Everything but the Squeal

19

“Damn you,” Hammond said into the phone. He sounded as though he meant it. It was getting dark, and I'd just arrived home. Two messages on my answering machine had told me that Jessica hadn't come home yet. Hammond was number three.

“Damn me? Why? Is it something I've done recently, or some kind of general principle?”

“Yoshino,” he said.

I squinted into the past. “Who's Yoshino?”

“That's hilarious,” he said.

“Oh, Yoshino,” I said. “What happened?”

“More important,” he said, “what the fuck are you up to?”

“A1, I told you. Kansas City. I showed you her picture.”

“That was one girl. Kidnapping, I think you said. You didn't say anything about a serial murderer.”

“You've got another one?” A sense of futility, familiar by now, swept over me. “Don't say you've got another one.”

“Don't tell me what not to say. And you better get your ass in here. Some people in this here building are hopping.”

“Have you got another one?”

“Yes.”

I looked around the living room. I'd lighted a fire in the wood-burning stove, and the Mozart horn concerto I'd heard at the Gursteins’ was giving the room's acoustics a workout. The computer was on and blinking at me, its dinky little fan whirring in a comfortable fashion.

“Blond?” I said.

“That'll wait until you get to the morgue.”

’Tm in the car.”

Rush hour had congealed on the freeways. The gods of weather had decided that a little sprinkle would grease the roads and slow the traffic, so Alice's useless windshield wipers were sweeping sarcastically back and forth when I turned into the neon-lighted parking lot under Parker Center, the cops' home base. I went straight to the morgue.

Yoshino let me in,looking slightly shamefaced. “Thanks,” I said nastily as she closed the door behind me.

The morgue was cold, but a lot warmer than Max Bruner's voice when he said, “She was doing what she was supposed to do.”

“Well, hey,” I said, “whatever happened to individual initiative?”

“It went out with the frontier,” Bruner said. He was wearing a cashmere jacket that would have made Miles Brand goggle with envy and a pair of fawn-colored wool slacks that proclaimed some kind of fashion statement with an Italian accent. I was almost afraid to look at his shoes. They were certain to be made of the skin of an unborn calf or something else you could wear only once without saying hello to your toenails.

“Looking good, Max,” I said, thinking about bad cops.

“Because of Al,” he said with an air of sorely tried patience, “I've agreed to let you see the body before we have our talk. Like I said, that's because of Al. If I'd had my way, we'd have put you up overnight with a bunch of vomiting DUI’s before we even said hello.” He reached into the pocket of his elegant jacket, pulled out a handful of loose Maalox, and tossed them back like popcorn.

“That's white of you,” I said. To Yoshino I said, “Figure of speech.”

“Four-one-two,” Bruner said to Yoshino as he chewed.

Her hair looked messed up, and I hoped her anniversary party had been a success. She tossed him an icy glance that said she already knew the number and went over to the wall, pulled out a drawer, and peeled back the sheet.

The stainless steel gleamed under the fluorescent tubes, but not enough to outshine Junko's face. She'd been opened from her throat to her hipbones.

“No,” I said. I looked for someplace to sit. Precise as an atomic clock, Yoshino pressed a chair against the backs of my knees and I folded into it. Big black butterflies performed a mating dance in front of my eyes, and my pulse threatened to burst out of my wrists. I thought I was going to black out.

“You know her?” Bruner asked. He was bending over me. Over his shoulder, Hammond looked concerned.

“Junko,” I said through lips that felt as dry and parched as the pages of a Gutenberg Bible. I knew I shouldn't start to cry, but I wasn't sure I could avoid it.

“Furuta,” Bruner said. “Junko Furuta. Sixteen. From Gardena. Middle-class parents, father an executive with an automobile dealership. She was a methadone junkie. On the street about a year.”

She'd been on the street about a month, I thought. I shook my head, not to disagree with Bruner, but to deny that she was dead. After all, I was the reason she was dead.

“You okay, Simeon?” Hammond asked.

I ignored him. Probably I couldn't have responded if I'd wanted to. I was trying to find another reason for her to be dead. I couldn't. She'd been killed because her pimp was afraid that I'd get to her and that she'd talk to me.

“I don't give a fuck if he's okay,” Bruner said. “What I want to know is what he knows about it.” His stomach emitted a painful little growl.

“Max,” Hammond said, “ease up.”

I looked up at Hammond. Was he playing good-cop, bad-cop? Or was he on my side? He caught my eye and stared at his feet. He was playing good-cop, bad-cop.

“I want to look at her,” I said. I didn't, but I had to.

I got up, shaking off Yoshino's attempt to place a steadying hand under my elbow, and walked very slowly to the drawer. Junko's hair hung over her shoulders, limp and wet as seaweed. Her eyes were wide open. They didn't make her look alive. They had the same expression of dusty surprise you see in the eyes of stuffed fish. I could see the glistening white of her sternum, dead cartilage peeping through the top of the long gash that ended just above her pubic hair. I noted with something like dispassion that the gash divided her scarred navel, turning it into a pair of surprised-looking parentheses.

“This one really could be my daughter,” Yoshino said.

“She's Okinawan,” I said. I was startled by the sound of my voice. It sounded like a gravel avalanche. “You're not Okinawan.”

“How do you know that?” Bruner demanded.

“Yoshino's Japanese,” I said. “There's a difference.”

“How do you know that this one is Okinawan?” Bruner's eyes narrowed. “I didn't know that.”

I leaned against the drawer, defeating an urge to reach out and close Junko's eyes. After all, what did it matter to her? I fought off a surge of weariness. “That's the trouble with L.A. cops,” I said. “They're racists. Can't tell the difference between a Japanese and an Okinawan.”

“Simeon,” Hammond said, “this isn't the way to go.”

I lifted the tag on Junko's toe. It said Junko Furuta. “You knew she was on the street,” I said to Bruner. “What else did you know?”

“Lockup,” Bruner said. “I know you're going to the lockup.”

“Great,” I said. “That'll do her a lot of good. Do you a lot of good too. Do you know who her pimp was?”

“Marco,” he said. “Some crustacean named Marco.”

“But you're not interested in that,” I said to Bruner. I had to blink to fight down tears. “Well, fuck off.”

“I'm interested,” Bruner said. He looked down at Junko and then up at me and held up one hand, palm outward. It was meant to be a placating gesture, but it just made him look like a Teutonic Smoky the Bear. “There's a lot of kids out there. She's already dead. I have to be interested in the rest of them. Which means that I'm interested in you.”

“So put me in the lockup.”

“There's room to negotiate here,” Bruner said, backing off. He reached out and pushed the drawer shut. Junko rolled into the dark. “You know Marco's name, you know Junko's name. Question is, what else do you know? Hammond says you're all right.”

Hammond muttered something.

“So,” Bruner continued, “what else do you know? That can help us, I mean.”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Wrong answer,” Bruner said tightly.

“Max, if it hasn't gotten to you yet, I told you a while ago to fuck off.”

Bruner smoothed a hand down the seam of his four-hundred-dollar jacket. Then he lifted his wrist and checked his watch. When he looked back up to me, his face was open and guileless. “Let's be specific,” he said.

“Be as specific as you like,” I said, reseating myself in the chair.

“You'll answer my questions?”

“As long as they're specific.”

“How do you know about Junko?”

“I was looking for Aimee Sorrell. I was hired by her parents to find her. They thought she was in Los Angeles.”

He nodded as though I were a slow pupil who had just gotten his first right answer. “Did you find her?”

“No.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

“Have you got any idea who's got her?”

That was the big one. “No,” I said. “In fact, last night I got fired.”

“What's the connection between her and Junko?”

“Oh, come on. The belly button,” I said. I wasn't telling Bruner anything new.

“Why did you ask Yoshino to call you if anyone else came in with a scarred belly button?”

“Max,” I said, “you saw the picture of Aimee. After I saw the picture, I told Hammond to call me if a little girl came in with a burned belly button. He did. It was the wrong girl. I asked Yoshino to call me if another one came in.” He kept staring at me. “In case it was Aimee,” I said.

“You're not trying to figure out who's burning all these little girls.”

“I'm looking for Aimee. If figuring that out would help me, I’d try to figure that out. Same as you would.”

“That's very specific,” he said.

“I'm a very specific kind of guy.”

“And why do you know Junko's name?”

“Are you looking for the pimp?”

Bruner made a sound that was a lot like spitting.

“He's not on the street,” Hammond said. Bruner gave him an angry glance.

“So where is he?”

“You,” Bruner said to Yoshino. “Go do something.”

“Well,” she said, “there's the records.” She shuffled off toward the door. Her heels clacked indignantly on the concrete floor.

“Gosh, you dress nice, Max,” I said.

Bruner pulled up another chair and straddled it, facing me. “We can lift your license, you know,” he said. He pried some Maalox loose from his back teeth with his tongue and chewed it.

“No shit,” I said, looking around wildly. “Stop the car.”

Bruner slowly leaned forward until his head was resting on the back of the chair. His acidic stomach rumbled. He had a bald spot the size of a mature tarantula that I hadn't noticed before.

“I know Junko's name,” I said, “because I spent more than a week on the street. I know Marco because I know Junko. You can learn a lot sitting around in the wrong restaurants. You should try it sometime.”

“I'm not allowed to work the street anymore,” Bruner said without lifting his head. “We're looking for the pimp. Who else should we be looking for?”

I took it as a rhetorical question and didn't bother to answer. “What do we do now?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Bruner said, lifting his head. His face was wan and sour and exhausted. “Listen,” he said, “I spent years of my life out there, whether you like my clothes or not. You've been there for a week, and it's practically killing you. I saw you when you looked at her.” He jerked his chin in the direction of Junko's drawer. “Do you know how many I've seen come and go? Do you know how many greasy little perps I've questioned? How many corpses I've had to look at? Most of them babies. Have you got any idea what a shitty job this is?”

“I think I do,” I said. “So, to get back to business, what do we do now?”

Bruner looked at Hammond, and Hammond nodded.

“You don't do anything,” Bruner said. “But if anything happens, anything at all, you'll give me a call, right?”

“Max,” I said, “you have my personal word of honor.” I may have laid it on a little thick, because he gave me a mean little squint, but then he got up.

They followed me to the parking lot, both of them, but they let me go. As Alice chugged dutifully up the ramp and into the drizzle, I asked myself whether I'd just eliminated my main source of information. I knew Hammond was okay, but could I or couldn't I trust Bruner? I couldn't answer the question, so I just kept driving. When in doubt, I'd learned at a relatively early age, just keep doing what you're already doing. If you do, at least you're doing something. To this rule I'd long ago added a codicil: don't change your mind before sundown.

Sundown had long come and gone by the time I reached home again. According to my answering machine, Wyatt and Annie had called three more times about Jessica.

“She's not here,” I said, calling back. I'd run out of sympathy.

“Do you know what this is doing to Annie?” Wyatt demanded. “She's been in bed with a sick headache since three.”

“Wyatt,” I said, “it'll be okay.”

“Where is she? I should go get her.”

“So go get her,” I said unkindly. I hung up. Then I popped open a bottle of Singha and drank it in one long chug. I drank seven more before I finally passed out, trying to wash the image of Junko Furuta from my memory.