A World the Color of Salt (28 page)

Feeding time, not with Gary, but at eleven-thirty, in the lab. Guacamole and chips. Rugalach. Falafel, and brownies, and chocolate chip cookies giving Mrs. Fields a run for her money. Salads. Meatballs bobbing in barbecue sauce. Too much.

Kathleen Kennedy and the personnel director had dressed up the long tables with paper tablecloths and a centerpiece of pine branches and candy canes.

Billy K. and Chris Cummins, the specialist in charge of the CAR, the Coroner's Analytic Robot, shared dubious honors for Good Glop in a Crock-Pot. When Chris came into the room dressed in his lab coat and a chef's hat, Billy K. followed with several bricks of cream cheese clutched in each hand. For the longest time they fussed at the table, Billy's dark head
down, Chris's sandy hair bunched out like mini-muffins. As I'd pass by on my way to go do this or that, Chris'd look up from his stirring with a mad scientist's grin on his face and inhale the aroma.

“You getting high on that stuff, Chris?” I asked him.

He Jet go the wooden spoon, rolled his eyes heavenward, and fluttered his hands.

Chris monitors the robot, meant to take the tedium out of analyzing the whole splendid array of toxins both legal and otherwise that people use to alter their bored and pitiful states. The robot releases such solvents as chloroform into the samples, caps the tubes, shakes them, and moves them to a centrifuge where they're spun at tremendous force, causing the solvent to separate. He readjusts the pH, identifies acidic drugs, such as codeine and Tylenol, then sticks the sample back in the CAR to repeat the whole routine, this time testing for antidepressants; for anesthetics, such as cocaine and nitrous oxide; for anorexics—those compounds that suppress appetite—such as meth, the magic vitamin, and China White, a designer drug with 18,000 times the toxicity of heroin. And with each run of thirty samples, he includes seven or eight other compounds for a linearity check, a “standard,” for control, so no whiner on a witness stand gets to cry “Foul.”

When the time came to pluck up paper plates and feast, we gathered around Chris like hesitant school kids while he lifted the glass lid of the pot and began to spoon. The mixture was a sort of cantaloupe color.

“Smells like chili. But it don't walk like chili,” someone said.

“Looks like something erupted from a very sick dog,” I said, and everyone groaned and said, Thank you, Smokey, thank you very much.

“I'll have you know this product was developed in the Robert,” the Robert being Chris's name for the CAR. “I call it Chris Cummins's Crimeval Chili.”

My boss was hanging back, waiting near two file cabinets just outside the door, with a clear view of the action. Supervisors always wait till the last in food lines, just as lieutenants always sacrifice themselves in the front lines of a war. He asked Chris, “Is that spelled as in
primeval
or
crime
and
evil
?”

“Take your pick,” Chris said, beaming, plopping a blob on
the next person's plate. Billy gave us the go-ahead, saying, If you closed your eyes, you
could
eat it—and everybody did, even me, with me meeting Gary Svoboda for lunch in barely an hour.

“Where's Joe Sanders?” The question came from a Colombian Joe had recommended for a job about six months ago.

Kathleen looked around the room, chin bobbing as she counted bodies, and said, “Yeah, we have a few people missing, don't we?” She wore a red dress with a beaded snowflake on the shoulder, and next to her, one haunch on a desk, the supply clerk was casting appreciative glances.

Luther Furijawa said he saw Joe at the morgue earlier. “We had a vegetable-oil case over there.” A bony man with a streak of clean gray above the right temple, he was a man people liked and respected.

Stu Hollings, from the doorway, said, “I thought Freon was outlawed,” referring to the fluorocarbon propellant base used in the cans. Fluorocarbons are cardio-toxic. With some people it doesn't take many uses to become sensitized; the heart responds by fibrillating.

“Yeah, Kathleen can't even sniff correction fluid anymore,” the supply clerk said. “What's the world coming to?”

Luther Furijawa said, “That's right. Trichloroethane, the drying agent in correction fluid, has been replaced with a non-intoxicating, ozone-safe solvent.” He shook his head and said, “This young man was fifteen years old, an A student, too. So sad. Dr. Watanabe thought it was a case of simple asphyxiation—suicide, or perhaps death at the hands of another—because the boy had a plastic sack over his head. But I was afraid it could be an inhalant and thereby volatile, so we examined the lungs underwater.” When Luther said this, it wasn't self-congratulatory, because that is not the way Luther is. He added that the boy had been with two of his friends, hanging out, doing homework, listening to music, eating cookies the boy had baked himself. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, and never came out.

We were all silent for a moment, until I heard Trudy's deep voice: “Isn't that too bad?” she said. “Why do kids do that to themselves?” That was the most I'd ever heard Trudy say out loud in a group like that. She seemed relaxed today, smiling
more, and when she finished saying what she did, her gaze settled on me from across the room with a pleasant look on her face. Standing next to her was Billy K., both of them against the wall by the window as they ate, their coffee cups on the sill. The line of Trudy's glasses came up to about the height of Billy's elbow. Her hair seemed longer, and she was wearing colors, green slacks and a red blouse, and red Christmas-light earrings that blinked off and on, off and on, reflecting on her cheeks. I wondered if Trudy could consider Billy K. a possible match. My eyes flicked over to meet his then, and I thought, Uh-oh, and looked away.

Herb, his gaze fixed somewhere in the middle of the floor, said, “The beat goes on.”

We stood there with our Christmas-party plates piled with food, the bright poinsettia patterns spearing through beans and guacamole, lemon squares and brownies.

I said my Merry Christmases to everyone, hugged the men as well as the women—bless 'em, bless 'em all—and decided to leave my car in the lot and walk over to meet Gary.

Waiting for the traffic light, I thought about what I'd be doing for Christmas Day, tomorrow. I didn't expect to spend Christmas with Joe. But when he told me last night he was sort of obligated to see Jennifer and their son, David, home from college, on Christmas, I already felt lonely. He said if he got away early, he could come by later. Just like dating a married man. Wow, I didn't come anywhere close to waiting a year and a half for Joe to clear the doorsill. Patricia asked me one time how you know when you're in love. I said it was when you say his name over and over again and you're not even moving your lips.

It was warm outside, maybe seventy-two, but cold in the café. Gary got there two minutes after me and found me sitting on my hands. He sat across from me in a booth, facing the light, the sun bouncing off the white metal tables outside, constricting his pupils to almost nothing. Our surroundings of used brick, bleached oak, and shiny brass rails were a soothing contrast to the beige bleakness of the lab, but it
was
chilly. “This could be a satellite to the morgue,” I said.

“Marvellen's always cold,” he said. “I tell her on trips if she'd just put her feet on top of the bologna we wouldn't need the ice pack.”

I laughed because he said it with such roundness to his eyes.

I said, “At work I get coffee just to warm my hands—snake blood I guess.” A waiter came up with menus. “Could I have some ho
t
tea, please?” emphasizing the
t
because in California when people hear
tea
they always think cold, don't ask me why.

Gary said, “I'm going to have the meat loaf. You?” His stubby finger mashed the menu as he looked up at me, the walrus mustache glinting golden-orange in the light.

“I don't think so,” I said. “Hey, Gare, you notice I gave you the crow's nest?”

“Huh?”

“The best seat. In Oakland you watch your back.”

“I watch my back, front, sides, and feet,” he said. The waiter came back with my tea and Gary's diet soda, and took the rest of our order. Then Gary laid one big arm on the table toward me, grinned, and said, “Phillip Dugdale's got himself
shoveling monkey caca morning to night in the Santa Ana Zoo.”

“What? Gary. What'd he do?”

“You know, the Mexes you can kind of understand, they don't have all the advantages. But these here are white boys. Our pal Phillip had the bad sense to commit a drunk-and-disorderly in the city of Garden Grove, to which my friend Frank Ellis is assigned. Except for the fact he came up in front of Judge Rickenbacker, he'd be doing a sixteen-monther on assault.”

“What happened? Tell me.”

“Dugdale tells her this stuff with AA, how he's been trying real hard to get straight, got a good job washing dishes seven days a week if he wants it, and when he's not doing that he's down at the Cultural Arts Center, learning how to work out his frustrations in clay. Doesn't that just get ya?”

“Crooks we shall always have with us.”

“Con men we shall always have with us. That guy . . .” Gary rubbed the back of his neck.

I was hopeful. “Why do those two bother you so much?”

“I told you. They're bad news.”

“What'd he do to get your friend's attention?”

“You're not eating hardly a thing. You want some of my potatoes here? This is good stuff. How's the salad? Okay. Frank gets a call from a motel owner. The guy has to take a slug of booze just to calm down. He points out back, and there's Phillip sitting on the swimming-pool slide, up at the top, yelling all over the place. Frank asks him how long he's been drinking, and he says, ‘I just wanted to go for a swim. Look, I'll pee in a bottle for you,' and starts unzipping. Turns out there was an argument over a broken shower rod and Phillip grabbed up a fistful of motel manager shirt and offered to rip him a new A-hole. Well, Frank gives him the Breathalyzer and he blows a
five
, poor dumb sonofabitch.”

“Maybe he's only violent when he's drinking,” I said.

Gary finished the bread with the last bite of meat loaf as he said, “The twink is bad news, any way you cut it. Shoveling zoo doo is exactly where he belongs.”

Debut House is on Hollywood Boulevard near an old theater heretofore host of the splashy movie premiere; a little beyond is the famous lingerie house, Frederick's of Hollywood, where in the seventies you could get garter belts and crotchless panties and all manner of sexy stuff now sold right out in the open on the carousels of Robinson's, amid the flannel pj's and Ninja Turtle sleepers.

It was Christmas Day. There'd been no traffic on the freeways going north. My jacket was off, my window half down, and I had a tape of western birdsongs playing. I was up to the mewing sounds of the tiny California gnatcatcher, which nests in coastal scrub but is now practically extinct from housing overdevelopment. Then came the deep
chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh
of another endangered bird, the cactus wren. A heavily spotted bird with a downward-scooping bill and a white eyebrow, it hides in the underbrush, sort of growling. I was privileged to see one once when I was walking Farmer outside Capistrano, in a wash. I studied it without knowing what it was, made mental notes, then looked it up later in
Peterson's.

The hillsides were almost totally brown from the drought, but otherwise it was the kind of day people see on TV and give as reason to move to California; a day bright and clear, and I thought how nice it would be to keep going all the way up to Santa Barbara. A beautiful, perfect day for hunting Annie Gwendolyn Dugdale, mother of Phillip and Roland G. Last known address: Debut Halfway House, Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood. Next to Frederick's.

Carolyn Snyder was a pleasant woman about my age, maybe upward, with a trim body and earnest eyes.

When she talked it was as though you'd brought her a great problem to ponder, her eyes worried and far away.

She was leaning one hand on the door frame, a blonde spear of hair drifting down the right side of her face. All I asked was, “Do you have an Annie G. Dugdale residing here?”

Carolyn was responsible for seeing that twelve ladies had enough soap for the washer, sheets for the beds, and access
to doctors and counselors. Early on in the conversation I told her who I was and where I worked.

“Annie's in trouble, then,” she said.

“I just wondered was she here today by any chance. Just to talk to her.”

“They're like children, you know,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “They're good for a while, you think you've done something; then they leave. Oh, they come back—usually, anyway. Sometimes they're not even using. They just disappear,” she said, shrugging, looking at me now with a pleasant expression. “And then they show up again. I ask them where they've been and all they do is get quiet and smoke. Or yell. Sometimes they yell. They'll say—oh, they'll say I don't have a right to treat them like kids, stuff like that.”