The dancers pause only briefly to eat, sleep, lay together, partake of peyote cactus, or bathe in the creeks that are warm in the summer and cold in winter. The dancing is organized and directed by ritual specialists, and has specific steps and motions and rhythms for men and women.
If the Spanish find us dancing, the dancers are beaten, and also taken back to the mission and locked inside for several days. The Franciscan fathers admonish them and preside over the punishments but always forgive us, in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord, who loves us. Some Juaneños passionately love Father Serra for bringing Jesus to us, but many only pretend. The Franciscans call us neophytes, which means a person new to God. Some of us call the Franciscans crilsin, which means invaders, or people not of our world. Others call them bor’bascala, or “white pigs.” I am glad to read and speak Spanish because most of these Acjacheme words will die when we do, man by woman, word by word. Many people have died here in the mission, of disease and in the big earthquake, and because of the sickness of our hearts when we are denied our way of life and how we eat and how we speak and what we believe and our dancing. The Spanish have taken our spirits and yet they preach love of their Holy Spirit.
Late that day, Water Dog lost his trail and I have trouble finding it on the hills of boulders and the arroyos thick with toyon and manzanita. We see a bear watching us from a green meadow. He is silver and hump-backed and contrasts beautifully with the orange poppies. Soon the trail and all its signs were gone and we were tired. I didn’t tell Bernardo but I felt as if I was thousands of kilometers away from Magdalena and would not see her again, even in parts.
That night we ate two hares, which are larger than the rabbits but much tougher and less flavorful.
We slept near a spring on blankets we carry on our backs and in the morning we climbed a steep rise and saw the vultures circling over a distant hill.
We went there without talking and I felt this heaviness in me and Bernardo did, too, and even Water Dog who is always hopeful seemed sad.
And there we found Magdalena’s white blouse, torn and bloody and discarded in the brush.
And we smelled what the vultures smelled and we found her in the manzanita.
Osaka calls a minute later.
“No,” he says, “I can’t match your fingerprint with the Newport house kitchen or dining room.”
“Hell, Glen, that thumb is textbook.”
“We didn’t find any prints that weren’t Tarlow’s. One of my people told me it was the cleanest island counter he’s ever seen. Like housekeeping had just been there. Ditto the cooktop area, the sink, the drawer hardware, the dishes in the sink and the cabinets.”
“What about the plastic chopsticks and the sake can and the bourbon bottle in the trash?”
“Tarlow’s on the can but the bourbon bottle was clean.”
“So Jeffs wiped it all down.”
“Someone did.”
Gale punches off and beds down.
Falls asleep fast, sees the Killer Cat, padding down the hallway of his boyhood home.
The cat stops and looks at Sally’s closed bedroom door, then comes to Gale’s door and sits, tail twitching.
The detective jumps wide-eyed from his bed, lands loudly on the hardwood floor, heart beating hard.
17
“Mr. Gale? My name is Norris Kennedy. I was a friend of Bennet Tarlow. I remember you from a fight in Las Vegas — Fury-Wilder three.”
Early morning in San Juan Capistrano, Gale still in bed, sunlight streaming into the little bedroom in the house where he grew up.
It’s just hours after being invited to hell by Vernon Jeffs.
And less than an hour since he sent off the search warrant request to the Honorable Carl Schmidt for the home and white Ford Econoline belonging to Vernon Jeffs.
And learned that no prints of Jeffs were found in Tarlow’s Newport Beach home.
“When can we meet?” he asks.
“I’m in Laguna. Moulin on Forest?”
Gale and Mendez arrive first and take an outside table far in a corner. The café is busy as always this morning, mostly locals and their dogs, who all seem to know each other, and plenty of well-heeled tourists tucking into their crepes, omelets, and lattes.
Norris Kennedy is much as Gale remembers her, a pretty redhead with one dimple and a measured smile, shapely.
Introductions but no small talk.
“I didn’t call sooner because I had no idea who would kill Bennet,” Norris says.
“Do you now?”
She gives Gale an assayer’s stare, unblinking dark brown eyes boring into him, then Mendez.
“He was one of the most energetic, ambitious, and complex men I’ve ever known,” she says. “I was a city attorney in Las Vegas at the time, specializing in gaming and hospitality, so I’ve met more than a few people like that. Businessmen, politicians, gangsters, Hollywood. The gamut. I could go on and on about Tarlow but I won’t.”
The detectives’ silence draws her out. “The Tarlow Company is a house divided,” she says. “Bennet and his father detested each other. His stepmother took her stepson’s side on most things. The big issue was always profit. Bennet, in his father’s eyes, was a mediocre builder and a poor businessman. Bennet thought of his dad as a money-grubber and a bore. Then there’s the patriarch, the original Bennet Tarlow himself, strong but mostly silent at ninety, presiding over the world from his mansion overlooking Crystal Cove in Newport Beach.”
A waiter brings them breakfast. A little dog in a blue vest, pulling on his leash and wagging his tail pleadingly, puts his front paws on Norris Kennedy’s bistro chair before his owner yanks him away.
“Sorry, Norris,” he says. “You know how he likes you. Jasper, sit!”
“No problem, Bob. He won’t get this breakfast!”
“Jasper, heel.”
The three begin breakfast in silence, Gale stealing a long look at Norris while she shakes pepper onto her omelet. She’s less effusive than he remembered her, more matter-of-fact, and somehow more beguiling.
“What?” she asks Gale.
“Nothing. Just observing.”
“That’s Robert Clark,” she says. “He made the classic surf movie Laguna to Mavericks.”
“I loved that movie,” says Gale, who surfed Crystal Cove ineptly, but successfully hunted nearby lobsters as a boy.
“I did, too,” says Mendez.
A silent beat.
“Suspects?” asks Kennedy. “Persons of interest?”
“Yes,” says Mendez.
“Who?”
“No,” says Mendez.
“I think you should be looking at Ben’s projects, especially Wildcoast. There’s been resistance within Tarlow Company since the beginning. Resistance from certain county supervisors, support from others. Stiff resistance from Native Californians whose ancestors lived on the land back to ten thousand years ago. Ben was fearful about everything to do with that development. Developers don’t build cities from scratch but that’s what he was trying to do. I can’t tell you how many very intense phone calls he had. Sometimes late at night.”
“Names?” asks Gale. “Companies? Organizations?”
“No. He’d always politely excuse himself, go to another room, and close the door. I certainly heard the word ‘Wildcoast’ several times. Do you have his phone?”
“We think the killer destroyed and dumped it,” says Mendez.
Gale looks over at the surfer twins, and their athletic, probably prosperous parents. Exactly the kind of people who want to live in Wildcoast, he thinks. Wonders if they might even qualify to buy a home in one of the “affordable” tracts.