Pacific Beat

Chapter 6

Jim stood on the sidewalk outside Becky Flynn’s bayfront cottage and gazed through the oleander that walled her property from the rest of the world. He passed through the gate, bell chiming, a certain pressure gathering in his head. Moving toward Becky’s house was for Weir like walking into yesterday, only knowing how the days ahead would end. Each step echoed with the thousand memories of others so much like it, of the thousand peninsula nights they’d spent here in the varying stages of love, disillusion, abandonment. His stomach fluttered as he climbed onto the porch and looked through the screen door.

She was sitting on the couch, her head cocked to one side to hold the telephone, a yellow legal pad propped on her crossed knees. Becky was always making notes on something. He watched her nod in profile, bring a yellow pencil to her mouth, and touch the eraser to her lips. She had cut her hair into a loose fall of light brown curls that ended abruptly above her shoulders. Becky’s hair had always been a primary vanity — the longer the better — but this new do spoke of adjusted priorities. We’re getting older, thought Weir, his fist poised to knock. He watched her for another surreptitious moment, beholding the perpendicular curves of thigh and calf as she raised her bare feet to the coffee table and wrote something on the pad. She nodded, took a deep breath, and hung up. For a second, she stared off into space, smile cracks forming at the edge of her lips.

She got up, came to the door, and swung it open.

She met him inside with a measuring look that turned into a hug. The top of her head smelled the way it had for the three decades Jim had known her. Over her shoulder, he looked at the old place for the first time in — what, he wondered — almost two years? There were some new things: a Pegge Hopper print on the tongue-in-groove wall above the hearth, a big gray torchiere in the far corner, a Persian rug on the hardwood floor before the fireplace, a new coat of paint. The rest was the same, though, right down to the heavy old dining set that took up too much space at the far end of the room, the deep soft couch, the curtains that Becky had made all those years ago of chintz now faded by sun, the cut flowers she bought each Friday from the stand down by Poon’s Locker. There was a FLYNN FOR MAYOR banner — green on white — tacked across one wall, a smaller SLOW THE GROWTH poster on another, boxes of campaign fliers and mailing envelopes on the floor by the fireplace.

Becky herself had added a few things, too: Her skin was paler, her hips and breasts a little larger, and there was a deepening network of lines at the corners of her dark brown eyes. Mileage was implied, not all of it smooth. All in all, to Weir, she just looked beautiful. He had held her image all those hours in the Zihuat jail, comforted by memory but tormented by her distance and the fact that they had messed it up so badly.

“God, Jim. I don’t know what to say to you.”

“No.”

“I’ve been so worried about you. God, I’m sorry.” She held him again and sighed — a declared need.

They stood in silence for a moment, then Becky turned and walked toward the kitchen. Weir followed — a seemingly ancient habit — took down two heavy glasses and filled them with ice. Becky poured in some good gin, a dribble of vermouth, shaved off a lemon peel, and swept one around each rim before dropping them in. Through her kitchen window, Jim could see the fog floating down like a lowered blanket. His hands were shaking again as he picked up the drink. He felt as if his heart were made of wood, beating slowly and begrudgingly toward the moment when it could just stop.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I left messages.”

“Thanks. This has been bad.”

They settled into the couch, the standard positions, Weir’s feet already yearning for the boots to be off, to be wanning from the fire. The answering machine picked up an incoming call: a Proposition A proofreader at the print shop had just discovered fliers with the word public misspelled as pubic.

“I saw her early that night at the Whale,” said Jim. “Ray came by and Mom was there. She looked good and strong — a little thin, maybe.”

“I hadn’t talked to her for a few days.”

“How had she been, Beck?”

“I’ve been asking myself that question ever since I heard. It’s not as easy to answer as I thought it would be. Okay, Ann and I have been friends for what, thirty-plus years? We did everything from roller-skate together in pigtails to borrow each other’s doll clothes, to share our diaries, to take the same classes, have crushes on the same boys, to... everything. We were girls, then we were women, and we went through all of it together. Except for the few months she spent in France — what, fifteen years old or whatever it was — we’ve been like this.” Becky twisted her fingers in the wish-me-luck sign and stared from behind it into Jim’s face. “But back in November, something started to change. It was just before you left for Mexico.”

“I didn’t see it.”

Weir heard Becky’s silence accuse him: If you’d been paying attention to your family instead of getting ready to chase rainbows, you might have.

“It was subtle, Jim. I thought it was something just between us, so I didn’t really worry too much. Now, well, after what happened, everything has its own terrible resonance.” She drank, then set the glass down on the coffee table. “Ann was pulling back. She was putting something between herself and me and it bugged me.”

“What was it about her?”

“Smiles, mostly. Sometimes she was so... polite. It was like the smile was there to deflect me. She’d be so sunny, so comprehensively positive, so... fucking vague.”

“About what?”

“Everything. I’d call and ask her how she was and it sounded like a state-of-the person address, something she’d planned out and rehearsed. You know Ann. You could always rely on Ann for straight answers, straight talk. If Ann thought what you were doing was wrong, she’d say so. If she didn’t feel good that day, you’d hear about it. She was never evasive. But back in January, that’s what I felt. I ran into her at the market late one night — eleven say — and she’s picking up her groceries for the week. We’re standing in front of the soup and she actually stared through me for a second, then, she clicked in — big smile, this strained grimace she’s trying to pass off as a smile. I ask what’s wrong and she says, ‘Not a thing! I’m just tired out a bit tonight; that’s what I get for shopping without my make-up on!’ She pulls off a can of something and the whole stack falls over, all these red cans banging down to the floor. So I play along like I believe her, but I make a note of it. I called her a couple of nights later, and she sounded so giddy, so up. I swear to God, Jim, I wondered for a second if she was into the blow or something. We made a lunch date for the next Sunday and she seemed... not there. She held up her end of the conversation but she really didn’t bring anything to it. She left most of her food. Her mind was somewhere else.”

“You call her on it?”

“Of course I did. Annie laughed it off, turned it back around on me, like I was projecting my own usual neurotic character onto her. I almost bought it; I’m always ready to buy that one. We’d just gotten Prop A on the ballot, there was the march in Laguna Canyon to organize, I was trying to get my candidate’s apps finished up. So, well, you had your treasure and I had mine. But it just wasn’t her. I saw her a lot this winter, ran into her here and there, went by the Whale and had dinner in her station. Sometimes she seemed just like Ann. The other times — and there were several of them — she was somewhere else.”

Jim groped back to November to corroborate Becky’s story, but he couldn’t. Ann had seemed like Ann. He had been lost in getting ready for the Black Pearl off of Zihuat: dive gear and compressor, the air lance and water dredge, the winches and cables, the grid stakes and surface buoys, everything from a rebuild on the engine to spare regulator gaskets. I missed it, he thought, plain and simple.

“Did you talk to anyone about her? Ray, Mom?”

Becky shook her head. “With Ann, I always went straight to the source. Like I said, I thought this was all just between her and me. Friends fall out, waver, get back together. Sometimes you have to hold a match to the bridge just to remind yourself how strong and needed it is.”

They exchanged glances, mutual acknowledgement that such matches were held — all too often and by both parties — to their own bridge, but the result was not a warming reminder of value, but fire itself.

Becky drained her glass. “What can you share with me?”

“What do you want?”

“I got a copy of Bristol’s report, so I know the basics.”

“Small town.”

“It wasn’t hard — a former public defender has her networks.”

“I can’t add much. I saw where they brought her up, and I was at the crime scene this evening.”

“Innelman and Deak?”

Jim nodded. “Innelman’s a good man. I don’t know about Deak.”

“He’s young and cocky, but he’s thorough, too.”

“If you’ve seen the report, you know as much as I do.”

“Do I?” Becky looked at him sharply, then smiled. “Dennison must be twitching. If things played out just right, this could sway the election. Now he’ll really avoid a debate.”

Becky squinted her dark brown eyes, and offered up a satisfied little smile. It was a look far less impish than cunning. Weir had always hated it.

“What did Dennison want to see you and Ray about today?” she asked.

Jim made up a story about him getting the dive job for another search of the bay. It was fairly solid for a quick lie, something Poon would have been proud of.

“That’s Sheriffs jurisdiction.”

“That’s what I tried to tell Brian. Anyway, Harbor Patrol divers found a kitchen knife just a hundred feet from where Ann died. Six-inch blade, no hilt, unexceptional.”

“Then why would Brian want you to dive again?”

“He’s just being careful.”

“Make on the knife?”

“I didn’t see one,” he lied again.

“You’re getting rusty, Weir. And your hands are shaking.”

“I know.”

The telephone rang again, this time an invitation for Becky to speak to the Newport Beach Chapter of Women in Business. Becky made a note on the yellow pad. “They’ll try to skewer me. Know something? I liked life better when it was simple.”

Jim was quiet for a moment. Becky’s last statement had the ring of a can of worms about to be opened. Maybe that’s what we needed all along, he thought — get the bad things out so we could figure out what to do with them. One of Becky’s primary faults — which she was always the first to confess — was her penchant for doing a dozen things at once, but not necessarily right. He tried not to sound accusatory. “Well, looks like you have plenty of campaign work.”

She looked at him, then away. “It seems... appropriate. I decided not too long ago that liking your life isn’t everything. You’ve got to bring something to the party, make a difference... maybe that sounds naive. But I had the feeling I had to contribute rather than just take. Anyway, I was always impatient when I was with you, toward the end. Working as a PD got old fast. I’m just that way — I like to move on. Greener pastures maybe, I don’t know.”

“Like you said, we all have our own treasures.”

She shot him a hard glance. “You weren’t just looking for treasure, you were looking for a way out... of everything.”

Same old scratchy record, he thought. Becky had never understood why he quit the Sheriffs. To an ambitious young woman dedicated to the grindstone, his jump from full-time employment into the speculative waters of salvage and treasure hunting was the very pinnacle of whimsy, reeking of adolescence and insolvency. Becky’s family had been poor — not dirt poor, but lower-middle-class poor — always on the edge of a utility shutoff, a car repo, an insurance cancellation. Becky’s first deal with herself as an adult was to keep that from happening to her. The more Jim had talked about things like his freedom and his time, the tighter-mouthed Becky had become. She had made him doubt himself, when doubt was a luxury he couldn’t afford. To Becky, doubt was something you live with every day, something you listen to with respect — the point scout of conscience. Her marriage to a hotshot Newport lawyer had lasted less than a year. Becky, he had always thought, was a more complicated animal.

“I was looking for the same thing you were,” he said finally. “You were wrong to think any different, and you still are. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never know me better than I do, Becky.”

She studied him, retreating invisibly. Her eyes said, I don’t know about that, but her words were, “I guess we’ve been through all this before.”

“I thought about you a lot in Mexico.” He placed his shaking hands on his knees and looked into the fireplace.

“I thought about you, too.”

“Did you come up with any answers?”

Becky’s hand found the back of his neck and her fingers twisted a lock of his hair. A warming surge came up through him.

“No answers. Just questions. Sometimes I think it’s all behind us, then I think about something and it feels like it never ended. It’s like looking back on a battlefield, wondering if you’ve got the balls to jump in again. Come to think of it, I did come up with one answer. The answer is, I want someone who’s going to stay, stick it out.”

Jim nodded, realizing how little the description fit him.

“Tell me about Mexico,” she said.

He did, from the promising blue-water dives to the frustration of trying to cover so much bottom alone, to the surprise of being found with marijuana that wasn’t his, stuffed conspicuously in the engine compartment of Lady Luck, to his thirty-four days of hell in the Zihuatanejo jail, then his sudden and unexplained release.

For a while, they talked about Becky’s run for mayor of Newport Beach, the practice, the Slow Growth proposition on the coming June ballot. It was a walk through. Becky sighed, took a deep drink, and stared into the black fireplace.

Weir stood, took another look at the big FLYNN FOR MAYOR banner on the far wall.

She walked him to the door, the polished hardwood floor creaking in the same places it always had. “I want to leave you with something, though. I saw Ann about five-thirty that... last day. I was walking down the bayfront, taking a break from the mailers, and she drove through the alley. She was going to work. Why did she drive it when she could walk?”

Weir had been wondering the same thing himself. He could think of only one earthly reason for Ann to get in her old car and drive the three blocks to work, then spend ten minutes looking for a parking space when it would take two minutes to just walk. She was wearing street clothes when they found her. Provocative street clothes. Had she changed at work? In the car? Somewhere else?

“Because she wasn’t going home after work,” he said.

“I wouldn’t think so.”

Into the air around Weir settled the fact that Becky had done just this thing to him once, years ago, the first official pivot point upon which their relationship began its long and anguished descent. “Did she ever say anything about another man?”

“No, that’s not something I think Ann would talk about. She had her private side — the Weir trademark. It’s possible. She was attractive, alive... oh, you know, all that kind of thing.” Becky wiped away a tear, glaring with a certain fierceness out the window toward the buildings of Newport Center on the mainland.

Weir leaned against the doorjamb. Things kept welling up inside him. There didn’t seem to be any end to them. For a blessed, frightening moment, he felt stripped of pretense. “I don’t know what to do, Becky.”

She held him for a long while, then straightened him by the shoulders and wiped some hair off his forehead. “Fight, Jim. Stay and fight it out. Be kind to your heart.”

Jim stepped onto the porch and let the screen door bounce shut behind him. It was strange to him how quickly the old antagonisms could reappear, along with the feeling that he’d love to take Becky in his arms again and press his face against the soft, fragrant plane of her neck and lose himself in her.

Walking down her steps, he had the feeling again of being isolated on the bow of some great ship, wind on his face, gliding from one dark shore to another in search of something he was yet to identify. He was tiring, even in his own visions, of being alone.

Raymond’s room at Hoag Hospital had a view of north Newport and a glimpse of the Pacific. Weir found him deeply asleep, with his hands crossed over his stomach and his mouth slightly open. He had on a light blue smock that tied in the back and a plastic wristband with his name and some numbers on it. There were flowers on the counter and bed stand, and taped to the walls a collection of get-well cards made of construction paper and crayons by his young cousins.

Weir pulled up a chair and poured Ray some water from a blue pitcher. For a while, he looked out to the dull gray horizon and the glimmering sea. As Jim watched his friend sleep, the idea hit him that Raymond might not make it through this. Ray was strong, but he wasn’t flexible. He was married to routine, laws, procedures, clear delineations of right and wrong. They kept him ordered, and Jim understood why. Weir had noticed in his training at the Sheriff Academy that, among others, a certain type was drawn to law enforcement — people who needed to belong to something, to be told who they were. Rather than slog their ways through life, trying to figure things on their own, these few needed to have the questions answered for them, needed the clear definitions set out by the uniform they would wear, the gun they would carry, the code — California Penal — by which they would live. And although Jim never considered Raymond to be one of those people, he had often wondered whether Ray didn’t adhere too closely to the job he had taken, didn’t see things in the simple black and white picture suggested by the words guilt and innocence. That was fine. The trouble is, what happens when life betrays you and the law can’t help? What happens when the foundations fall away? In the absence of belief, what rushes in to replace it? Jim said a brief prayer for Raymond, that he would have enough strength to build a new belief, and enough love to build a new strength.

He went to the nurse’s station and managed to find someone not too busy to talk. She told him what they’d already told him — that Raymond had apparently neither eaten nor slept in three days, and that he had finally just passed out. He was taking food now, and sleeping the rest of the time. None of this was uncommon to the grieving, she said. He’d be out soon. “I’m so sorry about your sister.”