T. Parker - Laguna Heat

The cat slunk to her face for another rub and Shephard slapped it away. He found her carotid and pressed it, uselessly. His ears were ringing, and he felt a bloated thumping in his chest.

Shephard saw that Helene had left an envelope resting on her chest. To Joseph was written on the outside in a calm and lovely script. He stood for a moment and tried to quiet his pounding heart, but the attempt was as futile as trying to find life in Helene Lang’s quiet artery. With a silent nod to his own ungodliness, Shephard took the envelope, shut the door behind him, and returned to the stale kitchen. He sat down, and heard Helene Lang’s whiskey voice as he read:

My Dear Joseph,

It was only a few days ago that I realized how long I’ve been waiting for this. Strangely, I am at peace now. I leave with much bitterness and regret, but I bargained for them both, as you well know. The real sadness about life is all the time it gives us to do what we can never undo. If I spent my time too close to the shadows I have no one to blame except myself. And what is it about those shadows that draws some of us, like moths to light? I suppose there is a sunny world somewhere, but it never much interested us, did it, Joe? For what we did to Burton I should burn twice in hell, and would do it gladly if it could bring him back and make things right. But that is childish, and we have been anything but children. Regret is a luxury that even I have outgrown. The one good thing I did on earth was love you, but Jesus, why does He give us the hands to do what we imagine? Finally, I will hurt you too, but the confession I made was for myself, and believe me I needed it badly. Even after all we have done I cannot be a part of what you do now. I have made arrangements to bring the proper people to the proper places, and should they fail and you succeed, no one will be wronged more than they have been wronged already.

I love you, Joe, but I wish I’d never been born to do it.

Peace to you someday, too,

The cat jumped onto Shephard’s lap and rubbed its nose against the corner of the letter. His nerves jolted and he pushed the animal back to the floor. The wind outside assaulted the windows and the glass shivered so vehemently that Shephard wondered if it might break and bring the whole storm into the suite. He smoked a cigarette and flushed the butt down the kitchen sink, then smoked another. If Helene Lang was just a crazy liar, she had played it right down to the end, he thought. A lot farther, it seemed, than anyone would have asked her to.

For the next hour, Shephard went through her suite. He again studied the photographs in the living room and hall. He carefully rifled the kitchen drawers. In the second room off the hallway, guest quarters, he inspected the closet and found it nearly empty, but lingered over a collection of personal papers and snapshots that were pushed far into the recesses of a dresser. Letters from Joe, innocent lover’s notes; a dried and ancient boutonniere with pin still intact; a baby picture unmistakably of Joe Datilla.

Back in the bedroom, which now seemed to smell of death, he worked his way through the large walk-in closet. Helene Lang’s wardrobe befitted the social animal: cocktail dresses, dinner dresses, business suits, all bunched along one wall, gay colors and fine fabrics. The clothes were pressed together without regard for wrinkles or freshness, some of the slinkier gowns having slid to an end of their hangers, which now dipped helter-skelter from the weight. Another wall was dedicated to sport clothes and sweaters. The floor of the closet looked like a sale bin in a discount store: it was littered with dozens of shoes, which formed a small hill of mismatched colors and shapes. A group of bathing suits lay in one corner, the top one still damp from a recent swim. The suits below lay in a heap that smelled of chlorine and mildew.

The bathroom was roomy but dominated by crud. Black mold stained the bottom of the shower door, the linoleum cracked and peeled upward in one corner, and a furry orange rug was wadded around the toilet base, either to stop a leak or warm the feet.

Helene Lang must have done her entertaining at the lounge, Shephard thought, if she did any entertaining at all. The sink dripped, and the mirror above was so smudged that it offered only a translucent approximation when he looked into it. He wondered if an approximation was all Helene had wanted.

In the bedroom proper he flipped on the light and regarded it fully for the first time. The room was large but sparsely furnished, giving off the same air of carelessness as the closet. A simple director’s chair sat by the far corner near the window, overhung by a lamp. To his left Shephard noted a potted palm, and above it on the wall hung an oversized rubbing of some Mayan deity, its mouth agape and filled with large round teeth, a rattle — or perhaps some weapon — clutched in its hand. A dresser stood beside the bed, drawers open and spilling underclothes of varying purpose. Beside the empty bottles on the nightstand stood a clock radio whose digital readout flipped to 10:14 A.M. as he watched.

Shephard found what he was looking for under the bed, that final catch-all of the bad housekeeper. At first the weight of it deceived him, seeming too heavy to contain the news clips that any social director would collect. But after he had worked the cumbersome blue trunk into the corner of the room and opened its solid lid, he saw that thirty years of Surfside history had been bound in leather volumes, one for each year. The covers were uniform navy blue, with gold lettering for the date and the words Surfside Club.

He sat down in the rickety director’s chair and turned on the lamp above him. Gazing across the room, he thought back to his late night walk on the beach — it was just two days ago, he counted, but it seemed more like a thousand — when he had felt the murder of Hope Creeley transforming from homicide into something even darker, less negotiable. As he had described it to Datilla, it was proportionless, without balance. Had the killer bothered to take even five dollars, an earring, a television, then at least some idea of form and shape would have been suggested. But he saw the case as utterly without reason. I have come closer only to remain far away, he thought. True, he had given the killer a face and fingerprints, a car, a talent, a set of coinciding descriptions fit for the Academy textbooks. But he still couldn’t answer the question, Why?

As he sat with the heavy trunk at his feet, Shephard remembered the strange feeling he’d had on the balcony only moments before, and it dawned on him that he was working a case in the present, when all indicators pointed toward the past. It was clear that the Surfside had been the stage for things beyond his understanding, and that all the players — Algernon and Creeley, Datilla and Helene, even Wade — were unfurling their bony fingers toward the trunk before him. He looked at the bed, wondering if she would have approved. And as he stared at her lifeless chest, hoping like a small boy that maybe she would come to life again, Shephard knew that Helene Lang had all but led him to this place, to her life and death.

He knew, too, that the trunk would include Wade and Colleen, Datilla and Helene, Tim and Margie, Burton and Hope. They seemed tangled, inextricable, one and the same. As he reached for the volume marked 1951, his rational side urged him on while his instincts rebuked him, and for a moment he felt as if his hand were moving both toward and away from the book, like a cat feeling water with a hesitant paw.

But in the end it was more Helene Lang’s advice to know thyself than his own sense of duty that led him to take the volume and bring it to his lap. Outside, the wind shuddered into the windows again and he felt chilled, though sweat was tickling down his head. Her words echoed as he began reading: Welcome to the club.