Т Паркер - The Blue Hour

Mirrored walls. Jesus in glass. Lonely and black.

Who’s in there with Colesceau? Who turned out the lights for him? Maybe this friend plays the role of Colesceau so Colesceau can go out. Idiot Billy Wayne?

But how could Colesceau go out, or anyone get in, with the crowd right there?

Something that Hess had just seen drew him back to his own bathroom. He looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror again. He opened the door and looked at the manufacturer’s sticker. He closed the cabinet door and watched his face reappear. He opened it and watched it vanish into a shelf of shave gear and medicine bottles.

Glass. Glass, a hole in the world.

Sending me through the looking glass again.

Again.

Hess felt a funny little rush in his head and got his blue notebook. He found the home phone number for Quail Creek Apartment Homes manager Art Ledbetter and dialed it while he looked out the window. He answered on the second ring. Hess told him who he was and told Ledbetter he had a simple question.

“All right, Detective.”

“Do any of the smaller bedrooms in the Quail Creek apartments have mirrored walls?”

“No, sir. None of the Quail Creek units do. We don’t use glass on the closet doors, either. It’s too expensive.”

“So a tenant would have to put up mirrored walls at his own expense?”

“We wouldn’t allow it. But it would be easy enough to do without us knowing.”

Hess considered. He thought of his dream, a huge bird crashing through a mirror, then changing into something else on the other side. A Porti-Boy. Was the bird an ostrich? Hold that thought.

“Can you give me the name and phone number of the tenant who lives directly behind 12 Meadowlark? That address would be... I have that complex map in my file here...”

“It’s 28 Covey Run. And the tenant is one of the ghost people I hardly ever see — I told you about her — a single woman. Anyway, I’d have to call you from the office with her name and number. I don’t have it here.”

Hess asked Art to call both his office and home numbers as soon as he had them.

Next he dialed New West Farms, hoping that someone might be there an hour before the start of business. Farmers could be like that, he thought, up before the sun. But he got a recording and left a message, identifying himself and saying a return call was important.

What was it about the big bird breaking through the mirror?

What was it about Spurlea buying ostrich and emu meat?

Hess was hot now and he knew it, and he knew the luck was with him and he thought — for the first time in days — that he should trust his instincts again.

He was starting to understand. He saw the picture: a big bird crashing through the mirror, a big bird hatching from a big egg.

Hold that thought.

He called the station and got the watch commander to have someone check his fax machine. A moment later the watch commander called back.

“Hess, you’ve got some document with a signature on it. A UPS delivery receipt, I think.”

“Who took the delivery?”

“Looks like William Wayne.”

“No doubt?”

“The writing’s good and clear.”

“Look like an eleven-year-old did it?”

“No. I’d guess man’s writing, slant forward, low, heavy, kind of rushed A grown-up.”

“Put it in the top drawer of my desk, will you?”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“That’s all.”

“How you feeling these days?”

“Better by the second.”

Hess hung up and went to the window again. Dawn was breaking behind him, to the east, and the first faint line of the horizon was coalescing above the gray ocean.

The phone rang.

The owner of New West Farms told him that Helena Spurlea had never bought so much as one ounce of ostrich meat from him.

Hess understood why.

“She only buys the eggs, correct?”

“That’s right. She doesn’t eat the goddamned things. She paints them.”

“Can you give me the delivery address?”

The owner was happy to.

It was Wheeler Greenfield’s place in Lake Elsinore, just like Hess knew it would be. Of course, she rents from him...

Hold that thought.

Spurlea is Colesceau’s mother.

Hold that thought.

He called Art Ledbetter again.

“Just heading out the door, Detective.”

“Is the woman who rents 28 Covey Run named Helena Spurlea?”

Ledbetter was quiet for a beat. “I don’t know. Like I said before, I don’t collect the rent — I just oversee maintenance and sec—”

Hess exhaled and felt his heart thumping in his throat. “Where do the rent checks go?”

“Schaff Property Management in Newport Beach.”

Monthly checks of $875 for storage to Schaff...

Hess hung up and dug into his miscellany file, where he had kept the documents relating to Matamoros Colesceau. At the bottom of the second page of Colesceau’s protocol agreement with the State of California, the document specifying the terms of his parole and his chemical castration, was Colesceau’s signature.

It was slant forward, low and heavy.

Mother and son, he thought.

He got Judge Ernest Alvarez’s home number from his black book and dialed.

Ten minutes later he was granted phone warrants to search the apartments of Matamoros Colesceau and Helena Spurlea for a Porti-Boy embalming machine, formaldehyde-based solution, a homemade car alarm override, a Deer Sleigh’R, chloroform and a blond wig.

In the grainy half light preceding dawn, Big Bill Wayne sat in his van and sipped a Bloody Mary from a mason jar. He wondered where the top had gotten to, probably out in the Ortega somewhere. No worries. He stared as Trudy Powers and her husband got out of their Volvo wagon, shut the doors, joined hands and walked together slowly across the park toward the rise. It was 5:14.

Trudy had a Bible in her right hand and the same purse slung over her shoulder as the day before. She was wearing a white dress and sandals. To Big Bill’s satisfaction, her hair was up. Her husband, Jonathan, tall and bearded and stork-like, wore shorts and a T-shirt and a baseball cap. He looked like something that would propagate only in wetlands.

Colesceau had said that Trudy Powers would be good to her word, and she had been. He had thanked her for the pie, arranged to pray early the next morning in the park just east of the Quail Creek Apartment Homes. Colesceau had told her the sunrise was beautiful from there — that he’d often gotten up early and gone alone there to see it and pray. Bill hoped she’d honor her commitment.

In fact, Colesceau had never prayed from the park, but Bill had been there twice before, unable to sleep and looking for a place he could dump Lael or Janet if they got to be too much of a problem. He’d covered half the county looking into places for occasions like that. Which was how he found the hanging trees in Ortega. And how the bodies of his first three completely botched preservation attempts had ended up deep in the bottom of Black Star Canyon, in a forgotten mine shaft half a mile beyond the DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF THE FIRE MARSHAL sign. It was so deep he never heard them hit.

Bill felt his heart speed up. He checked himself in the mirror, then got out, locked up and walked into the park. Looking ahead he saw Trudy and her husband disappear over a gentle rise. It was an ideal place because the condos all around were hidden by trees to give park users the illusion of privacy. And in this near-dark, no one could see much anyway.

He walked down the swale and started up the rise. The park was empty and he could feel his things in the pockets of his long denim coat. One for Stork and one for Trudy.