Where Serpents Lie

Six

Tonello’s is an expensive Italian restaurant in the metro district of Orange County. It’s a warm and clubby place, with excellent food and service just formal enough to let you know you’re important. It’s close to the Performing Arts Center and the South Coast Repertory Theater, two cultural jewels in the county’s modest crown. It’s a smoky back room without the smoke, given our brutal but sanctimonious times. If you’re powerful or ambitious, you want to be known there.

For years it’s been the watering hole for the politicians and businesspeople who command their fiefdoms within the county — the supervisors and city pols, the judges and the assemblymen, the developers and real estate magnates, the publishers and editors and media executives, the many lobbyists who represent Wall Street brokerage firms and banks, the philanthropists and the social elite. If your status isn’t as high as your ambition, you can still go, so long as you’re dressed well, submissive and don’t expect a table. Jim Wade is a regular there, along with his heir apparent, Jordan Ishmael. Few others in our Sheriff-Coroner Department have much reason to patronize the place. We like cop hangouts. But for the last six months or so I’ve been showing up at Tonello’s myself, an unknown in the smiling, boozy world of the Orange County elite. Jim suggested that I might profit from a proximity to these people, though he’s never said exactly how. Ishmael, of course, detests my presence. Melinda joins me occasionally. With Linda Sharpe’s bitter words still ringing in my ears, I pulled up to the valet line and left my car and a five with Rodrigo. He parked it out of sight, back with the other Fords.

I walked in with a truculent glow, due to my good fortune at Prehistoric Pets. Ishmael was at the bar, and for once I was glad to see him. I delivered to him the line I’d been dying to deliver for the last few hours:

“Where’s Wade? I got a sketch of a Horridus suspect coming through in less than an hour.”

Ishmael looked at me hard, his green eyes openly suspicious. He motioned behind him with a turn of his head. “With your personal publicist from CNB.”

“Perfect,” I said, smiling. “Talk to you later, Ish.”

I paid, then overtipped the bartender.

“My daughter says she’s starting to really like you.”

“Everybody in your family likes me, except for you.”

“Pride goes before the fall, Naughton.”

“I always land on my feet.”

“When you’re not passed out on your face.”

“Those days are gone.”

“A drunk’s a drunk.”

I took my Herradura rocks and eased through the crowd to where Sheriff Wade, Donna Mason and a couple of the new county supervisors — Dom Ingardia and Lucille Watrous — were holding down one corner of the lounge. I nodded to my boss and to Donna, clicked glasses with the supervisors.

“Nice work yesterday, Terry,” said Lucille. She’s an older woman, savvy and tough, who often looks at me with a twinkle in her eyes that makes me feel like a hero, or her son, or perhaps a fatted lamb. “One more offender off the streets. Two more, I guess.”

“One more kid in juvie, too,” I said.

“Beats turning tricks for Daddy,” said Ingardia, who was recently appointed supervisor — the most powerful office in the county — by the governor. He’s a real estate salesman, and I don’t see how he’s going to help guide this county out of the shitswamp of development it’s fallen into, but that’s another matter.

“Ten years old...,” I said.

I turned my attention to Donna Mason. I always feel all alone with her, even in a crowded room. I kind of have to screw up my courage to talk to her in a situation like this. “That was a good segment you did on us,” I said.

“You probably don’t realize how good,” she said. “The phones have been ringing all day. That bite looks bad, Sergeant.”

I nodded and smiled at her, rather stupidly, I think. I ran my fingers over the bandage on my face. She looks different than she does on TV, her face is thinner and her smile is quirkier and she seems lighter, less permanent. She’s from one of the hollows of West Virginia, born poor but naturally advantaged: she’s quite beautiful, extremely smart and knows what she wants. She works long hours, keeps up a demanding social life and still manages to read two or three books a week. I’ve gathered that much. She was married at twenty-two and divorced two years ago, at twenty-eight. No kids. Her hair is wavy and black and cut short, kind of curls forward around the sides of her face. Her skin is pale and her eyes are brown. She’s small, perfectly proportioned, unathletic. The first seconds I spent with her were six months ago in an elevator at a press conference, where we were headed from the briefing room to the seafood buffet. I looked at her, introduced myself and shook her hand. I’ve been thinking about her ever since, off and on, no matter how hard I try not to.

“It’s nice to work together,” I said lamely. “You know, law enforcement and the... media.”

“Oh, can’t you just call me the news? Or the press, or a reporter, or even a hyena, vulture, jackal or bloodsucker? I can’t get used to being a medium of any kind. It makes me feel so... vaporous.”

Vaporous, with just a hint of the hollows in the lengthened vowels and the gentle lilt of the “r.” You won’t hear her talk like that on CNB.

Sheriff Wade smiled down with an avuncular grin. He’s labored hard for good press over the years, and I’ve helped him land an ally in CNB. More accurately, the children I work to protect have helped him into the good graces of the news sellers. Children are hot now. Children — namely the children of the baby boomers, and the bad things that happen to them — sell. CNB is a local news network, but extremely popular here, and getting more so every month. Like other businesses defined by place, CNB’s fortunes and the future of Orange County are intertwined.

So, what I did next no cop should do, but I had my reasons.

“Sir,” I said to Sheriff Wade, “we’re going to be getting an artist’s sketch of a Horridus suspect in the next hour. Can I have it sent through to the fax in your car?”

He put his lips together as if to whistle, leveled his gray eyes on me through his glasses and took me by the arm, away from the group.

“Easy, media hound. What’s this about?”

We worked our way toward the bar and I told him about the reptile collection angle and my visit to Steve Wicks. Jordan Ishmael eased in our direction, but Wade warned him off in that silent way the powerful have. I glanced over at Donna and the supervisors, then back to the sheriff.

“I thought we were going to let this guy operate,” he said.

“For now.”

“Comments like that have a way of hitting the news.”

“She’ll clear it with me. She always has.”

He looked across the room at Donna Mason. Wade is over six-three, with the weathered skin and dry pale eyes of a rancher. Then he looked down at me. “What do we know about your guy, besides he likes snakes and knows a little Latin?”

“He matches the physical description on the profile.”

“Besides that?”

“Nothing.”

“Go easy, Terry. We don’t need to be seen swinging at bad pitches. That’s best done off-camera.”

“I understand.”

He nodded. “You and Melinda going to come to the ranch Saturday?”

Sheriff Jim Wade’s annual equestrian show and benefit for County Youth Services was set for the weekend. If you’re somebody, you go. I’d never been invited until this year, though I know that Jordan and Melinda Ishmael used to attend together.

“Much looking forward to it.”

“Go ahead. Call Amanda and use the fax in the Lincoln. Here’s the key.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re in charge of CAY, Terry. But I wouldn’t go public with that sketch yet, if I were you.”

“Understood, sir.”

The fax transmission came through the machine in Wade’s gold Lincoln about twenty minutes later. It was clear and specific, taunting in its ordinariness. I smoothed it against my lap and studied it. Slender face, wavy hair, the glasses. A high forehead. Mustaches and beard. Smallish ears and a mouth that looked neither cruel nor kind. A look of intelligence, perhaps. I’ve seen enough artist’s sketches derived from witnesses to know how much they can seem to tell you and how little they often do. The next page had him without the facial hair. Same guy, but he looked more ordinary, less individual. Without the glasses he could have been an artist’s conception of Everyman. I folded the sheets neatly and put them in the inside pocket of my sport coat.

Back inside I got another drink and made the rounds. I put in a good word for our part of the sheriff’s budget with Lucille and Ingardia; they control our purse strings, sort of. I suggested to one of the Disneyland executives that some kind of abused kids’ night might be a nice PR stunt for the theme park and the Sheriffs. I felt good. I introduced Ishmael to a Times editor I know, with the idea the editor might want to hear about the new Sheriff Department Web site that Ishmael and some of his cohorts are working overtime to establish. Ish silently fumed at my farming out a media source to him, which pleased me. I bought another drink for myself, and one for Peter Stowe, who works for the Irvine Company, which is the county’s largest landowner. We talked about this new “developer/environmentalist” agreement that would set aside certain county acreage to preserve endangered species, while opening up other parts of it for houses, industrial parks and what have you. The Times and the Register — Orange County’s two major dailies — had both recently gushed about the sexy way the builders and the environmentalists had jumped into the same bed. Basically, the Orange County press is for developing the county until the last blade of grass is gone, though they publish photo-heavy, love-the-land features that suggest otherwise. To me the new land agreement looked like a good deal for the Irvine Company, and I said so, and Peter Stowe said, smoothly, “Of course it is, or we wouldn’t have made it.”

I smiled and clicked his glass in a fit of bonhomie I immediately regretted. Truth be told, I kind of hate the Irvine Company and all the development interests who’ve had carte blanche in this county since the beginning of time. It really was a beautiful, logical, functional place once, and I sorely miss that era. I grew up here and I feel vested in this place: my family is here, my blood and history, my dreams and disappointment, my co-mortgage — shared with Melinda. So I’m a little dour about people like Peter Stowe, and his easy confidence, and the way that people like him and companies like his always, always get what they want here.

Orange County has a rural, agrarian history, but it has become a tightly packed grid of suburbs that even now — and I’m not sure why this is — continues to be an in-demand place to live. The traffic is as bad as Los Angeles County, our neighbor to the north, and the air is every bit as contaminated. Crime rates are high. Property is expensive, though not as expensive as it used to be. The developers and county politicians are trying to jam a new international airport — fifth largest in the nation — down the throats of about a million people in south Orange County who voted against it. A few people will make a lot of money from it, though there is a perfectly good airport — just recently opened — about five miles away. More customers, is what it all boils down to. County “business leaders” brought us to this saturation point with earnest vigor, and they have not stopped yet. They’re not really leaders; they’re opportunists with an eye, always, on the bottom line.

The governing board of supervisors, for instance — of which Ingardia is the newest member — is a drowsy but powerful group of men and women who have been selling off county interests to developers for the better part of a century. The board’s names and faces change with the years, but their collective history is a discernible thing. A few years ago they were so enmeshed in their own concerns — like hobnobbing here at Tonello’s — that none of them took the time to understand that our near senile tax collector-treasurer was taking insane gambles with public money. Of course, he lost a lot of it — close to $2 billion — and the supervisors quickly denied responsibility for the problem. When they were done braying their innocence, they declared bankruptcy and immediately tried to dump the debt onto the very people whose money they had lost — through a tax hike. Newspapers reported that during those last days before the collapse, one of the supervisors was so distraught with the idea of losing her retirement that all she could talk about while the county sank into bankruptcy was her pension. I think that’s a wholly representative anecdote, if it’s true. One of the supervisors, in fact, quit his job and returned to be an officer on a local police force, where he had started public service years ago. He was the only one of the lot who earned my respect, though I’m sure my respect had little to do with his decision. When you meet these people face to face, as I have in the last few weeks, it’s hard to dislike them personally. But the best thing they and people like them could ever do for this embattled county would be to leave it.

Since Matthew’s death, I have not been eager to judge any man, even if I’m tempted to feel superior. But I do tend to get pissed off.

“You guys are slick, Peter,” I said.

“Just building communities for people to live in,” he said.

“Paying customers,” I noted.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Terry.”

Maybe. But when I look around at this once serene place and see the cars stalled on the maze of freeways and the surface streets jammed with drivers trying to avoid the freeways and the smog hanging heavily over them all like a mood that can’t be willed away, and plans to build an airport large enough to handle a departure or arrival every minute, I wonder. I wonder about us and the way we’ve chosen to live. I wonder what it says about us, and what it will mean to the generations we create and leave behind. I’m not a pessimist, nor certainly apocalyptic, but I can’t help but surmise that we’ve all bought into something so demanding and consuming that we don’t even know what it is anymore. The race is frantic but the goal is forgotten. Our energy surges but our conscience has shut down. We are headless horsemen — lost, but making good time. Guys like Peter, they’re mainly along for the money, riding out the last few years of manifest destiny in pinstripe suits and loafers with fucking tassels. There at Tonello’s I could have gotten worked up about this, but I didn’t because my phone rang.

It was Johnny, and he was excited. I made my way outside with the phone to my ear and a sense of self-importance I couldn’t help myself from enjoying. The tequila was singing in my brain. I glanced over at Donna again, but she was talking to one of the executives who runs the Anaheim Angels baseball team. I imagined being in one of those private boxes with her, a bottle of champagne going and the Angels pounding Seattle.

Johnny was down in San Clemente, the southernmost city in the county, where The Horridus abducted his second girl. He said the next day’s San Clemente Shopper was running a for-sale ad for a late-model red Dodge van. Johnny had gotten the Shopper editor to let him have a sneak preview of the pages that would go to press that night. He talked to the woman who’d sold the ad — over the counter — to a nicely dressed, thirty-something man with glasses. Johnny made the call, posing as a Shopper delivery man who’d seen the ad early, and said he was really interested in the Dodge. The guy who answered said he could come by at seven tonight if he was serious. He was only taking cash. Johnny made the date.

“Clean shaven or beard?”

“Clean.”

“Did you sign up Louis?” I asked.

“Signed and sealed. We’ll meet at six-thirty. I hear you found someone for Amanda.”

“I’ve got him in my pocket and he feels good,” I said. “Guy was in a reptile house, telling some kid what Crotalus horridus was. Fits our description.”

“What do you want me to do, Terry, if this van salesman looks right? Rattle him or glide?”

“Get inside his house if you can. Get him talking. Stay cool. Pick his brains about the van. If he feels like talking, let him do it. No pressure, though. If he feels right, glide. If he looks good we’ll put a bumper-lock surveillance on him, and get to know him better. If he looks really right, make a deposit to hold the van for two or three days — as long as he’ll give you. Get his work number.”

I clicked off the phone. You’re out there somewhere, I thought: selling your house and your van, rubbing your hands over your newly shaven face, feeding your collection of snakes, looking for your next girl. You’re out there and I’m right here. But before you know how it happened, I’m going to be straight in your face. And I’m the last guy on earth you want to meet. Bet on it, friend.

I went in and got another drink and talked to a director of the South Coast Repertory Theater, which is one of the county’s true world-class institutions. When I try to converse with someone in the arts, I always realize how artless I am, how little I know about the world of creation and performance, the world of themes and ideas.

I ended up kind of glazed, had no idea whatsoever who Wally Shawn was, and let the director pick my brain about The Horridus. He asked me about the name, and trying to sound erudite, I told him it was a Latin designation for two reptiles, moloch and crotalus, both of which are followed by the species identifier — horridus.

“Which, of course, means rough, or bristled,” I said. “He wrote it on some evidence associated with his second abduction.”

He listened, then he said something interesting.

He said Moloch was a deity to whom the Israelites offered sacrifices of human children. He said that most Bible scholars maintain that Moloch was actually Yahweh himself, the God of the Jewish people, and that only later, shamed by their practice, they changed the name of that bloodthirsty god from Yahweh to Moloch.

“They rewrote history,” he said. “Odd to think that our Judeo-Christian tradition featured child sacrifice at one time.”

“I guess I would have changed the name of my god, too,” I said.

“Or asked him for a more humane program,” said the director. “When you catch him, will you castrate him?”

“The State of California frowns on that, but it’s been done. A castrated rapist can still rape, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a crime of violence, not sex. At least that’s what the current thinking is. When a castrated rapist rapes again, I’d have to agree.”

“We live in some very challenging times, don’t we, Terry? Can I buy you another drink?”

“Thanks, but I’m just about to leave.”

I said my good-byes and looked one last time into the clear brown eyes of Donna Mason. My heart thumped in my chest and my stomach felt like I was going over a highway in a big fast car.

I let myself into the apartment ten minutes later. It’s a wonderful place, fifth floor, top level, on the other side of the metro district, just a stone’s throw from the nice theaters and expensive restaurants. There’s actually a bean field across from one side, a last vestige of our agrarian history. It’s also got a man-made stream that flows through the clusters of units — hokey, but pleasant. I opened the windows and a bottle of Cabernet, got out some glasses and wiped them shiny with a paper towel. I looked down over the city and felt inexcusably happy.

Five minutes later Donna Mason slipped in. All I could do was watch her come across the floor and shake my head.

She threw her arms around me and buried her fragrant black curls in my neck. “God, I’ve missed you,” she said.