Trauma Page 13

  “Maybe she just took them away.”

  “No sign of a struggle? And you didn’t even notice? Come on, Bonnie!”

  “I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember. It’s like there’s a whole chunk of yesterday just missing.”

  “You were overtired, probably. I get that, too, lapses of memory when I’m tired. I get lapses of memory when I’m not tired. The best thing to do is go back over everything you did yesterday, like, step by step in chronological order.”

  “I’ve tried to. I still can’t remember.”

  “What did you do? You cleaned up George Keighley’s house in the morning—what time did you finish up there?”

  “Twelve, twelve-fifteen, something like that.”

  “Then what? You dumped the mattresses at the Riverside waste facility?”

  “Yes. Then I came home, and Ray was here but so was Duke. The thing is that Duke was supposed to be working. He said he’d found a job at the Century Plaza, but that was just a lie. We had an argument about it.”

  “Did he walk out then?”

  “No … I called Esmeralda at about three o’clock, and I remember looking out into the yard when I was making the call and they were both still lying on their loungers. I showered and changed, and about quarter after seven I went downtown to meet Esmeralda and her father and this guy called Juan Maderas, who knows all about Mexican mythology and stuff.”

  “Then you came home?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What time was that, when you came home?”

  “I don’t know. Not too late. Nine-thirty, maybe.”

  “Were Duke and Ray still here when you came home?”

  Bonnie frowned. She remembered parking the Buick. She remembered opening the front door. Then all she could remember was climbing into bed and saying, “Good night, Duke. Sleep tight. Mind the bugs don’t bite.” If she had spoken to him, he must have been there.

  “Duke was there,” she said, nodding slowly at first and then more vigorously. “Duke was definitely there. He must have drunk too much beer and gone to bed early.”

  “How about Ray?”

  She had knocked on Ray’s bedroom door and called out, “Good night, Ray … don’t go listening to those earphones all night.” So Ray must have been there, too.

  “Yes … Ray was there.”

  Dan grimaced. “You know what this leaves us with, don’t you? Sometime in the middle of the night, Duke and Ray left their beds and disappeared out the front door, miraculously locking and chaining it behind them.”

  “That’s why I think that something terrible’s happened.”

  “You realize you’re talking supernatural here. Like, X-Files. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Howard Jacobson. Ask this Juan Maderas character. Ask Esmeralda’s father. They all seem to think that this insect goddess really exists.”

  Dan took out his notebook and flipped it open. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do here, Bonnie. Once they’ve finished up on La Brea, I’m going to ask a couple of the forensics guys to swing over this way and give this house a quick once-over. That’s if you have no objections.”

  “Of course not, if they can find out what happened to Duke and Ray.”

  “Well, I’m not making any promises, but you never know. Meanwhile, you should keep on phoning around. Check up on any bars that Duke might go to. Ask his friends if they’ve seen him.”

  “He doesn’t have any friends.”

  Life Without Duke

  The next four days went past like a silent movie. Every morning she woke up and the house was silent. She sat at the kitchen table and ate a yogurt, watching the television with the sound on mute. Then she stood in the living room, staring out of the window, expecting at any minute to see Duke and Ray walking across the street, laughing and waving. But they never did.

  In the afternoons, when the sun came around the house, she went out into the yard and flicked through magazines, although all the time she was waiting for the phone to ring. When it did, she invariably jumped and felt a sharp salt taste in her mouth.

  On the fifth day she had just finished her yogurt when Lieutenant Munoz called her. “Listen, sweet cheeks, there’s a cleaning job in Benedict Canyon you might be interested in. Do you want to meet me there—say, around ten?”

  “I don’t know, Dan.”

  “This is going to need your delicate touch, Bonnie. I’m sure that Ken Kessler could clean up just as good as you, technically. He’s willing to do it if you’re not interested. But … you’ll see what I mean when you get here.”

  “Okay … I guess it’s not doing me any good, sitting around the house and moping.”

  “That’s my girl. See you later, okay?”

  She had never seen so much blood in her life. It hardly seem possible that one human being could contain so much of it, let alone crawl around a whole house from room to room bleeding so profusely.

  The house was down at the bottom of a sharp slope on the east side of Benedict Canyon—a smart, single-story residence with white-painted walls and bougainvillea sprawling over the porch. Inside, it was fiercely air-conditioned and totally white, so that it felt like the inside of an igloo. The walls were white, the carpets were white, the furniture was white. That was what made the trails of blood look even grislier.

  There were splatters of blood, loops of blood, Jackson Pollock action paintings of blood. There was blood on the walls, blood on the furniture, blood on the refrigerator door. The whole nine pints.

  Dan took Bonnie into the living room first. “I’ll tell you what happened. Mrs. Chloris Neighbor went to a regular dance class every Thursday afternoon, for three hours. Her husband, Mr. Anthony Neighbor, worked at home as a freelance architect, so on Thursday afternoon he was guaranteed some time on his own.

  “Last Thursday afternoon he celebrated his few hours of freedom by taking off all of his clothes and watching a pornographic videotape. Sometime during the course of this entertainment, he decided to increase his pleasure by inserting a fluorescent light tube into his rectum. He must have grown more and more excited, because he then decided to switch the light tube on. Whereupon it shattered and caused massive internal slicing.

  “This is only surmise, but it seems to us that he was too embarrassed to call 911. He crawled from room to room, trying to find a way to stem the bleeding, but in the end he collapsed and died. This was what Mrs. Neighbor had to come home to.”

  Bonnie rubbed the toe of her shoe into the carpet. “This is going to cost.”

  “Mrs. Neighbor’s outside if you want to talk to her.”

  “Okay.”

  They went outside. Mrs. Neighbor was standing under the trees, her face lit up by the sunlight that danced through the leaves. She was small, very thin, with an ash-blond bob and big, haunted eyes. She wore a black silk cheongsam, and she looked more like a frightened little animal than a woman.

  “Mrs. Neighbor, I’m Bonnie Winter. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. It’s very hard to understand, losing your husband like that.”

  “I know.”

  “It makes me feel—well, I guess you can imagine how it makes me feel. Inadequate. If I’d been adequate, he never would have—”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Mrs. Neighbor. Who knows what goes on in the minds of men?”

  She glanced quickly at Dan, as if daring him to say, “Only The Shadow knows, ho-ho-ho.”

  Mrs. Neighbor said, “I couldn’t clean the blood up myself. It’s his precious blood. I worshiped him. I worshiped every hair on his head. I never thought that I would have to mop up his blood from the floor. I couldn’t. That’s like mopping up his life, mopping up our life together.”

  “Do you happen to know if you’re insured for trauma damage?”

  Mrs. Neighbor stared at her wide-eyed. “What?”

  “Your late husband left a very expensive mess, Mrs. Neighbor.”

  “That’s hi
s lifeblood in there. That’s him.”

  “Yes,” said Bonnie. “And I promise you that we can clean it all up with really great respect.” Not to mention Lysol.

  As she walked back to the Buick, Dan came over and opened the door for her.

  “I had a report back from forensics this morning.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “They checked your house over pretty good. And do you know what they said? They said it was the cleanest house they had ever had the misfortune to come across. Spotless.”

  “Nothing to give them any clue what might have happened to Duke and Ray?”

  “Nothing at all. They even checked the handles of the kitchen knives.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Kitchen knives are the most commonly used weapon in domestic homicide, that’s why. Most perpetrators wash the knives afterward, but what they don’t realize is that if you stab somebody hard, microscopic traces of human blood tend to penetrate the crevices between the steel blade and the wooden or plastic handle, and they’re almost impossible to get rid of … just like microscopic traces of meat or cheese will always penetrate those same crevices, and be just as difficult to remove, even in a dishwasher using a biological detergent.”

  “So? What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that one of your kitchen knives wasn’t new, but it was as clean as new. In other words, it contained no trace of any biological waste matter whatsoever. You can only get a knife that clean by soaking it in enzyme solutions specifically formulated to digest cream, yogurt, milk, egg, ice cream, cheese and blood.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nobody’s drawing any inferences, Bonnie. Nobody’s making any accusations. We’re simply telling you that one of your kitchen knives was unnaturally clean. That’s not evidence, I’ll admit—but it’s an interesting lack of evidence.”

  “That’s all they found out?”

  “They’d like to make a more detailed search, if you’ll allow it. But as your friend, I’d probably say that you ought to talk to your lawyer before you let them back into your house a second time.”

  “This knife thing—what are you trying to say, Dan? You’re trying to tell me that I stabbed them to death or something?”

  “Bonnie, sweetheart—nobody’s saying nothing.”

  “You’re warning me, aren’t you? You think they’re dead, and you’re warning me that I’m one of your suspects! Come on, Dan, this is me you’re talking to!”

  “We don’t have any evidence of any kind that Duke and Ray are dead. It’s kind of mysterious that they should both have disappeared without taking any clothes or personal possessions. But stranger things happen. People are disappearing all the time. Some of them don’t even take their shoes.”

  Bonnie sat down behind the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Something very weird happened in my house, Dan. I know you don’t believe all this stuff about the butterflies, but I think you’re making a very big mistake. The butterflies … they’re the key to this whole thing.”

  Dan closed the car door for her. “You going to do this job?” he asked, nodding toward the Neighbor residence.

  “Oh, sure. I’ve got plenty of enzyme solution for getting rid of blood.”

  “Bonnie—”

  “What? You’re not going to ask me out to dinner, are you?”

  “No,” said Dan, shaking his head. “I was just going to say … nothing important.” He patted the roof of the car, stepped back and watched her drive away in a cloud of oily blue smoke.

  The Mystic Eats Gorditas

  She met him at Nopales, the Mexican restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He was sitting in a corner way in the back of the restaurant, and she didn’t see him at first. The place was crowded and noisy, and a five-piece Mexican band was playing guitars and trumpets and bongos on a tiny stage.

  At last she caught hold of a waiter and said, “Juan Maderas?”

  “In back. Table twenty-one.”

  He stood up as she approached him and drew out a chair for her. He was still dressed in black, although his bolo had given way to a florid black scarf.

  “You found it okay?”

  “I took a taxi.”

  He sat down and offered her the bottle of red wine, but she said, “No—no, thanks. And listen, don’t let me stop you eating. Whatever that is, it looks delicious.”

  “Gorditas,” he said. “That means ‘little fat ones.’ Little cups made out of tortilla dough, deep fried and filled with mashed beans and shredded meat.”

  “My husband would never let me eat Mexican.”

  “Your husband has disappeared.”

  She nodded. “My son, too. It’s like one of those locked-room mysteries, you know?”

  “I don’t think it’s a locked-room mystery. I think it’s a locked-mind mystery.”

  “Well, you’re right, in a way. I’m finding it very hard to remember what happened that afternoon. I don’t recall Duke and Ray actually leaving … and they were home when I came back from seeing you. But in the morning they were both gone, and all of the doors and windows were locked.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Why me? I’m not a policeman, or a psychiatrist. I’m a writer, that’s all. A historian.”

  Bonnie opened her bag and took out the screw-top jar. “I found this in my living room.”

  “A Clouded Apollo. I see. So you think that Itzpapalotl had something to do with your husband and son’s disappearance?”

  Bonnie nodded. “I think she could have.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly know when they disappeared. But if it was nighttime, Itzpapalotl could have transformed herself, couldn’t she? Instead of being a butterfly, she could have turned herself into an insect monster, the way you described her, with knives on her wings and everything. She could have killed them and turned them into butterflies, too, like the witches in the legend, and that’s how they disappeared. When I opened the front door, they simply flew away.”

  “And you believe that this could actually have happened?”

  “How else could they have gotten out of the house without my seeing them?”

  “But Itzpapalotl would have had to kill them to turn them into butterflies. Only a person who is dead and damned can become a Clouded Apollo. And if she did kill them, what happened to the blood? In Aztec sacrifices, the heart is cut beating out of the rib cage and held up for everybody to see. If that had happened, surely your house would have looked like a slaughterhouse.”

  “Yes,” said Bonnie.

  “But there was no blood, as I understand it.”

  “No.”

  Bonnie was silent for a moment. Juan Maderas calmly watched her, forking up his gorditas. The band began to play a slow, sad, quavering song, the musical equivalent of somebody’s lower lip trembling.

  After a while, Bonnie said, “I had another idea, too.”

  “Go on.”

  “Supposing Itzpapalotl came into my house that afternoon—in daylight—disguised as a butterfly.”

  “Yes. That’s how she conceals herself.”

  “Supposing she settled on my ear and whispered that I should—well, supposing she suggested to me that I should get rid of the people I love the most. And I didn’t realize that she’d done it. I mean, whispered to me like that.

  “Supposing I took it into my head that I had to kill Duke and Ray. Without even realizing that it was Itzpapalotl who wanted me to do it. Because a whole piece of that afternoon is just missing, you know? Like a lost piece of jigsaw puzzle.”

  “So you think it’s conceivable that Itzpapalotl persuaded you to murder Duke and Ray yourself?”

  “I don’t know. It’s insane, isn’t it? But where did they go?”

  “That’s precisely the flaw in your second theory, isn’t it? Let’s say that you’re right, and that Itzpapalotl did
cajole you into killing Duke and Ray.… How did you do it? Did you strangle them? Remember there were two of them, and you would have had to strangle them one at a time. And what would you strangle them with? Your bare hands? Did you stab them? The same thing applies.… You couldn’t have killed them both at once. And besides, there was no blood. You could have shot them, I suppose.”

  “We don’t own a gun. Well, we did, but Duke sold it.”

  “That eliminates that possibility, then. But more than anything else, where did they go, even if you killed them? How does a woman dispose of the bodies of two men from a suburban house without anybody seeing her do it? And where are the bodies now? They haven’t been found, have they?”

  Bonnie brushed back her hair with her hand. “I came to see you because I thought you could give me some kind of explanation.”

  “You mean you thought you could lay the blame for what happened to your husband and son on a Mexican demon goddess?”

  “Don’t you believe in her?”

  “Of course I believe in her. But I also believe that ancient demons can’t do very much in the modern world unless they’re called on.”

  “You think that I summoned her?”

  “It’s possible. Perhaps you don’t remember doing it. Perhaps you do, but you’re pretending that you don’t.”

  The band struck up a dreamy version of “La Pesadilla” Bonnie said, “You don’t think it was me, though, do you? If somebody’s murdered them, it wasn’t me. I mean, even if it was me, I didn’t know what I was doing. It was Itzpapalotl.”

  “Only you can know that.”

  The Day of the Clouded Apollo

  She stood in the living room, her bleached-blond hair shining in the afternoon sunlight. She was staring at a large reproduction of a painting of Elvis that Duke had given her for her thirtieth birthday. It was Elvis in Love Me Tender, with his cowboy hat and his buckskin fringes.

  She remembered that birthday so vividly. Duke had been working then, and he had taken her out to a country-and-western restaurant for steak and ribs and dancing. They had laughed so much that Duke had been forced to pull onto the side of the road.