Т Паркер - Pacific Beat

What he felt most strongly right now — besides the grief, guilt, and anger that continued to multiply silently inside him — was that Robbins and Innelman were trying to make something fit that wouldn’t. A vague, shapeless idea coalesced inside him, too unformed yet to hold, vaporous enough to hide itself in the looming geography of sadness. But the longer he watched the gray water of the bay, the more embodied and specific the notion became. It formed, wavered, darted away. Then it was back again, quick as a hummingbird, taunting. Weir nailed it.

Ann knew him, he thought. She came down here without a struggle because she trusted him. All the crime stats on this planet would bear out that probability.

Weir’s mind rewound quickly: Ann’s friends, coworkers, acquaintances, relatives — any male she’d trust enough to follow down here on a fog-heavy night. The list was short and obvious: Raymond, Nesto, Jim himself, a couple of Poon’s rickety old friends who’d doted on her almost as much as Poon had. Ann wouldn’t just hustle down here with anyone. Ann was private. Ann was wary. On the obvious level, she knew everyone, from the clerks at Balboa Grocery to the boys who ran the ferry — she’d lived here for thirty-nine years, gone to high school and two years of junior college, had two jobs — both of which brought the public to her. She was bright, friendly, likable, pretty. Jim thought back to a surprise party Raymond had thrown for her last year. A couple of hundred people had packed into the Eight Peso to celebrate, half of them male, many of them knowing her well enough to offer a kiss, a present, ask for a dance. Would she follow one down here to the Back Bay on a fog-heavy night? No. Not unless they were lovers. Would she take a man on the side? It didn’t seem like Ann, but neither did the lifeless form lying upon the damp earth that morning.

She didn’t even have a coat.

She changed her clothes after work, Jim thought, but she didn’t put on a coat. No coat because she wasn’t planning on going out. Maybe coming down here was the last thing on her mind. Maybe he had the knife to her throat, under her beautiful long hair. Maybe a gun to her back, like Robbins had said.

He turned to the picture of the murder weapon — an unremarkable kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a gently curving one-sided blade. The handle was in good condition and had the words KENTUCKY HOMESTEAD branded into it, along with a little logo of a kettle in a fireplace, JAPAN was etched onto the steel, just above the handle. The darkened juncture between blade and wood could have been blood, sludge, stain — or any combination. He closed the file.

As Jim climbed the embankment toward Morning Star Lane, an obvious possibility presented itself: There was so little evidence left because someone had cleaned it up and taken it away.

Like a cop would.

The cop that Mackie Ruff had said he saw.

That’s what he was doing during those minutes when Ann lay on the ground, full of someone’s brutal seed, staring up at the fog and praying that he would leave, just leave us, just walk into the night forever, and let me keep alive inside me the one miracle I thought I never could have.

He was cleaning things up.

Jim stood on the sidewalk outside Becky Flynn’s bayfront cottage and gazed through the oleander that walled her property from the rest of the world. He passed through the gate, bell chiming, a certain pressure gathering in his head. Moving toward Becky’s house was for Weir like walking into yesterday, only knowing how the days ahead would end. Each step echoed with the thousand memories of others so much like it, of the thousand peninsula nights they’d spent here in the varying stages of love, disillusion, abandonment. His stomach fluttered as he climbed onto the porch and looked through the screen door.

She was sitting on the couch, her head cocked to one side to hold the telephone, a yellow legal pad propped on her crossed knees. Becky was always making notes on something. He watched her nod in profile, bring a yellow pencil to her mouth, and touch the eraser to her lips. She had cut her hair into a loose fall of light brown curls that ended abruptly above her shoulders. Becky’s hair had always been a primary vanity — the longer the better — but this new do spoke of adjusted priorities. We’re getting older, thought Weir, his fist poised to knock. He watched her for another surreptitious moment, beholding the perpendicular curves of thigh and calf as she raised her bare feet to the coffee table and wrote something on the pad. She nodded, took a deep breath, and hung up. For a second, she stared off into space, smile cracks forming at the edge of her lips.

She got up, came to the door, and swung it open.

She met him inside with a measuring look that turned into a hug. The top of her head smelled the way it had for the three decades Jim had known her. Over her shoulder, he looked at the old place for the first time in — what, he wondered — almost two years? There were some new things: a Pegge Hopper print on the tongue-in-groove wall above the hearth, a big gray torchiere in the far corner, a Persian rug on the hardwood floor before the fireplace, a new coat of paint. The rest was the same, though, right down to the heavy old dining set that took up too much space at the far end of the room, the deep soft couch, the curtains that Becky had made all those years ago of chintz now faded by sun, the cut flowers she bought each Friday from the stand down by Poon’s Locker. There was a FLYNN FOR MAYOR banner — green on white — tacked across one wall, a smaller SLOW THE GROWTH poster on another, boxes of campaign fliers and mailing envelopes on the floor by the fireplace.

Becky herself had added a few things, too: Her skin was paler, her hips and breasts a little larger, and there was a deepening network of lines at the corners of her dark brown eyes. Mileage was implied, not all of it smooth. All in all, to Weir, she just looked beautiful. He had held her image all those hours in the Zihuat jail, comforted by memory but tormented by her distance and the fact that they had messed it up so badly.

“God, Jim. I don’t know what to say to you.”

“No.”

“I’ve been so worried about you. God, I’m sorry.” She held him again and sighed — a declared need.

They stood in silence for a moment, then Becky turned and walked toward the kitchen. Weir followed — a seemingly ancient habit — took down two heavy glasses and filled them with ice. Becky poured in some good gin, a dribble of vermouth, shaved off a lemon peel, and swept one around each rim before dropping them in. Through her kitchen window, Jim could see the fog floating down like a lowered blanket. His hands were shaking again as he picked up the drink. He felt as if his heart were made of wood, beating slowly and begrudgingly toward the moment when it could just stop.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I left messages.”

“Thanks. This has been bad.”

They settled into the couch, the standard positions, Weir’s feet already yearning for the boots to be off, to be wanning from the fire. The answering machine picked up an incoming call: a Proposition A proofreader at the print shop had just discovered fliers with the word public misspelled as pubic.

“I saw her early that night at the Whale,” said Jim. “Ray came by and Mom was there. She looked good and strong — a little thin, maybe.”

“I hadn’t talked to her for a few days.”

“How had she been, Beck?”

“I’ve been asking myself that question ever since I heard. It’s not as easy to answer as I thought it would be. Okay, Ann and I have been friends for what, thirty-plus years? We did everything from roller-skate together in pigtails to borrow each other’s doll clothes, to share our diaries, to take the same classes, have crushes on the same boys, to... everything. We were girls, then we were women, and we went through all of it together. Except for the few months she spent in France — what, fifteen years old or whatever it was — we’ve been like this.” Becky twisted her fingers in the wish-me-luck sign and stared from behind it into Jim’s face. “But back in November, something started to change. It was just before you left for Mexico.”