T. Parker - Laguna Heat

Heads appeared in the doorway. Shephard stripped open the pajamas and looked down with almost tearful relief at the unburned chest and stomach of Francis Rubio.

Murmuring from the doorway was a small crowd of old people — one man adjusting his hearing aid, a woman in curlers, the horrified face of Claire Bailey as she struggled to get in. Water pelted down from the sprinkler. Through it all, Rubio’s eyes never strayed from Shephard.

Claire Bailey stood beside him. She had already called the fire department and the police, she said. In the quiet that followed, the sprinkler overhead shut off and Claire Bailey started weeping. She helped Shephard peel the tape from Rubio’s face. When they lifted the first wide white strip from his mouth, the man’s heels began pounding the bed again, his hands opened and closed around nothing, and he bellowed into the silence of Ross Manor.

Shephard eased his way through the people outside the door, looking them in the eyes and telling them that everything was okay now, just a little trouble with Mr. Rubio’s new lawyer. One man said that attorneys were always a pain. He broke into a run when he reached the hall, and headed for the stairs. As he clambered down the stairway, two sounds echoed in his ears, even through the din of Rubio’s wailing. One was the sound of footsteps going down the stairs when he had first climbed them, the other was the slamming door he had heard as he stood outside room 206. He reached the lobby, panting. On the porch, both of the men had risen from their rockers to stare at the overstuffed chair that had landed, as if dropped from heaven, on the lawn. Shephard ran to the LaVerda and was about to jump onto the seat — the key already in his hand — when he saw the spark plug cables, neatly severed, lying across the leather. He cursed and looked up Ross Street, where less than a block away a convertible red Cadillac and its gray-haired driver lurched around a corner and out of sight.

The cops were waiting for him when he finally came home that night, as he knew they would be. Benson from Newport Beach and Hudson from Santa Ana. They stared at him appraisingly as Little Theodore delivered him on the back of his Harley-Davidson.

“Little trouble in Newport I’d like to talk to you about,” Benson said with a crooked smile. He was short, with a combative face, and looked younger than Shephard.

Hudson was bulky and unshaven, and apparently not a talker. “Ditto in Santa Ana,” he said, as if it were an effort. “At Ross Manor.”

They came upstairs, surveyed his stripped apartment, and asked their questions. He modified the truth for Benson, saying only that he had waited for Helene Lang to meet him, then gone upstairs to find the door open, and let himself in.

It was news to Benson that her name wasn’t Dorothy Edmond. He made a note of this, then sat stroking Cal. “If the door was open when you found her, how come it was locked when we got there?” he asked.

“Just thinking of you,” Shephard said. “Didn’t want anybody tampering with your scene.”

Benson seemed to ponder this for a moment. “The next time you want to help me, stay the hell out of Newport, okay?”

“Ditto in Santa Ana,” Hudson managed again.

After an hour of questions, Benson and Hudson closed their notebooks as if on cue, took a last look around the inhospitable apartment, and left.

Later that night, as he studied the face of Azul Mercante in the pale light of his living room, Shephard could feel something foreign inside himself, a barely recognizable emotion, like an unwatered seed only now beginning to grow. He considered Mercante’s haughty smile, the superiority in his eyes, the way he had forced himself into Shephard’s own home and tried to drag his mother down. Images flickered through his mind. Looking at the sketch, Shephard saw in the man everything he had learned to despise: arrogance, violence, recklessness, and a belief — most difficult of all for Shephard to understand — that everything is legitimized by one’s own passion. He recognized the crude emotion growing inside him. It was rage.

And he realized, as he listened to the sound of someone coming up his stairway, that Azul Mercante had yet to understand the full rage of revenge. That rage must have been written on his face when he opened the door and beheld the windswept beauty of the young woman in front of him.

“Hi, Tom,” she said finally. “You look like hell.” Jane handed him the Identikit he’d given her. “You said this was an excuse to see me again. Well, now it’s mine to see you. I’ve never seen this guy before.”

He stepped aside to let her in. “This is it.”

“Your apartment... well...” She looked around at the bleak living room. Shephard watched her, wondering at the perfect match between the blue of her eyes and the blue of her blouse. Really, he thought, is she any of my business? Then she brought her lips to his mouth, and they stood there so long, wrapped silently together, that Cal finally came in from the patio to investigate. “He’s cute,” Jane said.

“If you think Cal’s cute, you need a drink. If I had some wine I’d offer you a glass, if I had a glass. It’ll have to be vodka. Rocks or neat?”

“Rocks. It’s a blazer tonight again.”

“So you’re thawing out? No more fires on August nights?”

“Guess so.”

They sat on the floor, Cal working his way between them in sly jealousy. He seemed taken with the guest and panted up close to her face; a charmer in all respects, Shephard thought. Cal had never been shy with the ladies.

“You were right about animals being easy to love,” she said. “And safe. Dad and Becky, you and Cal, Buster and I.” She smiled and stroked Cal’s head. The dog wiggled appreciatively, then snuck in a sloppy kiss.

“You asked for it,” Shephard said. “Get away, Cal. She’s not yours.” But Cal had teamed up, and he turned to Shephard with a look of immunity.

“Sorry about the other night. I didn’t mean to come off like the ice bitch. Make me another drink, would you? Then I’ll try to explain myself.”

She lay back and talked to the ceiling, Shephard beside her. Her first love, she said, had been in high school, and she still thought of the boy, who was now somewhere up north and married. He had proposed to her the night they graduated and she had refused out of principle. And it was the right thing to do, she said, because the boy had found a girl to marry not long after, and Jane had fallen in love with an older man her second year out of school. She was working as a waitress in New Orleans, had gone there on a whim, with a friend. Charlie. It was easy to fall for his dark good looks and his quiet attentiveness. “Besides, he wouldn’t come around all the time,” she said. “You know how it is when you can’t always have what you want. So I loved him all the more.”

But Charlie was a philanderer — the more she suspected it, the more she wanted him — and he finally left her in a bitter Southern winter, with nothing but syphilis as a goodbye. “I was young, dumb,” she said, tilting the vodka to her lips. “But I wised up a little that winter.”

She came back to California. She was twenty-one, broke, and didn’t have an idea of what to do with herself. Shephard tried to picture her, stepping off the bus with her bags, a California beauty returned to the motherland. Charlie blew it, he thought. If he ever ran across him he would tell him so, and perhaps break his nose.

“I was pretty low,” Jane was saying, “but as soon as I met Raymond, that all changed. He was a year younger than I was, a pretty, pretty boy. Strong face, a good heart, full of art. He wanted to be a painter. Met him here in town, at the Festival. We got an apartment and moved in together, got engaged, planned everything for the wedding. Two days before the big one, Ray just disappeared. He left a little note saying he couldn’t do it, had to be free to find himself, or something. I really loved him. I still see him around, but he gave up the art and starting dealing cocaine. Makes a lot of money, too. Don’t bust him, Shephard. He’s an alright guy. I guess.”