A World the Color of Salt (22 page)

A knowing and seductive expression moved into Roland's face. I'd seen it a thousand-thousand times, from men at the bar after I'd finished my set of dances and needed a drink to cool off, at the table near the door when the bar was closing, or in the parking lot. I'd seen it from my father's friends in the backyard at our barbecues when I was only thirteen, and still once in a while with new cops, cops I didn't know and who didn't know me, who I was. So it was staring/glaring time again.

I said, “Your parole officer know you're associating with a user?”

His face went slack. He said to Patricia, “What is this? What you doing to me?”

She said, “Nothing. I'm sor—”

He pitched around, taking Annabel's arm again, and said, “We're bookin', baby.”

Patricia went after him, her ankle-length, blue-and-white Australian dress with the ruffles on the bottom kicking up with each step. Then she stopped and looked back and said, “Thanks a lot, Samantha, for your understanding.”

I was Samantha again. This time I didn't say anything. The smart one with nothing to say.

That night I thought the wind had kicked up, sending leaves ticking against my window. I wandered into the living room, thinking how I regretted the leaves this year, mostly brown, from a summer so hot and dry. The two liquidambars in front of my condo, resembling sycamores but from the witch-hazel family, halfheartedly got to the yellow stage about a month ago. While my back was turned, a
pop
issued from the window, and I looked and saw, because of my neighbor's balcony light, a crystaled spot in the glass, and saw that the wind was not blowing, for the Christmas lights on her tree did not sway. As I slid open the door, another
pick
sounded to the left of me, and then I saw the pebble bounce onto the patio floor and out through the railing. What the
hell
, I thought, and knew it was Roland, knew it, and knew I could not prove it, would not see him as I stepped to the railing and looked down. For a moment I thought I saw something move among the black clumps of bushes fifty yards from my place, leading down the bluff, and thought, Well, I guess the guy's at least got a good arm.

I went in and closed the door and slipped my sawed-off broom handle in the channel of the slider, checked the front-door lock again, and waited two hours in the darkness to go to sleep.

In the morning when I left for work, not across from my door, but the next, was a brown female pintail lodged between the iron bars of the railing, bent to a U, butt out, legs and neck in. I went back in and got a plastic trash bag and a trail of paper towels and stuck it in. Tell me it flew through the railing and bucked back out.

Stu Hollings decided to send me to Westminster first thing Monday. Little Saigon. A very fast station there, as cops say, lots of new violence among the immigrants. So many criminals, so little time. Same as in Long Beach, in L.A. County. In both those cities the contrasts are newer, the abrasions fresher. In Westminster, though the street signs are still lettered in Olde English, the town now plays host to fourteen-year-old Asian thugs with mag pistols and assault rifles. They burst into homes and murder praying women or anyone else who won't satisfy demands for hidden stash; and these crimes often go unreported because the populace is afraid. Watch the news; study history—it's the young. They refuse heart.

My boss and I were walking up the front steps of the lab, fresh asphalt in the back requiring us to park across the street, when he told me about the shooting in Westminster. Stu had come from getting doughnuts, a white box in his hands, which meant he'd already been at the lab and went out again. Like the little piggy who gets up earlier and earlier to beat the big bad wolf, you can't arrive before Stu Hollings. Joe used to be like that, first in, last out, before his heart attack, and I used to try to beat him. No more. Not only does Joe not arrive early, it just isn't fun anymore.

He held the door for me. “This is a homicide, a forty-year-old owner of a doughnut store.” For one flash of a second, I thought, Surely he didn't get the doughnuts he's holding
there.

We stepped in and paused in front of Kathleen Kennedy's reception area. She'd put a small Christmas tree on the counter near the wall, no decorations yet; and no Kathleen,
until she whisked around the corner carrying a stuffed elf in a sleigh with a Santa cap on. She smiled when she saw us, asking, “Isn't he cute?” and turning Santa-elf this way and that.

I nodded and proceeded down the hall, Stu behind me. When he caught up to me he said, “She's nice, isn't she?” waiting for my confirmation with a special light in his eye. Sometimes I think I'm not a woman—neither a woman nor a man. I look at Kathleen Kennedy, I look at the director's secretary, who bounces and twitches and makes guys happy with her high tinkly laugh, at others I could name, and I think, I am not like them. So who am I? I'm fond of men; more than I should be. But I don't want to be one. The Kathleens of the world are a mystery to me, and I don't know why exactly. Even Janetta, in the coroner's office. The saving grace for me is people like Jeri Landsforth, the anthropologist; and Dr. Schafer-White, the pathologist, a mommy who probably dresses her little girl in velvet dresses the same day she'll be stabbing livers with a scalpel, just below the rib cage, and slipping in a thermometer to read the time of death. When I think of those two, I think, Okay, I'm not alone; and besides, Raymond likes me, and Joe.

“Killed her with one shot,” Stu said, bringing his right thumb up exactly between his eyebrows. “Westminster requested our involvement. They want someone knows what he's doing. You're him. Joe Sanders is actually the one who called back and would like to have you out there.”

We'd reached his office, and went in.

I said, “If it's all right with you, I'd like to talk to you in the future about my next step here. I mean, I've done just about everything except DNA, and Johnson's hogging that all right now. I'd really like to do something else; you know, take some training. Carnivorous insects, for instance. There's a course at Fullerton—”

He'd set the box of doughnuts on the desk and was hanging his jacket on the back of the door, glancing out the doorway as he came around, as if to see who else was or wasn't at their desks. “You have a problem, Smokey? Working scenes since you've been back?”

Stu was about the same age as Joe. Transferred in from
Indianapolis a year ago. He was a big, plain-looking man who looked like he'd sell tires or teach history or be the guy who tries to sell you refrigerators as you get off the escalator at Sears. Egg-shaped face with a shiny forehead, round bifocals. He was okay but I couldn't get a fix on him, couldn't figure out who he was yet besides being good at following procedure. Definitely a company man, which I both liked and didn't like; I like them honest enough to go by the rules yet imaginative enough to break them, so there you go, hard to please.

“If you mean am I queasy, no. Nothing like that.”

“You have a problem with any personnel?”

“No.”

As he was asking me these questions, his eyes shivered in that weird paroxysm some people's do when concentrating, as if reading a page right-to-left and not ever catching up. He moved over behind his desk and said, “That case from Mission Viejo, the one with the boy in the hills? The cop dries the shirt in the
sun
,” Stu shaking his head. “Can you believe it? On a tree branch, out in the sun.” He unlocked his desk, fidgeted around with the stuff on top, and tore off yesterday's calendar page. “Then the idiot folds the shirt right over the wound holes. Who trains these guys anyway?” looking at me for an answer.

“As a matter of fact, the lab gives tr—”

“We have plenty of technicians on bench work. The spec is well covered. Blood alcohol's getting busy, but that's not where I need you.”

“With all due respect, Stu, I can't be everywhere.”

He looked at me with a new evaluation. “Have I forgotten a case you're on?”

“I'm helping out wherever. And that's fine. I like the variety.”

Still standing, he was reading a paper on his desk. Then raising his head, he said, “I thought everybody liked field work best.”

“I like field work.”

“Don't like the hours? More predictable hours here? Your boyfriend . . . ?”

“Stu, I said I like field work.” What I hated was somebody insinuating that personal interests interfere with professional
ones, or that because I'm a woman I don't have the level of interest a man would. This conversation was pinning me to the wall, though. The fact of the matter was that my resistance was up to going to Westminster
precisely
because I was a woman and Joe-baby a man, and that galled me more than I wanted to think, for without that tension, I wouldn't be having this inane conversation with Stu Hollings in his office. I said, “This time of morning I should make it in what? Thirty minutes?”

“Good,” Stu said, cutting open the tape on the doughnut box with his fingernail and lifting the lid. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Got to watch calories, huh?” He smiled at me, returning his gaze to the pink-and-chocolate mounds. His shirt pulled tightly across his stomach, his sleeves rolled because his wrists were so thick.

I said, “I'll present more information regarding that course in carnivorous insects I mentioned later, okay? We can talk about it then?”

“You do that,” he said, neatly laying out a folded paper towel for his doughnut to rest on.

At my desk, I grabbed my kit containing the things needed for collecting and preserving samples, and put it on top, flipping the latch open so I could check my supplies. Joe would've already done most of the work. The blood would've clotted and unclotted by now, he could get good samples, and he knew what he was doing. I couldn't see why he needed me. I checked my supply of filter paper. I needed more gloves. The elasticized strap on my eye protection was getting unelasticized; I'd have to replace it sometime. Swabs, syringes, Luminal. Razor blades. Tweezers. Saline solution. Mason jar. Small tubes. Joe would have dry ice. Thermometer/barometer. Evidence envelopes—plenty of those. Tape for lifting prints.

Billy K. would be there, probably, but I thought I'd better bring film for my own camera, the one I kept in the trunk and hoped all summer wouldn't fry. I rummaged in the back of my top drawer, didn't find any. Then opened the same big left-hand drawer where I'd temporarily stored the brass collet from the Dwyer case before I had the good sense to take it to Property, and maybe not the good sense, since I hadn't handled
it correctly in the first place and it seemed to mean nothing to anyone after all, and looked in there. Thinking how much time had already passed on the Dwyer case. Thinking of the Dugdales, and what was happening to my frilly friend Patricia, losing her bearings. Mad at myself that I'd been dwelling too much on my own puny emotional problems with one Joe-London-Cutie-Pie-Sanders while all this was going on.

“It's fly specks, I'm telling you.”

“It's paint.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I said, “What's it painting here? What's it depicting? Not holly berries.” Using the eraser end of a pencil in the corner where the window met the frame, I shoved open the metal door that led from the kitchen into the customer area of the shop. We'd been checking stain on the door's window.

“It's flies,” I said.

“What makes you think so?” Joe said.

“
Because
, the way they're grouped.”

“We don't have flies in December.”

I stopped, saw he was sort of smiling. He used to do that to me when I was a lab rook—test me, see how much I believed my guesses.

I said, “I don't care what time of year it is, certain conditions, you get flies. Here . . .” I started back. He wasn't following. I said, “The edges. Come back and look.”

He didn't move. He did raise his eyebrows and thrust both hands on his hips.
Now
what did I say?

Finally he came over. Looking back into the kitchen through the door's window, I saw the Westminster cop, whose shoulders blocked most of the view farther in. A woman's legs and feet extended on the floor ahead of him, like tiny alien legs emitting from his shoulder. She wore black moccasins and no socks or stockings. The legs had broad stain on them, almost as if they'd been wiped.

I said, “We should do prints on the legs.” The puffy ankles meant the skin would be firm. Many times investigators don't dust certain surfaces because they think they can't get prints, or they don't know what we barn boys can do with our technology. Once we found a perfect, clean set of four on each of the undersides of a victim's arms who'd been raped and murdered right after toweling off from a bath. The girl was thirteen; the killer was her neighbor. That was the first of many times I would've liked to have seen Star Chamber justice—the personal, uncomplicated meting out of penalty I would sooner call repair.

The Westminster cop turned around, a question in his eyes, when I tapped on the glass with the pencil, showing Joe the edge of the red concentration. I shook my head no, and spoke to Joe again.

“Little parentheses. Foreleg, middle leg, rear leg. Foreleg, middle leg, rear leg.” Fly footpads had left the pattern. Find six red specks away from the main mass, and you could see it clearly. I said, “Flies.”

“Hm. Not bad.”

“Who needs a course in insects?” I said.

“You taking a course in insects?”

“Maybe. I'm bored.”

“Why are you so edgy today?”

“I'm not edgy.”

I went back toward the front of the shop, Joe somewhere behind me. I passed the white plastic table with broad splats of blood across it. “Let's see what else is around,” I said. Joe had taken smears, using Q-Tips and slides, of the blood on the table and on a chair leg. It's not unusual to gather fifty, seventy-five blood samples from a scene. Joe had already syringed the larger pools in the back near the victim.