Dark Rivers of the Heart (12 page)

Half afraid that the two men would hear his heart thundering, Spencer joined Lee at the desk and accepted the gift.

It was two inches in diameter. Carved on one side was the head of a dragon. On the other side was an equally stylized pheasant.

“This looks too expensive to—”

“It’s only soapstone. Pheasants and dragons, Mr. Grant. You need their power. Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.”

Dangling the medallion from its chain, Spencer said, “A charm?”

“Effective,” Lee said. “Did you see the Quan Yin when you came in the restaurant?”

“Excuse me?”

“The wooden statue, by the front door?”

“Yes, I did. The woman with the gentle face.”

“A spirit resides in her and prevents enemies from crossing my threshold.” Lee was as solemn as when he’d recounted his escape from Vietnam. “She is especially good at barring envious people, and envy is second only to self-pity as the most dangerous of all emotions.”

“After a life like yours, you can believe in this?”

“We must believe in something, Mr. Grant.”

They shook hands.

Carrying the notepaper and the medallion, Spencer followed the escort out of the room.

In the elevator, recalling the brief exchange between the escort and the bald man when they had first entered the reception lounge, Spencer said, “I was scanned for weapons on the way down, wasn’t I?”

The escort seemed amused by the question but didn’t answer.

A minute later, at the front door, Spencer paused to study the Quan Yin. “He really thinks she works, keeps out his enemies?”

“If he thinks so, then she must,” said the escort. “Mr. Lee is a great man.”

Spencer looked at him. “You were in the boat?”

“I was only eight. My mother was the woman who died of thirst the day before we were rescued.”

“He says he saved no one.”

“He saved us all,” the escort said, and he opened the door.

On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, half blinded by the harsh sunlight, jarred by the noise of the passing traffic and a jet overhead, Spencer felt as if he had awakened suddenly from a dream. Or had just plunged into one.

During the entire time he’d been in the restaurant and the rooms beneath it, no one had looked at his scar.

He turned and gazed through the glass door of the restaurant.

The man whose mother had died of thirst on the South China Sea now stood among the tables again, folding white cloth napkins into fanciful, peaked shapes.

The print lab, where David Davis and a young male assistant were waiting for Roy Miro, was one of four rooms occupied by Fingerprint Analysis. Image-processing computers, high-definition monitors, and more exotic pieces of equipment were provided in generous quantity.

Davis was preparing to develop latent fingerprints on the bathroom window that had been carefully removed from the Santa Monica bungalow. It lay on the marble top of a lab bench—the entire frame, with the glass intact and the corroded brass piano hinge attached.

“This one’s important,” Roy warned as he approached them.

“Of course, yes, every case is important,” Davis said.

“This one’s
more
important. And urgent.”

Roy disliked Davis, not merely because the man had an annoying name, but because he was exhaustingly enthusiastic. Tall, thin, storklike, with wiry blond hair, David Davis never merely walked anywhere but bustled, scurried, sprinted. Instead of just turning, he always seemed to
spin.
He never pointed at anything but
thrust
a finger at it. To Roy Miro, who avoided extremes of appearance and of public behavior, Davis was embarrassingly theatrical.

The assistant—known to Roy only as Wertz—was a pale creature who wore his lab coat as if it were the cassock of a humble novice in a seminary. When he wasn’t rushing off to fetch something for Davis, he orbited his boss with fidgety reverence. He made Roy sick.

“The flashlight gave us nothing,” David Davis said, flamboyantly whirling one hand to indicate a big zero. “Zero! Not even a partial. Crap. A piece of
crap
—that flashlight! No smooth surface on it. Brushed steel, ribbed steel, checked steel, but no
smooth
steel.”

“Too bad,” Roy said.

“Too bad?” Davis said, eyes widening as if Roy had responded to news of the Pope’s assassination with a shrug and a chuckle. “It’s as if the damned thing was
designed
for burglars and thugs—the official Mafia flashlight, for God’s sake.”

Wertz mumbled an affirmative, “For God’s sake.”

“So let’s do the window,” Roy said impatiently.

“Yes, we have big hopes for the window,” Davis said, his head bobbing up and down like that of a parrot listening to reggae music. “Lacquer. Painted with multiple coats of mustard-yellow lacquer to resist the steam from the shower, you see. Smooth.” Davis beamed at the small window that lay on the marble lab bench. “If there’s anything on it, we’ll fume it up.”

“The quicker the better,” Roy stressed.

In one corner of the room, under a ventilation hood, stood an empty ten-gallon fish tank. Wearing surgical gloves, handling the window by the edges, Wertz conveyed it to the tank. A smaller object would have been suspended on wires, with spring-loaded clips. The window was too heavy and cumbersome for that, so Wertz stood it in the tank, at an angle, against one of the glass walls. It just fit.

Davis put three cotton balls in a petri dish and placed the dish in the bottom of the tank. He used a pipette to transfer a few drops of liquid cyanoacrylate methyl ester to the cotton. With a second pipette, he applied a similar quantity of sodium hydroxide solution.

Immediately, a cloud of cyanoacrylate fumes billowed through the fish tank, up toward the ventilation hood.

Latent prints, left by small amounts of skin oils and sweat and dirt, were generally invisible to the naked eye until developed with one of several substances: powders, iodine, silver nitrate solution, ninhydrin solution—or cyanoacrylate fumes, which often achieved the best results on nonporous materials like glass, metal, plastic, and hard lacquers. The fumes readily condensed into resin on any surface but more heavily on the oils of which latent prints were formed.

The process could take as little as thirty minutes. If they left the window in the tank more than sixty minutes, so much resin might be deposited that print details would be lost. Davis settled on forty minutes and left Wertz to watch over the fuming.

Those were forty cruel minutes for Roy, because David Davis, a techno geek without equal, insisted on demonstrating some new, state-of-the-art lab equipment. With much gesticulating and exclaiming, his eyes as beady and bright as those of a bird, the technician dwelt on every mechanical detail at excruciating length.

By the time Wertz announced that the window was out of the fish tank, Roy was exhausted from being attentive to Davis. Wistfully, he recalled the Bettonfields’ bedroom the night before: holding lovely Penelope’s hand, listening to the Beatles. He’d been so relaxed.

The dead were often better company than the living.

Wertz led them to the photography table, on which lay the bathroom window. A Polaroid CU-5 was fixed to a rack over the table, lens downward, to take closeups of any prints that might be found.

The side of the window that was facing up had been on the inside of the bungalow, and the mystery man must have touched it when he escaped. The outside, of course, had been washed with rain.

Although a black background would have been ideal, the mustard-yellow lacquer should have been sufficiently dark to contrast with a friction-ridge pattern of white cyanoacrylate deposits. A close examination revealed nothing on either the frame or the glass itself.

Wertz switched off the overhead fluorescent panels, leaving the lab dark except for what little daylight leaked around the closed Levolor blinds. His pale face seemed vaguely phosphorescent in the murk, like the flesh of a creature that lived in a deep-sea trench.

“A little oblique light will make something pop up,” Davis said.

A halogen lamp, with a cone-shaped shade and a flexible metal cable for a neck, hung on a wall bracket nearby. Davis unhooked it, switched it on, and slowly moved it around the bathroom window, aiming the focused light at severe angles across the frame.

“Nothing,” Roy said impatiently.

“Let’s try the glass,” Davis said, angling light from first one direction then another, studying the pane as he’d studied the frame.

Nothing.

“Magnetic powder,” Davis said. “That’s the ticket.”

Wertz flicked on the fluorescent lights. He went to a supply cabinet and returned with a jar of magnetic powder and a magnetic applicator called a Magna-Brush, which Roy had seen used before.

Streamers of black powder flowed in rays from the applicator and stuck where there were traces of grease or oil, but loose grains were drawn back by the magnetized brush. The advantage of the magnetized over other fingerprint powders was that it did not leave the suspect surface coated with excess material.

Wertz covered every inch of the frame and pane. No prints.

“Okay, all right, fine, so be it!” Davis exclaimed, rubbing his long-fingered hands together, bobbing his head, happily rising to the challenge. “Shoot, we’re not stumped yet. Damned if we are! This is what makes the job fun.”

“If it’s easy, it’s for assholes,” Wertz said with a grin, obviously repeating one of their favorite aphorisms.

“Exactly!” Davis said. “Right you are, young master Wertz. And we are not just
any
assholes.”

The challenge seemed to have made them dangerously giddy.

Roy looked pointedly at his wristwatch.

While Wertz put away the Magna-Brush and jar of powder, David Davis pulled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully transferred the window to an adjoining room that was smaller than the main lab. He stood it in a metal sink and snatched one of two plastic laboratory wash bottles that stood on the counter, with which he washed down the lacquered frame and glass. “Methanol solution of rhodamine 6G,” Davis explained, as though Roy would know what that was or as if he might even keep it in his refrigerator at home.

Wertz came in just then and said, “I used to know a Rhodamine, lived in apartment 6G, just across the hall.”

“This smell like her?” Davis asked.

“She was more pungent,” Wertz said, and he laughed with Davis.

Nerd humor. Roy found it tedious, not funny. He supposed he should be relieved about that.

Trading the first wash bottle for the second, David Davis said, “Straight methanol. Washes away excess rhodamine.”

“Rhodamine always went to excess, and you couldn’t wash her away for weeks,” said Wertz, and they laughed again.

Sometimes Roy hated his job.

Wertz powered up a water-cooled argon ion laser generator that stood along one wall. He fiddled with the controls.

Davis carried the window to the laser-examination table.

Satisfied that the machine was ready, Wertz distributed laser goggles. Davis switched off the fluorescents. The only light was the pale wedge that came through the door from the adjoining lab.

Putting on his goggles, Roy crowded close to the table with the two technicians.

Davis switched on the laser. As the eerie beam of light played across the bottom of the window frame, a print appeared almost at once, limed in rhodamine: strange, luminescent whorls.

“There’s the sonofabitch!” Davis said.

“Could be anybody’s print,” Roy said. “We’ll see.”

Wertz said, “That one looks like a thumb.”

The light moved on. More prints magically glowed around the handle and the latch hasp in the center of the bottom member of the frame. A cluster: some partial, some smeared, some whole and clear.

“If I was a betting man,” Davis said, “I’d wager a bundle that the window had been cleaned recently, wiped with a cloth, which gives us a pristine field. I’d bet all these prints belong to the same person, were laid down at the same time, by your man last night. They were harder to detect than usual because there wasn’t much oil on his fingertips.”

“Yeah, that’s right, he’d just been walking in the rain,” Wertz said excitedly.

Davis said, “And maybe he dried his hands on something when he entered the house.”

“There aren’t any oil glands in the underside of the hand,” Wertz felt obliged to tell Roy. “Fingertips get oily from touching the face, the hair, other parts of the body. Human beings seem to be incessantly touching themselves.”

“Hey, now,” Davis said in a mock-stern voice, “none of that
here,
young master Wertz.”

They both laughed.

The goggles pinched the bridge of Roy’s nose. They were giving him a headache.

Under the lambent light of the laser, another print appeared.

Even Mother Teresa on powerful methamphetamines would have been stricken by depression in the company of David Davis and the Wertz thing. Nevertheless, Roy felt his spirits rise with the appearance of each new luminous print.

The mystery man would not be a mystery much longer.

SEVEN

The day was mild, though not warm enough for sunbathing. At Venice Beach, however, Spencer saw six well-tanned young women in bikinis and two guys in flowered Hawaiian swim trunks, all lying on big towels and soaking up the rays, goose-pimpled but game.

Two muscular, barefoot men in shorts had set up a volleyball net in the sand. They were playing an energetic game, with much leaping, whooping, and grunting. On the paved promenade, a few people glided along on roller skates and Rollerblades, some in swimwear and some not. A bearded man, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, was flying a red kite with a long tail of red ribbons.

Everyone was too old for high school, old enough so they should have been at work on a Thursday afternoon. Spencer wondered how many were victims of the latest recession and how many were just perpetual adolescents who scammed a living from parents or society. California had long been home to a sizable community of the latter and, with its economic policies, had recently created the former in hordes to rival the affluent legions that it had spawned in previous decades.

On a grassy area adjacent to the sand, Rosie was sitting on a concrete-and-redwood bench, with her back to the matching picnic table. The feathery shadows of an enormous palm tree caressed her.

In white sandals, white slacks, and a purple blouse, she was even more exotic and strikingly beautiful than she had been in the moody Deco lighting at The Red Door. The blood of her Vietnamese mother and that of her African-American father were both visible in her features, yet she didn’t call to mind either of the ethnic heritages that she embodied. Instead, she seemed to be the exquisite Eve of a new race: a perfect, innocent woman made for a new Eden.

The peace of the innocent didn’t fill her, however. She looked tense and hostile as she stared out to sea, no less so when she turned and saw Spencer approaching. But then she smiled broadly when she saw Rocky. “What a cutie!” She leaned forward on the bench and made come-to-me motions with her hands. “Here, baby. Here, cutie.”

Rocky had been happily padding along, tail wagging, taking in the beach scene—but he froze when confronted by the reaching, cooing beauty on the bench. His tail slipped between his legs, fell still. He tensed and prepared to spring away if she moved toward him.

“What’s his name?” Rosie asked.

“Rocky. He’s shy.” Spencer sat on the other end of the bench.

“Come here, Rocky,” she coaxed. “Come here, you sweet thing.”

Rocky cocked his head and studied her warily.

“What’s wrong, cutie? Don’t you want to be cuddled and petted?”

Rocky whined. He dropped low on his front paws and wiggled his rear end, though he couldn’t bring himself to wag his tail. Indeed, he wanted to be cuddled. He just didn’t quite trust her.

“The more you come on to him,” Spencer advised, “the more he’ll withdraw. Ignore him, and there’s a chance he’ll decide you’re okay.”

When Rosie stopped coaxing and sat up straight again, Rocky was frightened by the sudden movement. He scrambled backward a few feet and studied her more warily than before.

“Has he always been this shy?” Rosie asked.

“Since I’ve known him. He’s four or five years old, but I’ve only had him for two. Saw one of those little spots the newspaper runs every Friday for the animal shelter. Nobody would adopt him, so they were going to have to put him to sleep.”

“He’s so cute. Anyone would adopt him.”

“He was a lot worse then.”

“You can’t mean he’d bite anyone. Not this sweetie.”

“No. Never tried to bite. He was too beaten down for that. He whined and trembled anytime you tried to approach him. When you touched him, he just sort of curled into a ball, closed his eyes, and whimpered, shivering like crazy, as if it hurt to be touched.”

“Abused?” she said grimly.

“Yeah. Normally, the people at the pound wouldn’t have featured him in the paper. He wasn’t a good prospect for adoption. They told me—when a dog’s as emotionally crippled as he was, it’s usually best not even to try to place him, just put him to sleep.”

Still watching the dog as he watched her, Rosie asked, “What happened to him?”

“I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. There are too many things in life I wish I’d never learned…’cause now I can’t forget.”

The woman looked away from the dog and met Spencer’s eyes.

He said, “Ignorance isn’t bliss, but sometimes…”

“…ignorance makes it possible for us to sleep at night,” she finished.

She was in her late twenties, perhaps thirty. She had been well out of infancy when bombs and gunfire shattered the Asian days, when Saigon fell, when conquering soldiers seized the spoils of war in drunken celebration, when the reeducation camps opened. Maybe as old as eight or nine. Pretty even then: silky black hair, enormous eyes. And far too old for the memories of those terrors ever to fade, as did the forgotten pain of birth and the night fears of the crib.

Last evening at The Red Door, when Rosie had said that Valerie Keene’s past was full of suffering, she hadn’t merely been guessing or expressing an intuition. She had meant that she’d seen a torment in Valerie that was akin to her own pain.

Spencer looked away from her and stared at the combers that broke gently on the shore. They cast an ever changing lacework of foam across the sand.

“Anyway,” he said, “if you ignore Rocky, he might come around. Probably not. But he might.”

He shifted his gaze to the red kite. It bobbed and darted on rising thermals, high in the blue sky.

“Why do you want to help Val?” she asked finally.

“Because she’s in trouble. And like you said yourself last night, she’s special.”

“You like her.”

“Yes. No. Well, not in the way you mean.”

“In what way, then?” Rosie asked.

Spencer couldn’t explain what he couldn’t understand.

He looked down from the red kite but not at the woman. Rocky was creeping past the far end of the bench, watching Rosie intently as she studiously ignored him. The dog was keeping well out of her reach in case she suddenly turned and snatched at him.

“Why do you want to help her?” Rosie pressed.

The dog was close enough to hear him.

Never lie to the dog.

As he had admitted in the truck last night, Spencer said, “Because I want to find a life.”

“And you think you can find it by helping her?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

The dog crept out of sight, circling the bench behind them.

Rosie said, “You think she’s part of this life you’re looking for. But what if she isn’t?”

He stared at the roller skaters on the promenade. They were gliding away from him, as if they were gossamer people blown by the wind, gliding, gliding away.

At last he said, “Then I’ll be no worse off than I am now.”

“And her?”

“I don’t want anything from her that she doesn’t want to give.”

After a silence, she said, “You’re a strange one, Spencer.”

“I know.”

“Very strange. Are you also special?”

“Me? No.”

“Special like Valerie?”

“No.”

“She deserves special.”

“I’m not.”

He heard stealthy sounds behind them, and he knew the dog was squirming on its belly, under the bench on the other side of the picnic table, under the table itself, trying to get closer to the woman, the better to detect and ponder her scent.

“She
did
talk to you quite a while Tuesday night,” Rosie said.

He said nothing, letting her make up her mind about him.

“And I saw…a couple of times…you made her laugh.”

He waited.

“Okay,” Rosie said, “since Mr. Lee called, I’ve been trying to remember anything Val said that might help you find her. But there’s not much. We liked each other right off, we got close pretty quickly. But mostly we just talked about work, about movies and books, about stuff in the news and things
now
, not about things in the past.”

“Where’d she live before she moved to Santa Monica?”

“She never said.”

“You didn’t ask? You think it might’ve been somewhere around Los Angeles?”

“No. She wasn’t familiar with the city.”

“She ever mention where she was born, where she grew up?”

“I don’t know why, but I think it was back east somewhere.”

“She ever tell you anything about her mom and dad, about having any brothers or sisters?”

“No. But when anyone was talking about family, she’d get this sadness in her eyes. I think maybe…her folks are all dead.”

He looked at Rosie. “You didn’t ask her about them?”

“No. It’s just a feeling.”

“Was she ever married?”

“Maybe. I didn’t ask.”

“For a friend, there’s a lot you didn’t ask.”

Rosie nodded. “Because I knew she couldn’t tell me the truth. I don’t have that many close friends, Mr. Grant, so I didn’t want to spoil our relationship by putting her in a position where she’d have to lie to me.”

Spencer put his right hand to his face. In the warm air, the scar felt icy under his fingertips.

The bearded man slowly reeled in the kite. That big red diamond blazed against the sky. Its tail of ribbons fluttered like flames.

“So,” Spencer said, “you sensed she was running from something?”

“I figured it might be a bad husband, you know, who beat her.”

“Do wives regularly run away, start their lives over from scratch, because of a bad husband, instead of just divorcing him?”

“They do in the movies,” she said. “If he’s violent enough.”

Rocky had slipped out from under the table. He appeared at Spencer’s side, having fully circled them. His tail was no longer between his legs, but he wasn’t wagging it, either. He watched Rosie intently as he continued to slink around to the front of the table.

Pretending to be unaware of the dog, Rosie said, “I don’t know if it helps…but from little things she said, I think she knows Las Vegas. She’s been there more than once, maybe a lot of times.”

“Could she have lived there?”

Rosie shrugged. “She liked games. She’s good at games. Scrabble, checkers, Monopoly…And sometimes we played cards—five-hundred rummy or two-hand pinochle. You should see her shuffle and deal out cards. She can really make them fly through her hands.”

“You think she picked that up in Vegas?”

She shrugged again.

Rocky sat on the grass in front of Rosie and stared at her with obvious yearning, but he remained ten feet away, safely out of reach.

“He’s decided he can’t trust me,” she said.

“Nothing personal,” Spencer assured her, getting to his feet.

“Maybe he knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Animals know things,” she said solemnly. “They can see into a person. They see the stains.”

“All Rocky sees is a beautiful lady who wants to cuddle him, and he’s going crazy because there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”

As if he understood his master, Rocky whined pathetically.

“He sees the stains,” she said softly. “He knows.”

“All I see,” Spencer said, “is a lovely woman on a sunny day.”

“A person does terrible things to survive.”

“That’s true of everyone,” he said, though he sensed that she was talking to herself more than to him. “Old stains, long faded.”

“Never entirely.” She seemed no longer to be staring at the dog but at something on the far side of an invisible bridge of time.

Though he was reluctant to leave her in that suddenly strange mood, Spencer could think of nothing more to say.

Where the white sand met the grass, the bearded man cranked the reel in his hands and appeared to be fishing the heavens. The blood-red kite gradually descended, its tail snapping like a whip of fire.

Finally Spencer thanked Rosie for talking with him. She wished him luck, and he walked away with Rocky.

The dog repeatedly stopped to glance back at the woman on the bench, then scurried to catch up with Spencer. When they had covered fifty yards and were halfway to the parking lot, Rocky issued a short yelp of decision and bolted back to the picnic table.

Spencer turned to watch.

In the last few feet, the mutt lost courage. He skidded nearly to a halt and approached her with his head lowered timidly, with much shivering and tail wagging.

Rosie slipped off the bench onto the grass, and pulled Rocky into her arms. Her sweet, clean laughter trilled across the park.

“Good dog,” Spencer said quietly.

The muscular volleyball players took a break from their game to get a couple of cans of Pepsi out of a Styrofoam cooler.

Having reeled his kite all the way to the earth, the bearded man headed for the parking lot by a route that brought him past Spencer. He looked like a mad prophet: untrimmed; unwashed; with deeply set, wild blue eyes; a beaky nose; pale lips; broken, yellow teeth. On his black T-shirt, in red letters, were five words:
ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY IN HELL.
He cast a fierce glance at Spencer, clutched his kite as if he thought every blackguard in creation wanted nothing more than to steal it, and stalked out of the park.

Spencer realized he had put a hand over his scar when the man had glanced at him. He lowered it.