The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller (13 page)

I went through my three Doe folders again to be sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. At ten o’clock Dr. Schaeffer called. “I know he’s not yours but I thought you might like to know the Capistrano victim got identified,” she said.

“You bet.”

“His relatives came looking, from the sketch in the paper. So it’s a small victory anyway. His name was Victor Minor Montalvo. His family are field workers. One brother works in an auto-body shop, I recall. A girlfriend did the fancy haircut for him,” she said.

On a yellow pad I wrote down
Victor Minor Montalvo
, set a dash, wrote
Capistrano
, then
Doe 4
.

“We gave him the name ‘Alligator’ for a while. Isn’t that awful? A watch came with him with an alligator in the center. The jaws were clock hands.”

I wrote “
Alligator
” on the pad. “How’s Doe Three, the Turtle Rock?” I asked, and wrote on the next line
Froylan Marcos Cordillo—Turtle Rock—Doe 3
.

“Nothing new that I know of,” she said. “Same for Doe Two. Same nothing. We had a group out front before the Montalvo family came in, demanding action. Chief Yaroshak is fit to be tied.”

She asked about Joe then, and I told her. Then she told me about her nephew, whose autopsy she had had to perform. He asphyxiated on a bit of a carrot his mother left in a dish on the coffee table. “She’s a basket case. He had just learned to pull himself up. My brother took her to be near her family in Illinois.”

“How terrible, Lenore.”

“Terrible doesn’t really cover it,” she said. “But what can you do? You go on. Now my ex is agonized about
our
kids. He gives me the third-degree on the phone every night, drives me crazy. I tell him, Well,
you
come over and watch them if you don’t trust the nanny that you and I both interviewed and hired. It’s tough.”

“I can imagine.”

“Yikes! I’ve got to get going. I have to get to the preschool early today. My nanny doesn’t drive.”

FIFTEEN

J
oe was still out of my reach. Not being a relative, I could only get so far. “Tomorrow,” the nurse said. “He could be out by then and moved to critical. Call then.”

I felt helpless and anxious. Yet, it was not like with Bill. I was too young then. As many crimes and vagaries as I’ve seen since then, I have still also experienced reasons to hope, and so I did.

On my way home I counted fifteen helicopters flying formations of staggered threes in a perfect blue sky, their speed so slow the blades seemed distinct at the ends of a center fuzz. It struck me that these lumbering birds were no less beautiful than those with feathers.

And on the banks of the bay when I took a walk late that afternoon, I saw a bird resembling a sandpiper bobbing along, except he was clunkier and all-over gray on top, not tan, though mottled like a piper. I couldn’t place it and vowed to look it up.

I watched a covey of coots zero between mallards and snatch food directly from the ducks’ mouths. How greedy, how unsatisfied, we all are.

Back home I took out a leftover sandwich and radishes trimmed but pale as corpses, and milk. I set out a bowl for Motorboat, who planted his forefeet on the rim and waited for me to get the bag of feed, his nose high in the air and twitching. The two of us chewed while I stood at the sink and looked out the window at the bay. Below an intense orange sky the mud flats gleamed. I could see a group of plovers and godwits and the gray bird I’d seen earlier and couldn’t name.

My
Peterson’s Guide
was on the end of the counter. I paged through it to check the outline of the bird I couldn’t identify. I went to get my field glasses from the other room and returned to spy on the bird. Smaller than a whimbrel, fatter than a lesser yellowlegs. Finally I came upon it: a wandering tattler. Strictly speaking, out of his territory. I rolled the name over in my mind, its sound reminding me of Dave Sanders, his concern about betraying his roommate, about
tattling
. I wondered how he was holding up, this new thing with his father.

I set the book down and reached to stroke Motorboat’s head. He stopped eating, just raised his head to my hand and let his little buck teeth hang down as his mouth fell open. I couldn’t solve the Does and I couldn’t fix Joe, but maybe I was good for something.

A little while later I was in the living room finishing off a celery stick and watching TV. I saw Gil Vanderman’s business card on the end table and picked it up. Muted the TV. And I don’t know why, but I pulled the phone toward me and punched in his number. I would just let it ring twice. But he picked up.

“Hi. This is Smokey Brandon.”

“Hey!”

“I thought I’d call.”

“Great to hear from you,” Gil said.

“Well, I don’t have anything to say, I just—”

“I would’ve called
you
but I don’t have your number. I guess you didn’t throw away my card. How’ve you been? Want to go grab a coffee?” His voice was rich but quick and vibrant.

I said, “Probably not tonight.”

“When’s a
good
night? Oh, wow! You know what I just saw fly by here?”

“What?”

“An owl with a rat in his talons. He flew right by my patio.”

“Neat,” I said.

“Say, you know how I said I’d seen you before? Well, you’ve probably seen me, only you didn’t know it. I give classes for kids down at the bay. Ever see us, spread out on blue tarps down there? Sure you have.”

“Maybe so.” I had, as a matter of fact.

“So when’s a good night for dinner?”

“Actually, I don’t know if—”

“How’s tomorrow night?”

“Weekdays are not usually good.”

“What kind of work do you do? I mean, where’s your office? I could meet you.”

“I work for the county. Santa Ana.”

“Gee, that’s too bad.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The whole city’s a Nine-One-One,” he said.

“Come now. It’s not that bad.”

I took the phone with me to check on Motorboat. Guinea pigs don’t jump, so I could have left him on the counter, but I picked him up and took him to be with me on the couch. Soon he’d try to take a chomp of the fabric, and I’d have to put him back.

“What do you do there for the county?” Gil said.

“Check on people.”

“Social worker? Parole officer, like that?”

“Something like that.”

“Any rate,” Gil said, “maybe I could meet you wherever.”

“Gil, you know what? I probably shouldn’t have called, really.”

“What, you don’t eat lunch?”

“I eat lunch. It’s just—”

“Good. I hate those women always worried about eating/not-eating. They can’t just relax and enjoy life. Like, what’d you have tonight? It’ll tell me something about you.”

“I don’t really think you care what I ate tonight, Gil, and if you did I’d worry about you.”

“So what about tomorrow night? Is that good?”

“You know what? I really didn’t…The thing is, I’m going with someone.”

“So? Two bird-nerds doing lunch, what’s the harm. But if you want to just yak on the phone, I’m okay with that.”

“Thanks, Gil.” But in a little while he invited me to Harbor Island to see great blue herons in their huge nests at the top of pine trees. He said his folks lived there. We could have dinner.

“That’s terrific, Gil, but I don’t think so.”

“Mom’s a great cook. We’ll go down to Balboa. A friend of mine lets me use his boat. We’re across the water in ten minutes. How’s Sunday?”

He was so persistent I couldn’t help but laugh. “Gil? Don’t count on it, really. A lot is going on in my life.”

“Oh. No problem. But you’ll like the herons. Of course, we have the garden-variety pelicans out there too, and—”

“That’s okay, Gil.”

“Remember, it wouldn’t be a date or like that.”

“Herons,” I said.

“Exactly. Will you consider it and let me know later?”

“I guess so.”

“You know, that first day? I said to myself, ‘Anybody named Smokey’s got be all right’.”

“You’re a little over the top, Gil.”

“Yeah, but to know me is to love me.”

Pig was asleep on my stomach, warm as a new pancake. Such trust. I flicked a wrist and un-muted the TV and put it on to a VHF station. I closed my eyes. Images came but this time not the brutal images of death, but of birds, their forms, behavior, and beauty.

Soon a song came on: “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’.”

I remembered a night that followed a day so steamy the bushes were chasing the dogs around. All the coolers seemed to be gasping. There was a club in North Vegas this side of seedy. That night…

My costume was colored the kind of pink you find in the well of a rose or the back of a baby’s mouth. A reckless pink, an Indian pink: the costume—what there was of it. Heels, rose-colored and very high, with thin straps crossed way up the ankle.

I’d been drinking whisky backstage with the other girls. I took right to whisky the first time I tried it: loved the scent, taste, the effects. No reason to be surprised. That’s what it’s designed for.

There was a dancer named Linda who went by Lacey. I wasn’t that drunk.
She
, however, was gone. She took an ice cube from her drink. “Here, Smokey, rub this on! Got to make those little soldiers stand at attention.” Her five-year-old daughter was there, cutting paper dolls out of a book, but badly.

I said she was stone-assed wicked and told another woman to cover little Julie’s eyes. I’m not proud of any of that, but that was the way it was. I knew I was coming to the end of my stay at Foxland. Perhaps that’s why I let myself get more than a little tipsy. I didn’t know where I would go, just knew it was almost over. I remember thinking maybe I’d use Julie’s scissors to snip off a red snake of hair and give it to somebody sweet as a goodbye gift.

When it was my turn on stage, through the dim light I saw a man and his son I’d conversed with several times before. A good dad, bringing the son to distract him from recent widowhood. Every once in a while the son (his name was Donny) would thrust his fist into the air and cry, “Roll with it, bay-bay!” and “Rock it on down!”

A hat. I had an enormous black velvet hat. Where did it go? I paid a hundred dollars for it, if you can imagine. Almost a week’s wages. Extravagant in every way. A long, wide, soft, hat. You can leave your hat on. I remembered a thick-necked guy with a hoarse voice yelling, “Give you every
inch
of my love!”

One time the son was there without the father but with friends. At my break they called me over. One of them said, “Can I dance with you, can I wash your feet, can I wash your hair?” Can
I wash your
hair?
I’d forgotten about that till now. The originality of it. The silliness of it. I confess, I was tempted.

Any woman is four or five women
, the writer said.

That final night I went home with the father, but I remembered the son. Tan, blond, good shoulders—a lot like a younger Gil Vanderman, but a wilder look in the eyes. I wondered whatever became of him. “Rock it on, bay-bay! Do it up right!”

I saw the father once afterward in a grocery store, but not the son. Donny, he said, was up north fighting fires. Maybe now, these days, like Gil he’s out teaching kids about birds. Flamingos. Pink ones. Or helping a little girl cut out dolls, badly.

SIXTEEN

A
BOCA DE JARRO:
This was the headline strung over the sketches of Doe One from Technology Park, Doe Two, the Nellie Gail. The Turtle Rock, Three, now known as Froylan Marcos Estancio Cordillo. Victor Minor Montalvo, the one with the good haircut, in the water near the river cane. The words appeared on the front page of a Spanish-language newspaper now smack in the middle of a conference table at sheriff’s headquarters:
A BOCA DE JARRO:
AT VERY CLOSE RANGE.

Boyd Russell had doughnuts on the table, and an insulated pitcher of coffee, when I came in. Will Bright arrived and laid his folders next to ours. Piece by piece, we went over everything we had: photos, sketches, ballistics reports; diagrams, lists, printouts, hand-drawn maps. “Let’s have the newspapers run the sketch for Doe One again,” I said.