“You’re a good partner, Hess.”
“You are, too.”
“We’re a decent team, aren’t we?”
“We’re doing okay, so far.”
“I know Brighton wants me to fail. I know the lawsuit makes him look bad. I know you’re supposed to watch me for him. Probably keep a record of it.”
“I’m supposed to watch out for you. Like you are for me.”
“That’s the first bullshit I’ve heard from you, Tim. I know the score and it’s more than you say it is. You can tell him what you want. I’m going to keep doing my job the way I think it needs to be done. Doesn’t mean I won’t mess up sometimes. What I’m not going to do is back off because of you, or Brighton, or anybody else. I’m going to find the Purse Snatcher and blow the brains out of his sick head and sleep good that night. All the rest of you can sweep up behind me, pick up the pieces, do what you have to do.
“This is the deal with me and Phil Kemp. Phil Kemp has been talking dirt to me since I got off jail duty my first two years. I mean real lowdown body parts and what he’d like to do. He’s rubbed his crotch on my ass and brushed my tits and said stuff you wouldn’t believe. I guess I didn’t react right when I was young. I didn’t know what to do. I thought that’s how it went, thought that meant being one of the boys. Then I started warning him off. He thought it was cute. Couple of weeks ago he was waiting in the parking structure, late, talking shit about Mike and what I really needed. He was leaning on my car. He took ahold of my arm, pretty hard, pretty rough. I got the nine between his eyes and I told him he could let go or get shot. He let go. Tried to laugh it off. So I hired a good lawyer. Because I’m sick of him getting away with it. I never wanted to play that game. It’s boring and it’s trite and it’s demeaning. Kemp’s a waste of a human being but he’s tight with Brighton. That’s why Brighton’s so eager for me to screw up. That would make it look like I’m suing because I can’t cut it.”
They walked south with the black water at their feet.
“What do you want, Merci? Out of this lawsuit? You want Kemp fired? Jail? A settlement? What?”
“I want Kemp to goddamned apologize to me and stop. It’s that simple.”
“That’s all?”
She thought about this. She wondered how clean she could come with Hess. Maybe it was the scotch or maybe it was just her instincts, but she thought she could trust him with this.
“Truth, Hess? What I want most is to go back in time and not file the goddamned thing. I’m already sorry I did it.”
She hoped he wouldn’t say just drop it, and he didn’t.
“But I’m not going to drop it, Hess. I’ll chase Kemp all the way to court if I have to. He’s gonna stop and he’s gonna apologize or I’ll ruin him. Guaranteed. And if fifteen other broads want to join in and wreck him with me, then they’ve got the right. They can do what they want. But I wish they’d quit treating me like some kind of leader. I got ten e-mails over the last three days, thanking me for stepping forward. For being courageous enough to stand up to the system. What they don’t get is I love the system. I’m part of it. I’m going to run the whole thing someday. Put money on that. And it really infuriates me to have to file a suit to get this guy to stop asking me to suck his miserable dick. But what I want to say to everybody else is, stay off my side.”
Merci heard a nightbird cry behind her, up close, like it was zooming past her ear. Then she could see it, just a blip of a shadow on the night, vanishing.
“You’re doing the right thing,” said Hess.
“That’s right. I’m doing it. Tell Brighton if you want to, since he doesn’t have the nuts to ask me himself.”
“This thing caught him by surprise.”
“That’s right. I never ratted Kemp out. Not until I talked to him. Then warned him. Then stuck a gun in his face. He’s getting what he deserves, Hess. I’m sorry if it upsets Brighton’s happiness, but it’s sure as hell upset mine.”
They ended up back at Hess’s apartment around eleven. Merci fell asleep on the couch and when she woke up at midnight Hess had made coffee.
He was lying back in a cheap recliner by the window with a glass of something on the sill, moonlight on his face, snoring. Merci stood over him and felt a strong urge to touch his hair while he wouldn’t know it.
She reached out, but stopped.
Twenty-Six
The Department of Mortuary Science of the health sciences division of Cypress College waits behind a heavy blue door next to a snack area with a view of the campus.
It was Monday morning. Hess went through and waited in the small lobby. The lobby was poorly lit and gave off a feeling of a decade long past — the 1950s, perhaps. On the walls were pictures of the school in the old days, when it was still located near downtown Los Angeles. Important mortuary science directors of the past, and some graduating classes, were also featured. A glass bookshelf held antiquated embalming texts, among them the seven-volume Humane Embalming.
The director came from the inner building and offered his hand. “Allen Bobb,” he said. “Detective Hess?”
Bobb was middle aged with a wide, pleasant face. His hair was thinning and his smile both open and wily at the same time. In Bobb’s cramped office Hess was offered a small chair on rollers that both men chuckled at.
Hess thought of all the chemicals they filled you with when you died and all the chemicals raging through his own blood right then and wished he was twenty-two again, bombing through giant waves at the Wedge, functionally immortal.
“I’ll cut to the chase,” said Hess.
“Shoot.”
He explained the circumstances: the missing women, the purses, the remains, the blood and trace formalin discovered in the soil by the lab.
Bobb nodded along like he’d heard it before. “He’s not embalming them, then. Not in the standard American way. Not if he’s removing organs and intestines. We leave those in. Are you familiar with the embalming process, Detective? Its goals and purpose, its limitations?”
“No.”
“Historically, the purpose was to discourage the spread of disease. Biologically speaking, there’s nothing more dangerous than a dead human body. Secondly, there were the cosmetic considerations — making the body presentable and natural for viewing before burial. The modern method was born in the Civil War, when thousands of bodies were shipped home for burial.”
“How long are they, uh, good for?”
“The bodies? Three to five days is our goal. Longer, if there are family circumstances that will delay interment.”
“Can you go weeks? Months?”
Bobb raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Weeks, maybe. Detective, if you underembalm, the corpse decomposes too quickly. If you overembalm, it becomes discolored and hard almost immediately.”
Hess scribbled down the questions in his own shorthand. His fingers seemed clunky again this morning, with patches of cold numbness on the tips. He lifted his pen hand and rubbed it with his thumb. The radio played an old Elvis song now, one that Hess remembered listening to at the beach many years ago.
He pulled a copy of Merci’s sketch from his pocket and handed it to the director. Bobb studied it with apparent patience, then gave it back. “No. I don’t think so, Detective. I’ve got a good memory for faces. I mean, this one’s pretty distinctive, with the long hair and mustache.”
“Former student, maybe someone who dropped out?”