Т Паркер - Pacific Beat

“It’s possible.”

“Maybe he sent them to her earlier.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice. I imagine the Newport Beach Police thought of the same thing. The local florists could tell you if he was that stupid.”

Robbins got out of the truck and shut the door. “Let me know what else I can do. I’ll have Yee’s finals ready for you by this time tomorrow. I’m sorry. How’d it go in Mexico?”

“Better than this.”

Weir stopped at a bar three blocks away, downed two shots of scotch and a water back. From a telephone over by the shuffleboard table, he called Raymond’s house and got no answer. He tried the Eight Peso Cantina on Balboa and found Raymond’s mother, Irena. Irena and Ray’s father, Ernesto, had owned the Eight Peso — a neighborhood cantina that offered good food and cheap drinks — for forty years. She told him between sobs that Ray had gone to the hospital. “He just fainted. It’s all too much for him,” she kept repeating. Ernesto — Nesto, to family and friends — had gone to stay with him, but Irena was keeping the bar open for business.

“Here’s your mother, Jim. Vaya con Dios.”

Virginia’s voice was firm but faint.

Jim told her he needed her help and she said nothing. Virginia’s complicity was understood.

“Go home, sit down at the kitchen table, get out the phone book. Call every florist in Newport Beach and find out who either sold a dozen purple roses to Ann, or had them delivered to Ann’s Kids. If you strike out, try Laguna, Corona del Mar, Costa Mesa. Try every number in the book. Don’t stop until you know.”

“He sent her those roses? The ones on her desk at work?”

“It’s an outside shot. This is our secret, Mom. Just ours for now, understand?”

“The police should have thought of this.”

“They have. I just want you to get the answers before they do.”

Virginia said she’d be starting her calls as soon as she got home.

Jim told her to remember what he had said early that morning, that they would get through this, that there would be an end to the way it felt. He hadn’t known then whether he believed it, and he didn’t know now.

For a moment, there was nothing but silence between them, a silence that bred in Jim terrible visions of the days to come.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, Jim. And anyone who thinks I’ll quit working for Slow Growth because of this has got another goddamned thing coming.” Virginia hung up, her sense of multiple missions declared to Jim by the loud crack of the phone hitting its cradle.

Weir called Hoag Hospital. A nurse told him that Lt. Cruz was apparently exhausted and had not been eating. He was sedated now and sleeping soundly.

A Newport Beach cop car followed him down Pacific Coast Highway for a mile or two. Jim studied the two officers in his rearview. They were young, groomed, alert. When the unit swept past him, the cop on the passenger’s side looked up and regarded Jim blankly from behind his shades. Kids, thought Weir, like Ray and I were once.

He parked on Morning Star Lane, walked past the park, down to the bay, and looked east. The sky, heavying with a marine layer, was an unemphatic white. The tide was on the flood now, higher than when Jim had seen it last, and the water broke into wedges of gray polished by the May breeze. A big Glastron motored slowly down the bay, making a white cut in the surface that healed as the boat passed.

Looking to the east, Jim could see the curve of bay, the narrow beach, the patches of ice plant and grasses that grew thicker toward the cliffs from which the big houses looked down. Beyond the water lay the mud flats, black and odorous, dotted with white seabirds.

He thought back to his days on Harbor Patrol, the placid mornings, the thick salt air, the partnership of Ray, the feeling of liberty that they both had, zipping around the water in their own boat, gainfully employed to catch bad guys. Two kids from the neighborhood never had it so good. Jim had gone to dicks — better pay, a bump-up; Raymond joined the NBPD for his sergeant’s stripes.He stopped for a moment at the place he had seen Ann last, unremarkable now except for an excess of footprints and a smooth body-length patch of earth where she had lain. Somewhere overhead a jet droned invisibly. In a world lacking absolutes, he thought, only death is nonnegotiable. The horror is the dreary efficiency of it all. It seemed less a part of the grand eternal cycle than a concept developed by CPAs. Still, there was the sadness growing inside him and it felt as if when the sadness got big enough, his body would just cave in around it and there wouldn’t be anything left. And with the sadness came the guilt, a deep and fundamental conviction that there was something he could have done, would have done, should have done. Vengeance seemed the obvious antidote. Ann had been pregnant.

He continued along the shore, his knees less reliable with each step, his ankles feeling brittle and ready to turn, his elbows and hands aching like those of an eighty-year-old predicting rain. He wished he had a coat. He stopped, took a deep breath, squeezed his hands into fists to get the blood moving again. For a brief moment, he hovered outside himself, looking down, and what he saw was a thin old man with pale skin and wispy white hair, standing alone, bent like a cane on the shore of a vast uncertain marsh, a man impermanent as the birds flitting overhead or the breeze that brushed across his sunken white cheeks.

The crime scene was undelineated, but he found the location by Innelman’s report, and by the browned, bloodstained earth. A couple of neighborhood kids stood by glumly; two more skidded around a trail on a pair of MX bikes. Lovers, arm-in-arm, watched from the shoreline with an air of forbidden curiosity, as if death were a black-tie party to which they had not been invited.

Jim read Dwight Innelman’s crime-scene report as he stood upon the unhallowed ground. It read like Ken Robbins’s summation: Ann being forced down to this midnight shore, the rape, the waiting, the final attack. No defense marks on Ann. No sign of struggle. Neighbors saw nothing; heard nothing. Door-to-doors got zip. A kitchen knife. The back of a tie tack or earring. Eleven roses, arranged. He pictured Ann, alive and beaming, at Virginia’s booth the night before.

Why no fight? Ann was five foot ten, 130 pounds. Good shape from work. Strong and capable. Did she offer herself as a sacrifice for what she carried inside, for her life? What he came up with in regards to Ann — what he had seen in her for thirty-plus years — was that she was the gentlest of all souls, and that she was capable of doing just that: offering her body to save her life. And the life of her unborn child, certainly.

Jim looked across the bay to where the other shore diminished in the haze. A sea gull winged by with a cry and the hiss of feathers on air. It was so close that Weir could hear the gristle working in its joints. In the west, the sun was starting its last rally of the day: a surge of doomed orange splendor before evening.

He stood, asking himself the most basic question of all: Why? In the simplest of terms, what was the motive? And as he had so many times in the last three days, Jim could offer no answer. She had no money. She had no power on earth to promote or hinder, really. She had none but the most casual access to the channels of power. She had no large ambitions that might lead her to blackmail, betray, leverage, connive, manipulate. She was a symbol of no cause, a proponent of no revolution. Ann was just a woman getting by, he thought. Why? Was it all done for the few minutes that her anguish could become someone else’s pleasure? Or had she had a more far-reaching agenda, did the branches of her life spread into places he had simply never known? Could someone have struck at Virginia through Ann? At Becky, at Raymond, at himself? Weir knew that he had snubbed the life — and therefore the men — of law enforcement when he quit, but how could that account for this monstrous revenge by a Newport Beach or any other cop? Nothing fit.