Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
Lots of outlay, thought
Hess. She makes some money in this hellhole. Enough to buy "emu and
ostrich products" to feed her patients. And why so much for "storage"?
What's she storing—cows?
More scribbles into his
blue notebook, Hess's fingers feeling thick and unwilling, his sense of
disgust growing.
In the receivable files,
Hess found a dizzying labyrinth of private payments, insurance reimbursements,
and state, county and federal payouts. Some were payable to individual
patients, some to family, some to Helena Spurlea, some to the Rose Garden Home.
Between the discharged, the transferred, the institutionalized and the deceased
it was impossible for Hess to account for the income per patient. Even his
cursory inspection revealed that one A. Bohanan had expired in March of 1996
and received monthly medical insurance payments of $588 through September of
the same year, payable to the Rose Garden Home. A similar benefits-for-the-dead
history for M.A. Salott.
It was profane.
The file for January of this year contained nothing
at all related to the purchase of an embalming machine by William Wayne.
• • •
Hess inspected the house,
the garage and the grounds, finding no trace of the Porti-Boy and no documents
relating to the purchase of such a thing. No mirrored walls, no ostrich or emu
meat in the freezer. No van, no Seville. Just a junked old truck, up on blocks,
half of it missing. No tracks on the old asphalt of the driveway. When it was
light they could check the road.
• • •
Merci was standing
across the room from Wayne when Hess came back into the kitchen. Her arms were
crossed and she had one hand up, fingers rubbing her chin.
"William is kind
of forgetful about things, Tim. Foggy."
"Let's throw him
in jail and see if he clears up."
"He's in charge here.
Doesn't want the other patients to get hungry. The doctor, he says, she cuts
out two or three days in a row, sometimes. Stay put, William. Tim, come with
me?"
Standing in the stinking
hallway, Hess heard the moaning again. Merci's face looked pale in the bad
light. He stood so he could see part of Wayne's feet through the door.
"He's too
stupid," said Merci.
"That can be
faked."
"I'm
convinced."
"I am, too. No
record. No driver's license. He probably doesn't even know how to drive a
car."
"He says he doesn't
know anything about an embalming machine. Had to tell him what one was. Says he
thought people went to heaven when they died. Says he doesn't know where the
Ortega Highway is. Never heard of Jillson, Kane or Stevens. Can't remember the
doctor here—Spurlee, or Surplia or Slurpia—something in that area.
Christ."
"Why'd he
run?"
"Saw the
guns."
Hess thought.
"We can get hair and prints."
"I already did.
Offered him water in a clean glass. He pulled out the hair himself—even got
some skin on the end for DNA. It's in a paper towel inside the glass."
"We can hold him
forty-eight on the resisting. Keep the questions coming, get Kamala Petersen in
for a look, see if his head clears up."
"It's hard to
clear up a skull full of lint."
"I think you're
right. I also think someone used his name to order a Porti-Boy, signed for the
delivery, maybe used his money to pay for it. He never saw the damned thing.
Maybe he's covering someone. Maybe someone's using him. Spurlea owns a panel
van."
Merci leaned back against
the wall, looked up. "What's the rest of this place look like? How come it
stinks so bad? What's all that moaning about?"
"Take five and
see for yourself."
She came back down the
stairs a few minutes later. Hess looked at her and saw the desperation on her
face, like when she was working Jerry Kirby's dead heart. Her voice was low,
wavering just a little.
"I'm calling the
cops, shutting this place down. I'm going to get the Health Department as soon
as they open in the morning. We'll take Wayne for resisting, see if anything
pops, see what Kamala thinks of him. If he's covering for someone on the
Porti-Boy, maybe he'll tell us who. I'll get him a protective cell, make sure
the creeps don't hurt him."
"Good." He
looked in at William Wayne's feet again. Then at Merci, whose eyes were cold
and dark.
"He really is in
charge of this hellhole, Hess. That damned Dr. Slurpee is who I want. I really
can't believe what I just saw."
"I couldn't
either."
Merci turned and kicked a hole in the wall.
"Steel toes. I'm just a little bit pissed off right now. Call Riverside
Sheriffs."
• • •
Back out the Ortega the sky was dark and the hills were darker. The road
was just a black ribbon with a yellow line through it that kept snaking out of
his headlights, then out of Hess's focus. He stared at it, the only line on
earth.
Finally, Merci cut
loose.
"The worst part of it
is none of those people did anything wrong. They probably
never
did anything wrong. William
Wayne probably didn't. And the scum we deal with every day, this Purse Snatcher
puke we're after? All they
do
is bad things. They've got good minds and good bodies and all they do is bring
the hurt down on other people. But you get unlucky enough to be born like
those people back there, you end up in the Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore.
That isn't right, Hess. You keep trying to tell me to feel what other people
feel and think what other people think and all that? Well, I never could,
until I looked at the people in the rooms back there. That's the first time I
could really feel—and smell, and see and think—just
exactly
what other people felt and smelled and saw and
thought. And it made me ashamed to be a human being and it made me furious. I'm
always furious, though. That's a different story."
She leaned across the seat
and Hess thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she drove a stiff index
finger into his shoulder and leaned toward him.
"Those people aren't
ever going to get better. And they never did anything bad to anybody. That
pisses me off and I intend to stay pissed off about it just as long as I can. I
wish Dr. Slurpee had a jacket. I wish she was looking at some time."
Hess nodded. "She
might get some. You did the right thing, calling the police."
"I should have waited
for that bitch and blown her heart out."
"Save your shells for
the Purse Snatcher."
"I got plenty for
whoever needs them. We just wasted three hours, Hess. Maybe that's what pisses
me off most."
• • •
Merci stared out at the
darkness and the stars as they dropped back down into Orange County. So much
sky, she thought, and so little time. Her fury had cooled down to a simmer but
she could feel it eager to boil up and over again. That was fine; it was what
kept her going.
But her heart felt wrong.
It was all mixed up, not unanimous like it always was. It felt heavy with her
failure to save Jerry Kirby. It was tender at the sudden and powerful empathy
she had felt for the people at the Rose Garden Home. It was still coiling with
her own indigenous anger. And there was something else inside her, too, something
underlying it all like a small blue flame warming a pot, and this had to do
with Hess.
He pulled up next to her
car in the Sheriff Department lot, left the engine running. She looked at her
watch: pushing midnight.
"Come
over?"
"Sure."
• • •
She shooed some cats out
of the way and made drinks. Her big toe hurt. In the living room she sat across
the sofa from Hess and tried to let the smell of the orange grove inhabit her.
That didn't work.
Hess stared at the
tube but didn't touch his drink.
"Stay
tonight?" she said.
"No. I'm going
to go in a minute."
"Why'd you come over
in the first place, then?"
To make sure you were
okay. Didn't want you to kick all the walls in."
She thought about this.
"I'm okay. Look, it's good if you go. I'm better off alone when I'm like
this."
"I know."
Hess parked and walked across the sand to the
lifeguard stand at 15th Street. He could feel the dampness on his cheeks and in
his ankles. He climbed the stand and sat on the platform with his back against
the house and watched the silver-black Pacific ripple under a sky shot with
stars.
He began a prayer but fell
asleep. He woke from a dream in which a huge bird crashed through a mirror and
emerged on the other side as a Porti-Boy embalming machine. His watch said 4:54
A.M.
He made coffee, paced his
apartment, looked at his new head in the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror. Left
side. Right side. Front. Pretty different, really. The smoothness looked okay
but the color was bad, kind of a yellow, like there wasn't enough blood behind
it, or the blood had turned clear. Borderline anemic. Bonnie the beauty would
have to embalm me with plenty of flesh tone, he thought. He kept looking at his
pale, hairless reflection.
The mirror glass was old
and thin at the edges but it gave a true likeness, Hess thought. He opened the
door and tried to read the name of the maker inside, but the ink on the sticker
had succumbed to the decades.
Mirrors, he thought:
mirrors in dreams, mirrors for baldness, mirrored walls not installed, steamed
mirrors in Merci's bathroom, and what was it Colesceau had said,
Send me through the looking glass
again?
It was the again part
that bothered Hess. Why
again?
Because Holtz had
taken him out the back door before.
But why? The mob
hadn't been there before.
Goddamned
Colesceau
again, he thought. Inside my
brain like a tumor that won't stop growing. Age. Repetition. Senescence.
He turned the TV to local
news. For a moment he considered the screen, how it looked kind of like a
mirror but had its own images inside.
Unless you turn it off.
Then you could do whatever you wanted in front of the dark gray screen, and see
yourself doing it.
He turned it off and
looked at himself. With the living room lamp behind him, the reflection was
surprisingly good: a bald old man with a sharp face. He could even see the wig
on its faceless foam stand in the background, $89, human hair.
An idea. He got Rick
Hjorth's pictures from his briefcase and the enlargements that Gilliam's people
had produced. He found the Saturday, August 14, 8:12 P.M. shot that
showed Colesceau downstairs in front of the TV, and set it aside. What he
wanted was a picture of Colesceau watching TV with no picture on.
But no luck. Probably not
enough light, Hess thought: and why would Colesceau sit in front of the tube
without turning it on?
He looked through the
pictures again. They showed him now what they had shown him before: that
Colesceau sat watching TV in his apartment while Ronnie Stevens was slaughtered
at a construction site on Main Street in Santa Ana.
Enough, he thought.
It's ... not.. .
him.
Hess sighed and shook his
head. It was 5:10 now. Without real purpose, he dealt the photographs onto the
yellow dinette tabletop, like cards in a game of solitaire. He turned them up
one at a time, studying each. Then he grouped them by subject: the interior
shots of Colesceau, taken through the crack in the blinds; exterior shots of Colesceau
on his porch; exterior shots of the apartment, taken from the street to show
both the lower and upper floors; the protesters; law enforcement; media. He'd
done all this before and learned little.
Hess looked out the window
again.
The years have become minutes and
this is what we do with our lives.
As a protest against the passage
of time, Hess rearranged the pictures according to sequence: an act of small
order in a world of grand chaos.
Of course, he'd done this
before and learned little, too. The date/time feature was a help but it
couldn't show what wasn't there.
But now, as he gazed over
the time line again for no better reason than to be doing what was apparently
useful, something caught his attention. Something he'd seen but not thought
about, looked at but not noticed. Just an oddity, really, a question. He could
feel the gears starting to mesh now, the teeth coming together, the wheels
starting to turn.
The 8:21 P.M.
exterior shot showed both the downstairs and upstairs lights were off.
The 8:22 interior shot,
taken through a crack in the blinds, showed Colesceau watching TV.
So far, so good,
thought Hess.
Then an 8:25 exterior
showed the upstairs light on.
Okay, he either went upstairs or used a convenience
switch downstairs. Simple enough.