Where Serpents Lie

Twenty-Four

On my way home I stopped by the first four female-owned homes that were listed for sale on the MLS. Time is cheap to the unemployed. More than that, though, it was either follow through or desperation — take your pick. The Nicols residence in Anaheim, not far from the stadium, had closed escrow two weeks earlier and the old owner gone to Hawaii. The Parlett home in the Fullerton hills was a horse property owned by an elderly woman who lived alone — no tenants in the guest cottage down by the stable. She looked at me with gray lonely eyes as we talked. The Haun residence in Orange had a for sale sign and a lock box on the front door. The sheet told me it was built in 1976, with a nonconforming “second unit” bootlegged in the back in 1980. It was in a decent neighborhood, one of those streets with lots of nice flat lawns but not a lot of trees. The block felt kind of open and exposed. The fact that the home was empty would have deterred some investigators, but I slipped into the backyard and approached the second unit for a first-hand look. It was locked, too. I peered through a side window at the hardwood floors, the freshly painted walls, the little kitchen with chipper pink tile around a white sink.

Next was Tustin, roughly on the way to my place in the metro district, Collette Loach’s house had been listed for $225,000. It was a three bedroom with a detached guest unit and “mature landscaping.” It was built in 1948 and it was small — 1,300 square feet for the main and another 600 for the guest house. I vaguely remembered the street — Wytton — for two reasons. First, I had played in the nearby Tustin Tiller gymnasium just a few blocks away as a guard on the Laguna freshman basketball team (Darien Aftergood was on that team, and it was one of the few games we won that year, I believe). Second, I’d once arrested a terrified kid who had played a Fourth of July prank on his best friend and set three Wytton Street houses on fire with a smoke bomb. It was a nice old block, not far from the high school, small on crime and big on quiet.

The house was hidden by old sycamore trees that cast the roof in shade, and by a rock wall that came out almost to the sidewalk. The wall was six feet high. It was one of several houses on the street with walls, and they all looked just a little funny sitting there amid the frank and unguarded others, saying, it seemed: stay out, stay clear, stay away. There was a wrought-iron gate across the driveway opening in the wall, and a buzzer box was fastened to the stones beside it. Under the box was the mail slot.

I got out and went up to the buzzer and pressed it. I have no idea where or if it rang. There was no movement from the house. So I walked along the wall, turned and followed it back until I was stopped by the next-door neighbor’s grapestake fence. It was cool in the shade there and when I looked up through the canopy of fresh May sycamore all I saw of the lowering sun were slivers slanting in from the west.

I backtracked around to the front and tried the other side. There was a very narrow pathway between the neighbor’s rose garden and the rock wall. The rose garden was the most lovingly tended patch of dirt I’d ever seen, weedless and rich brown, with dark green bushes heaving scores of color-drenched flowers into the air. An old man stood in the middle of the garden looking at me. He had baggy tan trousers and a green cardigan sweater and a pair of clippers in one hand. His face and head were brilliantly pale, almost blue white.

I said good afternoon and he nodded.

“I’m interested in the house,” I said, only then realizing there was no for sale sign in the yard.

The old man’s voice was faint. “I lost three Mr. Lincolns last week. Lost two Snowfires, two Deep Purples and a Blue Girl. Did you take them?”

“No, sir. I’m not a thief.”

“How do you do?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“You could be one,” he said, but his voice was full of deliberation, not accusation. “Peg can tell a thief from a pilot.”

I shrugged and smiled stupidly. “Have you seen Collette recently? Ms. Loach, the owner?”

“I can’t really see you.”

“She lives here, I think. She listed the house for sale, but I didn’t see a sign.”

“Pangloss. My wife said I’m a Pangloss. She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Her sons live there. Two of them. Nice young men — a minister and a salesman.”

“Do you mean Mrs. Loach’s sons?”

“Yes. Here, take this. The body of Christ.”

He held out a brilliant white rose with eight inches of stem. I took it and thanked him.

I looked at the wall beside me. Over the top I could see the roof of the house, and the dense sycamore. A power pole stood just behind the trees and you could see where the line curved upward to the pole top and where the utility company had trimmed the foliage back for safety.

“What are the sons’ names?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you describe them to me?”

“I don’t see them often. I only see up close. They look like sons to me.”

“Maybe I’ll just knock on the door,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said.

I went around to the front and tried the gate. Locked. So I walked around to the other side and climbed over the wall.

The house was wood, stained dark brown. The trim was white. The front yard was grass, healthy and trimmed along the cement drive that led to the garage. No flowers, hedges or shrubs. There was a long porch running along the front. No patio furniture. No flower pots. No birdbath or naked cherub or St. Francis or painted deer. A busy guy’s place, I thought: neat, efficient, low maintenance. Two guys, like the old man said? There were two windows facing the front, both with blinds drawn shut tight I knocked on the door and nothing happened. I waited and knocked again. Then I went around to the guest quarters behind. It looked closed up to me. The porch was littered with leaves and the windows were blocked off by thick curtains I couldn’t see through or around. I tried some windows on the side of the little cottage, but couldn’t see inside so much as an inch. The garage was connected: door locked, window blinds down.

I talked to three more neighbors but gathered little. Suburbs can be the most private places on earth, which is why places like Orange County can harbor some of the worst people in the world. Like Chet. Like The Horridus. One of the neighbors said he thought two young men lived there; the others said it was just one. They all agreed that the occupant(s) came and went in a white Saturn four-door.

Looking back at the place in the rearview I was reminded of the Grantley place in Hopkin. But then, I wanted to be.

On my way home I called the listing agent for the Loach house, to find out anything I could about Collette and the property. What I found out was that the owner had retracted the listing just after the MLS sheet went to print. My spirits sank and I cursed my luck. Then they began to rise. What would be a better reflection of an unstable, changing character than listing and unlisting a home in less than one week? The agent told me that Collette Loach had personal reasons for changing her mind. I asked for her phone number, but the agent said she was under strict orders from Loach not to give it out to anyone — a common practice for busy, private individuals, she informed me. All inquiries were to be handled by the realtor. I begged, pleaded and got nowhere with her. I toyed with the idea of telling her that I was not really an interested buyer, but worried that she might have read the papers or seen the news. I toyed with the idea of impersonating another deputy, say, Johnny Escobedo, but I remembered the look of warning on his face at the café. Plus, believe it or not, I know the difference between a moral act and an immoral one, not that I haven’t in my life chosen the latter. But I did call a friend of mine at the phone company in L.A. He was kind enough to check their statewide for me, only to confirm what I had feared: no Collette Loach with a telephone number in California.

Halfway home it was my turn to get a call. Will Fortune from Idaho, with an edge to his voice.

“Good news, bad news, and maybe news,” he said.

“Bad first.”

“The photographs were partially made by your old Yashica.”

My heart fell and my mouth went dry as sand.

“The good news is, I don’t think the final images were taken exclusively from photographs at all. They’re mainly digitized composites done by someone with a lot of patience, a lot of skill and some pretty good materials to start with — pictures of you and pictures of the girl and pictures of that cave. Our artist shot the final digitized images with a film recorder, thus a photograph. But he was careless. The edge marks from the original photos of the cave — taken with your camera — were still on the negs, just inside the edge marks the film recorder left. It’s a slick piece of work, but he was off by fractions of a millimeter. That fraction was big enough for me to drive a truck through.”

“If the photographs came from my camera, I’m sunk.”

“No. The final image was made up from photographs taken with your camera and photographs that may not have been. It’s image manipulation, pure and simple, and I will testify to that. But it gets better... maybe.”

“Give me the maybe better.”

“The shadow analysis worked beautifully. Those cave shots were taken on January the eleventh of this year. That was a Friday. If you can put yourself somewhere else, it means someone else took them. If someone else took them, you’ve been set up. I’ll testify to that, too. The DA can argue with me all he wants, but he can’t argue with the sun.”

It’s such a strange feeling, to have your heart shooting around inside your body like a balloon with the air escaping.

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“I’d reserve that privilege for Loren if I were you. Good luck.”

Few dates stay in the memory that long, unless they’re special. January the eleventh was all of that: I was with Donna. Newport Marriott Hotel, room 317. Our third time consummating the powerful desire that had grown since those first moments alone together in a county elevator two months before. I’d told Ishmael I was leaving the office, claiming an interview with a suspected child molester, up in Anaheim. It seemed like a small thing at the time: so little risked and so much gained. I did the actual interview the next Monday and dated the notes three days earlier. The suspected child molester was the man who became our turncoat, Professor Christopher Muhlberger, aka Danny, who blew out his brains in despair by the pool in Chet Alton’s rented Orange house.

It was an easy date to remember, too, because it was my fortieth birthday, and Melinda and Penny had awakened me that morning with a cake bearing a single candle that, when you lit it, whistled “Happy Birthday” over and over, until you blew it out.

Danny wouldn’t be contesting our interview time and date, though Danny’s calendar might. University professors keep pretty tight schedules, but he wouldn’t have stated his true reason for being away from his professional duties — ratting out friends so he’d get a lesser sex-with-minors pop — would he?

Ishmael might not “remember” my leaving at all. Why should he?

If need be, I could call Donna Mason to the stand and humiliate her in front of each and every one of her CNB viewers. And she could tell the truth about Terry Naughton, champion of the little people, where he was and what he was really doing that day. Maybe if I gave her the white rose sitting on the seat beside me, she’d be willing. Here, take this.