Everything but the Squeal Read online

  Juvenile Jane Doe's eyes were open and startled-looking, and brown curls clustered around her head. Small perfect teeth gleamed below a slightly inverted upper lip. She must have had an enchanting smile. Twenty-four hours ago she had been pretty.

  Hammond gave me a blank look. Yoshino was staring at the body as if sizing up the work that remained to be done on it, her face impassive under the hairdo.

  “She's not the one,” I said. My pulse was pounding in my ears.

  Hammond made an abrupt gesture, and Yoshino began to cover her up. Without thinking, I put my hand on her wrist and stopped her. She snapped her head up at me, her eyes boring into mine with so much contained energy that Hammond took a step back and ashes tumbled from his cigar onto the sheet. Looking down, Yoshino brushed them away immediately, as though the girl on the slab might feel them.

  “What happened?” I said. My voice could not have been more constricted if concrete had been poured into my throat.

  “What happened? Or what killed her?” Yoshino said. She was back to being the perfect professional; all the rage or loathing, whatever it had been that had driven Hammond backward, was bottled up once more.

  “Both.”

  She started to pass a hand through her hair, thought better of it, and threw Hammond a look. Hammond nodded.

  “What happened was that she was given a massive injection of a painkiller called Demerol. It would have made her fuzzy about what was happening, screwed with her memory later. Demerol will do all those things. The world being what it is, God help us, Demerol is a very big drug right now.” She toyed with a corner of the sheet that lay across the girl's rib cage. “Then she was used sexually, front and back. Probably in her mouth too, but he didn't get to finish there for reasons that will become apparent.”

  She looked up at both of us. Hammond had his cop face on, but my expression made her falter. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  A kind of cold front dropped down behind her eyes. “Why?”

  “He's okay,” Hammond said. “He's looking for one this age that hung out in some of the same places.”

  “Up to you, Lieutenant. Whatever you say. Where were we?” She looked down at the little body. “At some point while she was alive her hands were tied behind her. There's still some lividity where the ropes pressed into the flesh. Look, you can see the way the rope was twisted. Here's where the knot was.” She lifted the clenched hand to show us the wrist.

  I didn't look. Hammond didn't either.

  Yoshino put the hand back down gently. “What killed her was a sudden pressure on the neck. Broke it like a wishbone. Probably accidental.” She swallowed. “This is really the shits, you know? God in heaven, I have a daughter.”

  “Why accidental?” I asked.

  “The Demerol,” she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “What else? The way it happened, it looks like he had his hand behind her head, gripping the base of her neck, like he was forcing her to go down on him. Jesus, she was a baby. Anyway, the break is simple and clean, like she jerked backward with so much force—that would have been the Demerol, numbing her, hiding the pain from her—and when he shoved down, the bones went and it was all over. The Demerol says it was probably accidental. If he'd planned to kill her, he wouldn't have given her the Demerol. It was to make the whole thing tougher to remember.”

  “Maybe the Demerol was supposed to dull the pain.”

  “Oh, no,” Yoshino said in an entirely new tone of voice. “He wanted her to feel the pain. You haven't seen this.” She pulled the sheet down to the girl's hips. There was a raw circular discoloration in the center of her abdomen.

  “Look,” she said tightly. “Before the Demerol, he put his cigar out in her navel.”

  Nobody looked. Hammond stared at the opposite wall, and Yoshino gazed at the two of us. I looked at a mental image of Aimee Sorrell, captured in a Polaroid with an angry burn where her belly button should have been.

  “She's not the one,” I said again.

  “Well,” Yoshino said, “whoever she was, I hope someone shoots him between the eyes before he gets to those fizzwits on the California Supreme Court.”

  She covered the girl again and slid the drawer closed before she led us to the sliding door and let us out.

  “Where you going tonight, Yoshino?” I asked before the door could close.

  “Out with my husband,” she said. “It's our fifteenth anniversary.” She looked from Hammond to me. “How’d you know I was going out?”

  “Your hair,” I said. “It looks terrific.”

  “No kidding?” Yoshino said, raising her hand to give it a proprietary pat. “I hope so. It took decades.”

  “It was worth it,” I said. Hammond gave a snort and headed down the hallway.

  I put my hand on the sliding door, and she looked up at me inquiringly.

  “Call me if there's another one who's been burned that way,” I said, slipping a card into her hand. “Anyone with a burned belly button.”

  “I only do official work,” she said, sliding the door sharply closed. I barely got my fingers out in time.

  Hammond was waiting for me halfway down the hall.

  “What about my hair?” he asked, all tough guy again.

  “The Red Dog tonight,” I said. “Nine o'clock. Your hair will look perfect. You want me to talk to the cops? Bring me the right cop to talk to.”

  His mouth twisted. “That one's not so easy,” he said.

  “Do it, Al,” I said. “Otherwise, I'm on my own.”

  5 - Aurora

  I t was still only ten-forty-five, but I felt like I'd been awake for weeks. The world, as seen through the gritty glass of a downtown phone booth, was briefly bright. Even down here, directly across the street from police headquarters in Parker Center, traffic was light. The Saturday before Easter Sunday is usually a nice, peaceful day. I dialed my own number and listened to my answering machine go through its usual rigmarole.

  “Hey, Simeon,” Roxanne said, ever effervescent. I dated Roxanne occasionally, and now that Eleanor was in China I was seeing more of her than usual. “I have hidden eggs everywhere, and not even the big detective is going to find one of them. At least, not without a body search, which is a clue, I guess. What I mean is that I hope you haven't forgotten that you're supposed to be here tonight and that we're going to do eggs tomorrow morning. I'm tending bar at McGinty's until eleven, and I expect to see you there just before we close. If you're not, I've saved a dozen raw eggs and you'll find them in your bed when you get home. They'll be broken, like my heart. Be there, buster, and no excuses.” She hung up.

  I'd forgotten all about it. For the tenth time I resolved to get an appointment book and write things down in it. Other people showed up where they were supposed to be. Appointment books had to be the secret. Eleanor's appointment book was thicker than the Oxford English Dictionary and a lot worse organized, and she was always where she was supposed to be. At the moment, unfortunately, she was supposed to be in China.

  The second call was from my mother. “Well, Billy be damned,” she said, getting right to the point,` “if I'd known I was going to spend my life talking to a machine, I'd have given birth to a battery, too. At least you'd be grateful. And speaking of you, I'm sure you remember that you promised to come by tomorrow. I'm sure you know how much your father and I are looking forward to it. Bring Eleanor, if she's speaking to you.” I heard my father's voice in the background. “No,” my mother said, “it's that damned machine again.” Then there was a dial tone. That was how long it had been since I'd talked to my mother. Eleanor had left three weeks ago.

  The machine had promised three messages, so I hung on, watching a little Mexican girl, decked prematurely in her Easter best, argue with her mother about something. Her plump brown sturdy legs beneath half a mile of white ruffled crinoline anchored themselves to the sidewalk as permanently as an Ice Age as she tugged her mother in the direction she wanted to go. In
about eight years, she'd be the age of the girl on the slab.

  “Mr. Grist?” It was a voice I didn't recognize. “This is Jane Sorrell. Something has happened. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I need to see you. Please come. I don't know what I'm going to do.”

  I pressed my forehead against the glass of the telephone booth and watched the little Mexican girl, victorious, lead her mother down the street in the desired direction. Good for her. Somebody loved her.

  To get to the hotel, I headed west on Olympic and then, after miles of stunted architecture and Korean neon signs, swung north on Doheny toward Beverly Hills. Alice was so sluggish and unresponsive that it felt as though she were reading my mind. I didn't want to see Mrs. Sorrell. I didn't want to see Mr. Sorrell. I wanted to go home and spend Easter with my mother and father and pretend that I sold aluminum siding or something that never rusted, never warped, and always looked shiny and new and hopeful. I didn't want anything to do with families that had rotted and turned brown at the edges like Annie's avocado-and-clam dip.

  I was in a fine humor as I chugged up the driveway to the hotel. The clown who opened the driver's door, stuffed into a uniform that looked like something willed to him by the Philip Morris bellboy, didn't do much to raise my spirits.

  “Yes, sir,” he said with a bright smile as he estimated my income and looked Alice over. It was the smile a talent agent saves for a client who isn't working. “We don't get many of these, this far north of the border. We'll be real sure to park her where we can keep an eye on her.”

  “Park her on your chest,” I said, climbing out. “I sure hope you don't have to live on your tips.”

  “I usually know what to expect,” he said. He aimed Alice toward some unmapped area of the parking lot, the part they reserve for Volkswagen vans with psychedelic designs painted on them.

  Mrs. Sorrell hadn't given me her room number, so I had to go through the formality of finding a house phone. As always these days, they were located behind a bouquet of eight-foot flowers that looked like Venus's-flytraps bred to eat airplanes.

  “Yeah?” said a new voice, a sullen, young-sounding voice that I'd never heard before. It could have been a girl or a prepubescent boy.

  “Is Mrs. Sorrell there, please?” I asked, yanking upward on the frayed bootstraps of whatever residue of courtesy I had left.

  “No,” the new voice said. Its owner hung up.

  I resisted the urge to rip the phone out of the wall and feed it to the flowers, and once again requested the operator to connect me with the Sorrell suite.

  “Listen,” I said the moment the phone was lifted on the other end. “I've had to endure a lot of things today, not the least of which was a parking attendant so snotty that he should blow his nose into a parachute, and if you hang up one more time I'm going home, and you're going to have to deal with your mother, who will undoubtedly remove your skin in one-inch strips when she learns you sent me away. Do you understand?”

  There was no response.

  I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw little orange dots. “Is she coming back?”

  “Sooner than I'd like.”

  “Fine. I'm in the lobby.”

  “Well, lucky you.” It was a girl, no doubt about it. Boys don't learn to be that nasty until after their voices change.

  “There's a bouquet here that wants to eat me,” I said. “It's already got one of my buttons.”

  “Call me when it reaches your fly,” she said. But she didn't hang up.

  “That's the problem. It's a button fly.”

  She exhaled heavily, and I could imagine her rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, in the gesture of put-upon teenage girls everywhere. “I suppose you want to know our room number,” she said. “It's eleven.”

  Number eleven was a pink stucco bungalow that squatted behind a hedge of birds of paradise that was obviously the pride and joy of a gardener who liked birds of paradise. I wondered where they'd found one. After I pressed the bell twelve or thirteen times I found myself looking at a trim little naiad of seventeen or so with the same pouty mouth that Aimee had pointed toward the camera in her yearbook pictures.

  “Not bad,” she said appraisingly. “A little old, but not bad.”

  She had her mother's careless, honey-colored hair, blue eyes, and the longest legs I'd ever seen, holding up a pair of creased white tennis shorts. I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes. “Wait,” I said, “it's coming to me. Your name ... it begins with an A and it's got more vowels than a Hawaiian road map. It's . . . it's . . . Adelle.”

  “Fold your map and sit on it,” she said. “Adelle’s my older sister. I'm Aurora.” She gave me something that might have passed for a smile in a lockjaw ward. “My mother's expecting you?”

  “Your father calls her Mommy. How come you don't?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “It's a word I can't seem to wrap my mouth around.”

  “So what do you usually call her?”

  “You. That is, when we're speaking.”

  “As long as she's gone, let me ask you some questions.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because your sister has gone thataway. Because she could be in some very deep trouble.” She didn't drop to her knees or cry out helplessly, so I said, “Where is your mother, anyway?”

  “Drinking,” she said. “Me too.”

  She opened the door and I stepped into a carpet so deep that I nearly stumbled. The room was furnished in rattan and tropical prints. Palm trees waved balmily at me from the upholstery. There was a definite bite of whiskey in the air.

  “You started without me,” I said as she sat down on one end of a couch that looked like a great place to catch yellow fever, folded those legs, and picked up a half-full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Even with her legs crossed, her knees were perfect. Not a knobby patella or a skateboard scar in sight. Aurora slugged back an inch or so and handed the bottle to me, a challenge in her blue eyes. My mouth tasted like formaldehyde, so I took it. “Let's see if we can finish together,” she said as I tilted it to my lips and drank.

  It was like drinking smoke. I lowered it to take a breath, feeling something hot and red and alive burrowing down through the center of my chest, like an animated floor plan of hell. You Are Here, said the sign that had been posted at my mouth.

  She reached out for the bottle. “Uh-uh,” I said, pulling it away. “You can lose a hand that way.” I drank again and then handed her the bottle. She tilted it upward and made a gurgling sound. When a girl looks good with a bottle of whiskey in her mouth, it's time to be careful.

  “Banzai,” she said, wiping her lips with the back of her wrist. “The divine wind, right?”

  “What's the divine wind?” I asked, taking the bottle back and drinking. Her eyes watched the level of the whiskey as I drank. With every gulp the girl on the slab grew smaller and farther away.

  “I don't know,” she said. “Those retards who flew their airplanes into the sides of aircraft carriers or whatever. They were the divine wind or something like that.” She reached out a brown hand and grasped the bottle and chugged at it. A flush came into her cheeks.

  “Kamikaze,” I said as the penny dropped. “Kamikaze, the divine wind.”

  “Yeah,” she said, eyeing me over the mouth of the bottle, which was considerably emptier than it had been a moment ago. “What I want to know, when those guys finally got their orders and learned that they were supposed to go out and never come back, what I want to know is how come none of them ever said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? ”

  “The emperor was daddy,” I said. A wisp of pale hair hung over her brow, and I leaned forward and brushed it back. She didn't move away from me, so I sublimated the next impulse and took the bottle from her hand and drank. “It was an ancestral society. They did what daddy said they should do.”

  “Hey, you,” she said, her blue eyes level. “You're talking to me like I'm an adult now. Before, you talked to me like I was a kid.”<
br />
  “Before?” Before, as far as I was concerned, was the morgue.

  “On the phone. Strips of skin, you talked about. Would you have said anything like that to an adult?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “If adults talked to each other the way they talk to kids, what do you think would happen?” She retrieved the bottle and put away a slug that would have elicited cries of admiration on skid row.

  I thought about it. “The homicide rate would zoom.”

  “The title of War and Peace would be War and War,” she said.

  “The neon signs at the corners,” I said, “would read DON'T WALK, STUPID.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I'd like to kidnap an adult and tie him up in the cellar and talk to him like he's a kid until he dies.”

  “How does anybody grow up?” I asked rhetorically.

  She hoisted the whiskey and swallowed. “Don't ask me,” she said. “I haven't done it yet. Bass—that's a fish, and I learned this in biology—bass parents spend days guarding the hole where their eggs have been laid. All they care about in the whole world is guarding those eggs. They drive away anything that comes close, no matter how big it is. Even snapping turtles, the ones that could take your thumb off like macaroni. They don't even take a break to eat. For all I know, they don't go to the john.”

  She took a more moderate sip. “Finally,” she continued, “after four or five days, the eggs hatch. By then the parents are ravenous. When the baby bass swim up out of the hole, their mommy and daddy eat them. Just snap them up as fast as they can. So what's the difference between bass parents and human parents?”

  “I give up.”

  “Bass parents eat the child all at once,” she said. “Human parents take years.”

  “Some bass babies survive,” I said. “If they didn't, there wouldn't be any more bass.”

  “So do some human babies,” she said. “The ones who manage to swim away before they get eaten.”