“I’m only about twenty minutes from here,” she said. “Come over and eat?”
“It’s almost eleven.”
“I know what time it is.”
“I’d like that, then.”
“It’s in the middle of an orange grove. Follow me.”
She waited while Hess got out and into his car. He looked uncertain opening the door, as if he didn’t know how much strength it might take and he used a little too much.
At home she opened the windows and turned on the TV and made two Scotch and sodas. She’d bought a big bottle of each because she’d enjoyed it that night at the beach with him. She changed out of her bloody pants and showered. She listened to the messages — Mike McNally, again, hoping she hadn’t “busted a gut” in the gym. Then the Bianchi rep saying they’d shipped the holster Federal Airborne, their compliments, no obligation whatsoever, hoped she’d use it. They’d sent it to her home because the offer was, again, only for “select law enforcement individuals.”
“Select, my ass,” she muttered. “Just send it.”
Then she searched her cupboards for something to heat up — it was either beef stew or noodles in a Styrofoam cup so she went with the stew. There were some crackers that weren’t quite stale. She tried to arrange them artfully on a fancy serving plate but they kept sliding down to the middle. There were always oranges, so she cut up two fat ones. Just two gulps of that drink and it went to her head.
Hess was watching CNB when she brought the plate in. She could smell the orange groves like they were growing through the screens. Hess looked at her, a cat on one of his thighs and another with its head on his lap. She shooed them away and put the plate on the coffee table. The cat on Hess’s leg was standing up but not gone, tail jumping defiantly, so Merci held an orange hunk out and shot it in the face with the juice. The cat fled.
“It’s okay,” Hess said.
“Vermin.”
“Why do you have so many, then?”
“I like them.”
They ate some crackers and oranges. They clinked their glasses together and drank but neither made a toast. There wasn’t anything to say if you were thinking about what happened to Jerry Kirby and there was nothing else to think about. She could see him, youthful and dead on the concrete. Merci called upon her inner power to banish thoughts of it from her mind right now. And the thoughts obeyed, hovering outside her mind, though she knew they’d have to get back in sometime.
There hadn’t been many times in her life that she had applied all of her considerable will to the task at hand and come up empty. Jerry Kirby was one of them, and it made Merci doubt herself, made her wonder if she wasn’t as strong as she believed. She’d done everything in her power to make him live and he had died. What was important now was to put it out of her mind so she could come back to it fresh, maybe see what she’d done wrong, how to do it right the next time.
So she sipped the drink and let the alcohol lead her away.
“It’s either canned stew or Styro noodles.”
“I like stew. It reminds me of hunting trips to Idaho. Look, Colesceau again.”
“The TV makes him look bigger.”
She watched him on his ten-fifteen appearance, padding around in his socks and robe, collecting the tray, talking to the tennis people. She took another couple of sips of her cocktail. When Colesceau suggested his testicles might make good earrings for Tennis Man’s wife, Merci scoffed, “I’d like to see those.”
Hess said nothing.
Then the CNB anchor said they’d be back in just a moment, with traffic, weather and the breaking story of a murder in nearby Lake Elsinore.
“Maybe the Purse Snatcher killed LaLonde because his device broke down,” said Hess.
It surprised her, that Hess would make a jump like that, so quick, no reason at all for it.
Then Merci realized that if by some stretch of the imagination the Purse Snatcher had killed LaLonde, it well might have happened while they were sitting there outside Colesceau’s apartment an hour or so ago. Or maybe just after they’d left. Either way, CNB had Colesceau, on video, at home, not in Lake Elsinore.
Maybe Hess would believe his own eyes, since he wouldn’t believe her.
And then it came. Just like Hess had willed it to. Just like he’d seen the picture before it got to the screen.
She sat there with a buzz of excitement running along with the Scotch as the CNB anchor reported the murder of “amateur inventor and convicted car thief” Lee LaLonde in his Lake Elsinore workshop. He was apparently killed by an unidentified intruder “earlier tonight.” Riverside Sheriffs said robbery was apparently the motive.
Merci looked at the video footage of the shop, its door open and crime scene tape flapping, the deputies trying to do their jobs.
Hess was already on the phone. He left a message and her number, clicked off and put the handset on the arm of the couch beside him. Then he pulled the small notepad from his pocket, flipped through and wrote something.
The phone rang less than a minute later and Hess, to her irritation, answered it. He listened for a moment, asked what time, listened again. He thanked someone and clicked off without saying good-bye.
“Nine, nine-thirty. Some other tenants saw the door halfway up, then the body. Gunshot to the head. They’re saying botched robbery.”
“Well, it wasn’t our man Colesceau.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He looked at her and she could see the exhaustion and indecision in his eyes. He sat forward with effort, then stood. “We might be able to help, out there.”
“Riverside Sheriffs don’t need us tonight, Hess.”
“I know. But we could just...”
“Yeah, I know, too.”
She put her hand on his chest, lightly, and eased him back down to the couch. He didn’t resist, which she found sad and exciting.
They ate in near silence in front of the TV. Merci flipped to a sitcom rerun, one of those that bred so many future stars. Fun to see them with long hair. Hess didn’t seem to be looking at it, but he didn’t look at her, either. Most of the time he seemed to be staring out the dark open windows of the house. He kept his sport coat on, even though the night was warm.
She wondered if old people took tragedy harder — things like Ronnie Stevens or Jerry Kirby, things like being wrong about the suspect in an investigation. She continued to will Jerry Kirby out of her mind. And she willed Hess to feel better. She wondered if he was just sickened by what had gone down and had run out of things to say.
After dinner they walked the orange grove around the house. It was Merci’s idea to lift Hess’s spirits. She got fresh drinks and a couple of big flashlights they didn’t really need in the moonlight. She wanted Hess to smell an orange grove from the inside. And she wanted him to see something.
Now she stood astride a soft chocolate furrow and heard herself telling Hess to take a deep breath, a deeeep breath and see if he could feel the oranges going inside him.
“No, not exactly.”
“Try again.”
And he did, taking a long deep breath that made her wonder how much of his lung was gone — had he said half or two-thirds? — then she banished that thought from her mind too because it didn’t fit what she was trying to accomplish with regard to smells, oranges, being inside of things and improving the spirits of Hess.
“They’ll take up root inside you,” she said.
“I used to imagine that about ocean water. If it made you part ocean inside. Because sweat is salty.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted you to realize.” It really was exciting to educate an older person, if only a little..