And then the room itself, officers stepping out of the way to clear his shots.
When he had finished, the DC called the two sombre employees of the body transport company waiting in the hall, and they stepped in to manoeuvre the corpse into a white zippered body bag and lift it onto their gurney.
Michael leaned on the bookcase and watched Janey dusting for prints. “Anything interesting, Miss Amat?”
She shrugged. “Nah. No weapon. No obvious calling cards. We’ll have to bag the rug and a few bits and pieces. Plenty of prints, but they’re probably mostly his and hers. We’ll do an inch-by-inch once we’ve cleared the room.” She glanced at him, and held him fondly in her gaze for a moment. “Howya doing, Mike?”
“Better for seeing you, Janey.”
She grinned. “Yeh, that’ll be right. The only time guys are happy to see me is when I’m heading out the door.”
“That’s just cos you’ve got such a cute ass.”
“Hah! Mid-thirties and sagging. I don’t think so, Mike.”
“Hey, any guy would be glad to get his hands on your butt.”
“Yeh? So how come I haven’t met any of them?” She grinned and cocked a provocative eyebrow in his direction. “Unless, of course, you’re offering.”
He grinned. “I’m more of a tit man myself.”
“Damn! And I don’t have much in that department.” She cupped what little she had in each hand, pulled a face and turned back to her dusting. “Speaking of large breasts, what’s happening with that girl from Huntington Beach who was after your body?”
Michael’s face clouded slightly, and he tried to sound casual. “Nah. Wouldn’t have worked, Janey.”
She turned a frown in his direction. “You mean, you never put hands on her butt either?”
He shrugged. “I figure they put the implants in the wrong place. I thought I had big hands, too. But never could get them around it.”
He turned away then, his smile fading, and stared out through the French windows at the ocean view. He hadn’t laid hands on anyone in a long time and couldn’t imagine that he ever could again.
Chapter Three
Sunlight seeped in all around the edges of the Venetian blinds, long cracks of light falling in zigzag patterns across the furniture of the darkened room. Michael closed his eyes and saw again green, manicured lawns rising up across an undulating hillside punctuated by the occasional tree. No headstones here, just slabs engraved and laid in the ground. Plots sold, like so much real estate, with spectacular views of the Pacific, prices elevated by the proximity of John Wayne’s grave just a little further up the hill. Twenty thousand dollars to lay your body down for the last time in Pacific View Memorial Park, with airplanes from John Wayne airport flying overhead every few minutes to soothe your final sleep.
It had been a fine, fall day when they put Mora in the ground here. Shirt-sleeve weather. And the mourners had gathered, uncomfortable in dark suits and coats and hats, a small group of friends and relatives, most of whom had assiduously avoided eye contact with Michael. Her late husband’s children and ex-wife had arranged a lunch afterwards. A celebration, Michael thought. The chance to pick over her remains and discuss the recovery of their lost inheritance. He had not been invited, and wouldn’t have gone even if he had.
He stood long after they had left, watching the gravediggers shovelling dry, loose dirt over her coffin, and turned his face up toward the sun, in the hope that it might dry his tears.
In the end he had walked back down the hill to his car and driven home to an empty house and an empty life, wondering if it would ever again be filled with anything but pain.
A sound in the room made him open his eyes, and he saw Angela’s silhouette in the chair opposite. He could almost feel her impatience as she crossed her legs. “You’re obsessing, Michael. Grief is a natural process for dealing with bereavement. But you are turning it into a cause célèbre. You are focusing on Mora’s death as your loss rather than hers. And yes, of course, you suffered loss. But the dead are gone, and in the end the living must move on. You aren’t moving on. You have put your life on pause, the green light winking. You’re wallowing in your own self-pity.”
“It’s not true, Angela. I’m trying. I really am. That’s why I went back to my old job.” He paused, and allowed himself an ironic smile in the dark. “That, and the fact that I needed the money.”
“You never told me why you quit in the first place.”
“Mora wanted me to. She had so much money, neither of us needed to work. And after three years of widowhood, she wanted to play.”
“And you couldn’t play if you were tied to a job.”
“Yes.” He remembered the arguments. At first he had been dead against it. He loved his job, and he knew that without it his independence would be gone. It was her money, not his. He would be a kept man. But she had won in the end, turning those big, sad, brown eyes on him and trotting out the well-worn clichés. Life was not a rehearsal. Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today — tomorrow may never come. And for her it had been prophetic. Such a short time they had had together, and in the end he was pleased he had quit. They had travelled the world. Italy, France, the Far East, the Caribbean. So many happy moments, now just so many memories. But at least he had them.
“So how is it going? Orange County Forensic Science Service, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Originally I was at Santa Ana. But I’m based at Newport Beach now.”
He heard her smile. “So you can just about walk to work.”
“Just about.” But he was thinking about how it had been. Those first few days back at work. People he had known for years. It wasn’t that they were hostile, or even cool. Just lacking in warmth. He said, “They don’t understand.”
“Who don’t understand what?”
“My coworkers. They can’t figure out what I’m doing back there. It’s like they think I’m slumming, or something. Idle rich kid just playing at it. They figure I’m worth a fortune, so why the hell would I want to work? If only they knew.”
“Do you feel they are judging you in some way?”
“I’m sure of it. I’m sure they think I only married her for the money. After all, she was so much older than me.”
“Not so old, Michael. Ten years is nothing between adults. And she was still in her early forties, wasn’t she?”
He nodded and thought, she can’t see me nodding. “Yes,” he said.
There was a long silence. Then, “And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Marry her for her money.”
“Of course not!” He heard the pitch of his voice rising and wondered if he was protesting too much. If maybe there was some grain of truth in the thought and he didn’t want to face it. “At first, maybe, the money made her seem glamorous. Attractive. But in the end I fell for her. She was a good-looking woman, but that wasn’t it either. It was her. It was Mora. There was a beautiful, still centre to her that just drew me in and held me there. I was totally beguiled, Angela.”
“And what drew her to you?”
He smiled. “At first I think it was my youth.”
“And you’re an attractive man.”
He tried to see her face in the dark, but it was lost in shadow. “I’ve never had any trouble attracting women, if that’s what you mean.” He was a good-looking young man, tall, athletically built, with long dark hair that he swept back from a broad, tanned forehead set above ice-chip blue eyes. They were the genetic inheritance of his Celtic ancestry. Or perhaps the Eastern European gene pool that had spawned his great grandfather, from whom he had also inherited his surname. Kapinsky. Not a name he liked much. But he was the keeper of it, and the last in the line. “It doesn’t matter what attracted either of us in the beginning. We fell in love. And that’s what sustained us. And whatever money she might have left me, I’d trade every last penny of it to have her back.”