Valley of Lights

EIGHTEEN

I walked across the street from the campus and into a coffee shop where I could see they had a phone, and from there I rang the hospital for an update on Loretta's condition. As I waited to be put through, I turned to look behind me; I seemed to have this constant sensation of being watched, even when nobody was looking my way. The shop's counters were lined with students, books open and heads down, most with only coffee or a glass of water. A bearded kid with a philosophy text propped before him was muttering 'Shit, shit,' as he flicked through the pages of his notebook. Further down the same counter, a silent girl was going through a new hardcover book and scoring through some of its lines with a yellow magic marker.

Now, there was a point. Every body that he'd taken so far had been male. Was that out of preference, or out of necessity?

The desk nurse for the intensive care unit came onto the line. I gave her my enquiry.

'Mrs Heilbron was stable until half an hour ago,' she told me, 'when she began to haemorrhage. She's having another emergency operation now. Are you a relative?'

'No.'

'Then I really can't give you any more than that. We've managed to contact next of kin and they're on their way.'

'It's as bad as that?'

'I'm sorry. Perhaps you can speak to Mister Heilbron when he arrives.'

There was a silence while I took that one in.

Then I said, 'Yeah… I'll call again. Thanks.'

I dropped the pool car back at the hospital, but I didn't go in. I called a cab and then waited outside for it to arrive and take me home. I was in a daze; part of it was that I hadn't eaten since the previous night, but I couldn't even think of facing anything now. I'd found the trail again, taken it as far as I could – which had been to a ransacked room in a student mall, and no further.

I'd pulled the lion's tail, all right, but he'd done more than turn on me… he was taking my whole world apart, one piece at a time, and I couldn't even see where he was coming from.

The cabbie asked me if I wanted him to go a couple of blocks off the route so that I could see the 'massacre house'. I said no, thanks, and he shrugged and turned up his radio.

I paid him off at the gates of the trailer park, and walked in alone.

Woods, Winter, what was the difference. He was smoke, I couldn't fight him or beat him. I'd tried, and Loretta and Georgie had paid for my mistake; now there didn't seem to be anything more that I could do other than to sit around and wait for him to come. How many other innocents would have to suffer as part of the show before he decided to move in and deliver the final stroke, I didn't know. I'd have to put on the uniform again and go through the motions, but I felt as if the dying had already started, there on the inside.

A white car was waiting alongside my trailer, parked across the end of my own. So soon? I remember thinking as I stopped in the middle of the gravel road, and the door of the car opened.

Lieutenant Michaels got out. He was in uniform, and on duty. He said, 'Alex? You look wrecked.'

'Got it in one,' I said.

'Alone?'

'Right.'

'I called the motel and they said you'd checked out this morning. I've been stopping by on and off for the last two hours.'

'I already heard about the letter,' I said, making a move towards the house, but Michaels was shaking his head.

'It's not about the letter,' he said. 'Get in the car.'

I stopped. 'To go where?'

'I'll explain on the way.'

'Don't I even get five minutes to change?'

'No,' he said.

I got in. What could I say? The mood I was in, anybody could have ordered me around. I'd known Michaels for about five years and I'd even been to his house once, but our relationship had always been professional rather than personal. Now, as we drove out towards his district within which my own squad area fell, he was giving nothing away.

We made a turn onto a quiet street. I recognised it straight away as the street on which the 'massacre house' stood; the street was still blocked by barriers and there were some tall screens around the house itself, but a young probationary policewoman ducked to see into the car and then moved a barrier so that we could pass. Michaels cruised by slowly, and then picked up speed as we exited at the other end of the street. Apart from keeping some attention on the road, he'd been watching me all the time. I'd been tense, nothing I could help, and now he must have seen me relax a little.

He said, 'You thought that was where we were going?'

'If this is some kind of stunt,' I said, 'I wish you'd get to the point of it.'

'No stunt. We're going to a murder scene, but not that one. You think you've had a heavy day, wait until you see these people.'

Something was wrong with Michaels. It hadn't been too noticeable at first, but as time went on I began to see that he was edgy and disturbed in a way that I'd never seen in him before. He wouldn't say where we were going; and after the second attempt, I gave up trying to get it from him.

It was only after another forty-five minutes, slowed by the late-afternoon traffic, that I found out.

By then we'd travelled all the way across the city and were coming over the hills into the select north-eastern quarter where the rich people lived; I mean, the kind of people so rich that they could buy one of those places on the lower slopes of the Camelback Mountains and then not even bother to live in it for most of the year. It was an area that I only really knew as a tourist; I'd brought dates up here to the Camelback Inn for drinks a few times, when I'd really wanted to impress them, but that was about my only connection.

When we made the turn into a long private road I realised that we weren't aiming for an individual house, but for one of those walled developer villages near to the country club. This one was mostly screened by new trees and bushes, with only barred windows or garage doors peeking through. I couldn't see what we were doing here; it was way out of our area, after all.

The guard at the main gate took a look and then waved us through, as if we were expected. We didn't get more than fifty yards before we had to stop at the tail-end of a jam of police and County vehicles, and it was here that Michaels switched off the engine and got out. I followed, looking around. It was my first time actually inside a place like this, and I was curious. The architect had obviously had a Mediterranean concept in mind, a little piece of Renaissance Italy re-drafted for the tastes of local money so that the final effect was of a quiet corner in Disneyland. We walked around by a big fountain that splashed away as the centerpiece of the main plaza, and climbed a rock path with a white stone bell tower marking its end. I knocked on the stone as I passed, and it was hollow.

Michaels looked back at me. 'Hey,' he said, 'come on.'

I shrugged and said, 'I don't get it.'

'Simple. He didn't only hit one house, he hit two. Only for this one he got past a wall and private guards and dog patrols without being seen, and he got out again the same way. Kind of determined for an opportunist, wouldn't you say?'

Winter had been here? 'Jesus,' I said. 'Who'd he hit?'

But Michaels carried on.

I suppose it was cleverly laid out, if you go for that kind of thing. From each rambling white villa all that you could see was the roof of any other, and then not too close. The greenery was dense and well-planned, and keeping it in condition must have been a full-time job for a squad of gardeners. I could imagine it at night; they'd probably floodlight it in reds and greens, and the transplanted palms would move gently in the evening air. That's how they did it around the Camelback Inn, anyway. I didn't care for it much myself, but it had always impressed my dates.

I could hear the buzz before we even came up out of the bushes. Then we came up level with the terrace, and there we were.

There must have been at least four separate incident teams in and around the house, all climbing over one another and all of them arguing. There were some of our own people that I recognised, and others that I didn't know at all. We stood out on the terrace and waited as Michaels sent a message inside. I tried to see in through the full-length windows, but it was smoky glass and all that I could make out were moving shapes. I could only think of one reason why I should be here, which was that Winter might have left some deliberate clue or pointer involving me. If he had, it couldn't be anything too definite or they'd have done rather more than send Michaels alone to collect me. I wondered what I'd say, when faced with it.

We were there for about ten minutes before Berman came out; he was Chief of Detectives, young in the job but fairly well-respected by those who reckoned they knew what they were talking about. He looked from Michaels to me, and said, 'Alex Volchak?'

'That's me,' I said.

'Come inside, there's something I want you to take a look at. Don't worry, we already moved the bodies out.'

I suppose it wouldn't have looked quite as bad if the big lounge hadn't been so all-over white; the plaster walls, the wool carpet, even the furniture was white leather. It looked as if somebody had dynamited a live pig in the middle of it all. We walked through across rubber sheets, a makeshift path that kinked in the middle to avoid a particularly nasty stain with a body-shape taped out around it. The shape, which was sexless like they always are, wasn't too big.

Three steps led us into a tiled passage running all the way down the side of the house, and the walls here were unmarked except for a single fading line that looked as if it might have been painted on by a sputtering aerosol. It was like a signpost, pointing us towards the room at the end of the passage.

This turned out to be part-office, part-den, with a big desk and a couple of filing cabinets and a bookcase full of Readers' Digest Condensed Books that didn't even look as if they'd been opened. There was more mess on the desktop, spread all over the papers and ledgers there, and this time the tape showed an outline of someone slumped forward with his arms outstretched. It reminded me of those blast-shadows they found on a wall at Hiroshima. There were a lot of people standing around in here, most of them apparently with nothing to do, and all of them talking and pointing here and there.

Berman eased around behind the desk. 'You can thank the air conditioning that the smell isn't worse,' he said, addressing me and Michaels equally. 'They might have been lying around here for even longer if it wasn't for sightseers up on the mountain getting a glimpse of the body in the pool.'

I was looking at the wall behind him; the big hanging map there told me in an instant why I'd been brought over. Apart from the colored pins which clustered in the part of

the map corresponding to the downtown area of the city, its most eye-catching feature was the runny, handwritten legend DYING OF PARADISE? ASK ALEX

and just below this in the desert, a large, bloody cross. The cross was an approximation of the place where I'd scooped out a shallow grave for the body of Woods and then covered it over with stones.

Berman said, 'Any comments?'

'No,' I said cagily. 'What can I say? I don't even know whose place this is.'

'Jeff Miransky,' he said, looking at the spot where the body had been as if there was still some after-trace of the physical presence lingering there. 'Small-time thief turned big-time businessman, among other things the part-owner of the Paradise Motel. I'm looking for connections, Alex, and I'll grab a straw until something better comes along. The Paradise made news and you were there. Start thinking for me, will you?'

And it was as simple as that.

We were led out through the kitchen, being told to step carefully over a single female's shoe that lay with a chalk circle drawn around it. We came out by the surprisingly small pool, which was in the process of being drained so that its filters could be checked, and were pointed toward a spot on the other side of the outdoor furniture where the bushes had been pulled back. A section of the fence behind had been lifted away to give access over onto the patio of the next house along. This, it seemed, had become some kind of overspill and marshalling area in response to the awkwardness of the site and the widespread nature of the murder scene.

Seated at a white aluminum table at the end of the patio, with a kingsized piece of ham and a couple of tubs of coleslaw between them, were Morrell and McKay, the two Drug Squad detectives.

'Hey,' Morrell said as they saw us, 'the team's complete.'

'It's the Paradise reunion,' McKay added. 'Grab a seat and eat.'

Michaels stared at the food as if he couldn't quite believe that what he was seeing was real, and said, 'How'd you get hold of that?'

'We raided the fridge,' McKay said, gesturing shamelessly towards the villa behind him. 'Just about everybody in the estate got up and ran when they heard the bad news, so nobody's home.'

'And mayhem always gives me an appetite,' Morrell added. 'Join us?'

I hesitated for a moment. Then I said, 'Yeah, I think I will.'

'Oh, shit,' Michaels said dully, and wandered away.

I pulled over a chair. I hadn't eaten at all since the previous night, and hadn't even given it a thought until this moment; now it all seemed to have caught up with me, oddly sharpened and intensified by what I'd just seen. I could see what Morrell meant about mayhem, just as surely as Michaels couldn't; he wandered over to the house and stood looking in, deliberately doing his best not to see us.

I said, 'So how come you're both here?'

'Same reason as you,' Morrell said. 'We're supposed to be sitting here in earnest discussion to see if we can come up with any connection between Apocalypse Now over there and what we saw at the Paradise Motel.'

'You know of one?'

'No, 'cept that there's two people sitting at this table called Alex,' (at this, McKay meekly raised a hand) 'which is probably what made it worth a shot.'

I said, 'How long do you think they'll make us stick around? I've got things I have to do.'

'Yeah,' McKay agreed. 'The whole point about being a cop is that you don't sit around like Joe Citizen waiting to be told what happens next.'

Morrell handed me a Diet Pepsi. 'What did you make of it in there?' he said.

I could sense a change in their attitude then, a shift to a more watchful mode; they might look like burned-out hippies, but they were still detectives, after all.

So I simply said, 'It was bad.'

'They say that the house on the park was worse,' McKay said.

'No kidding?'

'And Michaels was the first one in.' He glanced over at Michaels, who had wandered down to the far end of the pool and was well out of earshot. 'You heard the story?'

'Only what they wrote in the newspaper.'

'That was only half of it. Word is that he heard a kid screaming, so he went in without waiting for backup. Got the full effect in Technicolor.'

Morrell said, 'Did he say what he saw?'

'No, but look at him. Half his mind's been somewhere else ever since. And I know Michaels, he isn't soft – whatever he saw, it must have been something that could frighten the crap out of a commode.'

We sat around for a while longer, until it was clear that we'd been forgotten, and then Morrell went through the fence to see if he could get a ruling on whether or not we should still hang around. We'd all agreed – Michaels excepted, because he hadn't even participated – that we couldn't come up with anything to throw light onto the mystery here.

Returning, Morrell said, 'Somebody's out looking at the desert from a helicopter. See if they can't spot what the X is supposed to be marking.'

'What about us?' McKay wanted to know.

'We're no use to anybody, we can go. They'll send for us if they need any more of our advice.'

McKay looked at what was left on the table, which wasn't much apart from a hambone and. some empty cola cans.

'I'll advise them all they like,' he said. 'It beats working any day.'

I finally got home about eight, to find a rental car with its trunk open in the spot where Loretta usually parked her jeep. I went inside and, as I looked through my mail – the letter from the department about the lifting of my suspension and the probability of a written reprimand going into my file, and a second letter from Doctor Mulholland – I could hear the goings-on next door. I heard an older woman's voice saying, plaintively, Well if she isn't here, where is she? and a man's voice replying, I don't know. Clara. I just don't know. It should have occurred to me earlier that the Mister Heilbron mentioned by the receptionist wouldn't be Loretta's husband, but her father-in-law and Georgie's grandfather. I went through and dropped wearily onto the bed, and wondered what the hell I was going to do next.

And that was my day.