Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (6 page)

Nina had another moment of shock, the same shock she had felt when Paul told her to take the organizer. He was challenging her judgment, telling her what to do about her own business. Paul did it so naturally, assuming the role as if it were his…Was it his? He seemed so strong sitting there beside her. He never questioned himself, while her whole life right now was a question.

She didn’t even have a business card. Something gave way beneath her and she slid into doubt. “I don’t like you telling me what to do,” she said. It came out sounding whiny.

“Well, I like it,” Paul said. He laughed and zoomed beyond the speed limit past Junipero toward Ocean Avenue, though the right lane was choked with tourists.

The irritation swept over her again. She was sick with worry about Wish, but this person beside her suddenly annoyed her so much! It is hopeless, she told herself, angry and pained.

Paul, oblivious, drove on, and after a while her anger turned back into confusion. Sitting next to him, she struggled again to understand what was between them.

He bent forward, looking hard ahead into the traffic like Ahab eyeballing the foamy brine for his whale, joyful in the midst of tension, his eyes bright and intent. She experienced the heavy shoulders next to her, the capable hands, the solidity of his body, and she caught his happiness at being fully engaged and out on a chase, even a chase that might lead to tragedy. If he had let his tongue hang out, panting joyfully like Hitchcock, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

He’s a big yellow Lab! she thought.

His aggressive energy, his lack of subtlety, his disdain for people who live in their heads-of course, since he lived in his legs!-she could live with that, she could love that, if she could only remember this moment, when she was finally in contact with his powerful, furry, canine essence.

Guess I just like big dogs, she thought to herself.

She leaned her head back on the seat, closed her eyes, and told herself that it could be worse. Paul, better than any man she had known, focused all this energy and wholeheartedness and bright-eyed intensity on her at night.

He had his way of loving her. He would click the dead bolt downstairs, turn off the light, and come noiselessly into the bedroom in the dim light of the seashell night-light. He would look a long time at her lying on the bed, and at those moments she knew for certain that she was the only one he wanted, knew it right down to the marrow. When he lowered himself onto her, arms supporting his weight, eyes looking into her eyes, he was fully involved, fully loving her. Simple and wholehearted, no question about how he felt.

No, it’s not hopeless, not hopeless at all, she thought, her eyes still closed, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

With this comprehension, some worries about their incompatibilities fell away. Amused now, she turned her head to the left to see him and he looked back, winked, and got back to driving. As she let her hand move to his thigh and rub it, feeling the long muscle contract as he accelerated, she thought, he’s an experience I can’t imagine ever denying myself again.

“What?” he said, catching her smile.

“I was thinking about your song. About the love monster. May I add a verse?”

“Sure.”

“It goes like this”:

I am King Kong-you’re a skyscraper

I am King Kong-you’re a skyscraper

I’ll climb up your angles, and up at the top

I’ll swing and I’ll holler, till you beg me to stop-

“I like it. You have talent. We’ll see just how much tonight.”

They entered the quaint tourist town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Taking a right on Ocean, Paul had to slow down for traffic. The sidewalks were choked with early-season tourists from Germany and France, meandering along among the flowers and antique stores. They took another right onto Dolores Street and pulled into a secret parking area behind the Hog’s Breath Inn and the Eastwood Building, where Paul had established his office. Clint Eastwood owned this brown rustic building with the jewelry store and Indian art emporium on the first floor, and once Paul knew that, he had told Nina, he knew this was the place for him.

Paul had met Clint once, while the actor was still mayor of Carmel. They had shaken hands and Clint had moved on, but Paul always said it zinged like God making contact with a mortal on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Was it the soft-spoken, menacing persona Paul liked? The disregard of authority? The Lone Ranger roles he always played? After a recent night curled up with popcorn in front of one of the DVDs, observing Paul’s grinning admiration as Eastwood got back at the bad guys, she thought she understood.

Clint wasn’t afraid. He’d gone through a long career in movies and television without once showing fear. When the situation called for fear, Clint’s eyes would squint and his lips would get snarly and he would get royally pissed off instead. Paul wanted to take on the world like that.

So renting the office in the Eastwood Building had pleased Paul deeply. They walked up the wooden stairway to Paul’s office, and he pressed the remote to unlock the door.

Inside, Tibetan rugs, Paul’s big desk with both a PC and an Apple sitting under a window that looked down at the outside bar area of the Hog’s Breath Inn, photos of the Himalaya by Galen Rowell and Paul himself on the walls-Paul had been in the Peace Corps in Nepal, not that it made him peaceful-a black leather couch, the small conference table where Wish worked, file cabinets, and a bar fridge in the corner where Paul kept beer and sundries.

In a pinch, he could spend the weekend there.

The soul of the office, of course, was invisible-the client files, his source lists, the search programs purchased from collection companies and process servers, all behind firewalls and passwords in the computers.

Nina went to the desk and looked out the window. Morning had segued into afternoon. Down below on the flowery patio of the Hog’s Breath, the vacation deity had granted permission to stop awhile, forget earthly cares, and sit holding a glass, talking about nothing much. Chatter and clinking drifted up to them.

“The permanent party,” she said.

“Right. The people come and go, but the party never ends.”

“He hasn’t been here.”

“No.”

Nina pulled out the Monterey County phone book and Wish’s organizer and began making calls. She called Community Hospital, the highway patrol, Danny again-no answer again-and Wish’s friends up at Lake Tahoe, where he usually lived. She didn’t like raising the alarm so loudly, but she had no choice. Paul worked the other line.

After a while, when they had run out of numbers, they paused. Paul looked at his watch. “You know what we have to do, don’t you? It’s three-thirty, and they’ll close by five.”

“Yes. We should go. It better not be him. What could have happened up there in the woods?”

“One step at a time. Lunch downstairs, then back to Salinas.”

In the heat of midday, they could identify some crops strictly by smell.

“Brussels sprouts,” Paul said. “I can’t stand ’em.”

“Mmm. Garlic. Fabulous.”

South Main Street still housed struggling secondhand stores, the shopping center that had never taken off, the Arby’s and Foster’s Freeze and the air of being lost in time that Nina remembered from childhood.

“I used to come here as a kid when the Northridge Shopping Center had the only good department stores in the whole county,” she said. “Then when I was clerking for Klaus, I would bring papers over to the courthouse for the lawyers. It looks just the same.”

“You still think of it as a sleepy agricultural town?” Paul said. “It’s changed. Silicon Valley is pressing down from the north. Executive homes are crammed together on small lots with high walls. A tired techie just snugs down in his concrete snail shell, never forced to meet a single neighbor.”

“We’re at least an hour to San Jose. They commute all that way?”

“Meanwhile, as the technical class hauls fifty miles between home in Salinas and work in San Jose, Mexico rolls up from the south and settles in the Alisal District. The population is eighty percent Latino these days. Did you know that?”

“Salinas has always been a tense place,” Nina said. “High crime rate for the population density. Part Okie, part Latino. Good fuel for writers like Steinbeck.”

“It does look sleepy, when you’re not here on Saturday night on the east side of town, when the bars get lively and the guns go off,” Paul said.

But no guns were in evidence on this sun-baked afternoon, just a few kids on bikes and moms pushing strollers past the thrift shops. Nina said, “Let’s stop at Foster’s Freeze for a dipped chocolate cone.”

“Right before the morgue?”

“Then again, maybe not,” Nina said. They drove through town in silence, each corner bringing Nina a fresh vista of memories. “You know, in front of the community center near the rodeo stands, there’s a giant sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. Did you ever see that, Paul?”

“Really? That’s a surprise. No, I don’t go to the rodeo. I guess it’s un-American of me.”

“I’ll take you this summer.”

“No, thanks, I know how you and Bob love these spectacles like monster-car races and motocross and calf roping, but I don’t like the seats.”

“What’s wrong with the seats?”

“They’re concrete and usually beer spattered.”

“Does that mean you don’t like football games either?” Nina asked.

“I like tennis matches. Whap, headjerk, whap, headjerk. Tennis whites and women fanning themselves in the stands. That’s what I like.”

“But you like modern art, don’t you?”

Paul told her, “Look, if Oldenburg put up a giant sculpture in Salinas, of all places, let’s drive by it right now.”

“You can’t see it from the street.”

“Too bad. What’s it look like?”

“Three massive red metal cowboy hats. Each one about twenty feet across.” They turned onto Alisal Street.

Speaking of modern art, the concrete fiends of justice perched on each cornice of the Monterey County Courthouse hadn’t changed. These gargoyles, along with the white pillars casting sharp shadows and the deserted concrete courtyard within, still gave rise within Nina to a certain anticipatory dread straight out of an early de Chirico painting.

The dark-suited figures flapping like vultures up the hot street to make their cases inside added to the general air of malevolence, and the Honeybee restaurant, where many a sleazy legal deal had been cut over the decades, extruded more lawyers as they passed by. This courthouse had always felt foreign to Nina, so different from the courthouse on Aguajito in Monterey, which had been built in friendly hippie days in a vaguely Big Sur style.

“I always wondered why you didn’t take Klaus’s offer and join his firm after you passed the bar,” Paul said as they searched for a parking spot in back.

Nina said, “Compressed version. My mother died, that was the main thing. Dad got married again very quickly. I wanted to leave. San Francisco was a good distance, and then I married Jack and he was ready to leave Klaus’s firm too. Don’t we all grow up and leave town?” She took out her cream and rubbed a flare-up on her arm.

“Not at all,” Paul said. “In fact, I sometimes think the world is divided into those who go and those who stay. So off to the big city, then a few years in Tahoe. And here you are again.”

“I really, really hope it’s not Wish in there.”

They entered the dim courthouse hall and submitted to the metal detector. As they walked down the stairs toward the coroner’s office she firmed her jaw. It better not be him, she thought fiercely, and prepared herself.

Inside, they waited almost half an hour in an anteroom before they were allowed in. Some telephoning went on in the office as they were checked out one more time. Although a man in a lab coat was swabbing down the tables with Lysol, the morgue had that familiar smell of decay.

“Is the autopsy report completed?” Nina said to the female lab assistant accompanying them. She was realizing that, if this was Wish, Sandy would need help to call a mortuary and-surely she would want Wish sent back home?

Better not think about that now.

“This morning, but the report hasn’t been approved.” This small young woman had a Spanish accent, a large mole on her chin, and a businesslike attitude.

“Findings?” Paul said.

“I don’t know much. You’ll have to go through the channels for finals.” They came to the drawer. She unlocked it and Paul helped her pull it out in a blast of frigid air.

A long, blackened, naked body lay supine in the drawer like a specimen in some hideous experiment. Cracked-looking flaps of skin hung off the charred and blackened arms and legs. The arms were pulled up as if to protect the chest. The abdomen was concave, as though emptied of its contents. An acrid, wet-charcoal smell wafted up.

“Oh, God.” Nina looked away, then back at the body. She forced herself to look for some sign of Wish. Long bones, some burned black hair hanging lankly over the skull-the skull, oh, boy, the skull-

Nina walked off a few steps. Paul continued to look. “What else did they find?”

“The remains of a concho belt,” the lab assistant said, observing without emotion. “You know, leather with those silver things. We have partial black leather boots, Doc Martens. Laces burned off. Tatters of white T-shirt and jeans on the backside of the body.”

“A concho belt?” Paul said. “Nina, go outside and call the Boyz. Ask them.” Nina was staring at the skull, which still held on to the patch of long dark hair. DNA, she thought. They’ll find out eventually.

“I can’t tell if it’s him, Paul,” she blurted.

“Go on. I’ll talk to this lady for a minute.”

Nina went. In the bathroom outside, she rinsed her mouth and threw water on her face. She took a brush to her hair, sloughing off the black mask of death she had just seen. Outside, she breathed the blessed air, got into the hot car, and called the Boyz.

“This is Tustin.”

“Hi. It’s Nina. Tustin, will you please try to remember, and ask your brother-was Wish wearing one of those leather belts with silver conchos on it? You know what I mean?”