Jonathan Kellerman - Private Eyes

“Wait for what, Joel?”

“Peace. Blank space.” A fearful glance at Milo, then over at the picture of Jesus.

“Pretty religious guy, are you, Joel?”

“It… helps.”

“Helps what?”

“Waiting.”

Milo bent his knees, cupped his hands on them, and lowered his face until it was nearly level with McCloskey’s.

“Why’d you burn her, Joel?”

McCloskey’s hands began to shake. He said, “No,” then crossed himself.

“Why, Joel? What’d she do to make you hate her so much?”

“No.”

“C’mon, Joel. What would it hurt to tell after all these years?”

Headshakes. “I- it’s not…”

“Not what?”

“No. I… sinned.”

“Confess your sin, Joel.”

“No… please.” Tears. More trembling.

“Isn’t confession part of salvation, Joel? Full confession?”

McCloskey licked his lips, put his hands together, and mumbled something.

Milo bent lower. “What’s that, Joel?”

“Done my confession.”

“Have you?”

Nod.

McCloskey swung his legs onto the bed and lay down on his back. Arms folded over his chest. Staring up at the ceiling, mouth agape. Beneath the apron his trousers were ancient tweed, tailored for a man thirty pounds heavier and two inches taller. The cuffs were frayed and rimmed stiff with black grime. The soles of his shoes were perforated in several places and clotted with dried food. Gray yarn peeked through some of the holes, bare flesh through others.

I said, “For you it may be all in the past. But understanding it would help her. And her daughter. After all these years the whole family’s still trying to comprehend.”

McCloskey stared at me. His eyes moved back and forth, as if following traffic. His lips moved soundlessly.

Deliberation. For a moment I thought he was going to open up.

Then he gave his head a violent shake, sat up, untied his apron, and slipped it over his head. His shirt bagged on him. Undoing the top three buttons, he pulled the fabric apart and exposed a hairless chest.

Hairless, but not unmarked.

Most of his skin was the color of spoiled milk. But a splotch of pink, puckered flesh, twice as wide as a hand, gnarled as briar, covered most of his left breast. The nipple was gone; in its place was a glossy, clabbered depression. Scar streaks flowed from the primary splash, like rosy paint, ending midway down his rib cage.

He stretched the shirt farther, thrust the ruined tissue forward. A heartbeat pulsed the lumpy mound. Very fast. His face was white, drawn, anointed with sweat.

“Someone do that to you at Quentin?” said Milo.

McCloskey smiled and looked back at Jesus again.

A smile of pride.

“I would take her pain away and eat it,” he said. “Swallow it and let it be me. All of it. Everything.”

He placed one hand on his chest, crossed the other arm over it.

“Sweet Lord,” he said. “The sacrament of pain.”

Then he began to mumble in something that sounded like Latin.

Milo looked down at him.

McCloskey kept praying.

“Have a nice day, Joel,” said Milo. When McCloskey didn’t respond, he said, “Have a nice wait.”

No break in the white-haired man’s benedictions.

“All this self-flagellation notwithstanding, Joel, if there’s something you could be doing to help us find her, your salvation’s not worth a goddam.”

McCloskey looked up- just for a second- the yellow eyes filled with terror: the panic of someone who’d wagered everything on a deal gone very sour.

Then he dropped to his knees, so hard it had to hurt, and resumed his supplication.

As we drove away, Milo said, “So, what’s the diagnosis?”

“Pathetic. If what we just saw was real.”

“That’s what I’m asking- was it?”

“I can’t be sure,” I said. “My instinct is to assume someone who’d hire a hit man wouldn’t balk at a bit of theatrics. But something about him was believable.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought so, too. Would you call him schizophrenic?”

“I didn’t see any overtly disturbed thinking, but he didn’t say much, so maybe.” I drove half a block. “ Pathetic fits better than anything technical.”

“What do you think drove him that far down?”

“Drugs, booze, prison, guilt. Singly or in combination. Or all of the above.”

“Boy,” he said, smiling, “you sound like a hard guy.”

I looked out the car window at the derelicts and junkies and bag ladies. Urban zombies squandering their allotment of breath on a wet-brained haze. A very old man was sleeping on the curb, dirt-caked belly up, snoring through rotted gums. Or maybe he wasn’t old at all. “Must be the environment.”

“Miss the green hills of San Labrador?”

“No,” I said, realizing it as the words left my mouth. “How about something in the middle?”

“How about.” He let out a tension-sloughing laugh. It wasn’t enough, and he ran his hand over his face. Drummed the dashboard. Opened the window and closed it and stretched his legs without attaining comfort.

“His chest,” I said. “Think it was self-inflicted?”

“Cross his heart and hope to die? That’s obviously what he wanted us to think. The sacrament of pain. Shit.”

Growling with contempt, but he looked ill at ease.

I made a stab at mind reading. “If he’s still into pain he might still be into inflicting it on others?”

He nodded. “All the guilty talk and praying, the guy told us exactly nothing. So maybe he isn’t all that fucked up, mentally. My instinct doesn’t yell Prime Suspect, but I’d hate to be caught in an aw-shucks situation if our combined hunch quotient turns out to be low.”

“So what’s next?”

“First find me a phone booth. I wanna call in, see if anything’s turned up on the lady. If it hasn’t, let’s go talk to Bayliss- the probation officer.”

“He’s retired.”

“I know. I got his home address before I came by. Middle-class neighborhood. You should feel comfortable.”

I found a phone booth near the Children’s Museum and waited in a no-parking zone as Milo used it. He was on the line long enough for two meter maids to drive by, prepare to cite me, only to be held at bay by the LAPD cardboard. Most fun I’d had in a long time. I savored it while watching parents herd their young toward the entrance to the museum.

Milo came back jingling change and shaking his head. “Nothing.”

“Who’d you speak to?”

“Highway Patrol, again. Then one of Chickering’s lackeys and Melissa.”

“How’s she doing?” I said, pulling into traffic.

“Still hyper. Making calls. She said one of the Gabneys phoned just a while ago- the husband. Expressing concern.”

“The goose with the golden egg,” I said. “Planning on telling Melissa about the Cassatt?”

“Any reason to?”

I thought about that. “Not that I can see- no use getting her riled up about something else.”

“I told her about McCloskey. That from what I could see we were talking brain death, but that I’d keep my eye on him. It seemed to calm her down.”

“Placebo?”

“Got anything stronger?”

I picked up the Harbor Freeway at Third, switched to the 10 west, and exited at Fairfax, heading north. Milo directed me to Crescent Heights, then farther north, just past Olympic, where I turned left on Commodore Sloat, passed a block of office buildings, then entered the Carthay Circle district, a tree-shaded enclave of small, exceedingly well-kept Spanish and mock-Tudor houses.

Milo recited an address and I matched the numerals to a shake-roofed, brick and madder-stucco cottage set on a corner lot two blocks up. The garage was a miniature clone of the house behind a hedge-bordered cobbled drive. A twenty-year-old Mustang, white and shining, sat in the drive. Moisture pools beneath the chassis and a neatly coiled garden hose rested near the rear tire.