Pacific Beat

Chapter 31

The wrecking ball was in full swing when Jim walked into the Eight Peso Cantina at ten o’clock. The windows had been boarded up, and bogus condemnation notices were stapled to the wood. A crane stood in the alley beside the cantina, its boom extended over the roof, a huge gold foil dollar sign dangling where the ball should be.

The Newport police chopper hovered above for a long while, low and noisy, its searchlight trained on the entering guests.

Inside, a mock interior lay in ruins around the room: splintered wood, pieces of concrete with rusted rebar protruding at angles, sawhorses with blinking orange lights, piles of rubble cordoned off with bright red pylons in the hope of keeping people from tripping on them. The skylight had been removed, and a jagged border of papier-mâché glued around the perimeter of the opening, through which the cool May breeze swirled.

Weir stepped in and nodded to Dale Blodgett, who stood with the air of a bouncer just inside the door. He was dressed in a tuxedo. “Thought you might not make it,” said Blodgett. His big face labored toward a smile.

“Trying to do my part,” said Weir. “Mom back yet?”

“Back from where?” Blodgett’s smile went down an octave.

“Doesn’t matter. Did you get Duty Free back together again?”

Blodgett sipped from a martini glass with a toothpick and two olives in it. “She’s ready. We might make a shakedown run tomorrow night. Interested?”

“I’ll think about it. Will that be one of the nights you and Lou Braga fill the bait tank?”

Blodgett blushed, finished off his drink in one gulp. “You lost me, Weir. Hey, have a drink, loosen up. Maybe even try to enjoy yourself.”

Jim stepped past him to hug Ray’s parents, the host and hostess, Ernesto and Irena Cruz. Irena had on an elaborate fuchsia dress, with a matching silk scarf around her neck. Ernesto wore a tuxedo so old, the elbows shined. Weir wondered whether his own tux looked that old, too. What can you do? The thought crossed his mind that Ernesto probably had been married in it. They pointed him to a far corner, where he could make out the back of Raymond, who seemed to be pressing a diminutive woman into a corner filled with rubble. The rubble was marked by a sawhorse with a pulsing light. The woman sat in a wheelchair, her face and the chromed chassis of her chair throbbing intermittently orange.

Between Jim and the corner were a couple of hundred people, dressed in varying degrees of finery. Half of them were the neighborhood folks, the faces he’d grown up with, the faces that had loomed sympathetically before him at the funerals of Poon, Jake, and Ann. The rest were the Prop A partisans from around the county — the disgruntled adversaries of development.

Raymond, looking slender and composed in a white dinner jacket and bow tie, found Jim in the crush and handed him a glass of champagne. “Any word?”

“None yet.”

Raymond looked at Jim without expression, then nodded very slightly. “If anyone can convince Percy, it’s Becky.”

“It’s not in the bag, Ray. I’m worried.”

“What can a prosecutor say to a tape of Ann’s purse?”

“He can say it was made during the commission of a burglary. No judge in the world is going to order a search warrant. The rest depends on how much energy the prosecutor’s got — and where his boss comes down.”

Raymond cast Jim a wary glance. “Cantrell’s supported D’Alba for two elections.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Doesn’t seem like there’s a man in this county who can afford to have Dave Cantrell take a fall.”

“That’s what Becky’s up against right now.”

“I need another drink.”

Ray broke away for the bar and Jim watched him drain one glass of champagne, then another. Dressed as he was, alone at the bar, staring back at Jim from over his raised glass, Raymond looked small, stranded, lost.

The band reassembled onstage and launched into a Zydeco tune. The kid playing accordian looked about twelve. The stage backdrop behind them was a painted pile of rubble with graveyard crosses placed atop each big rock, bearing the name of a neighborhood business or family home that would be ground up in the redevelopment deal. A banner across the top declared PACIFICO PRESENTS... In the corner closest to the street, a booth was set up, where a dapper old gentleman sold chances for the prize, a Japanese subcompact. Weir wondered who had donated the car, until he got close enough to read the sign: CHEVERTON SEWER & SEPTIC. Tickets were a hundred bucks apiece, and business looked good.

Becky walked in an hour later. She had changed to a backless black velvet dress and gloves that came up past her elbows, and her hair was pulled back on one side with a big rhinestone comb. Her lipstick was dark red and her eyes were made up into twin brown mysteries that seemed to draw Weir straight into her. Jim wondered whether she’d changed before seeing George Percy or after, then decided he would never ask. “God, you look good,” he said instead.

“It’s all for you, Mr. Weir. Come outside. Let’s talk.”

They stood on the sidewalk, facing the bay. “George is taking it to D’Alba right now. He’s not going to make a move either way without his boss — way too hot to handle alone. My guts tell me he’s with us.”

“And D’Alba’s with Cantrell.”

Becky nodded and turned to Jim. She put a hand on each of his arms and drew him forward gently. Her eyes picked up the glow from the streetlamps, illuminating some new pain inside. She lay her head on his shoulder for a long while and held him in her strong brown arms.

“Dance with me,” she said.

He led her to the crowded wooden floor, guiding her across it into a kind of modified swing step that, like so many things from days gone by, came back to them as sure as instinct. Jim felt elevated. Becky’s skin looked rich against the black fabric, and when he raised her hands for a spin, he caught the damp smell coming from her, saw the shine of sweat beneath her arms. Coming out of the turn, he pulled her closer.

While the room whirled around them, Jim began to feel for the first time in years the pieces of his life starting to settle into place. He could almost see them: surface meeting surface, side fitting side, corners snugging into larger corners to form a complete, harmonious whole. He entertained briefly a thought that had come to him dozens of times since returning home — a snippet of future possibility too precious and delicious to contemplate in any depth. A son. A daughter. The Weirs. My family. Even the loss of Ann had the feeling, as he pressed Becky’s supple warmth against him, of something that would eventually fit, bringing with it not her absence but the years she had been alive, the hours they had shared, the moments that, as moments do, continue on inside the living.

“I didn’t know what I was missing,” he said.

“I had an idea.”

“Can a mayor fit a love life into her busy schedule?”

“I’ll adjourn for you anytime.”

“Maybe you should adjourn over to Ray. He looks kind of lost at that bar by himself.”

Becky looked at the clock, then over to Nesto Cruz behind the bar. He shook his head. No call from Percy yet.

Jim found a booth and drank more champagne. As the alcohol did its work, he sighed deeper down into his seat and looked out through the mocked-up crossbars on a condemned window. The night was damp, bringing halos to the streetlamps and dew to the glass that faced the bay. He could see yacht masts tilting slowly, and the ghost-pale forms of hulls steady on the water. Beyond the invisible horizon of the island, the PacifiCo Tower stood illuminated against a starless sky. Tower of Babel, thought Weir, tower of lies, tower of pillage, tower of death. And I’m going to bring it down, one mirrored window at a time, straight down into the dead sea of this little city. He smiled, sipped, looked to the dance floor.

Ray and Becky danced with the ease of old friendship. Raymond kept his hips in a respectful rhythm that he never showed with Ann; with Ann it was always deeper and more fraught with sex and abandon and promise. There was a stiffness to him now, Jim saw, a sense of going through motions. When Ray made a turn, his black eyes locked for a moment with Jim’s, and in that instant Weir was reminded again that whatever the final tally would be, Raymond’s loss was the deepest and least fathomable, that Raymond’s memory would be forever tainted by the bitter scent of Ann’s betrayal. Raymond looked away.

And when he did, another truth stood revealed to Jim: that from this point on, Raymond and he would begin to drift apart. Even now he could feel in himself the autonomic recoil when he stood close to Raymond, feel the self-protective urge to go away. It was the weight of Ann, he knew, of the tragedy that had bruised them all; it was something akin to returning, as he once did, to the hospital where Poon had breathed his rattling last, where a frantic voice had told him to get the hell away from there as fast as he could. But that was only part of it. In the future, Raymond would find another woman, and when that happened, Raymond would have to seal off some of this, if there was to be any chance at all of a happiness and a life. Jim saw that he would become to Raymond what Raymond already was becoming to him: a living reminder of pain, an agent of sadness, a fellow traveler on a road once shared but no longer passable.

Jim wondered, How do I keep that from happening?

Becky dragged Raymond off the floor and to the bar. Nesto handed her the phone. Jim watched her nod, freeze, nod again, then give it back to Nesto. She brought Raymond to the table.

“D’Alba’s considering. George said to give them another hour. I can’t stand this. Anybody got a cigarette? Look-it’s speech time. This lady’s great.”

Weir bummed a smoke and lit it for Becky. They sat back in the booth and watched two young men push the old woman in the wheelchair toward the stage. They forgot to lock the chair wheels and nearly lost her over the edge once they had gotten her up. She rolled to the microphone under her own power. The twelve-year-old accordian player lowered the mike for her, cinched it tight, bowed. There was a smattering of applause, which seemed to wither in the voracious stare of this woman, who sat glaring into the crowd. Her downy white hair, backlit by the stage lights, stood out around her head like a halo. She held her hands in her lap, wrapped around a tumbler of scotch delivered by Irena. It got so quiet that Jim could hear the ice clinking in her glass.

“Thank you so much for inviting me here tonight,” she said. “I’ve come to the age where my humble meanderings are praised in public and giggled at in private, but I accept the mantle with whatever grace I can muster. My name is Doris Tharp.”

Weir was surprised at the resonance of her voice, a genderless tenor that seemed launched from a hollow of smoothly polished teak. She sipped from her scotch.

“You deserve better,” she said. “You deserve a Homer to chronicle these days, a seer, a sibyl. But this is not an age of prophets. It is an age of spokesmen... spokespersons. Even our sex awaits the leveling boot heel of conformity — but, I digress. At ninety-one, one’s entire life becomes a digression. My grandfather fought at Shiloh in the Civil War; my father came west in a covered wagon. One of my grandsons flew last week from New York to Paris in three hours on a Concorde; another died two years ago from a virus that didn’t even exist when John Tharp took up arms against the Union.

“I’d like to let you in on a little secret — there is no such thing as history. History is the name given to events in order to mark them for our forgetfulness. Nothing is really past us, in the same way that nothing is really with us — it all changes between blinks of the eye, no two moments the same. Those ignorant of history are not doomed to repeat it — that would be a staggering achievement. They are simply doomed to ignorance of everything else.

“But you asked me to talk about Proposition A, didn’t you?

Doris lifted her scotch glass and sipped. Her eyes — ice blue in the lights — peered into the crowd. Jim had the feeling they were seeing every detail of each face, every thought behind the face. It was quiet enough to hear the bay water lapping against the sand outside.

“We are a nation spoiled by excess, bored with the spoils, fattened on the boredom. We are a people not of ideas but of notions. We are a people hypnotized by the notion that we know what is good for the world, when in fact we don’t know what is good for ourselves. The average American family watches television for seven hours a day. Television executives defend the slop they serve us as ‘what the people want.’ The Medellin Cartel sells us ‘what the people want.’ The President tells us, on television, that we must stop the invasion of drugs because that is ‘what the people want.’ Let me tell you something: People want everything. We are accumulators, hoarders, gluttons, and misers. We Californians produce more trash per person than any other state in the nation, than any other civilization in the history of the planet. But we want more. We want things that don’t even exist yet; yes, we want those, too.”

Doris Tharp sipped her drink again, eyes fixed on the audience. “Why? Because it was here. A bounty inconceivable — an ocean teeming with fish, endless valleys of fertile soil, month upon month of growing season, rivers overflowing with gold. We devoured it at first just to live; now we live just to devour it. And what have we offered in return but one great wrapper licked clean and tossed back — a dead ocean, dead air, and hundreds of thousands more people rushing in to lick the wrapper.

“You people out there, you who want to stop the building and preserve what is left, if that is all your imagination can muster, then go forward with my blessing. But don’t forget your obligation to add something good to what is left. Don’t forget the backs that labored to bring you here; don’t forget that the roofs over your heads were put there by men you trained to do this, men you honored and courted and hired to protect you from the March wind and the August sun. Don’t forget that we are the builders, we are the spoilers, we are the insatiable guests living off the host of great generosity.

“Narcissus drowned in the pool of his self-admiration, and I fear that we may do that, too. We are not morally superior here; we are not the great friends of Earth — look at us, we sit here for the benefit of ourselves tonight, and nothing more — we are only the few who have found enough. It is our duty to share, not to hoard; to offer, not to abscond. Why? Because we have been blessed far more than we have blessed; we have been protected far more than we have protected; and we are all in need not of being saved but of being decent. Thank you.”

There was a hovering, tentative moment of silence before the applause started — scattered at first, then fuller, then rising in pitch and volume until the walls seemed to participate. Becky stood, then everyone else did. Jim watched as the two young men lifted Doris Tharp down from the stage. She handed one of them her glass, then wheeled herself through the parting crowd and out the door.

Nesto was waving frantically from behind the bar. Becky shot up, powered her way through the crowd, took the phone again. For a long while, she didn’t move. Weir’s legs felt numb. Then she placed the receiver back on its cradle, said something to Nesto, and came back to the booth.

She stood there looking down on Jim and Raymond, wiped a tear from her eye, and shook her head. “No. They’d reconsider what’s in evidence already, if we can come up with a new way to look at it. Otherwise, no. One of you get up and dance with me, please.”

For the next hour, Jim and Raymond hurled and were hurled by Becky around the dance floor. The crowd thinned and the floor opened up, so that the last half hour it was theirs alone, Becky dominating it and them in a frightening choreography of rage that left her comb gone, her hair in a sweat-drenched mess, her makeup running freely, and her body glistening.

When the band announced the last song, she took Jim and Raymond each by an arm and steered them toward the door. “Take me home,” she said. “We have work to do.”

The police chopper made another pass above, razed them with its beam, then banked away with a battle groan and was gone.

They sat in Becky’s living room in the dead quiet of early morning, poring over the crime-scene reports, the interviews, the lab conclusions, the coroner’s findings, the Ruff statements, the recent press clippings on Cantrell and the GROW, DON’T SLOW! organization, the PacifiCo annual report that Becky had obtained from a “friend” inside the company, the corporate profiles on PacifiCo and its holdings that her paralegal helpers had unearthed in their assault on Cheverton Sewer & Septic, even a copy of the Redevelopment Project for the peninsula — complete with artists’ conceptions of the new and improved neighborhood.

Two o’clock became three o’clock. The documents that Jim was reading began to merge in his mind into an unfocused enigma that offered up the same refrains: Ann the Deceased, Ann the Victim, Ann the Supine.

At four, Becky drank off another cup of coffee and went into the kitchen to make more.

Raymond looked up at Weir through his attorney’s spectacles and set the crime-scene report on the fireplace hearth. “Jim?”

“I’m listening.”

“Let’s kill him tonight.”

Weir considered Raymond’s deadpan expression. “I’d like to.”

“I’m serious. Use the opener, get him out of bed, take him out on one of Virginia’s skiffs, waste him and dump him out deep, tied to some dumbbells. I’ve got them at home.”

Jim could see behind Ray’s inscrutable mask a willingness that, for a moment, unsettled him. Justice of the Plains, he thought: Raymond and Francisco, chasing their stolen and beloved dreams across the rough terrains of fate, knights-errant, hell-bent on their way to the bullet marked for them. Would that bloody ending suit Raymond better than a lifetime of drinking, one bitter cup each day, the poison of knowing a truth that the system — the system he had served long and without complaint — would never allow him to prove? Maybe.

But for Jim, there was the breathing body of one Raymond Cruz: friend, brother, partner in tragedy. Life needs the living. “No. I’m not going to the chamber for Cantrell. I’m not about to let you, either. He isn’t worth it.”

“Ann was.”

“Nothing you can do will bring her back, Ray. Nothing. Ever. Least of all, that.”

The strangest of smiles crept into Raymond’s face, a smile of such soaring disregard that Weir’s scalp crawled.

“Just thinking out loud, Jim.”

“You let me know if you have any more thoughts along that line.” I

The smile changed to something more grounded. “I will.”

Becky came back with more coffee, slumped down into her sofa, and picked up the annual report for PacifiCo. “Drink more coffee,” she said. “It’s in here. Something is in here. Robbins already has something that points to Cantrell — we just haven’t found it yet. Look. Look until you go fucking blind, then look some more.”

At five o’clock, Weir placed his head back on the couch and watched the patterns in the stucco ceiling form shapes that looked like things he could identify. He and Jake and Ann had often lain on Jake’s bed and done the same thing: there’s the Indian chief, the state of Florida, the flat bicycle tire. Ann had spotted the pregnant lady first.

“Move around a minute,” said Becky. “It’ll wake you up some.”

“Think I will.”

He walked through the house, each room furnished with memories, both good and bad, of a lifetime spent on the perimeters of love for a woman. Time is running out for us, he thought. Time is running out for us to make legitimate what we’ve enjoyed so casually, so conditionally, on the sly. He wondered whether he and Becky had taken on, in the eyes of others, an aspect of the ridiculous. There was something comic in the hedging of life’s big bets.

On Becky’s nightstand was a vase with a dozen purple roses in it. He sat on the bed and beheld these lovely flowers, so tainted now for him. He closed his eyes for a moment and saw again the image from the dreams he had had so often this last week — of someone’s hand holding a purple rose up to the smiling, anticipatory face of Ann.

Against all the higher consciousness he could muster, Weir counted them.

Twelve.

Of course.

He sighed, closed his eyes again, and again saw the hand holding a purple rose up to Ann. At first, the rose was in focus and Ann was a blurred face in the background, then the rose lost specificity and Ann’s face became clear.

Weir’s head wobbled and he snapped himself up straight.

His eyes were so heavy. Just a moment to rest.

Of course, no rest. The hand holds the rose. A man’s hand. The petals are purple and full. Ann’s face becomes the place between her legs. The hand drips blood. This is unholy.

Weir stood to walk back into the living room. And when he looked again at the roses in Becky’s vase, he understood in an instant what he had only been seeing all along.

He stopped. The understanding was still there. He ran through it once, then again, then again. He reached out and took a flower from the vase. His hand was trembling as he gripped it up on the bulb, just under the petals, the thick green under leaves snug against his fingers and thumb.

He was still holding the flower when he walked back to the living room and drew the worried stares of Becky and Ray.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

“Give me the phone and Ken Robbins’s home number. I’ve got it. I know what he has that we haven’t seen yet.”

He dialed and got Mrs. Robbins. She told him dreamily that Ken was still not sleeping well, had already left for the office. It was 5:30. Weir apologized, called the Crime Lab, and got Robbins on the second ring.

“Ken, this is Jim Weir. Get the rose from the evidence freezer. The rose he put in Ann.”

“Why?”

“We’ve got him. We had it all along, and didn’t know it. Please Ken, get the rose.”

Robbins was quiet for a moment. “You’re out, Jim. Dennison made it clear. I can’t be running evidence for you anymore. My hands are tied and you know it.”

“Listen, Ken. This isn’t new. It’s something you’ve got already, brought in by the Newport cops. The chain of custody is tight, it’s admissible, solid, and sitting in your freezer twenty yards away. It isn’t mine. I’m asking you to take another look. I’m begging you, Ken. Get the rose and put it on your light table. Get a good overhead on it and a pair of clean tweezers.”

Another pause. “Wait.”

Becky sat still on the hearth. Raymond was at the front window, looking out toward the hedge of oleander.

Two minutes later, Robbins was back. “Okay. It’s on the table, I’ve got a light on it, and a pair of tweezers in my hand. Now what in hell am I going to do with this withered-up thing that I haven’t done already?”

“We overlooked something because it wasn’t visible. The green under leaves, right below the petals — what do they look like?”

“Nothing on this thing is green — it’s plain goddamned simple brown.”

“The brown husks then — can you see them?”

“They’re buried under the petals, Weir.”

Weir fingered the rose in his hand. Was it his hand in the dream? “Are they folded down against the stem?”

“Yeah, Jim. In the same damned way they were when it came in here.”

“But they weren’t that way when the flower went in. The force folded them back, closed them tight against the stem. Lift the petals and turn up the husks with your tweezers — all the way up to where they meet the bulb. Tell me what you see.”

Robbins set down the phone. Weir could hear him snapping on a pair of latex gloves, then the metallic shuffle of instruments in a drawer.

Jim felt his pulse beating through his ear and into the receiver. Becky hadn’t moved. Raymond was facing him now, the beginnings of a smile on his face. A minute went by.

Robbins picked up the phone again and cleared his throat. “Weir? It’s beautiful. A partial thumb and probably a forefinger, drawn in blood, sealed by the under leaf when it went in. The seawater pickled the plant and sealed in the print. I can’t... I can’t actually believe this. You want a job?”

“I want you to run it against Cantrell’s set.”

“He’s never been printed.”

“That picture of Goins I left with you... with the hair in the Baggie? Cantrell’s thumb is on the right side, halfway down. It ought to be clear as day. You still have the picture, don’t you?”

“Dennison insisted I throw it away. I... well, kind of didn’t quite throw it away. Give me fifteen minutes.”

“I’m at Becky’s house.”

He left the number and hung up.

Becky looked at him with an air of perplexity that in thirty years Jim had seen probably twice. Becky always had chosen games she could stay ahead of.

Raymond smiled wholly, walked across the room to Jim, and hugged him. It was the longest, strongest embrace from Ray that he could remember. Still, he thought, something seems to have gone out of him.

Jim watched as Raymond looked out the window for a moment, then walked over and sat on the couch.

“Maybe we should have a drink,” said Becky.

“Maybe we should wait until Robbins calls,” said Weir.

Raymond shot a glance at Becky, then stood and walked toward the door. “I need a minute alone.”

Jim caught the oddness in Raymond’s expression. “Don’t mess this up, Ray. We’re too close. We’ve worked too hard.”

Raymond smiled weakly. “I want to say a prayer of thanks under the stars. That’s all.”

“Stay with us, Ray,” said Becky. “Please?”

Raymond looked at each of them in turn, his face coloring and a visible anger rising in his eyes. “Don’t worry, kids. I’m not going to do anything to mess this up. I promise. I’m going to sit on the seawall, watch the sun rise on the day we take down the man who killed my wife. You couldn’t pay me to mess that up. You don’t believe me, that’s your problem. Keep an eye out if you want.”

Fifteen minutes went by. Weir paced the living room, looking out the window every few minutes at Raymond, who, still in his tux coat, sat on the seawall beside a lamppost, facing the bay and PacifiCo Tower. What terrible visions were his? Jim wondered. The darkness had begun to dissolve with the first hint of dawn.

Five minutes later, Robbins called back. His voice was subdued and he spoke very slowly. Weir remembered that this was Ken’s way of stretching out the pleasure, of letting the satisfaction of a job well done percolate down from the head into every inch of a waiting, exhausted body. Robbins lived his job. “It’s a lock,” he said. “A perfect match.”

“What now?” Jim asked, the first waves of relief starting to wash over him.

“I’m not sure, Weir. I ran them twice against the photo, but it didn’t matter. So I ran them twice through the computer index, then did a visual myself. The prints belong to Raymond Cruz.”

Weir hung up and looked again out the window to Raymond. Raymond waiting for the truth, he thought. Raymond, who knew.

Jim closed his eyes for a moment on the world he had known, trying to say goodbye to it. Then he opened them to a world he could imagine but still could not believe.

“What’s wrong?”

He walked past Becky, down the walkway of her yard and through the creaking gate. Raymond’s tuxedo jacket was spread convincingly across two pieces of driftwood that were propped and balanced against the lamppost.

Raymond himself was gone.