There was one interesting addendum. Blodgett and Raymond Cruz were called onto the chiefs carpet two years ago for a fight in the locker room. The gist was that Blodgett and Ray had exchanged racial insults, then started swinging before three fellow cops broke it up. Warnings were issued. A final note added that a “quantity of canned refried Mexican-style beans” was found by Raymond in his locker one night after shift, packed into his street shoes. He had accused Blodgett, who denied. The matter was not referred to again in Blodgett’s file.
He closed it and ran the Dispatch tape through the hour in question one more time. He listened to Raymond’s nearly constant communications from Unit 8, to Kearns’s less frequent messages from Unit 12, to Dale Blodgett’s clipped dispatches from Unit 6. Weir followed on the transcript. Blodgett signed off at 12:10 and didn’t come back on until almost 1:00 A.M. He told Carol Clark he was stopping for coffee — but failed to give his location. Fifty minutes to drink a cup of coffee? Jim checked Blodgett’s time card, but the blunt sergeant who’d filled Ray’s shoes with frijoles never bothered to clock in. He wrote on the pad, BLODGETT HOSTILE TO RAY — 50 MINUTES OUT OF CONTACT — NO PROOF OF CLOCKING OUT — HOW LATE BACK TO STATION?
Weir crossed his arms and stared at the swinging plastic tail of Ann’s cat clock. Malachi Ruff may have seen a cop car at the Back Bay that night, but Dennison wasn’t in it. Neither was Ray Cruz. But Philip Kearns and Dale Blodgett had, between them, over an hour of time unaccounted for during the hour in question, when Ann was being tormented in the darkness by the wild tobacco plant.
At midnight, Jim was standing on the Balboa Pier, watching the black Pacific heave against the pilings. Lamps cast dismal triangles of light against the darkness. The fog came off the water from the west, like some overweight and earth-bound cloud. The hour in question seemed close around him now, pressing in from all directions, hurling possibilities. Can anybody else hear them? It was this time, he thought, exactly three nights ago, when Ann took her final steps along the shore of the Back Bay.
Weir could see her as she moved down the trail through the ice plant, see the way she leaned back for balance, the way the red espadrilles threatened to buckle, the way she lifted her elbows up and out to steady herself, the strain of her calves, the shine — even down there in the foggy night— of her long golden hair. And the man behind her? Weir saw nothing more than a shadow, a shape in the darkness discernible only as a greater darkness. Together, he and Ann moved east along the shoreline, vanishing one unhurried step at a time into their own very private destiny.
The air around Jim hummed, charged by the dark energies of everything that had happened. Two kids on skateboards rolled by. A Japanese man added one more twisting mackerel to his bucket. The fog held the moon in a white web and wouldn’t let it out. Jim turned back toward town, lowered his head, and wept.
He sat again at the kitchen table, watched the pivoting tail of Ann’s cat clock. A gnawing late-night hunger came over him and he went to the fridge for something. He poured some milk and checked the leftovers — most of them probably going bad, he thought. There were drumsticks in a plastic bag, some stir-fried rice in a bowl, a collection of foil-wrapped surprises on the condiment shelf. One had anchovies he had to throw out. Another had a fat brownie that he ate while he stood there. The last contained three glass test tubes, each half-filled with clear fluid, each with a cork in the end. The first thing Weir thought was something to do with a pregnancy test, but why here?
He held them in his hand and read the handwritten labels: PCH BRIDGE 4/12; B. ISLAND 4/28; and BACK BAY 5/7. The writing was Virginia’s.
What?
He set them on the kitchen counter and looked at them for a short while, noting the slight sediment collected in the bottom curve of each tube. He uncorked one and smelled it, then touched a little on his finger and tasted it. Seawater, no doubt. Checking the impound list for anything that might explain these things, Weir found nothing.
Why?
Samples from the bay. Brine. Hidden in with things that are bound to get thrown out.
He wrapped them in the foil, put the package back, and went into the living room, where he lay down on the couch. The cat clock ticked from the kitchen; electricity buzzed through the power lines outside; the bay lapped lazily at the shore.
He fell asleep there, surrounded by the same walls that had held Ann’s life, and dreamed deep in the night of a man’s fingers holding a purple rose up to her smiling, radiant face.
Chapter 8
At six the next morning, Jim let himself and Interim Chief Dennison in the back door of Poon’s Locker. Virginia had closed the place for a few days. The blinds were drawn against a sunrise throttled in fog. He looked out across the bay, but he couldn’t see the other side. The mast of a big yacht found a hole in the gloom, through which it passed like a disembodied remnant from another age. Jim poured water into the coffeemaker.
“You were faster than I thought you’d be,” said Dennison. His eyebrows raised with curiosity, but the rest of his face braced for something he clearly didn’t want to hear. He had the look of a tax sneak about to open a letter from the IRS.
“I’m motivated. I saw Ray last night. He’s going to be okay — out today, hopefully.”
“How is your mother taking it?”
“She’s crushed, Brian. Have a seat.”
Dennison took a blue plastic chair off a table and sat. The coffee machine hissed and gurgled. Jim looked out to the sidewalk and thought about how many times as a teenager he had stood right here, brewing up coffee for the breakfast crowd, bursting with eagerness to get out of the café and aboard one of Poon’s charter boats heading out to sea. Ann always had table work: refilling salt and pepper, setting out the creamers and napkin dispensers. Jake, the firstborn, helped Poon with the boats. Virginia presided over the kitchen and walk-in, heated up the grill, brought out the eggs and bread, separated the bacon slabs ahead of time, because when the rush came nobody had a minute to waste. Poon would traipse through the café three or four times each morning, going between the coffeepot and the boats, hurling orders, bemoaning the weather no matter how good it was, cursing the landlubbers from whom he made his living. He and Virginia would scream at each other like old Italians. Jim remembered looking through these windows at Jake aboard one of the charter craft, naked to the waist, his body browned by sun, devotedly checking oil level or battery charge or lining up the game-fish rods in the racks behind the cabins. Jake was four years older. Jake could do everything. He was the best there was.
“I used to come down here and charter out your dad’s boats,” said Brian.
“Mom sold them off a while back, except for Sweetheart Deal.”
“Yeah, well I’ve certainly noticed that one.”
The fact of the matter, thought Weir, was that Annie had bawled relentlessly when Virginia got ready to auction off Sweetheart Deal,the last of the charter fleet. The little thirty-footer was always Ann’s favorite, moored just fifty feet offshore of the big house, kept neat as a museum piece by Poon. In the ten years since his death, the boat had been taken out only once that Jim knew of, by Ann. It had peeled, slouched, been nested in by birds, and was now moored outside Poon’s Locker, testimony to his absence. Every year, the city sent a Notice of Dereliction to Virginia, and every year Ann would do some cosmetic cleanup on Sweetheart Deal, then let her sit unattended and unused for another season.
Jim set down coffee for Dennison and himself, then pulled a chair from the table and sat. If Brian wants Sweetheart Deal out of Newport Harbor, he thought, he’ll have to talk to Virginia himself.