Golden Orange (40 page)

“So I can expedite things with no complications.”

“What things?”

“Having Warner Stillwell declared dead. I'm prepared to file a petition with the court. In fact, I've brought a stenographer with me today. She's waiting outside. I want an affidavit from you.”

“And what will I say in the affidavit?”

“You'll just describe as briefly as possible the events of Friday night, April twenty-first. You see, when the absence of a person is not satisfactorily explained after diligent search or inquiry, a person can be presumed to be dead. And being the only third-party witness to the tragedy, you, and
only
you, can provide us with an irrefutable presumption. Without any complications, I believe that the remainderman in the trust—sorry, that's Tess—can automatically receive her inheritance sooner than sixty days. As trustee I can deed the land over to her.”

“And if there were … complications, then what?”

“The court would probably decide to wait out the statutory period of five years before declaring Warner Stillwell dead.”

“I see,” Winnie said. “And I'll still be in jail when he's declared dead, when she gets the property.”

“I don't think so, Mister Farlowe,” Martin Scroggins said. “This facility is so overcrowded the sheriff is acting under the guidelines of a federal judge with instructions to release. I've learned that the sixty-day prisoners are serving only thirty-four. I expect a ninety-day prisoner like yourself could be out of here a lot sooner than you think. You'll serve less than two months, I should think.”

“Will Tess be willing to talk to me then? Or can you answer that, counsel?”

“Of course!” Martin Scroggins said. “She wants to see you right
now
! It's just not in her …”

“Best interest?”

“Correct.”

“Okay,” Winnie said.

Martin Scroggins smiled and said, “You're doing exactly the right thing. And remember, Warner Stillwell had
also
been drinking that night. He contributed to his own demise. I liked Warner immensely but …”

“He
was
seventy-two years old,” said Winnie.

Martin Scroggins stopped smiling because he was seventy himself, and
he
wasn't ready to go over the side. “I was about to say he should've known better than to be driving that boat with a nearly unconscious man in it, and no one else to help him. Well, it's over now and I think Tessie's shown great maturity since the tragedy. I believe she's ready for her inheritance.”

“I imagine she's asked you to take over all her legal affairs?”

“Why not? I was her family's attorney. And I've always hated irrevocable trusts. It's too often used to control others from the grave … Vanity. All is vanity.”

“It's a way to take it with you,” Winnie said. “Okay, counsel, send in your stenographer.”

Nineteen days after his incarceration, Winnie Farlowe was sitting on the roof of the jail watching two of his roommates shoot free-throws after they'd gotten tired of playing one-on-one. By this time the DEA agent had been convicted and was awaiting a sentence to a federal prison, and two other ex-lawmen had come into the high-power unit: one a former Secret Service agent, another a police captain from the South Bay.

Winnie noticed that his fellow prisoners weren't much different from all the other lawbreakers he'd arrested in his police career. Each one claimed he was not guilty, or his offense was mitigated by certain factors: a disloyal wife, a jealous superior, an addiction he couldn't control. And so forth. The only inmate who freely admitted his culpability, other than Winnie himself, was Douglas Bracken, the LAPD sergeant who had compulsively exposed himself to schoolgirls many times over an eight-month period before being caught. He was ten years older than Winnie: a lot thinner, a lot grayer.

Even here in high-power there was the inmates' pecking order. Bracken was ostracized and ignored. They called him “Short Eyes” behind his back and sometimes to his face. He was the only man on the seventh floor who looked sadder and more miserable than Winnie Farlowe. The man who looked the most content and carefree was the Nightstalker, but when he got into the courtroom he could be irritable and histrionic.

One of the two men shooting baskets missed a dribble pass, and the ball rolled over to Winnie's feet. He picked it up and, without thinking, tried a jump shot. It swished in.

Douglas Bracken was standing behind him. He said, “Nice shot. I bet you used to play the game.”

“Only in high school,” Winnie answered. “I warmed the bench mostly.”

Bracken took a few steps closer and said, “I used to play in high school too. Never got tall enough to be any good.”

When Winnie didn't respond, Bracken dropped his eyes and turned to walk away. Then Winnie said to himself: I'm no better than he is. I'm no better than
anybody.

Winnie said, “Wait a minute. Wanna play one-on-one? I'll give it a try if you will.”

Bracken and Winnie exhausted themselves after ten minutes of basketball. When the exercise period was over, Bracken walked back downstairs with him. “You're looking a lot better than when you first came in,” Bracken said. “I know about booze. I think it led to my own problem in some ways. The nurse told me you wouldn't even let them give you vitamin shots. You're doing it the hard way. Awful tough to white-knuckle it.”

“Next time you wanna play one-on-one, lemme know,” Winnie said.

Bracken hesitated, then said, “Instead of spending all your time thinking about what can't be changed, you ought to think about the future. You'll have a lot of sobriety under your belt when you get out. You can change things.”

“How about you?” Winnie said. “Can
you
change things?”

Swallowing twice, Bracken said, “I hope so. I got a wife and three kids. My daughter's gonna have a kid of her own soon. I looked down the barrel more than once. I truly wanted to bite it. Now maybe I wanna live. This place either makes a good man wanna die or it makes him really wanna live.”

Winnie paused. “Are you a good man, Bracken?”

“I don't know,” Bracken answered. “But I think
you
are.”

“Oh yeah?”

“There's no secrets here. Everybody knows you wouldn't even
be
here if you hadn't forced the judge to give you time. Only a good man'd do a thing like that. That's what I think.”

That night Winnie started an exercise program. It was very hard to do twenty push-ups. Sit-ups were nearly impossible, but Bracken encouraged him and even held Winnie's ankles so he could do them.

When Winnie had finished, lying exhausted in his bunk, Bracken took out his harmonica. It was one thing about him the others didn't criticize. When they were in their bunks at night, it wasn't unpleasant to hear old Short Eyes blowing a mournful, heart-cracking tune on his harmonica.

There was something Winnie wanted to hear, but he didn't ask for it. He just listened quietly. The others said, yeah, it was the only good thing about Short Eyes. He could really make music, that old wienie wagger.

As the weeks passed, on the seventh floor there were some amazing changes taking place in Winnie's little world. It wasn't because of his fellow inmates—some of whom were gone, only to be replaced by other errant lawmen—it was that his body chemistry was being dramatically altered. His cerebral cortex was humming along. The beta brain waves were surging against his skull like the surf at the Wedge. The alpha waves were cresting even while he lay calm and relaxed. It was strangely exciting. He could
think
! He was able to remember things. He could even remember things that had happened when he'd been drinking, many of which he'd just as soon have forgotten. Of course he couldn't remember the real blackouts, but he could remember things around the fringes of those blackout periods and sometimes little moments in the middle of that alcoholic darkness.

Physically, he was healthier than he'd been in a long time. His heart rhythm had smoothed out and the premature contractions were gone. He was able to sleep through the night, except when he had nightmares of screams in dark water. Or when he had a dream about Tess Binder holding him in her arms and calling him “old son.” Sometimes he'd wake up then. But ordinarily, he was sleeping eight hours every night. Usually though, it was fitful theta sleep. Sometimes it was delta sleep, deep and profound, with tormenting dreams. Of course, in jail, sleep was the ultimate escape. The best and only
real
escape available.

On June first, forty-one days after the incident in Isthmus Cove, Winnie was lying on his bunk thinking about the past, still unable to visualize a future. Two of his roommates were playing chess. One was writing a letter. Bracken was playing the harmonica. Winnie thought he was brave enough now, or he should be.

“Bracken,” Winnie said, “can you play ‘Where or When'?”

Bracken nodded and segued into the song. Winnie had never heard it on the harmonica. It wasn't just more melancholy, it was mournfully sad.

Winnie sang it very quietly to himself:

It seems we stood and talked like this before

We looked at each other in the same way then

Winnie thought of her, how she looked the first time in Spoon's Landing. And how she looked
most
beautiful: in that white linen dress with the gardenia in her hair. On the hilltop overlooking Two Harbors.

The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore

Then Winnie stopped thinking of Tess. He had a nagging unpleasant ghost of a memory. It happened when he wasn't well yet, when Buster came to visit him. What was it that had bothered him then, when his brain was in irons? What?

The harmonica wept, the way Bracken played it. It sounded like someone crying.

The things that happened for the first time

Seem to be happening again …

Then he struck! Like when the dinghy struck! It was
that
shocking! He remembered now what Buster had said: “You shouldn't be in jail. You could be with your little pal, sleeping on peachy sheets.”

It wasn't just an expression,
peachy
sheets. Lots of things were peachy, but not sheets. Only Tess Binder's sheets. Only if you'd
seen
them!

And at last, Winnie Farlowe started to grasp something. Partly because of connecting Buster to the peach-colored sheets. Partly because of the song triggering emotions he'd repressed. But mostly because he'd been sober for forty-one days, had stopped hammering his frontal lobes with massive daily doses of alcohol. Winnie Farlowe untangled the dream. The crazed sensation of
déja vu.
The nymph!

It had happened back in October, months before he'd met Tess Binder in Spoon's Landing, and smelled her jasmine, and become tormented by the words of a song. He'd been drinking a lot that night at Spoon's Halloween party. In fact, he was absolutely fried when he staggered outside searching for the off-duty barmaid who'd come to Spoon's party, dressed as a mermaid with feet, with only green pasties over her nipples.

The night air didn't revive him, and he did something insane. He got into his car and drove twelve blocks to Buster Wiles's apartment, hoping to bring him back to the party.

He couldn't remember parking the car on Balboa Boulevard. He did remember staggering toward Buster's porch. He couldn't remember falling. He did remember lying on the sidewalk and getting up. He couldn't remember crashing against Buster's door, but he did remember falling back on the floor of Buster's porch, flat on his back, with the porch roof spinning above him.

He remembered the door opening and the nymph appearing, all dressed in white, lipstick like blood. She wasn't wearing her glasses then and her hair was mussed. Buster came out behind her and said something.

The nymph laughed. Like wind chimes. She reached her hand toward Winnie, who was too drunk to lift his head. She held out her hand to pull him up, but he couldn't even take it. Then Buster said something and she laughed again and went back inside, leaving him with Buster.