Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
Hess locked over at
her but Merci just stared out the window.
The Rose Garden Home sat
at the base of the mountains, west of the lake. There was a gate across the
driveway entrance, and a gate closer to the house, but both were unlocked.
Merci stood in the dust and slid the gates back on steel wheels while Hess
watched her in the headlights.
The house was mostly
dark—three rooms lit inside, and a porch light throwing a glow above the front
door. The grounds were lit well, with halogen patio lights on stands. Hess
could see that it was a large wood-sided home that had once been blue. The
garage door was up, no cars inside. On the dead brown grass sat a wheeled sign
with a big red arrow above a message board. The letters were black against the
faded yellow background, and not very straight:
Rose Garden Home
Respect and Care
You Are Welcome
Hess stepped out of the
car and into the heat. He wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve. Low
nineties, he figured, maybe higher. The house loomed before him. He looked up
at the slouching porch, the crooked stairs, the old sofas against the wall, the
wrought-iron grates over the windows, the empty bird feeders hung from the
awnings, the onyx wind chimes motionless in the heat.
He could hear voices
inside the house but they were overlapping and faint and could have been from
the TV or a radio.
"This is one
fucked-up looking funeral home," said Merci. "What's that owner's
name again?"
"William
Wayne."
"Damn, look at
this place."
"Listen."
Through the heat came a
moan, a long, unhurried and oddly painless moan from the second floor. A moment
later Hess heard laughter downstairs—a young woman.
Merci shook her head.
"What's he do, pickle them before they're dead?"
"Be
careful."
Hess looked at her,
reached under his coat and loosened the strap on his shoulder rig. Merci did
the same. Hess stumbled on the slanting stairs, recovered across the porch and
got himself left of the door. Merci backed up against the wall on the right,
her H&K out now and at her side, tucked back behind the leg of her
trousers.
Hess reached out with his
right hand and knocked. The door was thin and he could hear the report on the
other side. The moan started up again but the laughing stopped. He could feel
his heart beating too fast in his chest, more rpm than horsepower, an engine
with gears that weren't quite meshing. It wasn't something he could do much
about.
He tried the knob but it
was locked. He looked at Merci. She stood relaxed but alert, arms at her sides,
boots apart, back to the house. She shrugged and Hess knocked again, harder and
longer.
Still nothing. Just
the moaning.
"Here goes,"
said Hess, holstering his sidearm. He stepped back, lowered his shoulder and
charged the door. It took him two tries, but the doorjamb splintered on the
second and he stepped aside and let Merci push through.
Hess drew and followed.
The anteroom was hot and the smell was strong. There was no mistaking that
smell. He noticed the hornets buzzing lazily in the dark heavy air of the
stairwell. There were two hallways leading off, one left and one right.
A young man with long
blond hair stepped into the dull light of the hallway, looked at them in fear,
dropped a tray of something and whipped around the other way.
Hess and Merci yelled at
the same time, a chorus of threat that echoed up into the stairwell and bounced
off the walls. And the moaning still, plaintive and caged.
Hess pounded down the
hall, jamming the gun into his holster. The guy cut left, out of sight. Hess
didn't hesitate. Into a kitchen, bright, a big butcher block and a table with
chairs. Three steps and Hess jumped and caught him at a far doorway of the
kitchen, bear-hugging the guy's arms tight to his body, using his weight to
crash them to the floor. Hess rolled and forced the face against the linoleum
and he could feel Merci behind him, nullifying the strength of one arm, then the
other.
"He's bagged, Hess!
Roll off clean, watch the teeth! Watch the teeth!
Don't move, you sonofaBITCH!"
Hess pushed, then rolled
away and saw her above him, sidearm aimed down at their prize. He righted
himself, held the guy's neck down with one hand and body-searched him with the
other. He got a janitor's key chain off one belt loop, a pocketknife, some kind
of laminated ID card. Then he turned the man over onto his back and stood. He
was breathing hard, short little gasps that didn't seem to get enough air in.
It was quiet all of a sudden, no moaning, no cop screams.
"Good,"
Hess said. "Work."
The guy looked early
twenties. His hair was long and wavy, he had a thin mustache and dark,
frightened eyes. Skinny and pale. He wore a filthy T-shirt, dark jeans, red tennis
shoes with no socks. He looked at Hess as if he was about to be devoured. Then
at Merci. His chin was quivering and he still hadn't said a word.
"Name,
shithead."
Eyes on Hess again, then
to Merci. Dark and haunted and maybe even remorseful, thought Hess. No struggle
at all now, just belly up and lying on his arms, stranded like a tortoise.
"What's your
name, young man?" he asked.
"Billy."
"Billy
what?"
"Billy
Wayne."
Hess looked down at the
plastic-covered card. "William J. Wayne," he said. "Number
113."
"I didn't do it. And
I want my lawyer."
"Exactly what didn't
you do?"
"Whatever it is. I
live here. I'm the man in charge when we're alone."
"In charge of
what?"
William J. Wayne looked at
each of them again, suspicion, genuine fear. "All of us. When the doctor
goes, I'm in charge."
Hess looked at Merci and
Merci looked back. The moaning started up again from above them somewhere.
"You got a lot of
goddamned explaining to do, Bill. I'm going to let you stand up, walk over and
sit you in a chair here. Then you're going to tell me what I want to know. You
try to fight me and I'll kick your balls all the way to the lake. Got
that?"
"I want my lawyer and
I didn't do it."
"Yeah, yeah, now
stand up real slow and get your ass into this chair. Tim, maybe you should
secure this haunted house before Billy tells us everything he hasn't
done."
• •
Hess, with the janitor's
key ring in one hand, started with the left hallway. The place smelled like a
portable outhouse that has been out in the sun a long time. The hornets droned.
He came to a door on his right and looked through the window. He could see the
wrought-iron grating that protected the glass from the inside. Beyond the
grating was a small room lit by a fluorescent shop lamp affixed high on one
wall. A small twisted person lay upon the bed, half covered in the sheets.
Sharp bones and skin, weak light and shadow. Mouth open, no sound. The person
blinked. Hess saw the excrement on the floor around a hole cut directly into
the wood. A clipboard hung from a nail outside the door listed the patient as
J. Orsino. The hornets buzzed in and out, clung to the walls, pivoted on the
light fixture.
The next room down held a
young woman laughing. All Hess could see of her was her backside, the
honey-colored hair and the arms of the gray straitjacket criss-crossed around
her waist. Her bed was pulled into the middle of the room and she sat on the
far side of it, facing the wall, her head bowed like she was crying or
thinking. Laughing. There was an upturned pot on the floor beside her bed, food
stuck to the bottom and sides, hornets flickering on the red enamel. Beside
that a kitchen tub that appeared half full of water.
The last room off this
hallway held a man who lay atop his bed and stared at the ceiling. The chart
said B. Schuster.
Hess tried to breathe
deeply but it was hard to inhale the foul air without tasting it all the way
down. He retraced his steps to the entry room and went down the hallway to his
right. In one room was a disfigured boy; the other was empty.
Upstairs. The unemphatic
moaning was an adolescent girl who looked out at Hess from under the covers of
her bed. When she saw him she stopped and smiled.
• • •
Upstairs on the third level Hess found a
spacious room that served as an office. It was well lit. An air conditioner
groaned steadily, cutting the temperature and the stench. There was a desk
along one wall, one chair and six tall file cabinets. There was one framed
picture on the desk—a young couple with a small boy—one of the small
black-and-whites popular in the fifties, from which era Hess had several of himself.
He recognized neither the people nor the landscape. He found the business
license and county permit for the Rose Garden Home—"an intensive care and
hospice" facility. The owner operator was a woman—Helena Spurlea. She'd
been in business for eleven years. The small photograph on her county permit
showed a stubborn-faced woman with dark bangs and unhappy eyes. She looked like
the woman in the little black-and-white, forty years older.
They
both looked at him when he walked in. Merci had pulled up two chairs to face
Wayne, backs forward. She sat with her arms on the wood, and a mildly amused
expression on her face. '
"Billy's decided
he doesn't need his lawyer right now. We're going to have a little chat, let
him go if that's what seems right. Sound good?"
Hess got the cue.
"I wouldn't let that sonofabitch go if I had a gun to my head."
Merci sighed, looked
at William Wayne. "This is Tim, by the way. He eats chicken heads for
breakfast, but he's an okay guy."
Hess opened his mouth
and slowly bit down on his thumb.
Wayne stared at him
from what looked to be a wholly exclusive universe. Then he turned to Merci
again. "Maybe I could just talk to you."
"That mean Tim
can look around a littler'
"It's the
doctor's place."
"But you're in
charge."
"I am in
charge."
"Let him look
around, and we can get this over with. Get all of us back to what we were
doing."
"I was feeding
227. I'm in charge when she's gone."
"I want to hear about
that. Tim, maybe you should take a tour."
Hess studied William Wayne
as he backed out of the room.
"Okay, Billy,"
said Merci. "Now what's the deal with the Porti-Boy?"
Billy giggled.
"What's that?"
• •
The file cabinets in the
upstairs office contained patient records. William J. Wayne was a
twenty-three-year old native of Riverside, born to an alcohol and
methedrine-dependent mother. He was born with "substantial" mental
retardation and his developmental age was estimated to be eleven. Hess noted
that he was capable of writing his name, which looked like something a first
grader might produce, the letters put together one line at a time. There was no
mention of any crime in Wayne's file, sexual or otherwise. Parents long
divorced, mother in Beaumont, father's LKA Grant's Pass, Oregon. Wayne's mother
apparently signed over her state checks to the Rose Garden Home, in return for
the care her son received: $388 per month. Hess made notes.
He got Bart Young's home
phone number out of his blue notebook and used the desk phone to dial it. Young
told him that the method of payment on William Wayne's Porti-Boy was a money
order, if he remembered correctly. He could confirm in the morning. He also
said they usually used UPS for deliveries in the western states. Hess then
called Brighton at home, who said he could get UPS Security at this hour. Five
minutes later the phone on Helena Spurlea's desk rang. Hessspent the next
minutes explaining his needs to the UPS regional security director, who said he
would fax a signed delivery receipt to the Sheriff Department first thing in
the morning. Hess thanked him and hung up.
He called for a law
enforcement DMV run on Helena Spurlea: 1992 Cadillac Seville and 1996 Chevy
panel van. Three points on her driving record. He wrote down the plate numbers.
Her CDL was current and a fax of it and her record was on its way to the
Sheriff's Department Homicide Detail, attention Tim Hess. The van, he thought:
where is it?
He pulled out the bottom
file cabinet drawer and fingered his way through the folders. Cancelled
checks. Invoices. Receipts for expenses. Handwritten notes. He pulled one at
random: the expected payments for mortgage and utilities, staples and
medications, vehicle maintenance, repairs of appliances, labor costs for
landscape, painting, cleaning. Some unexpected expenses, too: $956 for H.
Spurlea, round trip travel from LAX to Dallas to Brownsville, Texas, in the
fall of 1998; payment of $370 to New West Farms in nearby Temecula for
"ostrich and emu products" in 1997; regular monthly payments of $875
to the Schaff Management Group of Newport Beach for "storage" and
$585 to one Wheeler Greenfield of Lake Elsinore for "rent." There was
a $1,235 payment to Inland Glass for "wall glass installation" back
in 1997, which Hess found odd because he'd not seen a single mirrored wall in
the Rose Garden Home so far.