Pacific Beat

Chapter 24

Jim could see the outline of Sweetheart Deal fifty yards ahead of them. She slouched at her mooring, the mast angled skyward in an empty crucifix, the gull nest atop it an unmanned crown of thorns. Easy to see why the cops had overlooked it, Weir thought: All it looked good for was a fire hazard and a wildlife refuge. Raymond has got this wrong. Balboa Island lay at the far shore, then the mainland and Coast Highway; beyond them, the mirrored glass of the PacifiCo Tower presided from a near-distant hill, dotted like an i by the moon.

Raymond sat in front of him in the dinghy, his face pale against the night. He had not spoken the whole trip back; now he let it all out in a rush of words that seemed almost beyond his control. “I waited for it,” he said. “I knew it was coming, as soon as we found that garage-door opener. I think I knew, down somewhere, that I wasn’t enough for her. Sometimes, it struck me as okay — it seemed like she was... under appreciated. I forgave her, in advance. Annie would surprise me when I came home from work. One night not long ago, she wasn’t there to greet me as usual. I went into the bedroom and she was spread out on the bed, nothing on but a flimsy robe that was open most of the way, and a garter belt thing, and a lacy top. She was made up heavy, red lipstick, and her hair was pulled back the way I like it. There was a bottle of white wine on the nightstand, mostly gone, and she was holding a glass, resting it between her legs. Her fingernails were red, like her lips. She didn’t say anything at all — she just pulled me down. Those were the times I wanted her the most and it wouldn’t happen. I wanted her because she wanted me, but there was a short in the wiring somewhere and the whole thing got turned into fear. Mr. Night is someone who doesn’t have that problem.

“That night, I got to thinking about myself. Annie finished the bottle, got sick, passed out. I saw myself from the outside for a while, and what I saw was a good guy. A good cop. A man who married his high school sweetheart and tried hard to make a good life for her. A man learning the law. A guy who didn’t drink much or smoke. And you know what I wondered? I wondered if I might be better off — if we both might — if I wasn’t such a goddamned Boy Scout.”

Jim pulled on the oars, said nothing.

“You know something, Jim? I’ve had this feeling ever since I saw Annie down at the Back Bay, that when I kill the guy who did it, I’ll be... complete. That I’ll be worthy of her. That all the times I couldn’t do what she wanted won’t matter anymore. That when I kill him, I’ll kill that thing inside me that failed. That somehow, she ended up that way so I could become the man I always thought she wanted. Dumb, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to tell you something else,” said Raymond. “As soon as I read that letter about Annie and him, there was a voice inside my head. The voice says that Annie got what she deserved. I hate myself for thinking that, but it just happens on its own.”

“Some things aren’t worth thinking,” said Jim. “I’m not sure how you tune them out.”

Raymond’s face was beveled in moonlight and darkness. “Are you with me on this? If you’re not, it would help me to know.”

Weir wondered whether Francisco Cruz had asked the same of his men, the men who had finally abandoned him to the bullets of Joaquin La Perla. For awhile, at least, the answer must have been yes. “I’m with you, Ray.”

“Because you want to kill him?”

“Because I don’t want him to kill you.”

“When we get way out on the edge, I hope you keep your footing.”

“I do, too, Ray.”

He eased up to Sweetheart Deal and tossed the line. Raymond climbed out, the Whaler shifting with the loss of weight, the beam of his flashlight crossing the rust stains on the hull. Jim took the lantern and followed him, feeling himself drawn into Raymond’s net of logic regarding this ship: Ann protesting her sale after Poon’s death, Ann cleaning her up once a year to beat the city dereliction notices, Ann clinging to this rotting vestige as if it was a direct link to Poon himself. In a sense, he realized, it was. He could see Ann in his mind’s eye, reaching from the dinghy to steady herself against Sweetheart Deal, fingers touching the rough deck, knowing that the sea in which the old boat rocked was the same Pacific that had accepted Poon’s scattered ashes, perhaps seeing herself as an agent afloat upon this great separating river, as a connection between Poon’s underworld and the world of which she was still a citizen. Touch the ocean, touch the ship, touch the Father, a finger from above meets the finger from below, each outstretched and yearning. Ann, daddy’s girl. Ann, like Poon, the unfettered, the ulterior, the unloyal.

Jim realized as he climbed aboard that he hadn’t been on Sweetheart Deal since his father died, a decade ago. The deck was pliant under his feet. She smelled of mildew and the acid of bird waste that had piled up behind the mast, blown in flight just slightly astern by the prevailing onshore breezes. Raymond’s light led them through a squeaking door on which hung a lock too rusted to fasten anymore, and into the cabin. Jim, still shivering, lit the lantern. As the mantles glowed and the light gathered, he saw nothing that he was expecting.

The floor, repaneled in teakwood, was clean and shining. The walls were freshly painted a gleaming white, and there were bright flowered curtains over the portholes. The table was lowered from its stowed position, and covered with a simple white and pink checkered cloth. A single director’s chair was pushed up neatly under it. The air smelled faintly of flowers from the multitude of sachets that hung, sat, dangled, rested in every possible nook or cranny. A bud vase stood in the middle, complete with a purple rose. Jim touched it with a fingertip: silk. Beside it were two candles in short glass sticks, each half-burned. The berth was made up carefully, with a spread that picked up the background blue of the curtains, a couple of fluffy pillows, and a knitted afghan folded on the foot. A half dozen stuffed animals were tucked up against the pillows: floppy-eared dogs, a rabbit, a koala, a big Mickey Mouse.

“I thought...” said Raymond. “I thought she just threw this stuff away. It was... years ago.”

“I remember that dog from when she was a girl.”

“Didn’t she used to have curtains like these in her room?”

“Yes. Mom made that afghan.”

“The pillows look familiar, too.”

“They’re thirty years old, Ray.”

“Jesus. I can’t believe this.”

Weir couldn’t, either. It was like stepping into Ann’s girlhood room, right down to the horse miniatures that now stood upon the Formica pasture of the galley counter. He looked at Raymond, whose mouth actually hung open, a slow waltz of astonishment circling in his eyes. The lantern hissed, glowed brighter. But the more Jim looked, the more he saw that this was not just a girl’s cabin at all, but a woman’s. Behind the model horses sat a row of books: the Hardy and Eliot that Ann always had loved, May’s The Courage to Create, three volumes of Neruda, two of Marianne Moore, Marquez’s big novels, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth George. Holding up the books at each end were two bottles of wine, all four of them expensive cabernets. Two wineglasses stood to the left of the books, a bottle opener beside them. Next to that was a pack of cigarettes, with two extending from the open hole as if in casual invitation. Atop the pack rested a lighter in a simple silver case, around which was wrapped a roll of U.S. postage stamps. Leaning against the galley wall was one large bar of Belgian chocolate, unopened.

Jim’s vision moved again to the fold-out table. At the far end, away from the chair, was a tumbler — one of Poon’s old scotch glasses, he knew — filled with pens and pencils.

He looked at Raymond, who looked back. “Where she wrote,” he said. “The journal can’t be far.”

But the leather-bound book was nowhere obvious. They searched the drawers and shallow cupboards, the stowage space beneath the berth and benches, the tiny shelf in the water closet, the railed compartments behind the countertop. It was not under a pillow or stuffed animal, not tucked into the space behind the fold-out table, not beneath the round pillow that Ann had set on the seat of the director’s chair.

“Outside,” said Jim.

“She wouldn’t leave it outside,” said Raymond.

“Well, Ray, it’s not here. I’m checking outside.”

In the lantern light, Jim unlatched the two stowage holds. Raymond’s flashlight beam sprayed across the life jackets and faded orange preservers, the buoys and nylon lines, the ancient green wool blankets, flares, spear guns, fishing tackle, Poon’s old lever-action .22. They unfolded the blankets, pulled out the preservers and life buoys, then put them back.

“Engine compartment,” said Weir.

“It’s going to be a mess,” said Raymond.

And that it was, an oil-caked Hades of grime and rust, what was left of a once-proud diesel that seemed to have somehow shrunk with time to little more than a blackened mechanical artifact.

Jim was lifting the lantern up for a better look when he saw the corner of plastic sticking up from under the plug wires. When he pulled, it slipped down and almost away — a surprising weight and mass. Carefully, he worked it out. The plastic was cut from drop cloth, with the four corners joined at the top by twine. Inside it was a brown grocery bag, folded over. It weighed at least a pound. “We just passed Go,” said Weir. “Take it inside.”

Jim set the package on Ann’s table, carefully unknotting the twine and pulling out the paper bag. This he sat upright and unfolded, holding open the top with both hands. Raymond shined in his flashlight. Weir could see at a glance that there was no leather-bound journal. What there were was a small bundle of letters held together with more twine, and a stack of old school notebooks with covers of various colors. He took the letters out, untied the twine, and spread the envelopes over the tablecloth.

He picked up the top one, addressed in type to Ann Cruz at a post office box in Balboa, no return. Jim recognized the PO box number, one of Poon’s old “secrets” that somehow everyone in the family knew, one that Jim had long assumed was buried with his father ten years ago. The letter was postmarked on May 15 of this year, the day before Ann died.

For the next hour, while Dwight Innelman and Roger Deak collected specimens and dusted for fingerprints, Jim and Raymond read through the letters to Ann, holding them to the lamplight in rubber-gloved hands, looking for the sentence, the phrase, the word that might identify Mr. Night. But it was almost as if they had been written with this in mind — they were general, obscure, shadowy.

In the end, to Weir, only three things were clear: that Mr. Night loved Ann in a passionate, reckless way; that she was carrying his child, that he had known her, and she him, for at least a quarter of a century; that she was planning to end the affair.

He met Raymond’s stare from across the table, a look so fraught with shame and helplessness that Jim wanted to turn away. But Raymond did first. He gazed down at the letter in his hand with the spent expression of a man whose entire flotilla of belief has just been blown to sea by a storm of cruel, undeniable fact. The comfort of denial was finally gone.

Dwight Innelman stood over the table with one of the wineglasses from the counter. “The whole place is crawling with prints,” he said. “Check this.”

Jim studied the white dust, saw the perfect thumbprint halfway down, the two lovely fingertips opposite.

Raymond looked up at him. “What did she know about Duty Free that Mr. Night was afraid of?”

“She saw the dumpers. Blodgett said they weren’t close enough to make them, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe Ann saw more than he did. Maybe she recognized the boat.” Again Weir thought of Blodgett’s implication, that Becky was doing the dumping, or at least someone using her boat was. No, he thought. Take a stand.

Raymond considered. “Dave Smith?”

“Or call him Mr. Night.”

Jim stood.

“Where now?”

“Phil Kearns,” he said, “has an alibi for us to meet.”

Half an hour later, showered and changed, they sat in Jim’s truck outside the Whale’s Tale, watching as Sgt. Kearns pulled away from the curb in a new Miata convertible.

Kearns had said it wasn’t far. Jim followed him back out to the boulevard, then left. Fog was settling in again; the traffic was light. A fat moon hung like a spider in a web of clouds. Two miles down the peninsula, Kearns pulled into a driveway all but hidden by towering avocado and dense orange trees. Jim looped around and parked along the curb. Kearns nodded at Weir as he shut his car door and disappeared into the foliage around the old house. He was wearing a pastel linen suit, loafers, and no socks.

“He’s got to quit watching so much TV,” said Raymond. “And his alibi’s going to be a chick.”

“He’s got enough of them.”

Ray shook his head, tapped his fingers on the outside of the door.

Weir looked out. He could see a lit fraction of upstairs window through the trees, the silhouette of someone standing there. Kearns? The girl? How much had he rehearsed her? It shouldn’t be hard to tell.

A moment later, Kearns came from the house, winding his way through the front-yard jungle. In front of him was a girl with bright blond hair. As they headed for the truck, Weir pushed his briefcase under the seat and Ray got out to let them in.

She climbed up and sat down beside him in a halo of perfume. Kearns squeezed in next to her, then Ray. She had on a pair of complex athletic shoes, thick socks pulled up over faded jeans, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket. Her hair was pulled up over her head, held in place at the roots by a rubber band, the rest of it falling down willy-nilly. She had a high forehead, a round little nose, pouting pink lips. Her eyes were large and filled with the confidence that comes from unwavering male attention and the notion, as yet unchallenged, that a girl can get by with a bod and a smile. She looked thoughtproof, about sixteen.

“I’m Lucinda Fostes.”

“Jim Weir.”

“Cool.”

Jim pulled out and headed back down the boulevard.

“Jim’s got a few questions for you about last Monday night,” said Kearns. “Answer him honestly. You don’t have to hide anything, or protect me in any way. Got it?”

“Yeah,” said Lucinda. She was chewing gum. “Go ahead.”

“Tell me what you were doing at midnight.”

She popped the gum, leaning forward to look out the window and point. “My friend Kimber lives there. She’s rich.”

“Sunday night, Lucinda,” prompted Kearns.

“Why don’t you just tell him?”

“He wants to hear it from you. Go.”

“Okay, all right.” She sat back, crossed her hands over her knees, and shrugged histrionically. “First I went down to Fry’s — that’s the market — and got a guy to buy me a six-pack. Then I went down to Thirteenth to drink it. I was kinda like pissed off at my ex-boyfriend, Sean, so I drank four of them and went to his house up on Twentieth. He wasn’t home, his dad said. So I drank the other two rilly fast and went over to Charlie’s Chili for a burger.”

“This is before midnight?” asked Jim.

“This is like, quarter ’til eleven. So after I ate, I stood around Rumple’s for a while and listened to the band. I used to get in, but they carded me last month and I’m fully eighty-sixed now. So I just started walking, heading up Newport Boulevard.”

“Off the peninsula?”

“I don’t know. I can’t keep the peninsula and the mainland and like, all the islands, straight. I walked up the road, you know, toward like Costa Mesa. I was coming down off that swirly bridge when Phil pulled up in his cop car to talk.”

“How long have you known Phil?”

“Oh...” She chewed, gum snapping. “A few months. He’s my bud.”

“Then what?”

“He told me I should get home because it was almost eleven-thirty, and I told him I was hyper. So he said get in and he’d drive me around a minute, then take me home. So I did.”

Lucinda turned to watch Fifteenth Street go by. Weir noted Fry’s Market on the corner, wherein she had scored her beer. He glanced over to Ray at the far end of the seat.

“That’s where we like to hang in summer,” she said. “Cool guys, hard bodies galore. Over there’s where Lauren lives. She used to be Sean’s girlfriend.”

“Where did you drive?”

“Well, over the bridge, then down Coast Highway to Balboa Island. We went across on the ferry and Phil dropped me off at home. It was one-fifteen when I got in. I remember because my grandma said something about it the next day. I’m supposed to be in like one at the latest.”

Raymond’s voice had an edge. “An hour and forty-five minutes to go from the bridge to the ferry to the peninsula? That should take half an hour. You barely made the last ferry run.”

Lucinda popped her gum and looked first at Kearns, then over to Ray, then left to Jim. Weir watched the spray of her ponytail bobbing with the bump of the truck. She said something to Kearns that Jim couldn’t make out. What Kearns said back was, “Go ahead.”

“Well,” she said. “We like walked.”

“Like walked.”

“Yeah. And talked. He talked. That took maybe an hour. Phil’s always telling me to get my shit together and make something of myself. He’s always telling me not just to give it away to anybody. By that, he means my body. He’s always telling me if I get good grades and a couple years at a JC, I might get a clerk’s job at the station. It starts at nine hundred sixty a month, so it’s good pay.”

The hour in question, thought Weir. Kearns is clean if Lucinda is on the level. The idea hit him that she wasn’t complicated enough to lie for anybody but herself.

She leaned toward Kearns, whispered something, then turned to Jim again. “I might as well tell you I tried to get him to like do me right there in the car, but he wouldn’t. Plus, I’m eighteen, so I can do what I want.”

“Guess so,” said Jim.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“No.” Weir looked past Lucinda’s ponytail to Kearns, who was leaning back, eyeing him with a certain grimness. Kearns’s eyes trailed down to her, then back to Weir, a regretting expression: Look what I passed up.

Jim suddenly U-turned on Coast Highway and headed back toward Balboa.

“Cool,” said Lucinda.

“Sure there’s nothing else you want from her?” said Kearns. “Ask away, Weir. It’s now or you’re out of my face for good. That was the deal. I’ll have to tell Internal Affairs the same goddamned thing, if that makes you feel any better.”

“That’s enough.”

Jim headed back down the boulevard in silence, while Lucinda pointed out highlights to him and Ray. Kearns had apparently had this tour before. It seemed as if she knew everybody on the peninsula: Colin lives here, Ryan here, Kate and Max right there. A thought struck him. “You get around, don’t you, Lucinda?”

“Well, I’ve been living here for a year, and visiting every summer from Michigan for like, ten.”

“See a lot of faces.”

“As much as anybody else, I guess.”

He slid his briefcase from under the seat — nudging her legs, at which she giggled — laid it across her lap, and flipped open the two latches. Copies of Goins’s photograph lay on top, Dennison’s enlargements for the door-to-door.

He turned on the interior light, shut the lid, and set the photo on top of it.

“How about this one?”

“Joseph?”

Weir felt a dose of adrenaline kick in. Raymond’s clear, fierce eyes held his glance for a beat. He backed off the gas and held the truck in the middle of the lane as he turned to look at Lucinda Fostes. Kearns already had placed an assuring hand on her knee.

“Yeah, Joseph,” said Weir. “Where can we find him?”

Lucinda held up the copy, gum popping as she studied it. “Who’s the lady?”

“His mother. Do you know where he is?”

She sighed, put the picture on the briefcase lid, and looked at Jim. A kind of snotty vacancy crossed her face, then dissolved. “His name is Joseph Gray and he has a blue Porsche that’s in the shop. He’s Gramma’s new boarder. He moved in yesterday.”

Weir floored it. From the corner of his eye, he could see Phil Kearns reaching under his coat to snap off the safety strap on his holster. He pulled up to a liquor store and slammed on the brakes. Ray was out before the truck stopped, throwing someone off a pay phone to call in backup. Thirty seconds later, he was back in and Jim’s truck was screeching away from the curb in a cloud of tire smoke.

“Whoa,” said Lucinda.

“Was that his light I saw upstairs?” asked Weir.

“I guess so,” she said apprehensively.

“How many rooms upstairs?”

“Mine, and his, and the bathroom.”

“His is on the right, facing the street?”

“Yeah.Are you guys after Joe now, or what?”

“When we get to the house, you stay here,” said Weir. “Don’t move from this truck, not one inch. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, but like, whoa... this truck’s fast. What did he do? What did Joseph do?”

“Shut up,” said Kearns. “I’ll take the back door, Jim. You two head up front. Is there another way out, Lucinda?”

“No. You guys are like all over it.”

“Who’s home besides your grandmother?”

“Nobody I know of,” she said, bracing herself on the dash as Weir ran the red light at Dillman’s.

“Does he have a gun?” asked Kearns.

“I don’t know.”

“No car?” asked Weir.

“It’s in the shop.”

“What are you going to do when I stop this truck, Lucinda?”

“Stay in it. Gawd... wait ’til my friends hear about this!”

“Got a piece, Ray?”

“Ankle biter. Let’s go.”

Jim slowed down before the house, turned into the driveway, cut the lights and engine, and pocketed the keys. He looked once at the girl.

“I’m staying,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

On the porch, they waited ten seconds for Kearns to find the back way in. Then Ray tried the door, found it open, and stepped inside. Looking down the entryway to the living room, Jim could see a white-haired old woman sitting up asleep on the couch. The stairs were to his right. He heard Kearns in the kitchen, saw his shadow on the floor. Two at a time, he took the stairs, wood creaking under the runner, one hand on the railing and the other holding his father’s old .45. Ray was two steps behind. Jim stopped on the landing. Lucinda’s room, away from the street, was dark. Down the hall and across from it was Goins’s, the door shut and a faint light coming from beneath it. Jim lined himself up opposite the door, flicked off the safety, reached to the knob, and turned. Half an inch was all it rotated before stopping against the lock.

Weir stepped back and lowered his shoulder for the charge, but Raymond flew past him and slammed into the door.

With a shriek of breaking wood, it flew open, shot all the way back, and slammed against the wall with a thud. Jim, in a crouch, swung the gun, far left to right, his eyes drinking in the room as fast as he could make them. Ray moved left. Jim spun right, backed into a corner and scanned again over the automatic’s sight. The curtains of the open window swayed inward. He swung, held. The curtains swayed back. Weir dove to the floor, landing hard on his belly, the gun pointing under the bed. He rolled up, ran out of the room, down the hallway to the empty bathroom, then into Lucinda’s perfume-heavy lair, a place of rock-star posters, stuffed animals, clothes thrown everywhere.

Raymond was already there, slipping his gun into its ankle holster.

Back in Goins’s room, Jim really looked at everything for the first time: the computer on the desk, the cardboard box beside the bed, the pair of old-fashioned ladies’ eyeglasses sitting on the pillow with a piece of paper under them. The paper said, “I found your glasses, Mrs. Fostes. Love, Joseph.” Standing at the window, Jim guessed the distance to the thick branch of the avocado tree. Six feet max, he thought, easy enough.

Kearns blew in, a storm of pastel linens with a shiny 9mm auto.

“He cleared,” said Jim.

“I’ll call Watch. Window?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Shit.”

“He can’t get far. Hurry up, Phil.”

Weir waited in Horton Goins’s room while Kearns went into Lucinda’s and made the call. He slipped the gun into his holster and knelt down beside the box next to the bed. Shirts, shorts, two cameras, a sheet of proofs, a razor and shaving cream, a hairbrush, toothbrush, and two pairs of white and black checkered tennis shoes.

A sudden shadow in the doorway sent a fresh surge of alarm up his back. Mrs. Fostes, squinting terribly, steadied her rocking head of white hair at Jim. “Who are you?”

“Police, Mrs. Fostes — kind of. I’m sorry.”

She stepped in slowly, Kearns standing now in the hall with a “Let’s go” expression on his face. Raymond slipped behind Mrs. Fostes — taking advantage of her considerable blind spot — and started down the stairs.

“Where’s my granddaughter?”

“She’s okay. She’ll be right up.”

“Is Joseph here?”

“He left. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

Mrs. Fostes’s tired old eyes did their best to behold Weir.

Jim fetched the glasses from the pillow and slipped them on her. They settled perfectly into the dark indentations on either side of her nose. Mrs. Fostes’s eyes burned into Jim’s.

“Where did you find these?”

“Joseph did,” said Weir. “If you see him again, call the Newport Beach Police immediately.” He could hear Kearns’s footsteps pounding down the stairs, and Lucinda’s voice in the entryway.

“Why should I call you?”

“He’s a murder suspect, Mrs. Fostes.”

“Oh my.” She looked around the room once, as if her new eyesight were a gift from God. “There was something strange about him. But he was decent enough to return my glasses, wasn’t he?”