Eggs with their insides altered, made decorative.
Cars with their insides altered, made custom.
Bodies with their insides altered, made... what?
The closet held a few shirts and trousers on hangers; underclothes folded and stacked on a shelf; shoes toe to toe in a plastic sleeve hung from the ceiling. Like Janet Kane’s, he thought. No wig — human hair or otherwise.
Where would you hide the driver’s licenses? Flat and small enough to fit into a million different places.
Where would you hide them?
He bent down and looked under the bed: an aluminum baseball bat, a short rod and spinning reel, a Daisy spring action BB pistol cast to look like a six-gun.
When Hess stood back up he felt the blood rushing to his head, then a ringing lightness. The walls bowed convex then back flat again. Two of them were empty but the one opposite the bed had a framed poster of a castle looming atop a jagged mountaintop. He walked up close but there was no title or description. Against one wall was a dresser, which held sport shirts, shorts and more underwear. On top of it, Hess found some change, paper clips, a pen and stubs from three computer-generated movie tickets dated over the last three months. He wrote down the dates, times, titles and locations of the theaters, and put them back. One of them was for the night Janet Kane disappeared from the mall at Laguna Hills. The theater issuing the ticket was in Irvine, just a few miles away.
In the bathroom he scraped one of his credit cards down the bath towel hanging over the shower door, using a sheet of toilet paper to catch the fallout. With his head angled to the light he pulled several hairs out of the cotton terry and set them on the toilet paper too. He added more from the hairbrush in the top drawer, then folded the paper and slid it into his coat pocket. There was nothing of interest in the wastebasket, the cabinets or the toilet tank, from which he removed the top for a look. Someone had set bricks in each corner of the tank to save water.
Save water, Hess thought.
Save eggshells.
Save cars.
Save things in canning jars.
Save bodies.
The spare bedroom was really quite small — just a bed, a dresser with a lamp on it and a closet. It felt larger than it was because the closet doors and the back wall were mirrored. In the closet were four boxes of books, most of them in Romanian. Some extra blankets and pillows, a collection of men’s clothing that looked faded and rarely worn. A TV. The dresser held heavy sweaters, coats and socks. On the mirrored wall opposite the bed hung a black plastic crucifix that struck Hess as the loneliest depiction of Jesus he’d ever seen.
It seemed to Hess like a waste of a room. Why bother to pay for a two-bedroom unit? Hard to imagine overnight guests in the home of Matamoros Colesceau.
Twenty-Nine
“... I would say that the most drastic part of my treatment was the terrible feelings I experienced internally. It was explained to me that the hormone treatment would make me feel like I was constantly having premenstrual syndrome, but this description did not mean much to me because I was male. Am male. But it is a very bad feeling, as you know. Only in my case it lasted for three years instead of three days.”
“Constant or intermittent?”
Colesceau was still outside himself, looking down on the authoritatively seductive Merci Rayborn and his own rather hapless body. But he was having a good time talking to her, telling her about how the Depo-Provera murdered his sex drive and turned him into a peace-loving, nonsexual lamb of a man. His stimulation made him feel mentally sharp and physically lithe. It was like a spark being fanned.
“Three years seems very constant to me.”
The sergeant fostered confidence and energy in him and Colesceau was thankful for it. It surprised him. He wondered if he was changing.
Her dry, unloving voice again: “Did your imagination continue to work when you felt that way?”
“Regarding what?”
“Regarding things you’d like to do. Things you could do before and couldn’t do then? Could you picture things you’d like to do?”
Colesceau sighed deeply. He looked down at his own expression and thought it deserved some kind of award. He could be no more convincing than this. “For me, no. I lost my dreams along with my desire.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You would then win the bet. You cannot imagine what the death of that feeling is. The instinct to love and mate and extend the human race. Without it, you are nothing but a shell. Empty, like one of these eggs my mother decorates.”
“No sexual desire at all?”
“None.”
“Then how come you used your silver van to pin Ronnie Stevens’s car three nights back at the Main Place Mall?”
He was intrigued by this information. He felt his lips part and his face go slack. But from the outside, this had a positive effect: he looked bewildered and hapless. He looked innocent. And just a little bit insulted.
The neighbors started up their chanting again. He wished he could machine-gun every last one of them.
“I do not know Ronnie Stevens. I have never met him. I drive a red Datsun pickup truck from 1970. I haven’t been to the Main Place Mall in several months. Sergeant, remember one thing about me. About my behavior. This is it — never once did I deny my disease or my crimes of the past. I fully confessed to my acts. I am many things, Sergeant Rayborn, not all of them good. But one of the things I am, that I have never been able to change, is that I am honest. To a fault, perhaps.”
He watched her study him with her cold brown Doberman eyes. She looked dispassionate but unimpressed. It was the cop’s fundamental expression, he thought, and this Merci Rayborn looked like she was born with it on her face. He was sure now that she wore the holster strap unsnapped so she could get her gun quick and shoot fast.
“Okay, honest shitbird. Tell me where you were on Saturday night.”
“I was right here, as I explained earlier. I was even on TV, I believe. I’m sure the stations must keep video records.”
Hess went back down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the garage. It was nice to be able to get into the garage from inside the house, and Hess wished his apartment at 15th had the same feature. He turned on a light and looked at the decrepit little pickup truck. It was so old they were called Datsuns back then. Seventy, maybe, seventy-two? The doors were unlocked and the windows down. The registration and insurance were current. The odometer said 00000. The tires were in good shape and matched. Hess looked at the bed: lightly rusted and dented, no chemical or solvent stains. The glove box had the usuaclass="underline" tire pressure gauge, maps, pencils, cassette tapes. Hess pulled out three and read the titles: Eternal Health Through Yoga, by Sri Ram-Hara;TravelAudio #35 — Destination Romania; Deadwood, a novel by Pete Dexter.
Hess looked at the picture on the novel cassette: a long-haired, mustachioed gunslinger he recognized as Wild Bill Hickok.
... or that guy Paul Newman played in Buffalo Bill and the Indians.
Wrong Bill, right hair, thought Hess. He sat down in the passenger’s side and put back the tapes. He examined the headrest of the driver’s seat for hair. Same with the floorboards and the transmission hump. Nothing.
Outside the crowd started up again:
MAKE our NEIGHborhood
SAFE for the CHILdren!
Hess was sure there were no crimes against children in Colesceau’s jacket, but told himself to check again. He was a little surprised by the volume of the chant, the way the combined voices reverberated through the thin plywood of the garage door. The voice of fear, he thought. The papers said the vigil had been twenty-four hours a day for four days now, and that the neighbors had vowed to continue it until Colesceau got into his miserable little Datsun and left forever. The mob had set its own noise curfew at 9 P.M. so as not to interfere with work, school and sleep. Hess also read the people were driving in from other cities of the county to join the protest and that CNB had cameras set up round the clock, going to them live when Colesceau was visible or during slow periods during the news day.