The Blue Hour

Thirty-Nine

By sunset that evening Hess was driving with Merci back out the Ortega, along the swales shadowed by oaks, up the grades of sunlit stone, past the shimmering cottonwood and spring-fed grass. He looked out at the stand of trees where purses and blood belonging to Janet Kane and Lael Jillson had been found. Just darkness now, locked in by the shadows of sycamores and oaks. He thought of how cold that blood had been in the ground out there, already returning into elements by the time they’d found it. He could feel his own blood again now, hot and somehow foreign, apparently borderline anemic, but fortified by rads and noxious chemicals, antacids, antiemetics, painkillers, vitamins and the lingering narcotic of desire. It felt to him like the blood itself was polluted. But he was glad to have it. He noticed his eyes were blurring just a little again now, not so much blurring as failing to focus as well as they could. But that had come and gone, since the chemo.

“Kemp apologized to me this morning. He actually seemed to mean it. More to the point, he said he’d keep his mouth shut and his hands off me.”

“Good. That’s how it should be.”

“It’s not a victory. It’s just basic human respect I’m after.”

“Phil’s a tough one to get that from. You more than earned it.”

“Tomorrow he’s going to make a statement to the press. He’s going to apologize without admitting he did anything wrong. A misunderstanding or some such thing. I talked to Brighton afterward, and just between you and me, Kemp’s headed for an Admin desk.”

“Funny way to get promoted.”

“At least they’ll be able to watch him better. So, I’m thinking about the suit. I can drop it now without feeling like I backed off. That’ll probably get me more publicity than bringing it. Now they’ll say I’m abandoning the other women. But I don’t care. I’ve just got to get onto other things. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned.”

Hess locked over at her but Merci just stared out the window.

The Rose Garden Home sat at the base of the mountains, west of the lake. There was a gate across the driveway entrance, and a gate closer to the house, but both were unlocked. Merci stood in the dust and slid the gates back on steel wheels while Hess watched her in the headlights.

The house was mostly dark — three rooms lit inside, and a porch light throwing a glow above the front door. The grounds were lit well, with halogen patio lights on stands. Hess could see that it was a large wood-sided home that had once been blue. The garage door was up, no cars inside. On the dead brown grass sat a wheeled sign with a big red arrow above a message board. The letters were black against the faded yellow background, and not very straight:

Hess stepped out of the car and into the heat. He wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve. Low nineties, he figured, maybe higher. The house loomed before him. He looked up at the slouching porch, the crooked stairs, the old sofas against the wall, the wrought-iron grates over the windows, the empty bird feeders hung from the awnings, the onyx wind chimes motionless in the heat.

He could hear voices inside the house but they were overlapping and faint and could have been from the TV or a radio.

“This is one fucked-up looking funeral home,” said Merci. “What’s that owner’s name again?”

“William Wayne.”

“Jesus, look at this place.”

“Listen.”

Through the heat came a moan, a long, unhurried and oddly painless moan from the second floor. A moment later Hess heard laughter downstairs — a young woman.

Merci shook her head. “What’s he do, pickle them before they’re dead?”

“Be careful.”

Hess looked at her, reached under his coat and loosened the strap on his shoulder rig. Merci did the same. Hess stumbled on the slanting stairs, recovered across the porch and got himself left of the door. Merci backed up against the wall on the right, her H&K out now and at her side, tucked back behind the leg of her trousers.

Hess reached out with his right hand and knocked. The door was thin and he could hear the report on the other side. The moan started up again but the laughing stopped. He could feel his heart beating too fast in his chest, more rpm than horsepower, an engine with gears that weren’t quite meshing. It wasn’t something he could do much about.

He tried the knob but it was locked. He looked at Merci. She stood relaxed but alert, arms at her sides, boots apart, back to the house. She shrugged and Hess knocked again, harder and longer.

Still nothing. Just the moaning.

“Here goes,” said Hess, holstering his sidearm. He stepped back, lowered his shoulder and charged the door. It took him two tries, but the doorjamb splintered on the second and he stepped aside and let Merci push through.

Hess drew and followed. The anteroom was hot and the smell was strong. There was no mistaking that smell. He noticed the hornets buzzing lazily in the dark heavy air of the stairwell. There were two hallways leading off, one left and one right.

A young man with long blond hair stepped into the dull light of the hallway, looked at them in fear, dropped a tray of something and whipped around the other way.

Hess and Merci yelled at the same time, a chorus of threat that echoed up into the stairwell and bounced off the walls. And the moaning still, plaintive and caged.

Hess pounded down the hall, jamming the gun into his holster. The guy cut left, out of sight. Hess didn’t hesitate. Into a kitchen, bright, a big butcher block and a table with chairs. Three steps and Hess jumped and caught him at a far doorway of the kitchen, bear-hugging the guy’s arms tight to his body, using his weight to crash them to the floor. Hess rolled and forced the face against the linoleum and he could feel Merci behind him, nullifying the strength of one arm, then the other.

“He’s bagged, Hess! Roll off clean, watch the teeth! Watch the teeth! Don’t move, you sonofaBITCH!”

Hess pushed, then rolled away and saw her above him, sidearm aimed down at their prize. He righted himself, held the guy’s neck down with one hand and body-searched him with the other. He got a janitor’s key chain off one belt loop, a pocketknife, some kind of laminated ID card. Then he turned the man over onto his back and stood. He was breathing hard, short little gasps that didn’t seem to get enough air in. It was quiet all of a sudden, no moaning, no cop screams.

“Good,” Hess said. “Work.”

The guy looked early twenties. His hair was long and wavy, he had a thin mustache and dark, frightened eyes. Skinny and pale. He wore a filthy T-shirt, dark jeans, red tennis shoes with no socks. He looked at Hess as if he was about to be devoured. Then at Merci. His chin was quivering and he still hadn’t said a word.

“Name, shithead.”

Eyes on Hess again, then to Merci. Dark and haunted and maybe even remorseful, thought Hess. No struggle at all now, just belly up and lying on his arms, stranded like a tortoise.

“What’s your name, young man?” he asked.

“Billy.”

“Billy what?”

“Billy Wayne.”

Hess looked down at the plastic-covered card. “William J. Wayne,” he said. “Number 113.”

“I didn’t do it. And I want my lawyer.”

“Exactly what didn’t you do?”

“Whatever it is. I live here. I’m the man in charge when we’re alone.”

“In charge of what?”

William J. Wayne looked at each of them again, suspicion, genuine fear. “All of us. When the doctor goes, I’m in charge.”

Hess looked at Merci and Merci looked back. The moaning started up again from above them somewhere.

“You got a lot of goddamned explaining to do, Bill. I’m going to let you stand up, walk over and sit you in a chair here. Then you’re going to tell me what I want to know. You try to fight me and I’ll kick your balls all the way to the lake. Got that?”

“I want my lawyer and I didn’t do it.”

“Yeah, yeah, now stand up real slow and get your ass into this chair. Tim, maybe you should secure this haunted house before Billy tells us everything he hasn’t done.”

Hess, with the janitor’s key ring in one hand, started with the left hallway. The place smelled like a portable outhouse that has been out in the sun a long time. The hornets droned. He came to a door on his right and looked through the window. He could see the wrought-iron grating that protected the glass from the inside. Beyond the grating was a small room lit by a fluorescent shop lamp affixed high on one wall. A small twisted person lay upon the bed, half covered in the sheets. Sharp bones and skin, weak light and shadow. Mouth open, no sound. The person blinked. Hess saw the excrement on the floor around a hole cut directly into the wood. A clipboard hung from a nail outside the door listed the patient as J. Orsino. The hornets buzzed in and out, clung to the walls, pivoted on the light fixture.

The next room down held a young woman laughing. All Hess could see of her was her backside, the honey-colored hair and the arms of the gray straitjacket criss-crossed around her waist. Her bed was pulled into the middle of the room and she sat on the far side of it, facing the wall, her head bowed like she was crying or thinking. Laughing. There was an upturned pot on the floor beside her bed, food stuck to the bottom and sides, hornets flickering on the red enamel. Beside that a kitchen tub that appeared half full of water.

The last room off this hallway held a man who lay atop his bed and stared at the ceiling. The chart said B. Schuster.

Hess tried to breathe deeply but it was hard to inhale the foul air without tasting it all the way down. He retraced his steps to the entry room and went down the hallway to his right. In one room was a disfigured boy; the other was empty.

Upstairs. The unemphatic moaning was an adolescent girl who looked out at Hess from under the covers of her bed. When she saw him she stopped and smiled.

Upstairs on the third level Hess found a spacious room that served as an office. It was well lit. An air conditioner groaned steadily, cutting the temperature and the stench. There was a desk along one wall, one chair and six tall file cabinets. There was one framed picture on the desk — a young couple with a small boy — one of the small black-and-whites popular in the fifties, from which era Hess had several of himself. He recognized neither the people nor the landscape.

He found the business license and county permit for the Rose Garden Home — “an intensive care and hospice” facility. The owner operator was a woman — Helena Spurlea. She’d been in business for eleven years. The small photograph on her county permit showed a stubborn-faced woman with dark bangs and unhappy eyes. She looked like the woman in the little black-and-white, forty years older.

They both looked at him when he walked in. Merci had pulled up two chairs to face Wayne, backs forward. She sat with her arms on the wood, and a mildly amused expression on her face.

“Billy’s decided he doesn’t need his lawyer right now. We’re going to have a little chat, let him go if that’s what seems right. Sound good?”

Hess got the cue. “I wouldn’t let that sonofabitch go if I had a gun to my head.”

Merci sighed, looked at William Wayne. “This is Tim, by the way. He eats chicken heads for breakfast, but he’s an okay guy.”

Hess opened his mouth and slowly bit down on his thumb.

Wayne stared at him from what looked to be a wholly exclusive universe. Then he turned to Merci again. “Maybe I could just talk to you.”

“That mean Tim can look around a littler?”

“It’s the doctor’s place.”

“But you’re in charge.”

“I am in charge.”

“Let him look around, and we can get this over with. Get all of us back to what we were doing.”

“I was feeding 227. I’m in charge when she’s gone.”

“I want to hear about that. Tim, maybe you should take a tour.”

Hess studied William Wayne as he backed out of the room.

“Okay, Billy,” said Merci. “Now what’s the deal with the Porti-Boy?”

Billy giggled. “What’s that?”

The file cabinets in the upstairs office contained patient records. William J. Wayne was a twenty-three-year old native of Riverside, born to an alcohol and methedrine-dependent mother. He was born with “substantial” mental retardation and his developmental age was estimated to be eleven. Hess noted that he was capable of writing his name, which looked like something a first grader might produce, the letters put together one line at a time. There was no mention of any crime in Wayne’s file, sexual or otherwise. Parents long divorced, mother in Beaumont, father’s LKA Grant’s Pass, Oregon. Wayne’s mother apparently signed over her state checks to the Rose Garden Home, in return for the care her son received: $388 per month. Hess made notes.

He got Bart Young’s home phone number out of his blue notebook and used the desk phone to dial it. Young told him that the method of payment on William Wayne’s Porti-Boy was a money order, if he remembered correctly. He could confirm in the morning. He also said they usually used UPS for deliveries in the western states. Hess then called Brighton at home, who said he could get UPS Security at this hour. Five minutes later the phone on Helena Spurlea’s desk rang. Hess spent the next minutes explaining his needs to the UPS regional security director, who said he would fax a signed delivery receipt to the Sheriff Department first thing in the morning. Hess thanked him and hung up.

He called for a law enforcement DMV run on Helena Spurlea: 1992 Cadillac Seville and 1996 Chevy panel van. Three points on her driving record. He wrote down the plate numbers. Her CDL was current and a fax of it and her record was on its way to the Sheriff’s Department Homicide Detail, attention Tim Hess. The van, he thought: where is it?

He pulled out the bottom file cabinet drawer and fingered his way through the folders. Cancelled checks. Invoices. Receipts for expenses. Handwritten notes. He pulled one at random: the expected payments for mortgage and utilities, staples and medications, vehicle maintenance, repairs of appliances, labor costs for landscape, painting, cleaning. Some unexpected expenses, too: $956 for H. Spurlea, round trip travel from LAX to Dallas to Brownsville, Texas, in the fall of 1998; payment of $370 to New West Farms in nearby Temecula for “ostrich and emu products” in 1997; regular monthly payments of $875 to the Schaff Management Group of Newport Beach for “storage” and $585 to one Wheeler Greenfield of Lake Elsinore for “rent.” There was a $1,235 payment to Inland Glass for “wall glass installation” back in 1997, which Hess found odd because he’d not seen a single mirrored wall in the Rose Garden Home so far.

Lots of outlay, thought Hess. She makes some money in this hellhole. Enough to buy “emu and ostrich products” to feed her patients. And why so much for “storage”? What’s she storing — cows?

More scribbles into his blue notebook, Hess’s fingers feeling thick and unwilling, his sense of disgust growing.

In the receivable files, Hess found a dizzying labyrinth of private payments, insurance reimbursements, and state, county and federal payouts. Some were payable to individual patients, some to family, some to Helena Spurlea, some to the Rose Garden Home. Between the discharged, the transferred, the institutionalized and the deceased it was impossible for Hess to account for the income per patient. Even his cursory inspection revealed that one A. Bohanan had expired in March of 1996 and received monthly medical insurance payments of $588 through September of the same year, payable to the Rose Garden Home. A similar benefits-for-the-dead history for M.A. Salott.

It was profane.

The file for January of this year contained nothing at all related to the purchase of an embalming machine by William Wayne.

Hess inspected the house, the garage and the grounds, finding no trace of the Porti-Boy and no documents relating to the purchase of such a thing. No mirrored walls, no ostrich or emu meat in the freezer. No van, no Seville. Just a junked old truck, up on blocks, half of it missing. No tracks on the old asphalt of the driveway. When it was light they could check the road.

Merci was standing across the room from Wayne when Hess came back into the kitchen. Her arms were crossed and she had one hand up, fingers rubbing her chin.

“William is kind of forgetful about things, Tim. Foggy.”

“Let’s throw him in jail and see if he clears up.”

“He’s in charge here. Doesn’t want the other patients to get hungry. The doctor, he says, she cuts out two or three days in a row, sometimes. Stay put, William. Tim, come with me?”

Standing in the stinking hallway, Hess heard the moaning again. Merci’s face looked pale in the bad light. He stood so he could see part of Wayne’s feet through the door.

“He’s too stupid,” said Merci.

“That can be faked.”

“I’m convinced.”

“I am, too. No record. No driver’s license. He probably doesn’t even know how to drive a car.”

“He says he doesn’t know anything about an embalming machine. Had to tell him what one was. Says he thought people went to heaven when they died. Says he doesn’t know where the Ortega Highway is. Never heard of Jillson, Kane or Stevens. Can’t remember the doctor here — Spurlee, or Surplia or Slurpia — something in that area. Christ.”

“Why’d he run?”

“Saw the guns.”

Hess thought. “We can get hair and prints.”

“I already did. Offered him water in a clean glass. He pulled out the hair himself — even got some skin on the end for DNA. It’s in a paper towel inside the glass.”

“We can hold him forty-eight on the resisting. Keep the questions coming, get Kamala Petersen in for a look, see if his head clears up.”

“It’s hard to clear up a skull full of lint.”

“I think you’re right. I also think someone used his name to order a Porti-Boy, signed for the delivery, maybe used his money to pay for it. He never saw the damned thing. Maybe he’s covering someone. Maybe someone’s using him. Spurlea owns a panel van.”

Merci leaned back against the wall, looked up. “What’s the rest of this place look like? How come it stinks so bad? What’s all that moaning about?”

“Take five and see for yourself.”

She came back down the stairs a few minutes later. Hess looked at her and saw the desperation on her face, like when she was working Jerry Kirby’s dead heart. Her voice was low, wavering just a little.

“I’m calling the cops, shutting this place down. I’m going to get the Health Department as soon as they open in the morning. We’ll take Wayne for resisting, see if anything pops, see what Kamala thinks of him. If he’s covering for someone on the Porti-Boy, maybe he’ll tell us who. I’ll get him a protective cell, make sure the creeps don’t hurt him.”

“Good.” He looked in at William Wayne’s feet again. Then at Merci, whose eyes were cold and dark.

“He really is in charge of this hellhole, Hess. That damned Dr. Slurpee is who I want. I really can’t believe what I just saw.”

“I couldn’t either.”

Merci turned and kicked a hole in the wall. “Steel toes. I’m just a little bit pissed off right now. Call Riverside Sheriffs.”

Back out the Ortega the sky was dark and the hills were darker. The road was just a black ribbon with a yellow line through it that kept snaking out of his headlights, then out of Hess’s focus. He stared at it, the only line on earth.

Finally, Merci cut loose.

“The worst part of it is none of those people did anything wrong. They probably never did anything wrong. William Wayne probably didn’t. And the scum we deal with every day, this Purse Snatcher puke we’re after? All they do is bad things. They’ve got good minds and good bodies and all they do is bring the hurt down on other people. But you get unlucky enough to be born like those people back there, you end up in the Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore. That isn’t right, Hess. You keep trying to tell me to feel what other people feel and think what other people think and all that? Well, I never could, until I looked at the people in the rooms back there. That’s the first time I could really feel — and smell, and see and think — just exactly what other people felt and smelled and saw and thought. And it made me ashamed to be a human being and it made me furious. I’m always furious, though. That’s a different story.”

She leaned across the seat and Hess thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she drove a stiff index finger into his shoulder and leaned toward him.

“Those people aren’t ever going to get better. And they never did anything bad to anybody. That pisses me off and I intend to stay pissed off about it just as long as I can. I wish Dr. Slurpee had a jacket. I wish she was looking at some time.”

Hess nodded. “She might get some. You did the right thing, calling the police.”

“I should have waited for that bitch and blown her heart out.”

“Save your shells for the Purse Snatcher.”

“I got plenty for whoever needs them. We just wasted three hours, Hess. Maybe that’s what pisses me off most.”

Merci stared out at the darkness and the stars as they dropped back down into Orange County. So much sky, she thought, and so little time. Her fury had cooled down to a simmer but she could feel it eager to boil up and over again. That was fine; it was what kept her going.

But her heart felt wrong. It was all mixed up, not unanimous like it always was. It felt heavy with her failure to save Jerry Kirby. It was tender at the sudden and powerful empathy she had felt for the people at the Rose Garden Home. It was still coiling with her own indigenous anger. And there was something else inside her, too, something underlying it all like a small blue flame warming a pot, and this had to do with Hess.

He pulled up next to her car in the Sheriff Department lot, left the engine running. She looked at her watch: pushing midnight.

“Come over?”

“Sure.”

She shooed some cats out of the way and made drinks. Her big toe hurt. In the living room she sat across the sofa from Hess and tried to let the smell of the orange grove inhabit her. That didn’t work.

Hess stared at the tube but didn’t touch his drink.

“Stay tonight?” she said.

“No. I’m going to go in a minute.”

“Why’d you come over in the first place, then?”

“To make sure you were okay. Didn’t want you to kick all the walls in.”

She thought about this. “I’m okay. Look, it’s good if you go. I’m better off alone when I’m like this.”

“I know.”