She reversed too fast out of the parking slot.
He said, “Thorn in the paw?”
The car shot toward the street.
Harry braced himself, but he was not worried about her driving. She could handle a car far better than she handled people. “Want to talk about whatever’s wrong?”
“No.”
For someone who lived on the edge, who seemed fearless in moments of danger, who went skydiving and breakneck dirt-biking on weekends, Connie Gulliver was frustratingly, primly reticent when it came to making personal revelations. They had been working together for six months, and although Harry knew a great many things about her, sometimes it seemed he knew nothing important about her.
“It might help to talk about it,” Harry said.
“It wouldn’t help.”
Harry watched her surreptitiously as she drove, wondering if her anger arose from man problems. He had been a cop for fifteen years and had seen enough of human treachery and misery to know that men were the source of most women’s troubles. He knew nothing whatsoever of Connie’s love life, however, not even whether she had one.
“Does it have to do with this case?”
“No.”
He believed her. She tried, with apparent success, never to be stained by the filth in which her life as a cop required her to wade.
She said, “But I sure do want to nail this sonofabitch Durner. I think we’re close.”
Doyle Durner, a drifter who moved in the surfer subculture, was wanted for questioning in a series of rapes that had grown more violent incident by incident until the most recent victim had been beaten to death. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.
Durner was their primary suspect because he was known to have undergone a circumferential autologous penile engorgement. A plastic surgeon in Newport Beach liposuctioned fat out of Durner’s waist and injected it into his penis to increase its thickness. The procedure was definitely not recommended by the American Medical Association, but if the surgeon had a big mortgage to pay and the patient was obsessed with his circumference, the forces of the marketplace prevailed over concerns about post-operative complications. The circumference of Durner’s manhood had been increased fifty percent, such a dramatic enlargement that it must have’ caused him occasional discomfort. By all reports, he was happy with the results, not because he was likely to impress women but because he was likely to hurt them, which was the whole point. The victims’ description of their attacker’s freakish difference had helped authorities zero in on Durner — and three of them had noted the tattoo of a snake on his groin, which had been recorded in his police file upon his conviction for two rapes in Santa Barbara eight years ago.
By noon that Tuesday, Harry and Connie had spoken with workers and customers at three hangouts popular among surfers and other beach habitués in Laguna: a shop that sold surfboards and related gear, a yogurt and health food store, and a dimly lighted bar in which a dozen customers were drinking Mexican beers at eleven o’clock in the morning. If you could believe what they said, which you couldn’t, they had never heard of Doyle Durner and did not recognize him in the photo they were shown.
In the car between stops, Connie regaled Harry with the latest items in her collection of outrages. “You hear about the woman in Philadelphia, they found two infants dead of malnutrition in her apartment and dozens of crack-cocaine vials scattered all over the place? She’s so doped up her babies starve to death, and you know all they could charge her with? Reckless endangerment.”
Harry only sighed. When Connie was in the mood to talk about what she sometimes called “the continuing crisis”—or when she was more sarcastic, “the pre-millennium cotillion”; or in her bleaker moments, “these new Dark Ages”—no response was expected from him. She was quite satisfied to make a monologue of it.
She said, “A guy in New York killed his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter, pounded her with his fists and kicked her because she was dancing in front of the TV, interfering with his view. Probably watching ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ didn’t want to miss a shot of Vanna White’s fabulous legs.”
Like most cops, Connie had an acute sense of black humor. It was a defense mechanism. Without it you’d be driven crazy or become terminally depressed by the endless encounters with human evil and perversity that were central to the job. To those whose knowledge of police life came from half-baked television programs, real-life cop humor could seem crude and insensitive at times — though no good cop gave a rat’s ass for what anybody but another cop thought of him.
“There’s this Suicide Prevention Center up in Sacramento,” Connie said, braking for a red traffic light. “One of the counselors got sick of getting calls from this depressive senior citizen, so he and a friend went to the old guy’s apartment, held him down, slashed his wrists and throat.”
Sometimes, beneath Connie’s darkest humor, Harry perceived a bitterness that was not common to cops. Perhaps it was worse than mere bitterness. Maybe even despair. She was so self-contained that it was usually difficult to determine exactly what she was feeling.
Unlike Connie, Harry was an optimist. To remain an optimist, however, he found it necessary not to dwell on human folly and malevolence the way she did.
Trying to change the subject, he said, “How about lunch? I know this great little Italian trattoria with oilcloth on the tables, wine bottles for candleholders, good gnocchi, fabulous manicotti.”
She grimaced. “Nah. Let’s just grab tacos at a drive-through and eat on the fly.”
They compromised on a burger joint half a block north of Pacific Coast Highway. It had about a dozen customers and a Southwest decor. The tops of the whitewashed wood tables were sealed beneath an inch of acrylic. Pastel flame-pattern upholstery on the chairs. Potted cacti. Gorman and Parkison lithographs. They ought to have been selling black-bean soup and mesquite-grilled beef instead of burgers and fries.
Harry and Connie were eating at a small table along one wall — a dry, grilled-chicken sandwich for him; shoestring fries and sloppy, aromatic cheeseburger for her — when the tall man entered in a flash of sunlight that flared off the glass door. He stopped at the hostess station and looked around.
Although the guy was neatly groomed and well dressed in light-gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray Ultrasuede jacket, something about him instantly made Harry uneasy. His vague smile and mildly distracted air gave him a curiously professorial look. His face was round and soft, with a weak chin and pale lips. He looked timid, not threatening. Nevertheless, Harry’s gut tightened. Cop instinct.
2
Sammy Shamroe had been known as “Sam the Sham” back when he was a Los Angeles advertising agency executive blessed with a singular creative talent — and cursed with a taste for cocaine. That had been three years ago. An eternity.
Now he crawled out of the packing crate in which he lived, trailing the rags and crumpled newspapers that served as his bedding. He stopped crawling as soon as he moved beyond the drooping boughs of the oleander bush which grew at the edge of the vacant lot and concealed most of the crate. For a while he stayed on his hands and knees, his head hanging down, staring at the alley pavement.
Long ago he had ceased to be able to afford the high-end drugs that had so thoroughly ruined him. Now he suffered from a cheap-wine headache. He felt as if his skull had fallen open while he slept, allowing the wind to plant a handful of prickly burrs in the surface of his exposed brain.
He was not in the least disoriented. Because the sunlight fell straight down into the alley, leaving shadows only close along the back walls of the buildings on the north side, Sammy knew it was nearly noon. Although he hadn’t worn a watch, seen a calendar, held a job, or had an appointment to keep in three years, he was always aware of the season, the month, the day. Tuesday. He was acutely cognizant of where he was (Laguna Beach), of how he had gotten there (every mistake, every self-indulgence, every stupid self-destructive act retained in vivid detail), and of what he could expect for the rest of his life (shame, deprivation, struggle, regret).