Red Light (26 page)

It slid easily into
the padlock and the bolt jumped open. Merci worked it from the latch, then slid
the catch into place. The big aluminum door shuddered as she pulled up on the
handle, hooked her boot under the bottom and gave it a heave. Dust and rust
showered down when the door slammed up. The sun shot in and held the cobwebs
with light. Merci watched the motes swirl, sneezed twice.

Half a dozen pasteboard
boxes. A bike with flat, whitewall tires yellow couch along the far wall. A
stack of newspapers. A 70s era quid stereo with eight-track tape player, all
four speakers. Bootleg tapes stacked on top, labels faded and peeling:
Jefferson Airplane, Fifth Dimension, The Doors. Two metal file cabinets, a
credenza. A Regulator clock hung on the left wall, two lamp stands without
shades. A mattress and box spring leaned against the right wall, wrapped in
plastic that had long since cracked and peeled. Two chests of drawers. A
refrigerator that looked thirty years old. That was about it. Lots of space,
not much stuff.

She sneezed again,
then again, then stepped back into the sunlight for some fresh air. When she
squinted back into the unit from a distance it looked like a diorama of a
college student's room, or a bachelor’s apartment from three decades ago. All
it needed was lava lamps and one of those astrological sex position calendars
that she had first seen, been frankly mystified by, at a head shop when she was
twelve.

For P. B.?

Says
who?

Merci went back in,
waving the air in front of her face. She noted dusty-sweet smell of paperbacks
and old boxes. There was mouse crap on the floor, and a mousetrap with part of
a small gray skeleton in it.. No cheese. She tapped the sofa with her hand and
watched the dust puff She took a newspaper off the top of the stack and checked
the date: February 11, 1970.

The file cabinets
were empty. So were the credenza and dressers. When she opened the refrigerator
the top half of the thick old gasket peeled away and hung in front of her. The
freezer was an EAZY DEfrost, and Merci was surprised that even thirty years ago
manufacturers misspelled names to get the attention of buyers.

The bike was a
Schwinn. The mattress was from Sears. The quad system—her girlfriend Melanie
had owned one—was by Pioneer.

The first box she
looked in was filled with dishes. She lugged it off the stack and set it aside.
The next had a few paperbacks, some loose pens and pencils, an old desk lamp
with the cord wrapped around the base. There was an orange peace sign glued to
the shade. The third box contained winter gear—gloves and mittens, fur-lined
ladies' snow boots, a couple of plastic raincoats that remained tightly folded
when she picked them up. Mice had made a nest in one of the boots. Shreds of
newspaper and bits of cardboard fell to the ground when she turned it over and
shook it.

The box at the bottom
of the first stack was filled with hardcover books:
I Was Castro's Prisoner;
Five Days to Oblivion; East Minus West Equals Zero; Witness; The Blue Book.
She opened the last one, a spiral-bound volume, and scanned the title page. It
was the John Birch Society handbook, written by Robert Welch. Merci thought she
remembered some of the titles from the bookshelf in her girlhood home. Clark
and Marcella had had hundreds of books, but these seemed familiar. The mice had
gnawed the cover of
Tail of the Paper Tiger.

Another box: pots and
pans. Another: typing paper and old Smith-Corona ribbons, carbon paper, envelopes
yellowed with age, a heavy crank pencil sharpener, some rulers and a circular
slide rule, and a stack of leaflets held together with a thick rubber band that
crumbled away when she picked them up. The pamphlets had red and white covers:
Communism,
Hypnotism and the Beatles.
She looked through one. The author seemed to be
saying that the primitive jungle rhythms used in some Beatles songs could
induce a hypnotic state in listeners, and that communist messages could be
easily absorbed when someone was in such a state. There were other stacks:
Fluoride and Moscow; Disarmament and Surrender; The Obligations of the
Informed American.

The box on the bottom
was the only one sealed with tape. Merci noted that it was relatively new
tape—it didn't crack or peel when she tried to get it off. She used her
penknife, then folded open the flaps. On top was a thick stack of yellowed
newspapers from late 1969. The black-and-white photography and the print and
layout style made them look even older than they were.

Under the papers was
a manila folder, and in the folder was an inexpensive date book for 1969 and
an audiocassette. The cassette wasn't labeled. It was inside a locking plastic
bag that Merci was almost certain was not made in 1969. The date book was jammed
with names and numbers, shorthand, nicknames, code names, more numbers.

It
reminded her of Aubrey Whittaker's. Merci looked through first few pages,
hoping to find the owner's name and address. None.

Under the folder was
a black plastic garbage bag containing something light. Merci lifted it out and
set it on the floor. She untied the loose knot—no cracking of the plastic—and
looked in. A garment. Using both hands she carefully removed it and set it atop
the bag. It was a blue satin dress, small, blasted with blood. There were two
rips in the middle front, two more in the middle back. Still in the garbage bag
were two shoes, which Merci pulled out one at a time: blue velveteen heels,
high ; petite. More blood, ancient and almost black.

Patti Bailey,
she thought.
Black book, cassette tape, and the clothes she wore in her life.

The box held one more
black plastic bag. Inside was a smaller one, one of the locking freezer bags of
the type that Merci herself occasionally used to freeze extra food. Sealed up
in the freezer bag she found a Reuger .38 Special with a two-inch barrel and
two loose casings. The
blue steel was lightly rusted.

The evidence, she
thought, the evidence that Thornton never found. More specifically, perhaps,
the evidence that Thornton
should have found.

The rest of the box
contained another thick stack of old newspapers. Taped to these was a sheet of
white paper. Big, marking-pen letter like the childish writing on the letter
that had led her to this storage container, read:

MERCI—THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT TO GET UP TO SPEED ON
YOUR UNSOLVED.

She stepped back out
to the dazzling sunlight. The breeze coming off the desert was cold. She got
her crime-scene kit from the trunk, filled out a Field Evidence Sheet,
photographed what she had found, sketched the scene in her own rudimentary
manner, then packaged it back up loaded it into the Impala. She figured the
note and the key would have be good enough to establish a permitted search. If
a judge ruled against her, she'd lose the evidence as admissible. But if she
didn't take it now, she was running the risk of losing it altogether. It had
been hidden for thirty-two years and it could get hidden for thirty-two more.
She tagged it all with the Patti Bailey case number from 1969: H38-069.

• •

The manager of Inland
Storage was Carl Zulch. His hair was white and cropped short, his skin was
pale. His eyes were dark brown, rimmed with a thin circle of blue. She guessed
him to be in his mid-seventies.

She badged him and
Zulch insisted on writing down her ID number. She told him she needed to know
who paid the rent on 355 and Zulch told her that was impossible—he'd need a
court order.

"I've
got better," she said. "Permission to search."

"Prove
it."

She gave him a very
hard stare, which Zulch returned. She went to the car, got the letter, put the
key back in the envelope and set it on the counter.

Zulch
read it. "Who's P. B.?"

"A
woman who was murdered in 1969."

"Here?"

"No.
Orange County. Who pays the rent here, Mr. Zulch?"

"Still
impossible to say for sure," he said. "Because this is all I get for
that unit. I get it every month. Every month for the last five years."

He shuffled through a
drawer, came out with a stack of envelopes and pulled away the rubber band. It
took him a while to find what he was looking for. He handed it across the
counter to her.

The envelope was
addressed in typewritten print, no return address, a no-lick stamp. Inside
Merci found a twenty, a ten and two ones.

"Thirty-two a
month," said Zulch. "Never late. Never a check. Never a note. It
isn't the only space rented out like that. People have secrets. I keep
them."

"Who do you call
if it burns down? Who do you write to when the rent goes up?"

"We
don't raise the rents once you're in."

"Don't
tell me it's fire and earthquake proof, too."

Zulch had already
raised a pale finger in anticipation. He used to ply an old Rolodex, then he
pinched out a card and set in on the counter.

The card was dated at
the top. It said Bob Cartwright, followed an address, phone number and
signature.

"He
opened the account five years ago, like it says."

"Is
it used often?"

"No. I make the
rounds in my golf cart sometimes, see if everything's all right. Never seen the
renter."

"I'm taking the
envelope and the money. I'll get you thirty-two bucks to cover it."

• • •

Merci hadn't even coded
her way out of the complex when she place call to the renter of 355 on her cell
phone. A woman answered. She’d never heard of Bob Cartwright. She'd gotten this
telephone number from Pac Bell when she bought the house eight years ago. She
told Merci she never made purchases over the phone and to take her off list if
this was a telemarketing outfit.

Merci
said she would.

Next she called
headquarters and had one of the desk sergeants check the cross-referenced
directory. The address used by Bob Cartwright didn't exist.

She had just hit the
"end" button when the phone rang. The reception was bad but she
recognized James Gilliam's even, unhurried voice.

"The casing from
Whittaker's and the casing you gave me were fired by the same gun."

"How
sure are you?"

"As sure as I
can get. The extraction marks were identical, the firing marks identical.
Perfect match, every land and groove lined up. Textbook."

"Could
you say that in court?"

"Depends
how you got the second case."

"You
know that's not what I mean."

"I
can't get a better match than those two cases. Same gun. No doubt whatsoever.
No real room for dispute, no matter what firearms expert they brought in. It's
a lock. I'm going to ask you one question now. Did that casing come from where
I think it did?"

"Yeah."

"This
could get bad."

"It's
already bad. I'm not sure what to do."

"You
have to talk to Brighton."

"Shit.
Then what? What
am I going to do?"

"Whatever
he tells you to."

Merci listened to the
static. She couldn't think it through right now. Her heart was pounding too
hard and her brain felt foggy.

"Remember,
Merci, the casings don't prove he killed her. We can only assume the found
shell held the bullet that killed her. But we can't prove it without the bullet
and the bullet's in the ocean. If there was corroborating evidence, then the
casing is more damaging. Very damaging. Say, if those prints in the kitchen
were made by shoes like his. Or say, some of the fibers matched up to clothes
that were his. Things like that are what add up to a conviction. You know that.
It's all complicated by the fact that he was there for dinner."

Merci couldn't talk.
It was the first time in her life she found herself unable to speak. Finally,
the words rushed out.

"What if he
didn't do it? What if there's an explanation I'm not seeing?"

"Then there's
still the question of how brass fired by his gun got into Aubrey Whittaker's
apartment. He didn't leave it in the vase as a hostess gift."

"That
isn't funny."

"I'm
not trying to be."

"He's
one of us, James. One of
us."

There was a silence
before Gilliam spoke again. "Whoever killed Aubrey Whittaker is definitely
not one of us. Maybe he used to be. Whoever killed her should be arrested and
charged."

Merci knew this but
she hadn't really imagined it happening until now. Sergeant Michael McNally,
arrested for the murder of Aubrey Whittaker. It sounded like a headline from
some bogus souvenir newspaper.

"James,
I'm bringing in evidence in the Patti Bailey murder."

"That
would be thirty-two years old."

"I've got a gun
and a letter envelope I want to Super Glue the living daylights out of. There's
a dress, too. Four bullet holes in it and blood over."

"The
DNA possibilities should be interesting. We'll do what we can.”