“No Goins in the car?”
“No Goins. Innelman and Deak were working it, as of three A.M.”
“Can you tell me what they got out of Goins’s apartment?”
Kearns smiled wryly and sat back. “Nobody could figure out how Brian got on to Goins in the first place. Was it you?”
Jim nodded.
“Well, whatever he got from the apartment, he’s sitting on it, so it must be hot. Hot enough for this, anyway.” Kearns tossed Weir the morning Times from the couch. Front page Orange County section ran the headline:
Horton Goins, a 24-year old convicted sex offender who moved to Costa Mesa just four months ago, is being sought for questioning in the brutal stabbing death of Ann Cruz at the Back Bay last Tuesday...
Jim sped through the article, wondering why Dennison hadn’t tipped him. Had Brian tossed the cop theory, or was he blowing smoke to cover it? A snapshot of Horton and Edith ran beside the article, a good-looking, solitary young man standing with his soft, bloodshot-eyed mother.
“Nice work on the car.”
“It’s a start. We’ll hand out fliers of that snapshot this afternoon, down by the Wedge. Chances are, if he ditched the car there, he’s nowhere nearby. But it’s worth a try.”
Jim stood up and looked again at the dozing Crystal. There was something sublime about a sleeping woman.
“So,” said Kearns, “You’ve got a drunk who saw a cop car and a sleepy old lady who saw primer. Who do you pick?”
“I don’t pick,” said Weir. “Not yet.”
“I’m going with the lady.”
“Maybe Mackie Ruff’s recall will be better, now that his brain’s dried out.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“You guys still have him?”
Kearns smiled and nodded. “Rumors of press interest in a ‘secret witness,’ so Brian’s trying to keep Ruff out of circulation for a while. Paris was going nuts. Goins will change all that, I’d guess.”
“I’d guess.” Jim rose to leave, shook Kearns’s hand, and looked once more around the little apartment. “Thanks.”
“Give my best to Ray. He ought to get back to work, try to have a schedule, something like normal.”
“I think you’re right.”
On his way past the sun deck, Weir glanced at Crystal. Her freckled nose was clearly visible, just beneath the line of shadow cast by the rooftop. “See ya, handsome,” she said.
“Hope so, beautiful.” He saw in her — now that Kearns had pointed it out — a definite capacity to go through with things. He wondered what she saw in him. Where did Kearns find these women, anyway?
He walked across the bridge and toward his truck. Carol Clark sat in a sporty red convertible, smoking a cigarette and signaling him over with a slender finger. She started the engine as he approached. “Kneel down here so I don’t have to yell,” she said.
He knelt beside the car, bracing his hands against the body. He could see himself, reflected and disproportional, in her dark glasses.
“You’ve heard the Dispatch tape?”
“That’s right.”
“There’s no pause button on the tape recorder, but I can use the other dispatch station when I want to. The recorder’s only set up on the active one, right? Tuesday morning, I called Phil four times between twelve-thirty and twelve-fifty, on the dead station.” She blew a plume of smoke over Jim’s shoulder.
“I guess I wonder why.”
“You should. Slow night, no action. I buzzed Phil for a little chitchat. Everybody’s in on our... situation, but it’s not the kind of thing you want recorded. Follow?”
“So far.”
“Well, Prince Philip didn’t answer. He wasn’t in the car for twenty minutes. That doesn’t exactly match what he told | you in there. Small apartment, thin walls.”
“Hazard a guess where he was?”
“You hazard it. We’re talking about murder, and men I know.”
“You think Kearns is... uh, capable of going through with something like that?”
“He’s capable of getting women to do things they never even dreamed they’d do. I’m not a bimbo, contrary to what! you might conclude from that embarrassing little situation in there. I’m not sure how he reacts when he doesn’t get his way. Never seen him not get it.” She put the car in gear and inched forward. “Forget all this. I don’t exist.”
“Got ya.”
She looked at him from behind the dark lenses. “You know what the reason is, what the thing behind this is? Boredom. Boredom and narcissism.”
“I guess you’ve found the antidote.”
“You think of a better one, you can call me.”
Capacity to go through with things, thought Weir; Mix it with boredom and narcissism and you get two women and one man in a glass house on the water in Newport Beach Maybe the sun here just burns people dumb after a while Maybe a six-month summer does something to the groin. Maybe people are just bored and in love with themselves and they’re going to spend every drop of what they’ve got right here and now because they can’t spend it in the grave. Doesn’t anyone worry anymore?
Chapter 14
Jim and Raymond sprung Mackie Ruff from the holding tank at nine that morning, with instructions from Dennison to take him out the back door. While Raymond signed the paperwork, Jim leaned against the wall and waited. A fat plainclothes that Jim vaguely remembered from his sheriff days — Tillis, he thought — walked by and looked wordlessly at him, then a glum young officer in a uniform who smiled and said, “Eat shit and die” quietly enough for only Jim to hear. His nameplate said Hoch. Two cadets glowered at him on their way past: One turned back to fix him with a look of adamant disgust.
Mackie was a short, wiry man in his mid-sixties, with a violently red face and the palest of blue, booze-bleached eyes. He wanted to wait until noon for lunch, but they promised him something better. He smelled sharply of old sweat.
“I could use a drink,” said Ruff as they walked down the steps of the station. His pants were too long, even though the cuffs were rolled up at least four times, and the stiff, filthy material scuffed as he walked.
“Maybe after breakfast,” said Ray.
“I’m hungry, boys. How about the Balboa Bay Club?”
“You need a tie,” said Jim.
“Only wore a tie twice in my life — when I got married and when I buried her. How’s your dad?”
“He died back in ’eighty-one.”
“I’m sorry. Nobody told me.”
Raymond glanced over at Jim. Ruff had snored in the back of the chapel during Poon’s memorial service a decade ago.
“Jake?”
“For chrissakes, Mackie, he died in the war. You cried like a baby at the funeral.”
“Shit,” he said. “I guess I’m getting old.”
“You’ve been drunk for forty years,” said Raymond.
“Never hurt my career,” he said.
“You never had one,” said Ray.
“I worked for Poon Weir ten years,” he said hotly.
It was true, thought Jim: Mackie had swept the sidewalk and crushed empty boxes for the dumpster in return for breakfast and winter nights inside. He could still remember the sight of Ruff, spindly and unbalanced, trying to stomp the stiff cardboard boxes flat while he swayed and pitched like a deckhand in a storm.
“Nice of you boys to come get me,” he said. They had stopped at Jim’s truck.
“We’ve got some questions,” said Ray. “And you’re going to give us some answers to go with breakfast. Fair?”
They ate at the Porthole, one of the few peninsula bars left that was too bleak for tourists and college kids. The Porthole opened at ten for people who liked to get an early start. There were blowfish lanterns hung from knotted ropes, a sparsely populated aquarium behind the bar, and an anthology of small sea creatures lacquered into the countertop. Mackie fitted himself to a bar stool with the ease of a lid going onto a jar, then rubbed an orange starfish with his thumb. “That’s my lucky star,” he said. “If I rub it, somebody always buys me a drink.”