Pacific Beat

Chapter 10

Two blocks south of the ferry landing on Balboa is the Weir family home. The first house was built by Jim’s great-grandfather in 1891, on a site obtained by a hundred-year lease from what is now the PacifiCo Development Group. The original structure was destroyed by flood. Jim’s grandfather rebuilt in 1922, but the Pacific claimed both the home and the man in the now-infamous storm of 1939. Poon built a third house just after the war. It is a weathered, fading two-story Cape Cod-style home with a wall around it, and the wall is engulfed in bougainvillea. You have to know what you’re looking for to find the gate.

Jim passed through, shut it behind him quietly. The courtyard was overgrown with foliage that cut off the outside sounds, and the pavers were ankle-high in bougainvillea bracts, dry and light as paper. The fountain was clogged and inoperable. Jim reflected that his mother was a capable businesswoman, but when Poon died ten years ago, the house had begun a nosedive that really never stopped. Virginia had done little to check its decline. There was in her, Jim had come to understand, a genuine and simple need to keep at least something the way it used to be. With the death of Ann, he now realized, this house — and he himself — were the sole fixed bodies in Virginia’s diminishing galaxy. And he knew that if PacifiCo and the development cartel of Orange County sunk the Slow Growth Initiative and allowed the Balboa Redevelopment Project, this house, and Poon’s Locker, and Becky’s place, and Raymond’s and Ann’s Kids, and the Eight Peso Cantina and scores of other low-rent domiciles and mom-’n’-pop businesses like them would slide helplessly into the churning maw of progress. Weir understood the vehemence with which Virginia and others like her opposed the neighborhood’s proposed date with “redevelopment.” Selfish and provincial as it sometimes seemed, they were, in some respects, fighting for their lives. The thought lay heavy inside Jim as he walked through the door.

Virginia was sitting in the living room, erect in an old swivel chair, with four rickety card tables set up in front of her. It was Virginia’s “office.” The tables were piled high with Slow Growth fliers and envelopes to be addressed, circulars for Becky Flynn as mayor of Newport, invitations to the Wrecking Ball, Coastal Commission tomes, Environmental Impact Reports, State of California Codes, coffee cups, legal pads, green and white pencils that read SAVE THE PENINSULA — FLYNN FOR MAYOR on them. Pinned to the wall in front of her was a list of phone numbers almost two feet long — the volunteer army that she liked to call the Newport Irregulars. Virginia’s back was to him and her head was cocked at an extreme angle to hold the telephone in the crook of her neck. She was stuffing envelopes as she talked. “I don’t care what the Times says, we had close to seven thousand people at that protest march. They can’t even get my newspaper onto the porch, and you expect them to count seven thousand people... then split the difference and call it six thousand, I don’t care!”

She pivoted suddenly to face Jim, her elbows out, envelope passing between her mouth and the telephone, then into the ready-to-mail box. “The governor’s on the other line; I’ll call you back.” She hung up and shook her head at Jim. Her pale blue eyes had an exhausted, dull sheen to them. “I tried every florist in Newport, Laguna, and Costa Mesa. Nothing. Then I went alphabetically and made it to the El Modena listings before it got too late and they started to close. There’s a hundred and forty-six in the county and I’ve got a hundred and twenty-eight left. Where have you been?”

“Ann’s. Around.”

Virginia studied him with suspicion. “What was that meeting with Brian Dennison about?”

Jim explained that he was helping in the investigation of Ann — unofficially, tangentially, as a citizen and a brother. Virginia accepted it but suggested there might be, in fact, some plot at hand to penetrate the Flynn for Mayor and Slow Growth camps. Weir decided to let her entertain her conspiracy theories: Virginia was happiest when she was most paranoid. As far as he knew, the L.A. Times had never had any problem delivering a paper to the Weir household.

“Anyway,” she said. “I want to talk to you about Annie and tell you how it should be handled. I don’t think Brian Dennison’s force is doing anything correctly.”

Jim took a chair beside his mother, who immediately pushed in front of him a stack of Flynn for Mayor brochures and a pile of envelopes. He looked at Becky’s face on the front, a hyperglossy mug shot that made her look older and more reliable than Becky truly was. He wondered how many times he’d kissed that mouth, lost his fingers in those wonderful brown curls. Some memories never go away, especially when you cling to them like a life preserver for thirty-four fever-ridden days in a stinking Mexican jail. Maybe that’s what they’re for, he thought.

“I hear you finally dropped in on Becky,” said Virginia.

Jim nodded. Maybe that was one of the reasons we fell apart, he thought, because every time we held hands or had a fight, everybody in the whole neighborhood knew. Years ago, Weir had entertained the thought, rarely shared, of trying something genuinely storybook with Becky. The phrase go off somewhere together had, at times, an almost electrically urgent ring to it. But Becky was deep into the Public Defender’s Office, and he was mired in his forty hours a week of playing sheriff. Plus, Becky had no sentimental streak that Weir had ever been able to find. Becky, for instance, had found a revival house rerun of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet to be comic, although after Weir took her to see it, she’d made almost frighteningly emotional love to him that night aboard Lady Luck. Who could figure it?

“It was good to see her,” he said.

“Give her a chance,” said Virginia, case closed.

They looked at each other for a long moment, and Weir could see the injury in his mother’s cool blue eyes. There comes a time when a son can look at his aging mother and see the girl she used to be, the girl who accepted the awesome responsibility of motherhood, the girl who sacrificed her youth and her heart and her lithe young body to give him — this wailing, insatiable, unformed long shot — life. Was there any way to understand the bigness of it? Jim stood up and wrapped his arms around her. As he hugged her and ran his hands over her taut bony back, he looked around the old living room and sensed the memories — the afterimages and aftershocks of events now decades old but somehow still present. “Thank you,” he said.

Her hands pressed into his back. “For what?”

“Everything.”

“Well...”

“I’m starting to understand some of what you did.”

Her voice was hesitant now. “Now don’t start feeling sorry for me. Because I’d start feeling sorry for myself, and I’d go to pieces, and going to pieces is a luxury I can’t afford.”

A luxury she can’t afford, he thought. So Weir. He broke away and gave her a smile as he sat down beside her. It was the kind of smile that suggests whatever silly thing just happened, the wearer is now back in control. Virginia had one, too. Another Weir trademark.

“Couple of real stoics, aren’t we?” he asked.

“I’ve made a career of it,” she said. “Well... now, I...” Then all of a sudden Virginia’s face decomposed and she wiped at a big tear that ran across her hand and off a knuckle and landed audibly upon the old wooden chair. “Goddamn it, Jim,” she whispered.

“I know.” This has been a long time coming, he thought.

“Poon and Jake and now Ann. How much of this is a woman supposed to take? I...” She was sobbing now, her big gnarled hands trying impossibly to wipe away the tears. “... I miss her and I think about her every second and she’s gone. I mean even when your father had his heart attack, we knew it was coming, and even when Jake, in the war, that’s something you can understand... but Annie out in the cold, down by that horrible muddy swamp, and this... this animal uses a kitchen knife on her, all those times... oh my God, it just changes the way I feel about everything. It’s not enough, Jim, the way I tried to live wasn’t enough, thinking that if you didn’t cheat and took care of your own that when it was... all said and done there’d be more good than bad and you could take a little comfort from the fact that there really was some kind of... oh... justice...” She wiped the sleeve of her yellow windbreaker across her face, but the tears kept coming. She inhaled in jerking little gusts but nothing seemed to come back out. “Was it my fault?”

The girl, thought Jim. “No, Mom. Everything you did was right.”

She was shaking her head now, miles of regret in every wide, despondent arc. “Then why?”

“Maybe only God in heaven knows.”

Her pale blue eyes focused on him through the tears. “I have a new theory about God in heaven. My theory is he’s not much help to us down here. When I say my prayers, I don’t ask forgiveness anymore. I don’t ask for mercy. I don’t ask for peace. What I ask for is that I be treated with a little respect. That’s all. Just a little respect.”

The phone rang. To Jim’s astonishment, Virginia lifted the receiver and spoke her name into the mouthpiece with some semblance of control. She nodded, and looked at Jim with an expression of near-disbelief. “I understand your confusion, Mrs. Simpson, and I’ll put it in a nutshell for you. The Slow Growth Proposition will make it possible for the people of this county to exercise some control over a development industry that wants to drain the last penny of profit from the land before they pack up their bags and go do it somewhere else. Slow Growth is your chance to slow them down. It’s your chance to save what little is left of what made this a beautiful place to be. It’s that simple.”

She listened and looked at Jim again. “No, Mrs. Simpson, in spite of what that commercial said on TV last night, the Slow Growth Proposition will not kill our economy and make our traffic worse. It is not something proposed by rich Yuppies living in beachfront condos. It is not only for the south county, at the expense of the north. Those are lies told by developers who actually believe people are dumb enough to believe them. The lies were invented by a consultant in Los Angeles by the name of Harvey Keep, who is paid large amounts of money to invent such things. If you don’t understand that, Mrs. Simpson, I can’t help you. Tickets to the Wrecking Ball are fifty dollars. It’s a fund-raiser and, believe me, we need the funds. It’s Tuesday.”

In the moment of silence that followed, Jim watched his mother — the girl his mother once had been — pull a handful of tissue from a box and dry her face. “The battle keeps me sane,” she said.

“Everyone needs one.”

“Now... let me tell you about Annie.”

“First of all, she thought that someone was watching her.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Twice. The first time was months ago-late February, say. You know how Ann liked to walk the peninsula, late at night sometimes, just walk around and look at things? Well, she’d stopped by the Locker before going to the preschool. I remember clearly, she got a cup of coffee, poured in some milk, and told me how nice the sky was the night before, how many and clear the stars were. It was right after a storm, and the wind was coming out of the east, dry and colder than hell. And she told me that when she was walking around the neighborhood, she felt as if someone was behind her, but when she turned around to look, there was nothing.”

Jim considered. It was not like Ann to imagine things, or to say something was happening before she was sure it really was. Ann would not say someone was walking behind her unless she believed there was.

“When was the second time, Mom?”

“It was three weeks ago. I’d taken off around two to go help her with snack time. When I walked up, she was standing in the yard area, surrounded by all the kids. She stood still while the breeze whipped around her, looking out toward the water. She was kind of white. She looked like she was in a trance or something, until I came up and she broke into a smile. And she said, ‘Mom, it’s the strangest thing, but I feel like someone’s watching me.’ She hadn’t seen anything or heard anything — just a feeling this time. I wouldn’t even think much of it, but Annie’s not the type to make up those kinds of things, I’m the paranoid in this family. Besides... the same thing happened to me.”

“The following?”

Virginia nodded. A wisp of yellow hair, much the same color as her jacket with the marlin on the back, unwound and settled across her face. She blew on it, then positioned it behind an ear with her fingers. “I walk from here to the Locker every morning, right? There’s thirty feet of alley I go through, to the back door. Three mornings in the last two months, I saw someone standing at the corner, watching me head for the café. It’s still dark that early, so I couldn’t see much. At first, I thought it was Mackie Ruff or someone like him. He had the shape and the stillness of a waiting man. Then, two weeks ago, I went out with the Lady Anglers on twilight boat. We were all on board, weighing anchor, and I looked back toward the Locker and there he was. Same shape. Same attitude. It was him.”

“Did you recognize him?”

Virginia shook her head, then leveled her sun-paled blue eyes at Jim. “My belief is he’s one of Dennison’s men.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Stay here.” Virginia rose and disappeared into the kitchen. He heard the outside door slam, then silence. She’s going to the Locker, he thought. A few minutes later, she was back, with a heavy cardboard crate in her hands, one of the wax-sealed ones the frozen burgers arrived in.

Virginia set in on the floor, took a seat again, and pulled off the top. Inside were rows of test tubes, all labeled in her handwriting, each poked into foam to keep it upright. “This is your bay,” she said. “Someone’s been dumping in the ocean and the stuffs coming in on the tides. I’ve got samples here for three months running — starting back in late February.”

“When Ann thought she was followed.”

“Exactly.”

“What is it?”

“Seawater, with a twist — 1,1,1-Trichloroethane. It’s a solvent that kills things when you dump it in the sea. I’ve collected all these myself. Annie helped with a few. Most of them are in the Locker walk-in, but I’ve got some here at home, and Annie had three, too. We spread them out so they couldn’t all be taken at once.”

“By one of Dennison’s men?”

“That is correct. By whoever was following your sister and me. Let me tell you what’s going on here, Jim. This city is about to have the most important election in its history. The outcome will effect us more profoundly than that of any vote we’ve ever had. On one side are people who want to sell and exploit every last inch of what’s here; on the other are people who think that what’s precious should be protected. Brian Dennison’s run at mayor is being financed by the developers — mainly by C. David Cantrell of PacifiCo. It is no secret; you can read about it in the papers. Well, one of the things Cantrell wants to do is ‘redevelop’ this whole peninsula. It goes way beyond our neighborhood. The city can acquire property from anyone who won’t sell — from me, for instance, or Becky — by exercising their right of eminent domain. Dennison, as mayor, would exercise it. According to State Health and Safety Code, he’s required to close access to any public beaches when the toxic levels of TCE hit fifty parts per million. If the beaches close and stay closed long enough, people will be ready to give up and leave. This ocean here is everybody’s livelihood — directly or indirectly. My personal belief is that Dennison wants to let the levels rise until the city has to close the beaches, which will shut down this whole peninsula. Mayor Brian would tell the world what a polluted sinkhole it’s become. He’ll get council to condemn the structures. When that happens, Dave Cantrell’s redevelopment plan is going to look awfully good to the city council, especially with the value of the land way down. Basically, they’re shitting in our bay so they can buy it up cheap.”

Weir tried to grasp the magnitude of Virginia’s latest conspiracy theory. It was one in a long line that stretched back as far as he could remember. His favorite had always been the idea that the Beatles’ music was being used by Moscow to undermine the youth of America. There had been a booklet entitled Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, which Virginia had bought and distributed among peninsula parents back in the early sixties. There was also fluoridation of drinking water, LSD as government-supplied, and something about UNICEF as a way of draining U.S. dollars into the Communist bloc. These beliefs had left Jim, even as a boy, more worried about the theories than the conspiracies.

“So Dennison is using his men to shadow you, and Ann? To worry you about taking the samples.”

“Exactly. Maybe even to get the samples themselves, or tamper with them. You see, he can’t let the bay pollution become a campaign issue until it’s gotten bad enough to do him any good — otherwise he’d have to stand up and do something about it.”

Jim remembered Brian’s unease about the feds. “And he’s afraid you’re going to blow the whistle early.”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t you?”

Virginia placed the top back on the box. “All we have is trace. So far. Eight parts per million under the Coast Highway Bridge on May 3 — that was the highest.”

Jim sighed and shook his head. “Damn, Mom. You’ve got a pollution theory and no pollution. And cops running around after you to keep you from collecting evidence you’ve already got that doesn’t show anything.”

She looked at him and waited, clearly an admission that there was more here than met Jim’s eye. His mother had always been fond of watching Jim swim upstream into her silences. It took him a minute, then it was clear.

“Dennison doesn’t know you’ve only found trace. He thinks you’ve got more than you do.”

She nodded.

“How’s he know all this in the first place?”

“I’ve got one friend on his department — the Toxic Waste officer. He’s a good man, and he’s... well, intimated that I’ve been collecting data.”

“All this to get Dennison distracted from the election.”

Virginia’s pale eyes took on the clarity of anger. “All this to save the city I live in.”

Weir knew better than to argue. He stood, glanced down at the picture of Becky Flynn on the pamphlets, then went to the window and looked out at the descending evening. “Who’s the cop you’re so friendly with?”

“Sgt. Dale Blodgett.”

Jim considered this, let the implications roll around inside his head, let them come to rest with as little interference as he could allow. There was the obvious. “Did he know Ann? Blodgett, I mean.”

Virginia tracked his movement back toward the table. “We made a few sample runs together. The three of us spent some time patrolling the bay in his boat. Why?”

“I’m just curious, Mom. That’s all.”

Virginia’s silence accused him. Weir let it wash off him, as he had done so many times in his life. The thing about his mother was that she was losing people to care about, and replacing them with people to hate. Poon had always been such a goofball, he thought: How did they ever stand each other? It seemed important now to get back on track.

“I wonder why she didn’t tell Raymond — about being followed.”

Virginia shook her head, clueless, then sighed very deeply. “I don’t think that she and Ray had been talking much, Jim. Annie was far too private to confide something like that to me, but I think there may have been some... strain. This is interesting: I saw a light on at Ann’s Kids one night when I couldn’t sleep. This was back in early April. It was midnight — after Annie was done with work but before Ray would be home. So I walked over to the school, and there was Ann in her office, writing in this book. It was a leather-bound journal, good paper, blank pages. She seemed embarrassed, asked me not to tell Ray she was spending precious time keeping a diary. And I remember thinking, What business is it of Ray’s what my daughter writes?”

Jim remembered no diary in Ann’s house, nothing on the impound list to account for it in Evidence. Check with Innelman he thought, and check the office of Ann’s Kids.

“Of course,” said Virginia, “Ann always did like to write things down.”

“Yeah, I remember that.” Jim remembered a favorite Ann writing, a short story called “The Fists of Muhammad,” in which a teenage girl dreams of having hands like Muhammad Ali’s in order to beat up on her obnoxious younger — but stronger — brother. She’d typed it up on Virginia’s old Royal and left it tacked to the door of his room. Ann. “Becky told me that Ann didn’t seem right lately.”

Virginia took a deep breath and looked down at her big rough hands. “Jim, I really don’t know if she was happy anymore. This was a bad winter, but you wouldn’t know because you were gone. Cold enough to freeze my hot-water pipes — the old ones that run over the roof — wind all day, just couldn’t thaw out. You know how Annie and Ray’s house is — just a shell with carpet inside. I got them a good electric blanket and one of those electric heaters that cost a thousand dollars a day to run. Anyway, Ann was down, withdrawn, smiling all the time when she didn’t mean it. You know Annie — she was tough to read, but if you knew the way she was, you could see the falseness in her. Then, the end of April, she was coming out of it. We got freak weather then — eighty degrees, dry and clear. I thought maybe she was just thawing out with the sun. She was okay for about a week. She looked great, put on a little weight, rosy in the face. Pregnant, right? Just absolutely alive with promise. Then, second or third week of April, she went back down, worse than before. And she tried to hide it even harder... pure Weir. It lasted until about a week ago. She went up again, like nothing was ever wrong.”

Virginia was quiet for a while. As the silence stretched on, Weir could feel the ghosts of Poon and Jake and now Ann lurking about them, easing around the air, trying to get through and mutter the truth to them. The curtains swayed, and a shadow did or did not pass across the reflective surface of the sliding glass door. “Did you see her that day, Mom? Before you went to the Whale for wine?”

Virginia nodded. “I went by the preschool at two, to help with the milk and snacks. Scotty handles the café when I’m out. She wasn’t all the way there, Jim. Little things, like she gave milk to Danny, but Danny’s allergic to milk and always has orange juice. She caught herself, but I thought she was going to break into tears over it. She dropped a plate of crackers and almost cried. Something was wrong, but she wouldn’t say what. She said hormones. Damn.”

“Did you go into her office?”

“Yes.”

“That’s when you saw the roses on her desk?”

Virginia nodded. “Purple ones. Lovely. Come clean with the roses, Jim. What’s the connection?”

“There were eleven roses... at the scene. On Annie’s body.”

“Oh, Christ.”

Jim tried to graph Ann’s ups and downs over the last months, the months he was away. So much of the picture was missing. “When Annie was having a bad time this winter, did you ask her about it?”

“Of course I did. She admitted to me that things were getting to her. You have to understand how hard she and Ray worked. Look at Annie’s life: up at seven to get breakfast for Ray, then be off for the preschool. Home at four to do the house, do her errands, then off at six-thirty for the cocktail rush at the Whale. Back home again at eleven to get something ready for Ray to eat when he came home. Wait up for him, go to sleep at midnight or one, unless Ray was studying for an hour or so, which he usually did. Look at Ray’s life. Up at seven, study a while, drive up to morning class, home early afternoon for a nap, then go to work at five. He doesn’t get home before midnight, sometimes one in the morning. I never saw two people work harder in my whole life. I think they got so used to the treadmill, they wouldn’t know what to do if they got off it. Sometimes when I looked at them, I had the feeling that the only thing holding them together was the struggle. Like if they slowed down to smell the roses — there are those roses again — they’d just blow away in the breeze.”

“Is that what Annie told you?”

“That’s what she said. I waited around the Whale one night to walk her home. Terrible rainstorm, cold, arctic air. We went into her place for some tea, and we huddled in our coats and waited for those dumb wall furnaces to kick in. We stayed up a while and talked. She told me the whole thing might be worth it if she had a family around her. She wanted a child so badly, but the uterus... and she told me she wished she could point to one thing and say, ‘It’s all worth it because of this.’ She just looked so lost, wrapped in that big parka of hers. Thirty-nine years old and working two jobs to provide for a family she thought she’d never have. I don’t want to cry again.”

“Mom, do you think she’d see another man?”

Virginia looked at him a little vehemently, shaking her head. “She might. There was enough Poon in her. Do you?”

Jim thought for a moment, though he’d been wondering about this question since Raymond’s first call that night, saying that Ann wasn’t home. The truth of the matter, he thought, was that Ann would never tell him if she was. Not just because of Ray, but because of Ann herself. How well had he really known her? There had always been an unspoken agreement between them not to drag each other through every pit. That would be demeaning. There was the unspoken assumption that they didn’t mess each other up with things that were beneath a certain level of dignity neither had defined but each recognized. There was always the formality of borders, of belief in the idea that good fences make good siblings. Weir thought now: What shit.

“I really don’t know,” he said finally. “I wish I did.”

Virginia looked at him. “I know. It’s okay, Jim.”

“Have any of Ray’s friends from the department been around the last few months?”

“You mean around the café?”

“I mean around Ray and Ann.”

Virginia thought for a moment, shifted slowly in her chair. “Last month, a Saturday night, Annie and Ray and a young man — I think his name was Kearns — came by to say hello. Kearns is one of Ray’s friends from the cops. They were all dressed up, hitting the local bars. When they left, Ann had each one by the arm, in the middle of them, you know. It reminded me of when the men came home from the war. Why?”

“I’m trying to get a feel for whom she was seeing.”

“I sure as hell didn’t say she was seeing him.”

“Blodgett, maybe?”

Virginia’s gaze was fierce and cold. “Just on our runs out to the bay. I can categorically tell you that there was nothing between Annie and him. Nothing.”

“Anyone else? Any men you haven’t seen around before?”

“No.”

“How about him?”

Jim pulled out the snapshot of Horton and Edith Goins. Virginia studied the picture at length, first at arm’s length, then up close. “No. But he looks... I can’t say familiar, but he looks like he might be familiar.”

Virginia continued her reconnaissance of the snapshot. She held it up at different angles to the light. “Who is he?”

“He’s a released sex offender. He did something like what happened to Annie, back in Ohio, years ago.”

“Is that his mother?”

Jim nodded. “He sent her a postcard from the Locker, Mom — the ‘Wet Your Line’ ones.”

“I’ve seen him!” Virginia’s wide eyes went from Jim, to the photo, then back to Jim. “He’s come in three or four times. He wears these bright Hawaiian shirts and loud pants. He looked like someone from Ohio trying to fit in here. I’m positive it’s him. He should be arrested immediately.”

“The police are taking some evidence from his parents’ apartment. I think they’ll bring him in for questioning. Soon.”

Virginia looked at the picture again. “I’m sure I’ve seen him, at the Locker. I’ll testify to that, under oath.”

“First things first, Mom. I don’t have to tell you what to do, if you see him again.”

“You sure as hell don’t. I’ll hold him at gunpoint with Poon’s forty-five.”

“Call me, would be good enough. Or Brian Dennison.”

Virginia was about to say something about Dennison but stopped short. She started stuffing Flynn for Mayor circulars, with a vengeance.

“When was the last time Dale Blodgett saw Ann, as far as you know?”

“I’ll tell you about Dale Blodgett. He’s a cop. He’s a quiet man, doesn’t say much. I kind of like him. He’s the only cop with the guts to speak out for Becky and for Slow Growth. He’s the only cop Newport Beach has who works Toxic Waste, and he has to do that as overtime. But he wasn’t seeing Ann. I’m amazed Dennison hasn’t fired him or something.”

“Besides Kearns, have any other cops been hanging around with Ray and Annie?”

“How come you’re so interested in Ray’s cop friends?”

“I’m thinking they might be willing to put in some volunteer time, for Ann,” he lied.

“I think they should be considered suspects. Annie was fully aware of the TCE dumping.”

“There hasn’t been any dumping, Mom. You said that yourself. Trace only.”

Virginia looked at him with her customary deep suspicion. Wouldn’t she like to know what Mackie Ruff saw, he thought. The telephone rang again. Weir kissed Virginia’s cheek and went upstairs to get Dale Blodgett’s address from his file.

When the phone was free, he called Dennison to see whether a personal journal belonging to Ann had been booked in by Innelman. None had. He called Blodgett to see whether tonight would be a good time to talk, but the line was busy.

Jim wrote down the address on a slip of paper, put it into his pocket, and slipped back downstairs. While Virginia stuffed mailers in the living room, he found the extra key she kept for the preschool.

Jim was surprised to see a faint light on inside Ann’s Kids. The chain-link gate was open and someone sat at Ann’s desk. Jim could see the motionless profile enhanced by the soft fluorescence of a reading lamp.

His pulse quickened as he pushed open the gate, crossed the little play yard, and climbed the porch steps. In the front room, he stopped for a moment. Whoever was sitting in Ann’s office neither spoke nor moved.

Jim took two steps down the short hallway, then followed the light. At the doorway, he leaned forward and looked in.

“Don’t go for a career in burglary,” said Raymond, seated at Ann’s desk. “Let me guess. Virginia told you about the diary, and you wanted one more look at a flower vase that had fresh water but no flowers in it.”

Jim went in, studying Raymond’s face, his nerves settling. The lamplight bounced off a blotter, illuminating Ray from below. His eyes were black but clear, and Jim could see in them the unmistakable influence of pain. In another time, Jim thought, Ray would have stood up and bear-hugged him. In another time, he thought, we wouldn’t even be here. “You okay?”

“Thanks for the calls and visit. Guess I slept right through it. I needed some sleep.”

“How are you feeling now?”

“I’ll get there,” Ray said. “You?”

“I’ll get there, too.”

Raymond took a deep breath and leaned forward. “Innelman came and got the vase for prints, but all Robbins could find were Ann’s and a few tyke-sized smudges. I’ve looked through here three times for her journal. It’s not at home. It’s not here. It’s starting to piss me off.”

Weir looked down at a half-eaten sandwich and a carton of milk that sat on the desk in the pale light.

“Get this,” said Raymond, tapping the desk blotter. “Upper-right corner here — ‘Rita,’ ‘Renata,’ ‘Rene.’ Ann liked these R names for girls. I was holding out for Mary. Typical Catholic.”

Their eyes met, then darted away from each other like aquarium fish. Jim wondered at the terrible capriciousness of life, the way it dangled so much possibility, then yanked it away. Life was a little of heaven, a little of hell, and a whole lot of neither.

“I wish for just ten minutes I could forget,” said Ray. “Just ten minutes of being... well, being not this.”

“Let’s walk the neighborhood.”

Ray clicked off the light. “Sure.”

They headed north up the bayfront, past Becky’s, toward the yacht club. The little docks and private piers jutted out to their right, lost in fog. No sky was visible above them, just the pale marine layer that seemed both lazy and eternal. It was the kind of afternoon not content to surrender to evening. Weir was easily drawn back in time to the long summers when he and Ray ran amok here — skateboards and fishing poles, mud fights and running dives, sandbagging the Locker during the storm of ’68, the occasional blessed trip out to sea with Poon and Jake. They say we have our memories, thought Jim, but really our memories have us.

Raymond walked along, a half step behind him, in that slow, even gait he’d had since boyhood. “What do you think of the Lakers?” he asked suddenly.

Jim understood that for the next few minutes at least, Ray was going to be in the world without Ann. It was a shakedown cruise. “Detroit’s too tough. Portland is, too.”

Ray dribbled an imaginary ball past Weir, stopped, sprung, and sent off a fadeaway jumper. “They need a guard who’s a little reckless. A guy who can make things happen. How about me?”

“You’re too short, too old, and too slow.”

Jim looked at Raymond now, but what he saw was Raymond at the age of sixteen, on the basketball court at Newport Harbor High. He wasn’t tall then, and he still hadn’t lost all of his baby fat. Raymond wasn’t fast. But his results were astonishing, especially on defense. An opposing guard would bring the ball down court, angle left or right to set up a play, make his first pass, and... there would be Raymond, easing across the court in seeming slow motion, gathering the pass midair into an outstretched hand and turning toward his own basket. If there was a loose ball, Raymond would come up with it. He couldn’t jump, but he knew when to jump. His passing was so cunning and anticipatory that he’d bounce beautiful leads off the heads of teammates too slow to realize an assist was coming their way. Raymond seemed to play the game in some time zone of the near future, while everyone else scrambled helplessly in the contested present.

Ray sunk another jump shot. “Maybe I’ll play the Italian league. They love Americans over there.”

“That doesn’t make you any taller, younger, or faster, Ray. I think you’re better off as a cop.”

Jim took an imaginary pass; bounced it back. He watched Raymond out ahead of him a step and thought again how Ray’s anticipation spilled over into his work as a cop. Jim remembered the dozens of times he and Ray worked Sheriff patrol together, when Ray would just seem to know. They might answer two different alarm calls in the same hour. On one, Ray would sigh, get out of the unit, saunter up to a door, let himself in, and turn off the nerve-jangling security system. On the next, he would study the building from behind the windshield of their car, get this bright, eager look in his eyes, suggest that Jim take one entrance, then slip around to the other. Sooner or later — usually sooner — Ray would come marching out with some hapless junkie handcuffed to himself, or some terrified kid just then finding out that crime doesn’t pay. Ray would smile like a fisherman with a great catch.

Anticipation, thought Weir. Ray always had called it just luck.

“Or maybe Mexico,” said Raymond. “Forget basketball. Go to a village, become a fisherman, marry a Mexican girl who’ll have ten of my babies.” Ray stopped, touched his toes, straightened, and took a deep breath. “It’s weird, Jim — you spend your life on the treadmill and when it shuts down and you can do anything you want, all you can come up with are dumb clichés. I really want to live in a Mexican village, don’t I? With the pigs and chickens running loose and everybody sitting around a TV in the cantina watching soccer and ‘Starsky & Hutch’ in Spanish.”

“I can think of worse things.”

“You know why that scene appeals to you? Because you’re basically lazy. Who else would quit the Sheriffs on his way up to section head, so he could boat around the Pacific and look for other people’s treasure?”

“If I listened to you and Becky, I’d be sitting in some county cubicle nine to five, trying to catch bad guys I don’t care about. I’d still be drinking a sixer a night to put an edge on the boredom. No thanks.”

“True. You’d be an actual adult.”

“It felt pretty adult — my ass in jail.”

“Maybe I’m dumb, but I’d rather be putting dopes in jail than sitting in one myself.”

“I’ll opt for neither. How’s that?”

Raymond smiled. “Good for you, James. I give you shit but you know I’m pulling for you. Just remember that sometimes you have to stay and fight it out.”

“Noted.”

“Becky missed you a lot, I think.”

“I missed her, too. It surprised me.”

Raymond looked at Jim, a little knowingly. Ray had always billed himself as a step ahead in matters of the heart. It was also a backhanded compliment to Jim, with Ray being married to his sister. And Jim had always envied them a little. He had found himself, long ago, aspiring to the simplicity of Ray and Ann, but there was something in the marriage contract that on the most basic of levels scared the hell out of him. His deepest instincts told him that nothing between two people is ever really simple at all, especially if one of them is a Weir. Fact of the matter, he thought, is that people change. Is that good or bad?

A mullet splashed somewhere beside them, invisible but disclosed by its graceless plop.

Raymond waited a few steps ahead now, frozen, looking over the seawall to the narrow strip of sand below. Jim caught up and followed his gaze. A pure white heron stood not ten feet away, its tapered head housing an intense brown eye that beheld them without moving. A breeze touched its feathers. It stepped toward the bay with one stilt leg, its neck essing out, then freezing. The perfect eye locked onto them again.

“I didn’t do it,” said Raymond.

“What, Ray?”

“Didn’t think about Ann for ten minutes.”

Weir knew how much his sister had loved the herons. She had caught up with one as a girl, suffering a punctured shoulder for her trouble, later making a necklace from the feather she’d retained in her pudgy girl’s hand.

“Annie,” said Ray.

“I know.”

“Everywhere I look, man. She’s everywhere I go.”