The Blue Hour

Twenty-Seven

Two hours later Hess was still in the Department of Mortuary Science, setting aside the last file. He was exhausted and his neck felt like cold metal and the words he had been reading sometimes blurred and jumped off the pages. He thought to pick a word off the desk and put it back on the paper before he understood how spent he was.

For two hours Hess had looked at every photograph and name of every Department of Mortuary Science student graduated from Cypress College in the last decade. Four hundred and fourteen.

Based on age and appearance Hess came up with eighteen maybes, but nothing hot. None of the maybes wore long hair and a mustache. Bobb explained that they had a professional dress code the students had to follow when they were here. And few homes would hire an embalmer with a less than conventional appearance. Hess gathered that the college had screened all students for felony records before admission, so he knew his chances of stubbing his toe on a creep who’d been looking to learn a trade weren’t great. But, he thought, cracks were there to be slipped through.

Bobb was also kind enough to call a friend at the state Morticians’ Licensing Board, who agreed to supply Hess with a complete listing of Southern California undertakers. It would be on Hess’s fax machine by the end of the workday. If he wanted faces, he’d have to come up to Sacramento — the black-and-white two-by-twos didn’t transmit well at all.

The DMV 1028 list was on his desk when Hess got in that afternoon. He checked the names against their possibles from the Sex Offenders Registry, the department graduates and the outstanding warrants listing kept by the Sheriff’s Department.

Nothing added up. He wondered if he could get a list of embalming machine buyers, tick them off against the van owners, maybe get a hit.

What he had for sure was 312 panel vans registered in Orange County. This didn’t include the commercial ones. He circled the males, which left 224. If he could get Brighton to cut loose twenty-two deputies to run down ten vans each and check the tires, they could have it nailed in two shifts if they went fast — three if it went slowly.

Brighton’s secretary said he’d be in a meeting for the next hour.

Hess phoned Southern California Embalming Supply Company, the regional dealer for the Porti-Boy, Sawyer and several other embalming machines. In fact, they carried every major brand and some minor ones. He asked the president for a list of embalming machine buyers in the last year in Southern California. He explained that he wanted to run the names against the state board licensees.

The president was a pleasant sounding man who seemed to listen carefully to what Hess was saying. His name was Bart Young. He very politely refused Hess’s request for a customer list reaching back one year. Young said it would be a violation of trust. In the end all Hess could do was press his home and office phone numbers upon the fellow, and ask to have Young’s home number in return. If you framed the request right, giving a home phone became a small atonement for not giving something better. Hess believed in home phones because he did some of his best thinking at night, and he wasn’t afraid to intrude so long as he had a reason. He made a note on his desk calendar to call Young every day until he gave up the names.

An hour later Brighton approved the manpower shift and got an assistant to make the assignments. The first shift of tire checkers would hit the streets in four hours.

It was almost five o’clock when Bobb’s friend at the state Morticians’ Licensing Board faxed over the current list of Southern California embalmers. Hess settled down with it, his eyes tired and his vision blurring, long enough to find no matches at all with panel van owners, registered sex offenders or hotsheet fugitives.

He got his second dose of chest radiation after work. The doctor took some blood before the treatment, said he wanted to check the white cell level — it could rise or fall during chemotherapy and radiation — and it was important to keep an eye on things. He seemed surprised that Hess was working but said it was probably good. His tone of voice suggested to Hess that it mattered not one bit whether he was working or not because the outcome of all this was determined and unchangeable. He could be training for a marathon for all the radiation specialist cared. Hess thought of the oncologist’s statement that the average life span of a human being with a small cell cancer in the lung was nine weeks, but reminded himself that his was caught early, his was relatively small, his was surgically removed, his scans and X rays since the surgery had come up clean.

Lying on the table Hess imagined a target of black concentric circles on his chest, with his beating red heart as the bull’s eye.

The evening news carried a brief story about a suspect in the so-called Purse Snatcher abductions. Wallace Houston, the sheriff’s Press Information officer, showed the sketch and explained that this man was seen at an Orange County shopping mall “concurrent with the abduction of Janet Kane,” and was wanted for questioning. Hess thought the sketch looked good on TV — it came across clearly, and was specific rather than general, as many artists’ sketches seemed to be. Wallace held back the silver panel van with the mismatched tires, per Merci’s request. In keeping with Kamala Petersen’s observation, Wallace noted that this suspect might be wearing a vest and long coat, and was likely to be found at shopping malls.

It was only upon direct questioning from Lauren Diamond that Wallace admitted they were now looking at five, possibly six victims.

Hess ate a TV dinner.

An hour later he was floating face up out in the black Pacific, watching clouds made red by sunset. It seemed imperative to get the death off him, the sight of Ronnie Stevens’s purse overflowing onto the hood of her car, the formaldehyde and injection tubes and the pulsing machines and the temporal veins swelling with false life. When he came out he wrapped a big towel around himself and followed his own dark footprints across the sand to his apartment.

The phone was ringing. It was Kamala Petersen. She told Hess she’d called him because if she called Merci Rayborn, Merci would kill her.

“She about killed me when I told her I’d been drinking that night, and wasn’t sure about the pictures she showed me.”

“I’m glad she didn’t. How can I help you?”

“Well... this is the deal. I hope you don’t want to kill me, too. But I was watching CNB and they got that guy on a twenty-four-hour watch now, the sex offender? Like every time he sticks his head out the door or goes to the window, they go live and show him? Anyway, I think it could have been him at the mall that night. You know, with a blond wig and a fake mustache to make him look like a rock star from the seventies. Or that guy Paul Newman played in Buffalo Bill and the Indians.”

Hess wondered how Kamala Petersen could so blithely make a face ten days after the fact, a face on TV no less, through a wig and a fake mustache.

“You think the guy on TV could be him.”

“Right. I wouldn’t swear it was him, like Merci wanted me to with those pictures. But I will swear it could be him. See, both times I saw him on TV I was like totally awake. So my unconscience wasn’t working? But then after the second time I dreamed I was back in the mall and it looked like the guy on TV. The same eyes. You know, kind of sad and thinking something’s funny. Both at once.”

“So, are you making the man at the mall from the TV image, or from your dream?”

“From the dream.”

“Oh.”

Hess got the remote and found CNB. There was something on about a fire in Trabuco Canyon, no castrated sex offender peeking out from behind his blinds. He turned off the sound.

“Kamala? The problem here is that the sex offender in Irvine — his name is Colesceau, I believe — has short dark hair. The man you saw at the mall had long blond hair and a mustache. We’ve got no reason to believe he was wearing a wig. I mean, the hair samples we’ve got here are human, not synthetic.”

“There are plenty of human hair wigs out there.”

“There are some.”

Kamala sighed. “I know. I know you and Merci think I’m a complete ditz, but I’m not. It just takes a while for things to settle in my head sometimes.”

He wondered if three margaritas could be argued as an asset, too, something to loosen up Kamala Petersen’s “unconscience,” but he didn’t wonder very long.

Intoxicated, hooked on fashion mags, old movies and TV. Thinks everybody looks like somebody famous she’s seen a picture of.

Our witness, rendered uncallable in court by hypnosis.

“Kamala, when you saw this guy up at the Brea Mall, then down in Laguna Hills, did you ever think, hey — that’s a wig?”

“No.”

“But that’s your business, isn’t it — appearance, beauty, fashion?”

“Maybe that’s how good it was. My specialty is cosmetics, really. But I can tell you from my work that a good wig is hard to see. If you do the feathering right, and have a good cut to start with, it’s almost impossible, especially from a distance, or if you’re not really looking for it.”

True, thought Hess. And also true that her description had led to a sketch good enough to be recognized by the OCTA bus driver, the clerk at Arnie’s and Lee LaLonde. In fact, Hess himself had thought at first that there was something of Kamala’s man in Colesceau’s eyes.

But if it was Colesceau, why hadn’t the mug from his jacket clicked for her? Or the newspaper shots?

Hess wondered about a lineup. It seemed reasonable that a convicted violent sex offender disguised and seen in the vicinity of a sexual abduction might be considered suspect. It was a good way to turn up the heat on a guy. He imagined getting this Colesceau fellow outfitted with blond hair and a mustache.

The bad news was that an ID of a suspect in a disguise would probably be laughed at by any Da’s office in the country.

The good news was Colesceau had no search and seizure rights as a sex crime parolee: he and Merci could question him and check out his house any time they wanted until Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, when he completed his parole and his chemical castration program ended. If he was stashing a wig of golden human hair, a Deer Sleigh’R and a Porti-Boy, they could pretty much just walk in and look for them.

Hess watched a silent Mercedes commercial, a radiant blonde in a red convertible. Women in cars, he thought: secure, confident, protected. No word from LaLonde on the Purse Snatcher’s dysfunctional alarm override.

“Kamala, one more thing — did Merci give you the number here?”

“In case she wasn’t available. Oh well, let her kill me. I want to do the right thing.”

“You have.”

“They say on the TV that the guy’s been castrated. Then these doctors come on and say rape is a crime of anger.”

“That’s the current thinking.”

And if you’d ever seen what a bottle or a club or a gun barrel did to a woman who’d been raped with one, you’d probably agree. But he didn’t say that.

“They didn’t show very much of him,” Kamala said. “Mostly, the good video is from when they first surprised him a couple of days ago. The last time they showed him live, he was looking out from behind the door. It’s his eyes that give him away, Mr. Hess. Wet. Sad. Like Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago or Lon Chaney’s in Wolfman. Before he turns into the wolf. On TV he looks scared, like an animal.”

“He’s behaved like an animal.”

“To those women.”

“And those are the ones we know about.”

“It makes me want to never trust a man again.”

“Be careful who you trust.”

“I will. Well, thanks.”

He hung up and called Merci.