It was profane.
The file for January of this year contained nothing at all related to the purchase of an embalming machine by William Wayne.
Hess inspected the house, the garage and the grounds, finding no trace of the Porti-Boy and no documents relating to the purchase of such a thing. No mirrored walls, no ostrich or emu meat in the freezer. No van, no Seville. Just a junked old truck, up on blocks, half of it missing. No tracks on the old asphalt of the driveway. When it was light they could check the road.
Merci was standing across the room from Wayne when Hess came back into the kitchen. Her arms were crossed and she had one hand up, fingers rubbing her chin.
“William is kind of forgetful about things, Tim. Foggy.”
“Let’s throw him in jail and see if he clears up.”
“He’s in charge here. Doesn’t want the other patients to get hungry. The doctor, he says, she cuts out two or three days in a row, sometimes. Stay put, William. Tim, come with me?”
Standing in the stinking hallway, Hess heard the moaning again. Merci’s face looked pale in the bad light. He stood so he could see part of Wayne’s feet through the door.
“He’s too stupid,” said Merci.
“That can be faked.”
“I’m convinced.”
“I am, too. No record. No driver’s license. He probably doesn’t even know how to drive a car.”
“He says he doesn’t know anything about an embalming machine. Had to tell him what one was. Says he thought people went to heaven when they died. Says he doesn’t know where the Ortega Highway is. Never heard of Jillson, Kane or Stevens. Can’t remember the doctor here — Spurlee, or Surplia or Slurpia — something in that area. Christ.”
“Why’d he run?”
“Saw the guns.”
Hess thought. “We can get hair and prints.”
“I already did. Offered him water in a clean glass. He pulled out the hair himself — even got some skin on the end for DNA. It’s in a paper towel inside the glass.”
“We can hold him forty-eight on the resisting. Keep the questions coming, get Kamala Petersen in for a look, see if his head clears up.”
“It’s hard to clear up a skull full of lint.”
“I think you’re right. I also think someone used his name to order a Porti-Boy, signed for the delivery, maybe used his money to pay for it. He never saw the damned thing. Maybe he’s covering someone. Maybe someone’s using him. Spurlea owns a panel van.”
Merci leaned back against the wall, looked up. “What’s the rest of this place look like? How come it stinks so bad? What’s all that moaning about?”
“Take five and see for yourself.”
She came back down the stairs a few minutes later. Hess looked at her and saw the desperation on her face, like when she was working Jerry Kirby’s dead heart. Her voice was low, wavering just a little.
“I’m calling the cops, shutting this place down. I’m going to get the Health Department as soon as they open in the morning. We’ll take Wayne for resisting, see if anything pops, see what Kamala thinks of him. If he’s covering for someone on the Porti-Boy, maybe he’ll tell us who. I’ll get him a protective cell, make sure the creeps don’t hurt him.”
“Good.” He looked in at William Wayne’s feet again. Then at Merci, whose eyes were cold and dark.
“He really is in charge of this hellhole, Hess. That damned Dr. Slurpee is who I want. I really can’t believe what I just saw.”
“I couldn’t either.”
Merci turned and kicked a hole in the wall. “Steel toes. I’m just a little bit pissed off right now. Call Riverside Sheriffs.”
Back out the Ortega the sky was dark and the hills were darker. The road was just a black ribbon with a yellow line through it that kept snaking out of his headlights, then out of Hess’s focus. He stared at it, the only line on earth.
Finally, Merci cut loose.
“The worst part of it is none of those people did anything wrong. They probably never did anything wrong. William Wayne probably didn’t. And the scum we deal with every day, this Purse Snatcher puke we’re after? All they do is bad things. They’ve got good minds and good bodies and all they do is bring the hurt down on other people. But you get unlucky enough to be born like those people back there, you end up in the Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore. That isn’t right, Hess. You keep trying to tell me to feel what other people feel and think what other people think and all that? Well, I never could, until I looked at the people in the rooms back there. That’s the first time I could really feel — and smell, and see and think — just exactly what other people felt and smelled and saw and thought. And it made me ashamed to be a human being and it made me furious. I’m always furious, though. That’s a different story.”
She leaned across the seat and Hess thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she drove a stiff index finger into his shoulder and leaned toward him.
“Those people aren’t ever going to get better. And they never did anything bad to anybody. That pisses me off and I intend to stay pissed off about it just as long as I can. I wish Dr. Slurpee had a jacket. I wish she was looking at some time.”
Hess nodded. “She might get some. You did the right thing, calling the police.”
“I should have waited for that bitch and blown her heart out.”
“Save your shells for the Purse Snatcher.”
“I got plenty for whoever needs them. We just wasted three hours, Hess. Maybe that’s what pisses me off most.”
Merci stared out at the darkness and the stars as they dropped back down into Orange County. So much sky, she thought, and so little time. Her fury had cooled down to a simmer but she could feel it eager to boil up and over again. That was fine; it was what kept her going.
But her heart felt wrong. It was all mixed up, not unanimous like it always was. It felt heavy with her failure to save Jerry Kirby. It was tender at the sudden and powerful empathy she had felt for the people at the Rose Garden Home. It was still coiling with her own indigenous anger. And there was something else inside her, too, something underlying it all like a small blue flame warming a pot, and this had to do with Hess.
He pulled up next to her car in the Sheriff Department lot, left the engine running. She looked at her watch: pushing midnight.
“Come over?”
“Sure.”
She shooed some cats out of the way and made drinks. Her big toe hurt. In the living room she sat across the sofa from Hess and tried to let the smell of the orange grove inhabit her. That didn’t work.
Hess stared at the tube but didn’t touch his drink.
“Stay tonight?” she said.
“No. I’m going to go in a minute.”
“Why’d you come over in the first place, then?”
“To make sure you were okay. Didn’t want you to kick all the walls in.”
She thought about this. “I’m okay. Look, it’s good if you go. I’m better off alone when I’m like this.”
“I know.”
Forty
Hess parked and walked across the sand to the lifeguard stand at 15th Street. He could feel the dampness on his cheeks and in his ankles. He climbed the stand and sat on the platform with his back against the house and watched the silver-black Pacific ripple under a sky shot with stars.
He began a prayer but fell asleep. He woke from a dream in which a huge bird crashed through a mirror and emerged on the other side as a Porti-Boy embalming machine. His watch said 4:54 A.M.