”
“I said I’m sorry, Doctor.”
“Well, thank you, but eighty-four years old is eighty-four years old. At least the right side of my brain still works.”
“Have you retired?”
“Oh, yes, ten years back. Now I spend my time with the aviary, and reading the journals. It’s too hard to write anymore, so I read for … well, pleasure wouldn’t quite be the right word, would it?”
Gold’s booming laugh came over the line. Weir thought he detected something desperate in it. The idea crossed his mind that Dr. Gold was easing around the last great bend. At least he’s doing it with a sense of humor, thought Weir. There seemed to be too much sadness in the world.
“What do you have for me, Doctor?”
Gold cleared his throat. “Jim, I have to say first of all how sorry I am about your sister. I feel badly for you, and for Raymond, too.”
“We’re going to be okay, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite make out—”
“We’ll be okay.”
The line was suddenly quiet. Jim could hear Gold’s breathing. Ten seconds went by.
“I’m back,” said Gold, very quietly now. “I’m sorry. Every now and then a tiny seizure, a little focal seizure, but I can’t clear my head for a moment. Give me just another few seconds … is it Jim?”
“Yes, Doctor, it’s Jim Weir.”
“Oh my, this is … just hold on now. Wait.”
A minute later, Gold spoke again. The strength had returned to his voice, but Jim now understood how much energy the doctor used in just talking.
“Now, Jim. The reason I called is because I was going through the Sex Offender Registration files for the last three months. I review them quarterly, just to glean the numbers for my recidivism model. Does the name Horton Goins mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Well, he raped and stabbed a young woman in Ohio nine years ago. She didn’t die, but she’s been in and out of hospitals ever since, terribly disturbed. Schizophrenic. There’s no way you would know of him. It didn’t make the papers out here. But he was interesting to me for many reasons. He was only fifteen years old. He was raised in foster homes. He had a troubled boyhood, and an oddly variable IQ. He also had a perfectly readable schizophrenic metabolism.”
“Readable?”
“Positron emission tomography—the so-called PET scan. Dr. Field at UC Irvine was kind enough to let me work over his shoulder a bit on Mr. Goins. We flew him in from Dayton, very hush-hush, state police and Mr. Goins’s keeper from the hospital in tow. You can imagine the strings we had to pull. But what a subject! We could see the hyperstimulated thalamic stem—bright yellow and red, and the corresponding frontal activity that is usually suppressed in normal people. Goins’s PET scan was a virtual road map of schizophrenia—tracked chemically. National Geographic included a picture of his brain in its January ’eighty-seven issue on imaging technology. At any rate, I used Goins as a case study for class, and his … proclivities stuck in my mind. Jim, can you share with me the blood type on the suspect?”
“Type B positive.”
“Interesting. Goins is, also. The particulars of his episode are very similar to what I understand about Ann. He took his victim to a swampy area not far from town. It was late at night. He’d been watching her for a matter of weeks, it was discovered in the competency hearings. She was a waitress. Goins was committed to state hospital as a mentally disordered juvenile sex offender. They kept him almost nine years, performing the standard drug and psychotherapies, apparently to great effect. The PET that Dr. Fields did helped them prescribe even more helpfully—it’s not like they use these people as guinea pigs, then dump them.”
“No.” Jim could hear Gold catching his breath.
“This January, they remanded Horton to his parents— legal guardians, that is. It was the same old story. The state couldn’t keep him, his doctor approved a release, and the DA’s hands were tied because Horton had been in for custody of one kind or another for almost nine years. In late January, Horton Goins and his foster parents moved to Costa Mesa. That’s what—two miles from where Ann was found?”
Jim felt his throat thicken, a coolness spread into his feet. “Do you have an address?”
“Emmett and Edith Goins, courtesy of Pacific Bell.” He gave Jim the street address and phone number.
“According to your models, Dr. Gold, would Goins be likely to repeat?”
“Oh my, please wait…”
The line went quiet again. Jim could hear the doctor’s steady breathing. Gold’s seizure lasted half a minute.
“Hello?” His voice was very faint now.
“Hello, Doctor … it’s Jim Weir.”
“It’s so hard … so hard to come out from behind this cloud. And the seizure medications they give me—Dilantin, Tegretol, then more stuff to keep the others from eating away my stomach. It’s like … watching myself in a dream. Where were we?”
“I’d asked you if Horton Goins was likely to repeat.”
“It would be irresponsible to answer that question directly. So many factors, so many unknowns. But, well Jim, I did call you, didn’t I?”
“Thank you, Doctor. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Well …” Gold’s voice was reedy and thin now, as if the breath upon the cords was not enough to play them. “You know, Jim … just a few months ago I would have asked that if you apprehend Goins, you would put in a good word for me. Arrange an interview. But now … but now … I think I just want to rest. I have my birds.”
“God bless you, Dr. Gold.”
CHAPTER 9
EMMETT AND EDITH GOINS LIVED ON THE EAST SIDE OF COSTA Mesa, on Heather Street. It was a neighborhood of apartments built in the fifties: uniform rectangles, flat roofs, cement stairways with iron banisters leading to the upper units. The Goinses’ complex was called Island Gardens, and looked the same as the others around it except for one large bird of paradise plant and a six-foot-high stone head that stood off from the walkway. The statue was Polynesian in attitude, and covered with graffiti. The sign that stood behind this “island garden” was so faded by sunlight that Weir could hardly read it.
The Goinses lived downstairs, in 1-C. Jim walked past three reeking dumpsters busy with cats, past the stairs, down a walkway choked with weeds and dog turds, along the open windows of downstairs units, from which came the sounds of television and the smells of breakfast. The screens were dotted with flies that shined in the dull morning sun.
He knocked and stepped back. A game show sounded through the window—horrible laughter followed by carnivalesque music, then applause.
“Who is it?” A woman’s voice, low and rough.
“My name is Jim Weir.”
“We don’t want none.”
“I came to see Horton.”
“He’s not here.”
“May I talk to you for just a moment, please?”
Then the door opened about six inches and a pale, soft, red-haired woman looked up at him. She was wearing a blue terry robe with cigarette ash on the lapel. Her eyes were brown in the middle and bloodshot everywhere else.
Edith Goins’s eyes went down him, and back up—brown, red, brown again. “You the police?”
“No. But I’d like to ask some questions.”
“Another doctor?”
“No ma’am, just a regular guy.”
“Nobody regular’s interested in Horton.”
“May I come in?”
Edith Goins shut the door in Jim’s face. He heard voices, questions, a hopeful agreement. She opened the door a moment later and turned back inside. Jim followed. She was short, heavy, rounded. “This is Emmett,” she said. “Em, this is Mr. Weird.”
Jim didn’t see him at first. He was locked in shadow in the corner of the room, wrapped in a black robe with a big silver anchor emblazoned over one breast. His head was narrow, his hair cut short, his ears nearly flush with his skull. He wore a thin, almost prissy mustache. His face was red in the TV light, then it shifted—to great applause—to blue. He looked up at Jim and offered his hand. “Horton isn’t here,” he said finally.
Jim shook his hand, then sat at the far end of the couch from Edith. He set down his briefcase. “Thanks for having me in. Nice little apartment you have here.”
“Ought to be for eight-fifty a month,” said Emmett. “And if they pass this Slow Growth deal, then they’re going to stop the construction and rent’s going to go even higher.”
Jim glanced at the TV, where some frantic young couple made fools of themselves for an Amana range. “I had a talk with Dr. Robert Gold earlier. He’s a man who keeps track of people when they get out of hospitals. He told me that you and Horton moved here to Costa Mesa just this January.”
“January twenty-eighth,” said Edith. “Why are you so interested in Horton? The woman that got kilt?”
The question threw Weir off balance. This was going to be a strange ride. “Yes, A young woman. Five nights ago, down in the Back Bay in Newport, a couple of miles from here. We were … very close. Was Horton at home that night?”
Edith and Emmett exchanged blatantly furtive looks. Emmett nodded to his wife.
“That was Monday,” she said. “Horton was out Monday night Horton comes and goes as he pleases these days, even though his release people told him to stay put here.”
Jim nodded, waiting for more. The game show droned on stupidly. Weir sensed that big things were not being said here, things that might lay groundwork. “Would you mind, at all, telling me about Horton? I’m not a cop or a doctor. I’ve got no official standing. I just lost someone close and I’m doing what I can to help out.”
Emmett looked at Edith, then nodded again, but neither spoke. Their continuing silence implied that what was about to be revealed here was of such size and scope, it would dominate the entire moral landscape, but there was nothing theatrical in their faces. Edith brought a bottle of bourbon from beside the couch and poured a small shot into a coffee cup, Weir understanding now that he had provided a service—his presence was an excuse to drink. She swished it around for a moment, then drained it. “Horton ain’t ours. We got him from the agency when he was four.”
“He wasn’t four, he was almost six,” said Emmett. When Emmett looked at Jim straight on, one eye wandered and one stayed on target with sharp black intensity. “The agency lied about that, and plenty of the other, too.”
“We didn’t know four from six anyhow,” said Edith. On accounta not being able to have our own. See, Emmett was in a bad—”
“ ’Nuff a that, Edith.”
“… So we got one from the agency.”
“What agency was that?”
“Hardin County Adoption Agency. Hardin County being in Ohio.”
“Ah,” said Jim. He suddenly felt badly for these people. They seemed like lightning rods for calamity, and he’d only known them for five minutes. He recognized in them, too, the overwhelming desire to divulge, so common to children, adulterers, and drunks.
Edith poured another bourbon and studied it with a measured, rational air. “We were happy to get him. See, you usually got to wait a long spell, but Horton, we got him quick. They just made us sign a bunch of papers and out we went.”
“The fact they let us have him so easy should have told us something was up, but it didn’t,” said Emmett.
Edith shrugged. “We got a little brown cowboy shirt for him to wear out, some cowboy pants, too. I remember walkin’ with him between us out to the Buick, feeling like I finally had my family. I think that walk from the agency door to the Buick was the first and last time in my life I was happy. It was exactly twenty-four steps. I still remember that, for some reason.”
“Don’t get sloppy, Edith,” said her husband.
“I count steps sometimes, too,” said Jim.
Emboldened, Edith sipped again and continued. “Funny the things you remember when you’re happy. So we got Horton home and he was silent. He didn’t look at us or say a thing for five days. He ate a lot. We were told about the ’justment period, how the child had to grow into your life and feel secure before he could be happy. The agency told us to try a pet. We got him two hamsters, but they disappeared, and Horton didn’t know where. Later, we got him a dog, and he liked the dog a bunch. Dog ran off after a couple of weeks, though. Month later, some of the farm dogs dug up Horton’s dog and the hamsters outta the swamp down by bridge, came parading around the yard with them, Horton didn’t seem too surprised.”
A long silence followed. Emmett stared at the TV. “I talked to the agency about him. They said it was normal and that Horton didn’t have any history of bad behavior, so we had to be patient. The thing that got us the most was he’d never say nothing. One day, Horton stood up on his chair in the middle of dinner and pissed on the ham. I used a belt on him good, but he bit my leg so deep, it took eighteen stitches and a tetanus shot. It healed black for some reason.”
“That’s when we put Horton in the car and drove him back to the agency,” said Edith. “They couldn’t figure out why Horton was being so naughty, and they told us his record before was good. They tried to make it sound like we were doing something wrong and maybe we weren’t fit to have him. We said we’d try more lovin’ and understanding, on accounta that’s what a child needs, they said. We felt bad.”
“I didn’t,” said Emmett. “I knew right then from the look on that lady’s face, she was lying about him. I remember on the way back from the agency, Horton was sitting in the backseat of the Buick, burning a firefly in one of them cigarette lighters the old ’sixty-fours had in the rear.”
The silence got long again. “Pretty bad kid,” said Jim to fill it.
Edith nodded. “So we had a private investigator get the records from the agency. It was just like we thought. He’d burnt down his own house when he was four. He was really six when we got him, like I said, they tried to fool us. That’s why they let him go so fast. He was a lemon. So we tried to take him back, but they wouldn’t take him. Finally, he stuck a dead water moccasin down Pammy Fritzie’s underwear, and we turned him over to the Juvenile Authority. He was seven by then. They kept him two years. They did a lot of tests and told us they thought it might be a chemical problem. Maybe that was the second happiest time of my life, when we got rid of Horton then.”
Emmett held out his coffee cup and his wife poured in some bourbon. “A few months after Horton was at the Juvenile Authority, he started sending us letters. They were done in real nice writing, and the spelling was good. He had a real good vocabulary for a seven-year-old. He was smart. He wrote us about how sorry he was for what he’d done, and how much he missed the farm. I’ll tell you, we sat there at the kitchen table and cried because he sounded so full of sorrow and because we’d held a lot of love inside us just waitin’ for a reason to let it out, but we never had no reason. It was like Horton in the letter was the son we always wanted.”
“So,” said Edith, “we made the petition and got him back.”
Emmett sighed and looked at Jim. His face went blue again in the TV screen’s light. “As I look back on my life, Mr. Weird, I can honestly say that was the dumbest fuckin’ thing I ever did.”
“Me, too,” Edith added solemnly. “Horton was fine for a few years after that. That was, say from nine years old to twelve. He spent a lot of time out in the fields and the swamps, catching snakes and critters and bringing them home. He did his chores, earned some money, and bought books on animals. At school, well, Horton didn’t make many friends. He got beat up a lot because he wasn’t big and he was one of those kids—you know how they pick out one to badger all the time? They singled out Horton and made him kind of miserable. But, gosh, his grades! When Horton went into seventh level—that’s age thirteen about—he got all A’s and only one D. The D was in speech. He just couldn’t get up in front of everyone and talk.”
