“Just thinking of you,” Shephard said. “Didn’t want anybody tampering with your scene.”
Benson seemed to ponder this for a moment. “The next time you want to help me, stay the hell out of Newport, okay?”
“Ditto in Santa Ana,” Hudson managed again.
After an hour of questions, Benson and Hudson closed their notebooks as if on cue, took a last look around the inhospitable apartment, and left.
Later that night, as he studied the face of Azul Mercante in the pale light of his living room, Shephard could feel something foreign inside himself, a barely recognizable emotion, like an unwatered seed only now beginning to grow. He considered Mercante’s haughty smile, the superiority in his eyes, the way he had forced himself into Shephard’s own home and tried to drag his mother down. Images flickered through his mind. Looking at the sketch, Shephard saw in the man everything he had learned to despise: arrogance, violence, recklessness, and a belief — most difficult of all for Shephard to understand — that everything is legitimized by one’s own passion. He recognized the crude emotion growing inside him. It was rage.
And he realized, as he listened to the sound of someone coming up his stairway, that Azul Mercante had yet to understand the full rage of revenge. That rage must have been written on his face when he opened the door and beheld the windswept beauty of the young woman in front of him.
“Hi, Tom,” she said finally. “You look like hell.” Jane handed him the Identikit he’d given her. “You said this was an excuse to see me again. Well, now it’s mine to see you. I’ve never seen this guy before.”
He stepped aside to let her in. “This is it.”
“Your apartment... well...” She looked around at the bleak living room. Shephard watched her, wondering at the perfect match between the blue of her eyes and the blue of her blouse. Really, he thought, is she any of my business? Then she brought her lips to his mouth, and they stood there so long, wrapped silently together, that Cal finally came in from the patio to investigate. “He’s cute,” Jane said.
“If you think Cal’s cute, you need a drink. If I had some wine I’d offer you a glass, if I had a glass. It’ll have to be vodka. Rocks or neat?”
“Rocks. It’s a blazer tonight again.”
“So you’re thawing out? No more fires on August nights?”
“Guess so.”
They sat on the floor, Cal working his way between them in sly jealousy. He seemed taken with the guest and panted up close to her face; a charmer in all respects, Shephard thought. Cal had never been shy with the ladies.
“You were right about animals being easy to love,” she said. “And safe. Dad and Becky, you and Cal, Buster and I.” She smiled and stroked Cal’s head. The dog wiggled appreciatively, then snuck in a sloppy kiss.
“You asked for it,” Shephard said. “Get away, Cal. She’s not yours.” But Cal had teamed up, and he turned to Shephard with a look of immunity.
“Sorry about the other night. I didn’t mean to come off like the ice bitch. Make me another drink, would you? Then I’ll try to explain myself.”
She lay back and talked to the ceiling, Shephard beside her. Her first love, she said, had been in high school, and she still thought of the boy, who was now somewhere up north and married. He had proposed to her the night they graduated and she had refused out of principle. And it was the right thing to do, she said, because the boy had found a girl to marry not long after, and Jane had fallen in love with an older man her second year out of school. She was working as a waitress in New Orleans, had gone there on a whim, with a friend. Charlie. It was easy to fall for his dark good looks and his quiet attentiveness. “Besides, he wouldn’t come around all the time,” she said. “You know how it is when you can’t always have what you want. So I loved him all the more.”
But Charlie was a philanderer — the more she suspected it, the more she wanted him — and he finally left her in a bitter Southern winter, with nothing but syphilis as a goodbye. “I was young, dumb,” she said, tilting the vodka to her lips. “But I wised up a little that winter.”
She came back to California. She was twenty-one, broke, and didn’t have an idea of what to do with herself. Shephard tried to picture her, stepping off the bus with her bags, a California beauty returned to the motherland. Charlie blew it, he thought. If he ever ran across him he would tell him so, and perhaps break his nose.
“I was pretty low,” Jane was saying, “but as soon as I met Raymond, that all changed. He was a year younger than I was, a pretty, pretty boy. Strong face, a good heart, full of art. He wanted to be a painter. Met him here in town, at the Festival. We got an apartment and moved in together, got engaged, planned everything for the wedding. Two days before the big one, Ray just disappeared. He left a little note saying he couldn’t do it, had to be free to find himself, or something. I really loved him. I still see him around, but he gave up the art and starting dealing cocaine. Makes a lot of money, too. Don’t bust him, Shephard. He’s an alright guy. I guess.”
“Can I break his nose?”
She slapped him gently on the arm, then turned to face him. “After that, I just said fuck it, Tom. I traveled Europe and South America, a bit of the East. I did what I wanted, when I wanted. I took some men, mostly the ones who were most sincere about me, and spit ’em back up fast as I could. It was a way to get free, you know, a way not to fall. I kept it up for a couple of years after I got back. That’s how I learned about that cold something inside of me — that thing I can use if I need to — and I made an art form out of it. Then I just quit. I’d proved whatever the point was and I wasn’t very happy. I realized the one thing I’d always loved, even at the worst times, were the beasts. Like him.” Jane rubbed Cal’s belly. “So I enrolled at UCI in biology, and I’m going on to veterinary when I get out. To tell you the truth, I haven’t really felt much of anything for a long time. Then along comes this lanky detective who won’t take the hard line for an answer. You spoiled the whole program, Tom.” She ran her fingers through his hair, gently across the stitches.
“Well, you’re a couple of years ahead of me in the pain and heartache school. Though I’ve learned a few lessons, I guess.” Shephard tipped back his vodka, mostly water by now.
“Tell me about them.”
“No. Some other time. Enough for tonight.”
“All that make you think I’m not exactly the woman you had at Diver’s Cove?”
“No, Jane. It just makes me want to take you in the bedroom and love you for a long slow time.”
“Would you do that now? Please?”
Two hours later they were still there, Jane resting peacefully with her dark hair spread against a pillow, Shephard staring at the clock. Their lovemaking had been desperate, almost frightening to him, and mixed with the haunting face of Azul Mercante, which invaded the room each time he closed his eyes. It had left him overloaded with possibilities, premonitions. The alternating current of love and hatred was a voltage he could scarcely stand.
“Time won’t stop just because you stare at a clock, Tom.”
Shephard ran his hand over her forehead, through her hair. “Sorry.”
“You want to tell me now, just what’s going on?”
He lay back and started at the beginning, the summer of bad luck at the Surfside. Burton and Hope, Joe and Helene, Tim and Margie, Wade and Colleen. Azul Mercante. Jane leaned against the wall, drawing the sheet over herself, listening silently through the rest of his story: the Bibles, the cobalt and cadmium, Mercante’s transfer from Folsom and release from Lompoc. When Shephard finished, Jane was looking at the clock too. “So Rubio is hidden, and Wade? Where’s your father?”