Bones

CHAPTER 18

Robin was up by six, working in her studio soon after.

I found her sliding a razor-sharp mini-plane over a pristine rectangle of spruce. From the size and thickness of the wood, the future soundboard of an archtop guitar.

“Stromberg copy. Going to try the diagonal brace, see if I can tweak it for some interesting nuances.”

“Brought you coffee,” I said.

“Thanks-you’ve got crust in your eye-there we go, gone. Feel rested?”

“I tossed?”

“A bit. Get the message from your service?”

“Haven’t checked yet.” I yawned. “When did it come in?”

“Two calls, actually. Twelve forty and then at five, both from Milo.”

I reached him at his desk. “Huck did something?”

“Huck did the usual nothing. But there’s another body in the marsh.”

“Oh, no. Poor woman.”

“Not exactly.”

From seven thirty to nine p.m. the previous night, Silford Duboff and his girlfriend, Alma Reynolds, had enjoyed a vegan dinner at Real Food Daily on La Cienega.

“More accurately, I enjoyed it,” said Reynolds, on the other side of the one-way glass. “Sil was grumpy the entire time. Preoccupied. With what, I couldn’t pry out. I found the evening frustrating, but held my peace. Sil ordered his favorite item on their menu: the TV Dinner. Normally, that’s palliative. This time, it wasn’t. He closed up completely. So after a while I stopped trying, and we both simply consumed.”

Telling the story to Milo with authority but curious detachment, as if teaching a class.

A tall, solid woman in her fifties, Reynolds had an eagle nose, a heavy jaw, piercing blue eyes, and waist-length gray hair plaited tightly. The lecturer’s tone came honestly: For fifteen years, she’d worked as a junior college instructor in Oregon, teaching political science and economic history before retiring due to “budget cuts and apathetic students and fascist bureaucracy.”

Now she sat across from Milo, straight-backed, dry-eyed, wearing last night’s blue work shirt tucked into gray flannel trousers, hemp sandals. Tortoiseshell reading glasses hung from a chain. Turquoise-and-silver earrings livened her ears.

Milo said, “No idea what was on his mind?”

“Not a clue. He gets like that. Uncommunicative, like most men.”

Milo didn’t argue. Alma Reynolds wouldn’t have cared if he had.

She said, “We had our dessert and left. After the way Sil had behaved, I decided to cut my losses with a good book. I asked him to drive me to my apartment, made it clear he was to proceed to his.”

“Both of you live in Santa Monica.”

“Two blocks apart, but any space can be a universe if one wants it to. This was one of the times I wanted it to.”

“Were there lots of those times in your relationship?”

“Not lots,” said Alma Reynolds, “but not a rarity. Sil could be difficult.”

“Like most men.”

“I put up with it because he was a fine man. If there’s anything that emerges from this conversation, Lieutenant, that should be it.”

She took a deep breath through her mouth.

“Oh, well,” she said. “No sense fighting it.”

“Fighting what, ma’am?”

“This.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. Embedding her hands in her thick, gray hair, she wailed.

Milo took his time, got her to repeat the story.

Rather than drive Alma home, Duboff had veered south to the Bird Marsh. She’d protested, he’d ignored her. A “dispute” ensued, during which she told him to stop obsessing about the marsh. He said the place was his responsibility. She said the damn place was fine. He said don’t refer to it like that. She said, you’re being irrational, nothing the police did caused any serious disturbance, time to move on, Sil.

He ignored her.

Last straw; she blew.

Raising her voice in a way she hadn’t done since her divorce. Letting him know her green credentials were every bit as good as his, he was confusing ecological consciousness with obsessive-compulsive neurosis.

He ignored her.

She ordered him to stop the car.

He kept driving.

If she’d had a cell phone, she would’ve used it, but she didn’t, neither did he. Those towers, no matter what they wanted you to believe, were carcinogenic and disastrous for birds and insects and she’d rather be stranded in Timbuktu than capitulate to a toxic lifestyle.

She insisted he stop.

He drove faster.

“What’s gotten into you?”

Pretending she wasn’t there.

“Damn you, Sil! Talk to-”

“There’s something I need to see.”

“What?”

“Something.”

“That’s no answer!”

“It won’t take long, baby-”

“Don’t baby me, you know I despise tha-”

“Afterward we’ll go home and brew some tea-”

“You’ll go to your home and I’ll go to my home, and any tea I drink will be my own damn tea.”

“Suit yourself.”

“You don’t care what I want, do you?”

“Cool the drama, Alma. There’s something I need to see.”

“You’re imprisoning me-that’s psychologically toxic behav-”

“It won’t take long.”

“What won’t?”

“Not important.”

“Then why do you need to see it?”

“Not important to you.”

“What the hell are you talki-”

“Someone called me. Told me the answer was there.”

“The answer to what?”

“What happened.”

“To who?”

“Those women.”

“The women in the-”

“Yes.”

“Who? Who called?”

Silence.

“Who, Sil?”

“They didn’t say.”

“You’re lying, I can always tell.”

Silence.

“Someone calls you out of the clear blue and you comply like a droid?”

Silence.

“This is absurd, Sil, I insist-”

Silence.

“Blind obedience kills the soul-”

“The marsh is what matters.”

“The damn marsh is fine, can’t you get that through your thick skull?”

“Apparently not.”

“Unbelievable. Someone calls, you pant like a lapdog.”

“Maybe that’s what it takes, Alma.”

“What?”

“A dog. That’s how they found the women.”

“Oh, so now you’re a detective. Is that what you want to be, Sil? A uniformed droid?”

“It won’t take long.”

“What am I supposed to do while you nose around?”

“Just sit for a moment. It won’t take long.”

But it did.

Sitting parked on Jefferson, near the east-side entrance, she grew nervous, then scared. Wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Because to be truthful, the place always spooked her, especially at night, and it was spooky on this night, a moonless night, the sky thick and tarry and black.

No one around. No one.

Those stupid condos, abominations of human-centric narcissism, looming down, some of their lights on, but little good did they do, so distant, could well have been on another planet.

Waiting for Sil.

Five minutes. Six, seven, ten, fifteen eighteen.

Where the hell was he?

Fighting her nervousness with anger, she’d learned the technique from a faculty buddy in Oregon who taught cognitive psych. Substitute an empowering emotion for a helpless one.

It worked. She grew hotter and hotter under the collar, thinking about Sil, so rude arrogant compulsive goddamn thoughtless.

Leaving her stuck in the damn car.

When he got back, there’d be hell to pay.

Twenty-five minutes and still no sign of him and the anger began morphing back to nervousness.

Worse than nervousness. Fear, she wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

Time for another strategy. Confront the helplessness with action.

She got out of the car, walked toward the marsh.

Encountered pure darkness and stopped.

Calling his name.

No answer.

Calling louder.

Nothing.

She took a step forward, encountered way too much darkness and stopped-where was Sil’s penlight?-said, “You get your ass over here and take me the hell home and don’t call me until I call you.”

The impact sent her flying.

Hard, vicious fist in her belly, so much force it felt as if the hand were penetrating her innards.

Electric pain sparked through her body, captured her breath.

The second blow caught her on the side of the head and she went down.

A foot kicked the small of her back.

She curled herself tiny, prayed no more punishment would come.

Just as quickly as the attack had begun, it ended.

Footsteps fading into the night.

No sound of a car engine so she lay there thinking, He’s watching. Waited for a long time, before being able to entertain the big question:

Was that Sil?

If not, where was Sil?

Duboff had been knifed on the pathway. Bloodstains splotched the dirt twelve feet past Selena Bass’s dump site. Care had been taken to brush the surrounding soil all the way to the sidewalk, obscuring footprints. No errant hairs or body fluids that weren’t Duboff’s, no tire tracks along either side of the street.

A deep back wound had pierced Duboff’s left lung, the blow driven with enough force to crack a rib. The follow-up was an ear-to-ear throat slash, with Duboff lying facedown.

“Bad guy probably lifted him by the head,” said Milo. “Reached around and bam.”

Sneak attack in the dark, it needn’t have taken more than seconds. Alma Reynolds had sat in the car for nearly half an hour, ample time to clean the scene.

By calling out Duboff’s name, she’d announced her presence to the killer. Subsequent speech had pinpointed her location and he’d charged her.

Assaulting a potential witness but making no effort to finish her off.

Too intent on making his escape.

He’d expected a one-on-one meeting, but Duboff, ever the contrarian, had brought along Alma Reynolds, put her in mortal danger.

Milo said, “You still all right, ma’am? From your injuries?”

The question offended her.

“As I told you the first time, there are no injuries. Except to my ego.” She pushed herself upright, suppressed a wince.

“Bastard,” she said, leaving the interview room stiffly “I’m going to miss him incredibly.”

Milo and I moved to his office. I said, “Duboff was a misanthropic crank, but he trusted someone enough to meet in the dark. Alma Reynolds knew he was lying when he said he didn’t know who’d phoned. The lure was solving the murders.”

“Pretty flimsy,” he said. “Why would he fall for that?”

“Dedicated activist shows up the cops and keeps the sacred grounds pristine?”

“Guess so.”

“Being at the marsh after dark didn’t scare him. Alma said he dropped in regularly-including the night Selena was found when he missed the dump by a narrow margin.”

“Maybe too narrow, Alex.”

“He was part of it?”

“Like you said before, two guys would make the job easier. And talk about someone with an intense attachment to the marsh. Plus the guy’s weird. We considered him in the beginning, dropped him off the screen when we couldn’t find any felony record or links to Huck. Maybe that was a big-time goof.”

“He showed up to talk to his confederate?” I said. “Then why take Reynolds along?”

“He thought it would be a brief chat, like he told Reynolds. Got surprised.”

“Be interesting if Huck’s name shows up on any Save the Marsh mailing lists.”

“Be interesting to know where the hell Huck was last night. Which was the point of sitting on my commodious butt watching the shrubbery. No sign of him leaving or entering the house, but that means squat. He coulda made his move before I arrived, returned after I left to take the call on Duboff.”

“When did the call come in?”

“Right after midnight. But that was well past Duboff’s murder. Ol’ Alma wasn’t wearing a watch but she knows they left the restaurant shortly after nine, guesses she got blindsided at ten thirty or so. Which would put Duboff getting gutted at ten or so. She lay there, out of it, for another half hour, finally got up and looked for Duboff, which was stupid, but adrenaline can do all sorts of things to your judgment. After she found him, she ran back out to the street, screaming. No one around to hear, like you said, it’s a ghost town at night. So she got back in Duboff’s car, drove to Pacific Division, and reported the murder. Pacific has her logged in at eleven thirty-two. They put her in a room, took her statement, dispatched a car to the marsh, confirmed the body, and phoned Reed. He was in Solana Beach, called me. I was taking a bladder break, saw the message, called back, cowboyed to the marsh. Leaving Huck plenty of time and opportunity to return home.”

He rubbed his face. “I’m losing it, Alex. Shoulda driven up to the Vander house, leaned on the gate bell. If Huck wasn’t there, maybe someone else was-a maid, whatever, and I’d know.”

“You got called to a murder scene, you went.”

“Guy was dead, what was the rush?” Cursing. “Yeah, it was the logical response. Aka utter lack of creative thinking.”

“Unseemly,” I said.

“What is?”

“Self-flagellation from the man of granite.”

“Right,” he said, “I’m thinking sandstone.”