The Blue Hour

Thirty-One

The developed exposures from Rick Hjorth’s film were on Hess’s desk when he got back that evening. They were printed four by six and most of them were in focus. The ones taken after dark weren’t very good because the automatic flash was too weak for much distance. Hess was pleased that Hjorth had used the date/time feature on the camera, which marked each print in the upper right comer. He slid the pictures of him and Merci into his coat pocket.

Hess looked at the image of Colesceau’s apartment with the mob outside, picket signs and candles, even though it was still daylight — 5:01 P.M., August 14. Saturday. And Colesceau looking through the cracked door — 6:11 P.M. Colesceau on his porch — 6:12 P.M. Then Colesceau and the pretty neighbor, Trudy, apparently exchanging something near his porch — 6:14 P.M. A close-up of Trudy Powers after, smiling dreamily into Rick Hjorth’s lens — 6:22 P.M. Next, a picture of a young man holding a sign that said NEXT TIME CUT THE DAMNED THINGS OFF and flipping off the photographer while he smiled at the camera — 6:25 P.M.

And so on.

“Anything good?” Merci called over. She was at her desk with the phone pressed to one ear and a notepad open in front of her. Hess knew she was hassling Bart Young of the Embalming Supply Company once again, trying to get him to hurry the customer list. Hess had to hand it to her: she was obsessive enough to be a good investigator someday. Head of homicide? Maybe. Sheriff by fifty-eight? We’ll see, he thought. On the plus side, she’s got twenty-five years to figure it out.

“Nothing yet,” he called back.

Next time cut the damned things off.

He looked at the picture of the smiling flipper-offer, then sat back. It helped to laugh when you could, but sometimes there wasn’t a chuckle anywhere in your heart.

Hess looked out at the near-empty investigations room — it was almost seven o’clock — and wondered about the behavior of his own species. He was done being shocked by it at twenty-two. He was finished being disgusted by it at thirty. It was too grim and hopeless to be amusing and too amusing to be grim and hopeless. It made him want to be somewhere people didn’t murder and gut one another for thrills, where you didn’t carry around a sign calling for your neighbor’s nuts on a platter, where people had other things to do than stand around taking pictures of each other. Hess had spent too many of his sixty-seven years contemplating the grimace of his race, and he knew it. You could end up looking just like it. That was why when he made love to a woman he always made it last as long as he could because when he was doing that he wasn’t quite himself anymore, he was just a little better, a notch above the bullshit, temporarily upgraded.

Make it last, he thought. Make it last just a little longer.

Hess looked at the pictures that Rick Hjorth had snapped through a crack in the blinds of Matamoros Colesceau’s apartment.

They were taken from the same general angle as the view that Hess had of Colesceau that morning while he conferred with Merci in the downstairs bathroom. The couch, the wall opposite the front window, the TV. They were dark and the image small — reduced by distance as well as the top and bottom of the crack through which it was shot. Hess held the picture away and squinted at what looked like the back of Colesceau’s head. It was just visible above the back of the couch. Thinning hair over the dull patina of a scalp. It was somebody’s head, Hess concluded. Past it, the TV screen held the blurred picture of an actor walking down the hallway of a hospital set. The snapshot said, August 14, 8:12 P.M.

The time Ronnie Stevens’s heart was being removed, thought Hess. But Colesceau’s watching TV.

He got a loupe from the desk drawer and bent down for a better look. The image got bigger but more blurred. He breathed deeply and fogged the loupe. For a second it was like watching Colesceau through a window in a snowstorm. Sure, he thought, the TV watcher could really be a pillow or a stuffed bag or a doll or a cantaloupe on a stick with Magic Marker hair drawn on. It could be a holographic projection, swamp gas, or Lael Jillson’s severed head with the hair cropped short. He tossed the loupe back in the drawer and flipped the photograph toward the stack. The back of Colesceau’s head is the back of Colesceau’s fucking head and he was sitting there watching TV while someone bled and gutted Veronica Stevens in the Main Street construction site.

Deal with it.

The photographs proved it. And they also proved that nobody could crawl out of the kitchen alcove window and not be seen. The angle was wrong. The neighbor’s porch light shone upon the glass. It would be as obvious as someone pinned on concertina wire with a searchlight bearing down him.

Using the date/time numbers, he arranged all the shots in chronological order. Everything was so clear, right there in living color. But something wasn’t quite right. He stared, unfocused his vision a little, rearranged them according to subject: Colesceau, crowd, whole apartment, lower story, upper story. It wouldn’t come to him. It was like getting brushed by the wing of a bird you never saw. He asked Merci to come over for a look.

She stood beside his desk, hands on her hips, lips pursed. “I don’t see it.”

“Something touched me, then it left.”

She gave him a look. “Let me try the loupe.”

She bent, taking her time “The only thing I can think of is, when he watches TV, doesn’t he even move? I mean, it’s like he’s frozen. Mike’s kid is like that, though. He gets in front of the tube and goes hypnotic.”

“Well.”

“No?”

“That’s true, what you said, but it’s something about the exteriors, I think. Not Colesceau himself.”

“Time and date are right there. I’m not seeing it, Hess. I don’t see the problem.”

He looked at the pictures again. “Right now, I don’t sense anything odd there at all. It’s gone.”

“Goddamned creep is what he is, though.”

Hess sighed and flipped the pictures over. Try again later. “Colesceau can get that car alarm stuff at work, you know.”

“Any idiot with a computer can get car alarm stuff.”

Hess called Undersheriff Claycamp for an update on the search for the panel van, and to change the assignments just a little. Nothing had popped and Hess needed a little something for himself.

Then he told Merci goodnight and headed down to his car.

He drove to the medical center with his mind back in the haunted oaks of the Ortega. Then in the high bay of Pratt Automotive, seeing that black-and-yellow Shelby Cobra again. Then Allen Bobb’s mortuary sciences class. Then it was in Matamoros Colesceau’s garage, where he found nothing he’d hoped to find. Big waves kept shouldering their way into his thoughts, too, but he banished them as distractions. He allowed himself to be inside just one, however, speeding and swaddled in the cold blue Pacific, happy as a bullet in a barrel.

During his radiation treatment Hess suddenly broke out in a scalding sweat. It evaporated off his skin immediately and left him feeling as if he’d been purged by fire. He lay there wondering if they’d turned up the rads too high. Maybe it was punishment for having to stay open late for him on a Tuesday. Dr. Ramsinghani told him “the heavy sweat is an occasional side effect,” and smiled at him like he’d just bought a fine casket for himself.

He buttoned his shirt over his newly purified skin and walked back out to the waiting room.

Merci looked up from a magazine. “I tailed you.”

“I got four of the panel vans to check myself.”

“I heard you stealing them from Claycamp. Figured you might need your partner for it. Plus there’s goddamned reporters waiting for me at work. I’ll drive.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

“You’ve got a nice glow to you, Hess.”

“Funny.”

“No, I meant it... you look... oh, hell. Okay. All right. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever said. Ever.”

She looked at him with a guilty acquiescence on her face — but it was really only a minor guilt — and Hess smiled. Her slow shrug said sorry, this is what you get, don’t expect me to improve all that much, I’ll try.

“And Hess, they say if you laugh a lot you live longer.”

He just looked at her.

“I give up,” she said. “Put me out of my misery.”

“Put me out of mine?”

“Deal. I feel lucky tonight. Where’s that first van?”

Hess was thankful that Merci kept the Sheriff radio down low. It was a quiet night so far, calls for disturbing the peace, drunk in public, a car theft in Santa Ana. A bank thermometer read 81 degrees and the sun set through a bank of smog that spread the light into a red blanket low in the west.

They checked two vans in an hour — one in Mission Viejo and one in San Clemente. The registered owners had come up clean on records checks and all the tires were matched. None were new. Hess figured if the Purse Snatcher had caught on to his own identifying flaw, it would be a new right front, maybe a new set all around.

Vern Jackson, the third van owner, wasn’t home. He came up with assault and concealed weapon raps in ’79 and ’85. The vehicle wasn’t parked in the driveway or the street, so Hess stood watch while Merci went through a side gate. A few minutes later she was back out again, shaking her head.

The last van was registered to Brian Castor of Anaheim. He came back clean on the record check. The van sat in the driveway of an older tract home with a neat yard and a mailbox in the shape of a shark. It was red. They drove past, U-turned and parked along the curb in front.

The front door of the house was a dutch door with the top open. A large man with long blond hair stood just inside, watching them get out. Hess waved and pointed at the van.

Castor met them next to it, his hands on his hips, his “Gone Fishin’” T-shirt tight over his chest and arms.

“What’s up?”

“We’re checking a few vehicles — part of an ongoing investigation. Do you mind if we look at the outside?”

“Why mine?”

“Panel vans in the county.”

“Go ahead.”

But Merci had already gone ahead. She rounded the front of the van behind Castor, walked past him to check the right rear. She shook her head. Hess could see that the two right-side tires were not new.

“We need a look inside,” said Merci.

“Nice to meet you, too,” said Castor. “Go for it. It’s unlocked.”

Hess looked at the fisherman while Merci swung open the back door. A moment later she slammed it shut.

“Nix.”

Hess thanked Castor and apologized for interrupting his evening.

“Whatever, man. See you later, sweetheart.”

“Dream on, fish eyes,” said Merci, already moving toward the car.

Castor looked at Hess and smiled. “Spicy.”

A few minutes later Hess heard the words that he had learned to dread when he was twenty-two years old, just starting off, and had dreaded more with every passing year.

“Deputy down, eighteen-twelve Orangewood, El Modena off Chapman! Deputy down and it’s bad. Suspect down, too. Need paramedics and need ’em now.”

The words shot through Hess’s body like electricity. He realized they were half a mile away, told Merci the quickest way in.