Midnight Baby

CHAPTER 8

“You look different, Maggie.” The intensity of Guido’s gaze made me squirm like a prospective in-law. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Not a thing.” I handed him the videotape as I walked past him out of the bright, eucalyptus-scented day and into the dark cool of his living room. Guido still wore his tennis whites.

“There is something different.” He followed me in and shut the door. “Your hair? You cut your hair.”

“Nope. I got a good night’s sleep. Maybe that’s it.” I continued through the house with him to the studio and darkroom he had built onto the back.

“If it’s okay with you,” I said, “I’ll go ahead and run a dub.” “Go ahead. I’ll get the camera set up.”

Making a copy of the tape took no time at all. When it had run, I rewound the original, took the dub out of the recorder, and was sticking a label on it when I noticed that Guido hadn’t made much progress with his tripod and 35mm camera. He kept watching me until I felt intensely uncomfortable.

“Knock it off, Guido,” I warned.

“You lost some weight,” he said.

“Since you saw me Thursday? Not likely.” To speed things along, I took the camera from him and loaded it with black-and-white Plus-X pan film. As I screwed it onto the tripod, I said, “Maybe the difference is with you. Did you clean your glasses? Smoke something funny or put something up your nose?”

He crossed his arms over his chest like an aged professor, and studied me through narrowed eyes. “No. It’s you. But I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Will you stop?” I pushed his shoulder hard enough so that he had to uncross his arms to keep from falling over. “Can we just get this finished? I want to drive down to Long Beach today and I have to be back in the Valley for dinner at six. So could we cut the shit, my friend, and get to work? And nothing about me is any different.”

“Whatever you say.”

He dutifully bent to the task at hand. As I had told Mike, Guido is a master. If there is a manipulation that can be made with raw film or videotape, Guido can do it. He is fun to work with, and I would have enjoyed this little project thoroughly, except that he kept watching me.

A few hours later, we had a work table covered with eight-by-ten glossies, all different angles of Pisces’ face.

Stills made from videotape always have streaks and fuzzy edges. Considering that we had been filming at night using available light, Guido had wrought several small miracles of quality and clarity. We selected the four prints that showed the girl’s most typical expressions. These I put into a stiff mailing envelope and stowed in my bag.

Guido had also made a second set of stills, close-ups of some of the people who had been in the background that night. If they were neighborhood regulars, they were potential witnesses. Again, because the camera had been trained on the girl, the background extras were generally out of the range of focus, amorphous shapes gliding through the shadows. The quality was better than I had expected it to be, though I had doubts about how useful they would prove for Mike.

A bigger disappointment for me was the enlarged print of the Corvette driver’s face. Guido’s best effort came out looking more like the moon and its craters than a human.

He studied the print under a large magnifying glass. “What I want to do, Maggie, is give this to someone I know who does computer enhancements. Maybe he can get you something better.”

“Then do it.”

I had been stacking things together to pack into my camera bag. I stopped to look at one of the rejected full-face shots of Pisces. She had high, well-defined cheekbones, a small dimple in her chin, rather prominent ears. Just for comparison purposes, I wished that I had kept a copy of one of the later sketches the Metranos had shown Mike and me at the morgue. I knew I wasn’t going to solve the ten-year-old case of Amy Elizabeth Metrano by comparing two electronically generated pictures of dubious quality. It’s just that I was awfully damned curious.

“Tell me about computer enhancements,” I said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Are they worth anything?”

“Depends.” Guido frowned over the shot of the driver. He was going to talk apples when I was thinking oranges. It was all right with me. Somehow, I knew, all of it would end up in the same salad.

“Depends?” I said.

“Depends on the data available and how good a guesser the technician who interprets it is. A lot depends on luck. There’s a techno-nerd on campus who does this sort of thing, usually from information sent back by space probes. What we’ll do is give him what we have and tell him it’s a man’s face. So he’ll use statistical averages and some voodoo and give us back a man’s face with more details defined. If we gave him the same shit and told him it was a monkey, he’d give us back a bald monkey.”

“So they’re worthless,” I said.

“If it’s all you’ve got, though, go for it.”

“I told you about Amy Elizabeth Metrano,” I said. “Some computer wiz took a picture that had been made of her when she was four and projected from it what she might look like as she aged. Would you put any faith in the images he generated?”

“Hard to say. That’s different voodoo from the other situation, but it’s still voodoo, Maggie. Again, most of it is based on statistical averages. You know, how fast the nose grows, how dark her hair might get using family history. The problem is, there are so many variables.

“Why?” he asked. “I can hear the wheels turning, but I can’t see which way they’re headed.”

“Right now they’re turning toward Long Beach. It’s a nice day. Want to come along?”

“I would, but I have too much shit to do.” He began unscrewing his camera from the tripod. “You said you had dinner plans?”

“Yes. I’d invite you to come along, but it isn’t my party. I’m meeting Mike’s son.”

“Mike?”

“Yes,” I said. “I told you, I’m staying at Mike’s.”

“No, you didn’t tell me. Is everything cool between you two again?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He thought about that as he put the camera into its case. I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder.

“You do good work, Guido. Thanks for everything.”

“Yeah.” He was staring at me again.

“Bye, Guido,” I said.

“I’ll walk you out.”

My eyes were tired after hours of close work. The sun outside dazzled them, made them sting. I shielded my face with one hand while I rummaged in my bag for sunglasses. I put them on and turned to give Guido a hug. His eyes were all squinty, but I could see that he was still looking me over.

“Stop it,” I said.

He seemed to shake himself. He smiled at me as we walked down his long drive toward Mike’s Blazer. “You be careful down in Long Beach, hear? I’ve been hangin’ with you for a lot of years, Maggie. I know how easy it is for you to get into trouble.”

“I’m just going to the beach,” I said, all innocence.

“Duck if you hear gunfire.”

“I always do,” I laughed. “But, Guido, if I don’t make it back?”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure Casey gets my grandma’s rubies.”

“Will do.” He held my arm. “Be a hell of a shame if you died on us, Mag. But if you do? Can I have your cameras? You wouldn’t be needing them.”

“Sure, Guido.”

“And that brass iguana you picked up when we were in Honduras?”

“Sure, Guido.”

He continued with his wants list all the way down the hill.

I opened the car door and leaned toward him to kiss his cheek. He started to meet me, but then he suddenly drew back, his face bright as if the flash had exploded.

“I’ve got it.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a wet smooch full on the lips. “It started coming to me as soon as you said ‘Mike.’ I know why you seem different.”

“Dare I ask?”

“You got laid. After months of celibacy, Maggie MacGowen finally got laid.”

“Jesus Christ, Guido.” I pulled away from him and climbed into the car.

He held the door so that I couldn’t shut it. He was positively bubbly. “That’s it. I know it is. So you gotta tell me about it, Mag. This is major. I mean, I figure Mike probably joined the police sometime early sexual revolution: post-Pill, pre-herpes and pre-AIDS. We all know what those guys did. What’s it like to hop into the sack with a guy who must have fucked his way through half of the female population of L.A.?”

I turned on the engine, slipped it into drive, and eased off the brake. The car started to roll, but Guido still clung to the open door.

“Shit, think about it,” he said, jogging now. “L.A.‘s like the third-largest city in the country. What’s that, like the twelfth-largest city in the world or something? That’s a lot of tutors. The things he must have learned how to do. God, I hope you kids are being careful.”

“Close the door, Guido,” I said. My toe tapped the accelerator. The car leaped forward, forcing Guido to drop back. I reached for the door and slammed it just as I turned out of his drive and onto the twisty street below. Through the rustle of eucalyptus, I heard him yell:

“Way to go, Maggie.”

Just for academic reasons, I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. I seemed no different. It was just me, with mussed hair. And roses in my cheeks.

The canyon below Guido’s house was dappled with patches of deep shade and bright sun. The sky above was the hard, artificial blue of a Beverly Hills swimming pool. A day of rare beauty. To waste any part of it slogging along a grimy freeway seemed sacrilege. I thought about finding a place to pull over and go for a walk down to the narrow creek that ran along the canyon bottom, breathe some real air, scuff the dry earth, clear my mind.

Watching Pisces over and over, hearing her voice, hearing my voice talking to her, had left me feeling haunted. Like spending the morning with a ghost. I peered again into the darkness at the bottom of the canyon and kept moving along.