“I wanna see!”
“Knock it off, Tyrone! Mom’ll be here any minute! Get back here, I said! The cops are gonna put you in jail if you get near that pool!”
“Aw, will not, fuckface!”
“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I said. I don’t have kids myself, but I have nieces and nephews. I learned the Voice of Doom from my siblings.
Tyrone gave me a startled glance.
“Siddown,” I said, in the same tone of voice.
He did, muttering “Crap” under his breath.
“See?” his sister hissed at him.
Sirens were coming. I could hear the roar of a fire engine over the scream of an ambulance. 911 was taking no chances.
A minute later, the pool gate clanged open and four EMTs charged in, intent on rescue. One grabbed a pool skimmer and began trying to snag the body with it.
“Hey!” The cop grabbed his arm. “The guy’s dead, god-damnit! This is a murder scene!”
“He’s not dead till a doctor says so,” a female EMT informed him.
“Back off!” He’d wrestled the skimmer away from the EMT and stood with it braced like a quarterstaff, daring any of them to mess with his body. “He’s fuckin’ dead!”
“He will be if you don’t let us get him out of there!”
“What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. Here?” said a voice behind me. Whoever it was had a pretty good Voice of Doom too; it cut through the argument like a hot wire through ice cream.
I turned to see a tall blond woman in a sun hat, Hawaiian shirt flapping open over a white bikini. Chloe and Tyrone’s mother; the breast implants must be hereditary.
“Cooney!” she barked. “What are you doing? What’s—” She caught sight of the guy in the pool and stopped dead, her mouth hanging open far enough for me to see that one of her molars was gold.
Cooney came trundling over, sweating and apologetic.
“It’s okay, Pammy—”
“Don’t call me Pammy! Who are you?” she demanded, swiveling a laser eye on me. “Are you in charge here? Who’s that in my swimming pool?”
“Tom Kolodzi, ma’am,” I said, offering her a hand. “Do you know the man in the pool?”
“Of course not!” she snapped, taking my hand by reflex. Hers was cold and damp and covered by a latex glove. She let go fast, peeling the glove off with a snap. “Sorry. I was drowning squirrels in the garage.”
“Squirrels?”
“Ground squirrels,” she said through her teeth. “They eat the goddamn plantings. Are they going to get that—him—out of the pool?” Her eyes kept sliding toward the water, where the body had resumed its dead man’s float. Another siren—police, this time.
Slamming car doors and a radio crackle, and the brass was with us. The homicide lieutenant didn’t glance at me, and made short work of the EMTs, who retreated, muttering, under the edge of the patio roof, from which misters had begun to spray. The Mexican tree trimmers had evaporated during the cops’ confrontation with the EMTs. The scene-of-crime people arrived on homicide’s heels, and a police photographer was taking shots of everything in sight, including me and the squirrel-killer. I wanted to look up at the roof to see if Paulie had made it, but didn’t want to draw attention to her if she had.
The dead guy beached, flotsam in a navy-blue wool suit. Everybody leaned forward to look at his face—not least, Pammy.
I was looking at her, and saw the blood leave her face and her mist-on tan go yellow. Saw her glance, laser-sharp, at Chloe. Chloe’s mouth fell open, and her mother grabbed her shoulder, fingers digging in, before she could squeak.
“Take your brother in the house, darling,” Pammy said, in a pleasant mommy voice. “He doesn’t need to see this, and neither do you.” Chloe nodded like a robot, and took Tyrone’s hand. He didn’t resist; he’d seen the dead guy’s face too, and was the color of skim milk.
Nobody looks good soaking wet and dead, but this guy probably wasn’t a GQ model on his best day. Maybe fifty, with a good-sized gut, long strands of graying hair on a balding head. Weak chin, and a nose that was trying to make up for it.
There was a little black hole in his shirt front. The shirt was white, pasted to his body; I could see the curly black hairs on his chest through the cloth. I looked away in time to see Cooney, who was talking to one of the plainclothes people, glance in my direction and shake his head with a puzzled frown. Time to go.
The dead guy’s chest filled the screen of Paulie’s Mac. The black eye of the bullet hole sat in a vortex of water-swirled chest hair. She zoomed in so all you saw was the hole, then pressed something and the picture went from black-and-white to full color.
“Guh!” said MaryAnne, recoiling.
“Isn’t that cool?” Paulie asked me, ignoring the editor. “See the shades of blue all around the hole?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Really cool.” It was, but my stomach agreed with MaryAnne, who had clamped a hand to her mouth.
“We can’t run that!” she said, removing the hand and then putting it right back.
“I know, I know,” Paulie said impatiently. “Don’t worry, I got plenty more. Thanks for the tip, Kolodzi,” she said, giving me an eye. “I almost died of heatstroke on that roof, but it was worth it.”
She looked like she’d been boiled alive, even after an hour in the chill of the newsroom, but she’d used her time well.
There were some prize-winning shots of the body in the pool, as well as close-ups of Chloe, Cooney, Pam—several focused on her chest—and a heartbreaker of Tyrone, looking small and stricken and not saying “Crap.” Still better, Paulie’d heard everything said on the pool deck.
“Nobody knew the dead guy—or that’s what they said. But look at this.” She tapped a key and a soggy white rectangle popped onto the screen. A zoom in and I could see it was a wad of stuck-together business cards.
Howarth ap Gruffydd, PhD, one read. Director, Llangeggel-lyn Botanical Institute.
“Damn,” said MaryAnne. “What the heck is a Welsh botanist doing dead in Cooney Pratt’s swimming pool?”
“Maybe the gardener did it,” Paulie speculated. “He’s gone.”
“What, one of the guys with the ladder?” I asked.
She shook her head, cheeks sucked in to get the last dregs of Mr. Pibb through her straw.
“Nope, those guys were door-to-door palm tree trimmers. You know—cash only, and probably illegal.” A good bet, given the way they’d faded at the sight of the police. “There’s a regular yard guy, though; a guy named John Jaramillo. He should have been there today. But he wasn’t.” She popped the lid off her cup and tilted it up, sloshing ice.
“The cops asked for his phone and address, of course,” I suggested. She gave me a smug look and held out her arm. She’d scribbled the numbers with what looked like eyeliner.
Harvey, the new intern, came hustling in, a sheaf of printouts in hand. I’d sent him to do a quick search on the Pratts.
“I sent a lot of stuff to your e-mail, but I thought you’d like these … Jesus, is that guy dead?” He goggled at the screen, where Paulie’s best shot of Dr. ap Gruffydd had replaced the business card.
“No, it’s a YouTube video of Hillary Clinton after the Democratic primary,” MaryAnne said. “Can’t you tell?”
I made Harvey give me the quickie version on the Pratts, which he did, pausing occasionally to gape at the screen, where Paulie and MaryAnne were busy choosing shots.
Cooney Pratt was a real-estate developer; he’d made his money bulldozing desert and putting up tract homes, having either the good judgment or the luck to get out before the housing market collapsed. Pam was his third wife, occupation: housewife.