April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

I headed for the ladies’ room, thinking about the kind of person who would catch those nasty scorpions, took down my khakis and heard the unmistakable sound of stainless steel on porcelain. My handcuffs had fallen into the rest stop toilet bowl. Well, that clinched it. Fishing them out, I knew I would soon be over and done with it all.

We went half a mile down an unmarked road to a place where two boulders met, for no reason, at a right angle. They did nothing to block the wind and scree, which blasted from every direction so our hair whipped madly and we had to shout, and the cold cut through our parkas, as if Brennan had brought us to the cauldron source of all winds.

The dogs squinted against the blow and their ears were up and they trotted the area, pawing the sand where it had been dug before. Brennan pointed here and there and stood with shoulders hunched, a stream of snot running from his nose. Motorists doing ninety with their windshield wipers on might have gambled one or two seconds on a glance at the small circle of vehicles; we were out there while the rain came and went, while lightning raked the charcoal clouds moving in from Arizona, while six more holes two feet deep were dug by the sheriff’s men, and Brennan went down on his knees weeping and saying he was sorry that we could not find his stash.

Finally the rain was pelting hard enough that we retreated to the car, wet as the dogs. Brennan sat between me and Jason, quiet, his head sagging, shoulders stooped.

“What’s up, Ray?”

He did not respond.

“Disappointed? We’re disappointed, too,” I said. “We thought we could trust you, Ray. After driving out this far. You know, you don’t show us some results, we’re not taking you out for an airing anymore. Is that the game?” “It’s not a game,” he said. “I just don’t know exactly where it is. Could I lie down? I’m feeling very stressed right now,” and laid his head in my lap.

Brennan’s hands were still cuffed and he was in ankle irons. His face was turned away so all I could see was oily hair, dark at the roots, spiked in all directions, and a small perfectly formed reddened ear.

“Sit up, pal,” said Jason, reaching for his collar.

Brennan dug his teeth into my thigh and hung on like a pit bull.

I screamed and pulled him off and slammed his forehead against the back of the front seat. In a moment Brennan was out of the car, facedown in the sand with two deputies kneeling on his back.

“The son of a bitch tried to bite her,” Jason gasped breathlessly.

“I’m okay.”

His teeth had not penetrated the heavy khakis.

Jason was peering at me from underneath his whipping hair. He wanted me to find his eyes and mark the message there.

“Get him up,” Jason said.

They hoisted Brennan to his feet. He was spitting mealy-colored gunk and shouting hoarsely that we were all spying for the CIA.

Jason spun from the hips and while they held him, smashed a fist full-force into the side of Brennan’s nose, and blood and teeth spurted out as if from a squirt bottle.

Then the young agent turned to see what I thought of this action. His breath was coming hard, and his face was red and shiny with rain. He wanted to know if it were done now, if his initiation were complete.

I would have answered that there was no beginning or end to this. The intimate desperation I had shared with Brennan in the house had meant nothing but a tactic in an arrest. He and I and Jason and Todd Hanley were just interchangeable parts and would encounter one another in different guises again and again. I would have told him that, sooner or later, everything you care about ends up in the crapper.

“Over here!” someone yelled, and we slogged to where one of the shovels had overturned a black nylon strap. Lifting carefully, we found it was attached to an old discolored day pack, barely recognizable as yellow.

“That belongs to Willie!” I shouted.

“Willie who?”

“The transient we interviewed on the Promenade! He knew Brennan!” I was pointing, using sign language over the scream of the wind.

I thought of Willie’s stained white beard, how he had painfully lowered himself in the doorway of the old bookstore. The sad, lost look in his flat eyes. With icy fumbling fingers I unbuckled one of the pockets. Inside was a handful of sparkly girlie hair clips and ponytail scrunchies, cheap beaded bracelets and dime-store rings.

“This stuff isn’t Willie’s!” I shouted. “It’s Brennan’s trophies. From his victims, like he said!”

“Where is Willie?” Jason shouted back. “Is he out here? Did Brennan kill him, too? Is he dead?”

I did not answer but watched as Jason, carrying the pack, lumbered through the blustery sandstorm to the van where Brennan was receiving first aid for the injury he had suffered by falling down on a rock.

I turned to the open desert, its monotone mauves blurred by rain.

“Willie!” I bellowed. “Wil- lie !”

And lifted my arms and stood up on my toes and felt the wind under me.

The house was near the Venice canals, in a funky working-class pocket. It was, amongst Spanish shacks and Victorian clapboards, a two-story remodel painted blue, with all sorts of adornments hanging off the eaves — whales and wind chimes and snowflakes and a whole school of angelfish. Carved into a wooden oar were the words Welcome to the Forresters. A boat was still hitched to a trailer in the drive. On the porch a table was laden with young plants in flats from a nursery; above them, an American flag. On top of a pole, like a totem, sat a pelican with head tucked. I wondered how they’d gotten a sculpture up there, but then the wind ruffled its feathers and I saw that it was a real bird.

“Who’s there?” Margaret Forrester demanded, impulsively opening the door before hearing a reply.

The air had a swampy, cabbage smell, which must have carried from the languid, slow-moving channels that ran beneath arched bridges to the sea. People who lived in the expensive houses on the canals kept rowboats and canoes. But that upscale neighborhood was several blocks away.

“Ana Grey, with the FBI.”

“I know who you are.” She stepped out. “What are you doing here?” Then she saw the police.

“We have a warrant for your arrest.”

She folded her arms and laid her weight back on one hip.

“Is this about the guava trees?”

“It’s not about the guava trees.”

“—Because I’ve had it up to here. Have you met my neighbors? Obviously you have. I’ve told them if the fruit falls on their side, keep it, what is the problem? These are the oldest continually producing guava trees in Venice!” “You are under arrest as an accessory in the murder of your husband.”

The eyelids began to flutter, the eyeballs circling uselessly as if cut loose from their stalks. She whimpered like a child.

The police captain said, “Ma’am?”

Now there were sharp intakes of breath as if she had found herself in a gas chamber.

“I’m sorry. I was up until five a.m., working in my garden.”

The captain said, “What is it, a moon garden?”

“She has guava trees,” I explained.

“I’m going to read you your rights,” he began.

Margaret cried, “Andrew is the one who killed my husband. But he’s dead, too, so what is the purpose? Why are you doing this to me?”

“What did Detective Andrew Berringer have to do with the death of your husband?” I asked, although I knew.

I knew because during preparation for the trial, my attorney had obtained the coroner’s report on the death of Wes (the Hat) Forrester. He’d had it reviewed by an expert in tool and weapon marks, who found significant discrepancies in the stated cause of death. Lividity showed the body had been killed in one place and moved to another. Also, there were two kinds of wounds. One was consistent with a whack from a baseball bat to the back of the head; the second looked more like a hit from the riser of a stairs. The riser had caused a subdural hematoma, which had killed him. The baseball bat came later. The expert stated there was no bleeding in the margins of that wound, which meant Margaret or Andrew had hit him over the head to make it look like gang revenge after the heart had stopped pumping.