Twisted

CHAPTER 8

The bus that Isaac took to the Union District was a big, loose-in-the-rivets, half-empty, diesel-fed dinosaur that rumbled and bumped through dark city streets, brakes squeaking, belching pollution. Brightly lit; a crime-reduction measure.

By car, the ride from Hollywood would be twenty minutes. Using the MTA, an easy hour.

He sat at the back, read the latest edition of Davison’s Abnormal Psychology. His fellow riders were mostly cleaning women and restaurant workers, a few drunks. Nearly all Latino, mostly illegal, he figured. Just as his parents had been until the Doctors had intervened.

And now he was wearing his father’s hand-me-down suit and playing at scholar.

There but for the grace…

When he got home, his father would probably be at work. Lately, Papa had been taking a second shift dipping sheets into noxious vats, wanting to earn a little extra money. Isaiah, home from his roofing job, would be sleeping, and Joel, of late a gadabout, might or might not be around.

His mother would be in the kitchen, changed from her uniform to a faded housedress and slippers. A pot of albondigas soup simmering on the stove. A rack of tamales, both savory and sweet, fresh out of the oven.

Isaac had barely eaten all day, taking care to be hungry for her food. He’d learned the hard way his freshman year, eating a late lunch on campus and arriving home with insufficient appetite. Not a word of protest from Mama as she wrapped his uneaten dinner in foil. But those sad looks…

Tonight, he’d gorge as she sat and watched him. Eventually, he’d try to get her to talk about her day. She’d claim it was boring and want to know about the exciting world he lived in. He’d resist, then finally parcel out a few details. Not the crime stuff. The numbers and polysyllables.

A few well-chosen polysyllables always impressed Mama. When he tried to simplify his language, she stopped him, told him she understood.

She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. In any language multiple regression analysis and percentage of variance accounted for were incomprehensible except to the initiated. But he knew better than to patronize her.

Sensitive guy that he was.

One of the initiated.

Whatever that meant.

He’d dozed off and dreamed when the bus came to a quick stop. Jolted awake, he looked up in time to see the driver throw out a homeless man who’d failed to produce the fare.

Angry words and clenched fists shot through the bus’s wheezing door as the wretchedly filthy evictee stood in the gutter and howled vengeance. Isaac watched the man, bent over in shame, turned tiny by the bus’s departure.

The driver cursed and put on speed.

The cusp of violence. So much of the crime Isaac had studied began that way.

Not the June 28 murders, though. They were something different, he was sure of it. You could lie with numbers, but the numbers he’d divined weren’t lying.

Now to convince Detective Connor.

Petra.

Thinking of her by name was unsettling; it reminded him that she was a woman.

He sat lower in his seat, wanting to sink out of view. Not that any of his co-riders were the least bit interested in him. Some were regulars and surely recognized him, but no one spoke.

The geek in the borrowed suit.

Occasionally someone- a woman not unlike his mother- smiled as he boarded. But for the most part everyone wanted to rest.

The Somnolent Express.

Before being wakened, his dreams had been pleasant. Something featuring Detective Connor.

Petra.

Had he been in it? He wasn’t sure.

She had. Lithe and graceful, that efficient helmet of black hair.

The crisp features. Ivory skin, blue vein tracings at the periphery…

She wasn’t anywhere close to the contemporary female ideal: blond, busty, bubbly. She was the antithesis of all that, and Isaac respected her doubly for being herself, not giving in to crass social pressures.

A serious person. There seemed to be very little that amused her.

She always dressed in black. Her eyes were dark brown, but in a certain light, they appeared black as well. Searching eyes- working eyes- not vehicles for flirtation.

The overall impression was a young Morticia Addams, and Isaac had heard other detectives refer to her as Morticia. But also as “Barbie.” That he didn’t get.

There was plenty about Hollywood Division, about police work in general, that continued to elude him. His professors thought academia was complex, but now, after time spent with cops, it was all he could do not to burst out in laughter at departmental meetings.

Petra was no Barbie.

Just the opposite. Focused, intense.

He’d lain awake in bed more than once, imagining what her breasts looked like, only to shake himself out of that, appalled at his vulgarity.

Small, firm breasts- stop.

Still… she was a beautiful woman.