Pacific Beat

Chapter 9

Emmett and Edith Goins lived on the east side of Costa Mesa, on Heather Street. It was a neighborhood of apartments built in the fifties: uniform rectangles, flat roofs, cement stairways with iron banisters leading to the upper units. The Goinses’ complex was called Island Gardens, and looked the same as the others around it except for one large bird of paradise plant and a six-foot-high stone head that stood off from the walkway. The statue was Polynesian in attitude, and covered with graffiti. The sign that stood behind this “island garden” was so faded by sunlight that Weir could hardly read it.

The Goinses lived downstairs, in 1-C. Jim walked past three reeking dumpsters busy with cats, past the stairs, down a walkway choked with weeds and dog turds, along the open windows of downstairs units, from which came the sounds of television and the smells of breakfast. The screens were dotted with flies that shined in the dull morning sun.

He knocked and stepped back. A game show sounded through the window — horrible laughter followed by carnivalesque music, then applause.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice, low and rough.

“My name is Jim Weir.”

“We don’t want none.”

“I came to see Horton.”

“He’s not here.”

“May I talk to you for just a moment, please?”

Then the door opened about six inches and a pale, soft, red-haired woman looked up at him. She was wearing a blue terry robe with cigarette ash on the lapel. Her eyes were brown in the middle and bloodshot everywhere else.

Edith Goins’s eyes went down him, and back up — brown, red, brown again. “You the police?”

“No. But I’d like to ask some questions.”

“Another doctor?”

“No ma’am, just a regular guy.”

“Nobody regular’s interested in Horton.”

“May I come in?”

Edith Goins shut the door in Jim’s face. He heard voices, questions, a hopeful agreement. She opened the door a moment later and turned back inside. Jim followed. She was short, heavy, rounded. “This is Emmett,” she said. “Em, this is Mr. Weird.”

Jim didn’t see him at first. He was locked in shadow in the corner of the room, wrapped in a black robe with a big silver anchor emblazoned over one breast. His head was narrow, his hair cut short, his ears nearly flush with his skull. He wore a thin, almost prissy mustache. His face was red in the TV light, then it shifted — to great applause — to blue. He looked up at Jim and offered his hand. “Horton isn’t here,” he said finally.

Jim shook his hand, then sat at the far end of the couch from Edith. He set down his briefcase. “Thanks for having me in. Nice little apartment you have here.”

“Ought to be for eight-fifty a month,” said Emmett. “And if they pass this Slow Growth deal, then they’re going to stop the construction and rent’s going to go even higher.”

Jim glanced at the TV, where some frantic young couple made fools of themselves for an Amana range. “I had a talk with Dr. Robert Gold earlier. He’s a man who keeps track of people when they get out of hospitals. He told me that you and Horton moved here to Costa Mesa just this January.”

“January twenty-eighth,” said Edith. “Why are you so interested in Horton? The woman that got kilt?”

The question threw Weir off balance. This was going to be a strange ride. “Yes. A young woman. Five nights ago, down in the Back Bay in Newport, a couple of miles from here. We were... very close. Was Horton at home that night?”

Edith and Emmett exchanged blatantly furtive looks. Emmett nodded to his wife.

“That was Monday,” she said. “Horton was out Monday night. Horton comes and goes as he pleases these days, even though his release people told him to stay put here.”

Jim nodded, waiting for more. The game show droned on stupidly. Weir sensed that big things were not being said here, things that might lay groundwork. “Would you mind, at all, telling me about Horton? I’m not a cop or a doctor. I’ve got no official standing. I just lost someone close and I’m doing what I can to help out.”

Emmett looked at Edith, then nodded again, but neither spoke. Their continuing silence implied that what was about to be revealed here was of such size and scope, it would dominate the entire moral landscape, but there was nothing theatrical in their faces. Edith brought a bottle of bourbon from beside the couch and poured a small shot into a coffee cup, Weir understanding now that he had provided a service — his presence was an excuse to drink. She swished it around for a moment, then drained it. “Horton ain’t ours. We got him from the agency when he was four.”

“He wasn’t four, he was almost six,” said Emmett. When Emmett looked at Jim straight on, one eye wandered and one stayed on target with sharp black intensity. “The agency lied about that, and plenty of the other, too.”

“We didn’t know four from six anyhow,” said Edith. “On accounta not being able to have our own. See, Emmett was in a bad—”

“ ’Nuff a that, Edith.”

“...So we got one from the agency.”

“What agency was that?”

“Hardin County Adoption Agency. Hardin County being in Ohio.”

“Ah,” said Jim. He suddenly felt badly for these people. They seemed like lightning rods for calamity, and he’d only known them for five minutes. He recognized in them, too, the overwhelming desire to divulge, so common to children, adulterers, and drunks.

Edith poured another bourbon and studied it with a measured, rational air. “We were happy to get him. See, you usually got to wait a long spell, but Horton, we got him quick. They just made us sign a bunch of papers and out we went.”

“The fact they let us have him so easy should have told us something was up, but it didn’t,” said Emmett.

Edith shrugged. “We got a little brown cowboy shirt for him to wear out, some cowboy pants, too. I remember walkin’ with him between us out to the Buick, feeling like I finally had my family. I think that walk from the agency door to the Buick was the first and last time in my life I was happy. It was exactly twenty-four steps. I still remember that, for some reason.”

“Don’t get sloppy, Edith,” said her husband.

“I count steps sometimes, too,” said Jim.

Emboldened, Edith sipped again and continued. “Funny the things you remember when you’re happy. So we got Horton home and he was silent. He didn’t look at us or say a thing for five days. He ate a lot. We were told about the ‘adjustment period,’ how the child had to grow into your life and feel secure before he could be happy. The agency told us to try a pet. We got him two hamsters, but they disappeared, and Horton didn’t know where. Later, we got him a dog, and he liked the dog a bunch. Dog ran off after a couple of weeks, though. Month later, some of the farm dogs dug up Horton’s dog and the hamsters outta the swamp down by bridge, came parading around the yard with them. Horton didn’t seem too surprised.”

A long silence followed. Emmett stared at the TV. “I talked to the agency about him. They said it was normal and that Horton didn’t have any history of bad behavior, so we had to be patient. The thing that got us the most was he’d never say nothing. One day, Horton stood up on his chair in the middle of dinner and pissed on the ham. I used a belt on him good, but he bit my leg so deep, it took eighteen stitches and a tetanus shot. It healed black for some reason.”

“That’s when we put Horton in the car and drove him back to the agency.” said Edith. “They couldn’t figure out why Horton was being so naughty, and they told us his record before was good. They tried to make it sound like we were doing something wrong and maybe we weren’t fit to have him. We said we’d try more lovin’ and understanding, on accounta that’s what a child needs, they said. We felt bad.”

“I didn’t,” said Emmett. “I knew right then from the look on that lady’s face, she was lying about him. I remember on the way back from the agency, Horton was sitting in the backseat of the Buick, burning a firefly in one of them cigarette lighters the old ’sixty-fours had in the rear.”

The silence got long again. “Pretty bad kid,” said Jim to fill it.

Edith nodded. “So we had a private investigator get the records from the agency. It was just like we thought. He’d burnt down his own house when he was four. He was really six when we got him, like I said, they tried to fool us. That’s why they let him go so fast. He was a lemon. So we tried to take him back, but they wouldn’t take him. Finally, he stuck a dead water moccasin down Pammy Fritzie’s underwear, and we turned him over to the Juvenile Authority. He was seven by then. They kept him two years. They did a lot of tests and told us they thought it might be a chemical problem. Maybe that was the second happiest time of my life, when we got rid of Horton then.”

Emmett held out his coffee cup and his wife poured in some bourbon. “A few months after Horton was at the Juvenile Authority, he started sending us letters. They were done in real nice writing, and the spelling was good. He had a real good vocabulary for a seven-year-old. He was smart. He wrote us about how sorry he was for what he’d done, and how much he missed the farm. I’D tell you, we sat there at the kitchen table and cried because he sounded so full of sorrow and because we’d held a lot of love inside us just waitin’ for a reason to let it out, but we never had no reason. It was like Horton in the letter was the son we always wanted.”

“So,” said Edith, “we made the petition and got him back.”

Emmett sighed and looked at Jim. His face went blue again in the TV screen’s light. “As I look back on my life, Mr. Weird, I can honestly say that was the dumbest fuckin’ thing I ever did.”

“Me, too,” Edith added solemnly. “Horton was fine for a few years after that. That was, say from nine years old to twelve. He spent a lot of time out in the fields and the swamps, catching snakes and critters and bringing them home. He did his chores, earned some money, and bought books on animals. At school, well, Horton didn’t make many friends. He got beat up a lot because he wasn’t big and he was one of those kids — you know how they pick out one to badger all the time? They singled out Horton and made him kind of miserable. But, gosh, his grades! When Horton went into seventh level — that’s age thirteen about — he got all A’s and only one D. The D was in speech. He just couldn’t get up in front of everyone and talk.”

Weir was quiet as an invisible ripple of memory issued through the room. He understood that what he’d just heard represented the apex of happiness in the Goins family unit. “So I guess the Juvenile Authority did him some good.”

Edith nodded and drank again. “When Horton came back to us, he had learned self-control. He was very polite. He was quiet. He liked to move things into his room so he wouldn’t have to come out much. He wanted to eat in there, but we never allowed that. But you know, Horton never once told us he loved us. He never once remembered a birthday or made us anything for Christmas. He lived in some kind of other place. There was the Horton that nodded politely and did the dishes. Then there was the Horton that lived in his room for hours at a time, or spent whole days out in the fields or in the swamp. There was two Hortons. I’m convinced of that.”

The Goinses went quiet again, each lost to a separate remembrance. Edith’s head turned toward Jim. “You have kids?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then you probably think we’re a couple of dumb farmers, but we’re not. We’ve got love in our hearts — or at least we did a long time back — and we tried our best to find something to attach it to. There was nothing in the world we wanted more than to get through to that boy. After the first year, we started thinking it was us, and the more bad he did, the more we thought it was our fault. By the time we put him in the Juvenile Authority, we were just about crazy ourselves. We offered Horton our love. Nobody can say we didn’t. We stood by him. We still do.”

Emmett held out his cup for more. He looked at Jim, and in the TV light his eyes took on a cathode glow of surprising tenderness. “From age twelve to age fifteen, Horton was kind of distant. Still polite to us, never argued. For a brief time, he had a girlfriend, a girl his age who lived two farms over. Her name was Lucy Galen and we saw them together a few times, walking home from school. You could tell from the angle of Horton’s head, the way he looked at her, how... fascinated he was with this girl. He’d go to the fountain where she worked. We never knew exactly what happened, but Lucy’s parents called us one night and told us to keep Horton away from her or they’d call the police. Something about him and their daughter behind the smoke shed. So we forbid him to see her, and so far as we know, he didn’t. Horton spent more time in his room after that, quiet.”

Emmett turned off the TV with a remote. The apartment got suddenly darker and smaller, as if crouched in anticipation. “In May of that year, when Horton was fifteen, they found Lucy out in the swamp, stabbed bad and raped. They put Horton in jail but decided he was too crazy to help defend himself. They committed him. Lucy didn’t die, but she never got well, either, from what we heard. Nine years of hospital came after that, for Horton. They finally took a picture of what was making him crazy, and gave him a bunch of good drugs. He was getting better before that, but the new drugs cured him. January last, they let him out to us. Cured.”

Jim observed a moment of silence, for Lucy and Horton, but mostly for Emmett and Edith Goins. The apartment seemed to vibrate with their pain. “And you moved here to California?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

They exchanged looks again, looks of utter resignation. “Horton asked us to,” said his mother. “And besides, we were ready. Em couldn’t find any work in Ohio — we’d moved to Lima by then — so we thought California would be a good new start.”

“Did Horton say why he wanted to come here?”

Edith sipped again from her cup. “No. But he told us that California was rich in opportunity for Emmett, was a place we all could start over, and the weather was nice. He spent a lot of time doing research, and he decided Costa Mesa was the best place we could be. Close enough to the beach for good breezes, and close enough to the freeways for work. Horton got a job at a PhotoStop, soon as we moved out. See, during his stay in the state hospital, he got interested in photography. Took some real nice pictures of the other patients, though I must admit they’re some pretty scary people.”

“Which PhotoStop?”

“Right out here on Harbor Boulevard. To be honest, Horton must have lied just a tad on his application.”

“How has he been since he got out?”

Emmett set down his coffee mug. “This part might be hard for you to believe, Mr. Weird, because it was hard for us to believe. Horton is a changed man.”

“How so?”

“He’s clean and neat. He smiles upon occasion. He enjoys his work and takes it — well, took it — very seriously. He saw all the people around here so trim and suntanned, and he began doing exercises in his room. With his first few paychecks, he bought clothes. He likes the colors you got out here — the Hawaiian shirts and the baggy pants with the tight cuffs and those big jogging shoes that look so complicated. He puts Wildroot or something on his hair to hold it in place.”

Edith lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out her nose. “But you know, it’s not just his appearance or how he acts. We learned the hard way how a person can act one way and be another. It’s in the way he looks at us, at the world. There’s a light in his eyes now. There’s a... joy in them.”

Jim watched the smoke ease across the room, window-bound. “You say he quit his job?”

Emmett and Edith looked at each other again and shook their heads. Edith sighed out a lungful of smoke. “Starting out in early February — just a couple of weeks after we got here — Horton spent less and less time here. He told us he was working overtime, but we’d drive by to see and there’d be someone else in his booth. The terms of his release specifically say he’s gotta live with us, so we told him to stick close. He smiled and hugged us both — they seem to do that a lot in California — and said everything was ‘cool’ and not to worry. Well, two months ago today, Horton moved out. He took most of his things, his cameras and clothes, and he just disappeared. He never showed up at work, they said. He comes back here twice a week and spends the night — so’s not to violate the release. He calls every few days to say he’s fine, and we’ve gotten three postcards. But he won’t say where he is. Once a month, he’s got a review-board meeting, and he always shows up for it. Rest of the time, ’cept for a couple of nights, he’s gone. He took our Chevy and left us the truck. He’s actually pretty good about changing oil — did it before we left Ohio and when we got here.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“I honestly got no idea.”

Edith and Emmett looked at him now, the ball clearly in his court. Edith sat forward. “What exactly is motivating you at this point, Mr. Weird?”

“The woman who was killed was my sister, Ann.”

“Oh, my,” said Edith, her grief calling for another drink, which she poured with care.

Emmett sat forward, too, elbows on his robed knees. “Mr. Weird, we’ve been honest with you up to now, because we’ve found after all we’ve been through with Horton, that honesty is the easiest thing to do. We don’t feel we got anything to hide. We answered your questions even though you’re a stranger, and we’ll answer more if you got them. We’ve spent most of our lives answering questions about Horton. But I’ll tell you right now that Horton didn’t do it. He’s a new man. I’d bet everything I have on it.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Goins.”

“If you were sure I was right, you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

Jim nodded.

“Thing is,” said Edith. “We believe in him.”

But you really don’t believe in him, thought Jim, no matter how bad you want to. Can I? “May I see his room?”

Again the Goinses looked at each other. They regarded Jim now, shrugging at precisely the same moment. “Not much to see,” said Emmett. “But you’re welcome. We’ve got not one thing to hide, and neither does Horton.” He stood, tightened his robe sash with a martial tug, then led Weir down a short hallway toward Horton’s room.

It was the second on the right. Emmett swung open the door and followed Jim inside. It was small, with clean white walls, a twin bed, a desk with a blank blotter on it, sliding closets opposite the bed, and thin green shag carpet. To one wall was tacked a poster of a sunset over a swaying wheat field, with Thoreau’s “different drummer” quotation in fancy gold script at the bottom. On another were two promotional posters for a Japanese camera maker, featuring leggy blondes in swimsuits, draped with photographic gear. Between them was a colored picture of a human brain. The various parts of the organ were different colors, ranging from pale yellow to hot red. “That’s a PET picture of Horton’s brain,” said Emmett. “They do them to see the parts that make them crazy. Horton’s is that little red area way down in the middle. Over the last couple of years, it got smaller and smaller from the drugs.” A folded tripod leaned in one corner.

“Is he still on medication?”

“You bet he is. Costs us nine hundred a month, no generics. He’s real good about taking it — has a little electronic pillbox that beeps when it’s time for something.”

Jim nodded, his nerves jumping, a feeling growing inside him that he’d like to trash this place and see what he could find.

“Not much to see,” said Emmett. “Even when he was here a lot, the room was always neat. They taught him that in the hospital.”

“May I open some drawers? Look in the closet?”

“Help yourself.”

“I was wondering, too, do you have a recent picture of him?”

“Let me see what I’ve got,” said Emmett, heading for the door.

Weir slid open the closet door and looked inside: a few shirts and coats on hangers, pants folded and stacked on an upper shelf, cardboard boxes stacked at the far end. He pulled open the top one and saw the neat collection of photography magazines, proof sheets, developing gear. He removed one of the proofs and angled it toward the faint window light. Group shots in an institutional setting, dazed, scarcely attentive faces. Horton’s fellows in the state hospital, thought Weir. The last row were closeups of a man’s hand holding what looked like a crayon to a sheet of unmarked paper. It was a handsome hand — deeply lined, well proportioned, capable. Weir checked the date on the top magazine: June ’89. He could hear Emmett come into the room behind him.

“Got a couple here,” he said.

Jim left the closet door open, but backed out and accepted two snapshots from the hand of Emmett Goins. He could smell the bourbon on Emmett’s breath. “Just a month ago, these,” he said.

They were both pictures of Horton and Edith. Horton looked surprisingly good: wide-set, placid blue eyes, a high forehead, wavy dark brown hair, a strong but slender jawline tapering to a firm chin. His smile — a little crooked, a little shrewd — revealed large white teeth. There was something ulterior about that smile, though Jim couldn’t put his finger on it, something... employable. Looks like any other twenty-four year old Southern Californian, he thought. For just one fraction of a moment, Weir sensed recognition, but his mind, flying backward through the years, found nowhere to land.

“Take one if you want,” said Emmett.

“Thank you, I would.”

Jim slid open the top desk drawer: two loupes, a roll of masking tape, pencils and pens. The side drawers were nearly empty, just a few loose snapshots and some boxes of slides.

“Horton’s got pictures of everything. Most of ’em, he took with him.”

“Mr. Goins, do you have any idea where he is? Any clue at all?”

“Well, somewhere not too far is my guess.”

“No address?”

“All’s he ever said is it’s cheap. You can read the postcard he sent us if you want to.”

They went back to the living room, where Edith had turned on a soap. She brought down the volume and looked at Weir expectantly. “Not much to see, is there?”

“No, not really.”

Emmett pulled something off of the refrigerator and handed it to Jim. The writing was small and neat, done in a well-sharpened pencil. The postmark was April 26.

“Joseph?”

Edith explained. “Horton changed his name. The courts wouldn’t allow it because of his record, but he calls himself that, anyway. We can’t get used to it.”

When Jim flipped over the card, the blood rushed into his face. It was the old standard from Poon’s Locker, a shot of the shop with the words Wet Your Line at Poon’s Balboa! written across it.

“You know where Balboa is, Mr. Weird?”

“I grew up there.” His heart was throbbing hard now.

“We’re sorry about your sister,” said Edith, “but we know that Horton’s innocent, so we don’t mind talking.”

“Can you tell me what kind of car he has?”

“It’s an ’eighty-seven Caprice. White, four doors, blue interior.”

Weir decided to let Dennison’s men get the license-plate numbers — along with the postcard from Poon’s Locker, and a hair sample to check against the one found on Ann’s blouse. Who knows what else they’d find.

“Thank you very much, again. Both of you. You don’t have to mention this visit to Horton. No reason to get him upset.”

“Good luck. We got nothing to hide, and neither does Horton anymore.”

“I can see that now.”

“Good luck on your sister. Judging from you, she must have been a nice girl.”

“She was great.”

Jim skidded to a stop at the first pay phone he could find. He dialed Dennison’s direct number and the secretary told him Brian would be right with him. Weir stood, engulfed by the hazy smog on Harbor Boulevard, his stomach fluttering with eagerness. When Brian came on, Weir flew through the story — Dr. Gold, Horton Goins in Hardin County, the sudden unexplained move to Southern California, Edith and Emmett, the postcard. “The girl that Goins did in Ohio was a waitress, too. He befriended her, got her trust, and took her out to a swamp.”

“Good Christ in heaven, Weir.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.”

“Okay, I’m sending Innelman and Deak over there as soon as I can — they can ask a few questions, then pop the shit out of the place. Any chance Goins would show up and try to cart anything off?”

“Not with me watching the door.”

“Good. What’s your call on... what we talked about this morning?”

“I think Blodgett and Kearns have some questions to answer. Horton Goins wasn’t driving any cop car out at the Back Bay.”

Dennison was silent for a moment. “It’s your show with them, not mine. Blodgett’s off shift for the next few nights — might be a good time to find him home.”

“What did you get from Annie’s car?”

“A whole lot of hair and fingerprints — all hers. Robbins is working it over again right now.”

Weir hung up, his heart still beating fast. He spent the next forty-five minutes parked outside the Island Garden apartments, alert for a white ’87 Chevy Caprice. It never showed, but a new one did. Dwight Innelman and Roger Deak climbed out, followed, to his astonishment, by Interim Chief Brian Dennison and Mike Paris.

Jim smiled to himself as he started up the truck. Arresting a mentally disordered sex offender would be good for Brian. Good for the city. Good for the news media. Good for a campaign, too: Who wouldn’t want this crime-stopper to serve as mayor for their town? He watched Dennison bend down and check his hair in the side mirror of the cop car before leading his detectives toward the apartment.