Trauma Page 7

  “No, no.” Bonnie reached across to her glove compartment and took out one of her business cards. “That’s what I’m doing here, Mr. Lennox. I’m waiting for the family lawyer so that I can give him a quotation for cleaning the house up.”

  Kyle Lennox lifted his sunglasses again and peered at the card with the palest blue eyes that Bonnie had ever seen. She had always thought he was handsome when she saw him on television, but to see him right here on the street.… She made a point of not looking down at his tennis shorts again.

  “Hey, listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t have any idea.”

  “That’s all right. When somebody dies in circumstances like these, it isn’t surprising that their neighbors get kind of sensitive about it.”

  “No, I’m really sorry. I accused you of being a sicko and I was totally mistaken.”

  “It’s all right, really. It was a pretty easy mistake to make.”

  “I didn’t even know that there were special people—well, you know, I didn’t know that there were special companies who cleaned up after suicides and stuff. Don’t the cops do it?”

  “They don’t have the expertise. It takes more than a mop and a bucket to clean up after something like this.”

  “Jesus … I never knew. I’ll bet you get to see some pretty gruesome things, huh?”

  “Now and again. Mostly it’s just stains.”

  “Jesus. How many trauma scenes do you go to every week?”

  “Four, maybe. Sometimes more. People are always offing each other.”

  “Jesus. What was the worst one you ever saw?”

  Bonnie pointed to her business card. “Would you mind signing that for me? I really love The Wild and the Wayward. Sign it for Duke, could you, my husband? He loves it, too. He watches it even more religious than me.”

  “Okay, sure. Do you have a pen?”

  Bonnie took the chewed ballpoint pen from the top of her clipboard and handed it to him. He signed the card with a flourish. “There you go. For Duke … You Too Can Be Wild and Wayward.”

  “Well, he can be pretty darn wayward. I’m not so sure about wild.”

  At that moment, a metallic-green Coupe de Ville arrived outside the house, and a small ginger-haired man climbed out. He shrugged on a wheat-colored sport coat and then raised his hand to Bonnie in greeting.

  “That’s the family lawyer?” asked Kyle Lennox.

  “I guess,” Bonnie nodded and climbed out of her car, too.

  “I’d better leave you to it, then,” said Kyle Lennox. “It’s been real interesting to meet you, Bonnie … and sorry again about the misunderstanding. I hope you forgive me.”

  Bonnie smiled. “It’s nothing, really. Forget it.” Until she stood beside him, she hadn’t realized how tall he was—and how he smelled of suntanned, young, well-exercised man and Hugo aftershave by Hugo Boss. Forgive him? She would have forgiven him if he had publicly accused her of turning people’s milk to vinegar and sleeping with Satan.

  She watched him walk back across the street. She loved the little bounce in his step, a combination of fitness and very expensive tennis shoes. The family lawyer came up to her and stood beside her. “Isn’t that—?”

  “Yes, it is. He just gave me his autograph.”

  “My wife’s going to be so sick when I tell her. I’m Dudley Freeberg, by the way. Freeberg, Treagus and Wolp.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Freeberg.”

  “Well, likewise,” said Dudley Freeberg, and gave her a gappy grin.

  Ashes to Ashes

  Like all houses in which people have died violently, the Marrin residence was preternaturally silent, as if it were holding its breath at the horror of what had happened here.

  But it was the stench of burned carpet that struck Bonnie the most. As she and Dudley Freeberg stepped into the hallway, their nostrils were filled with the fumy smell of gasoline, mixed with badly scorched wool. There was another smell, too, like those sour, charred fragments of hamburger that stick to the barbecue.

  Dudley Freeberg peered around the back of the door, and then very cautiously closed it. On the inside, the white paint was bubbled and brown, and there was a sooty smoke trail all the way up to the ceiling. Ribbons of shriveled fabric hung from the upper part of the door, and the center panel had been scratched by a fan-shaped array of blunt, rectangular marks, as if somebody had been trying to scrape the paint off.

  “Skin,” said Bonnie, pointing to the fabric.

  Dudley Freeberg took off his glasses and stared at it.

  “Skin?” he said, and his Adam’s apple went up and down.

  “That’s right. And those scrape marks are where the fire department had to detach his remains from the door. I can clean the organic remains okay and remove the smoke stains, but you’ll have to bring in a professional painter to do the woodwork.”

  “I see,” said Dudley Freeberg, in a hollow voice. “A professional painter.”

  They looked around the rest of the hallway in utter silence. It was large, high-ceilinged, decorated in lilacs and golds. A large pottery vase of long-dead gladioli stood on a mock-rococo side table, and there was a gilt-framed reproduction of a painting of two Mexicans in large sombreros sleeping in the sun. Through a half-open door Bonnie could see a spacious, limed-oak kitchen. She would have loved a house like this, even though it was shabby—a house with space and tasteful furnishings and a sweeping staircase.

  It was the staircase that gave them the most vivid narrative of the last seconds of Mrs. Marrin’s fifteen-year-old lover. Rushing down the stairs in flames, he had burned a pattern of footprints in the lilac stair carpet—all the way down from the second-story landing to the front door, and the varnished banister rails were blistered where he had run his blazing hands down them.

  “Holy Christ,” said Dudley Freeberg. “He must have gone through some kind of hell.”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” said Bonnie. She didn’t want to think about any kind of hell, not today.

  They went upstairs to the main bedroom and stared at the soaked, blackened, four-poster bed, with its burned velvet drapes. Behind the headboard hung a mirror that was cracked from one corner to the other and stained brown with smoke. Bonnie could see herself and Dudley Freeberg standing side by side like characters from an old sepia photograph.

  Bonnie made notes. “The bed’ll have to go, obviously, and the carpets, and I can erase the smoke damage. Like I said, you’ll need the place repainted, but I can leave it like you wouldn’t know that anything got burned here.”

  “Well, that sounds fine.” Dudley Freeberg nodded. His face was waxy, and he was perspiring, and she could tell that he was close to suffering a panic attack. “Let’s, uh, wrap this up outside, shall we?” He hurried downstairs, his feet zigzagging to avoid the burned patches on the carpet.

  She sat in her car and wrote him an estimate while he stood with his coat over his arm and his necktie loosened, occasionally dabbing at his forehead with a crumpled-up Kleenex.

  When she handed him the estimate, he almost snatched it from her. “Great. That looks good to me. I’ll check with the family and then I’ll call you.”

  “Any time,” said Bonnie.

  “Thanks for—” he said, nodding toward the house.

  “Listen, this is something that nobody ever gets used to. You learn to deal with it, but you never get used to it. It’s not something that a person should get used to.”

  “Well, thanks again.”

  He walked stiff-legged back to his car and drove off with a skittering squeal of tires. Bonnie watched him go, and then she walked back to her own car. As she did so, Kyle Lennox appeared, dressed in khaki chinos and a black polo shirt, and called out, “Hi, Bonnie! Before you go, Bonnie!”

  She shaded her eyes with her hand. He came bounding across the street and said, “Hey, how was it?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Pretty grim in there, huh?”

  “You wouldn’t want to go in there unless y
ou had to.”

  “Somebody told me the kid was—you know—actually”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“stuck to the door.”

  Bonnie shrugged. “I’m not really at liberty to discuss anything like that. I just clean up.”

  “He was stuck to the door, though, right?”

  “Okay, yes. He was alight. He was trying to get out. He got stuck to the door.”

  Kyle Lennox shook his head slowly and admiringly and said, “That’s such a gross-out. I don’t know how you can do that stuff. I really don’t.”

  “You act on TV. I don’t know how you can do that, either. That would terrify me, acting on TV. I don’t even like being in home videos.”

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m having kind of a get-together tomorrow afternoon. You know, round-the-pool kind of thing. Just some friends from the studio and a couple of writers and one or two producers. Why don’t you come along?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m having a party, Bonnie, and I want you to come. I’d just love you to meet Gene Ballard. He’s our director. He’ll go crazy for you, I know it.”

  “I don’t think I understand. What are you inviting me to a party for? You don’t even know me.”

  “Hey! How well do you have to know anybody to like the way they look? How well do you have to know anybody to sincerely admire what they do? I really want you to come along, Bonnie. It’s not going to be formal. You’ll love it. All your favorite soap stars. And who knows? Gene may take a shine to you. He may even give you a walk-on part.”

  “When is it? This party?”

  “Tomorrow evening, six o’clock, right here. Tell me you’ll come.”

  Bonnie felt as if she were dreaming. This was really Kyle Lennox and he was really standing there and really inviting her to come to his show-business party round the pool.

  “Yes,” she said, and then she nodded. “Yes, okay. Why not?”

  Bonnie Sees her Mother

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” demanded her mother. “I could have made salad.”

  “Mom, it’s okay. I don’t want salad. I had a cheeseburger at Rusty’s.”

  “Cheeseburger! Don’t you know how much fat and salt they put in those things! No wonder you’ve put on so much weight.”

  “Oh, thanks. I think I’ve lost a couple of pounds as a matter of fact.”

  “You don’t come for three weeks and now you come and you don’t even tell me you’re coming.”

  “Well, I’m here now. What are you complaining about?”

  Mrs. Mulligan fussed around the living room, picking up TV Guides and plumping cushions. She shooed her ginger tomcat, Marcus, off the couch because she knew that Bonnie didn’t like it. The cat smelled rancid and had a terrible cackling hiss.

  She was a short, full-figured woman, Mrs. Mulligan, with huge, white bouffant hair like a ball of cotton and tiny little hands and feet. She looked like Bonnie, if Bonnie were to blow out her cheeks and squeeze her eyes tightly shut. She lived in Reseda in a house that looked like every other house in Reseda: respectable, tidy, with a well-trimmed lawn and china ornaments on every available square inch of shelf. Bonnie’s late father looked down from the living room wall with a strangely unbalanced grin that always reminded Bonnie of Alfred E. Neuman. It was a canvas-effect photograph in a gilded frame, with his fire department medals framed below.

  Bonnie’s five older brothers appeared in shoals of other framed photographs. Daryl when he graduated from the fire department academy. Robert when he got engaged to Nesta. Craig when he won the high school swimming trophy. Barry when he bought his first car. Richard when he broke his leg. Mark Hamill had signed the cast, and Mrs. Mulligan still had it in the garage.

  The only picture of Bonnie was when she was twelve, at her first communion. Bonnie looked so sweet and innocent in her white silk dress that she could look at herself as a child now and she could almost cry for her. So trusting, so full of hope.

  “The job I have to keep this place tidy,” said her mother. “Richard leaving his socks everywhere.”

  “Mom, as usual, it’s immaculate.”

  “You should have told me you were coming. I could have cleaned up.”

  “Why doesn’t Richard put his own socks away?”

  Her mother looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. Socks? Richard? His own? Away put?

  In the kitchen, Bonnie said, “I feel like going to Hawaii.” Her mother was arranging a plateful of butterscotch brownies and coconut squares. “Just me. By myself. I feel like packing a bag and going to Hawaii. I want to stand on a hill and watch a volcano erupting.”

  “A volcano? What about your family?”

  “What about me?”

  Her mother carried the tray of coffee and cookies into the living room. “You shouldn’t have started that dreadful cleaning business. It’s not healthy.”

  “It gives me satisfaction. It gives me the feeling that I’m making a difference.”

  “What difference? It’s enough to make you feel ill.”

  “Isn’t that a woman’s role in life? Cleaning up? Look at you. You’ve spent your entire adult life cleaning up.”

  “Yes, but people’s bodies. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “I don’t clean up bodies, Mom. The coroner’s department does that. Well, sometimes I clean up bits of bodies. Hair, teeth, stuff like that. I found seven toes the other day, underneath a tumble dryer. Guy killed his girlfriend with a chainsaw.”

  Her mother flapped her hand in disgust. “I don’t want to think about it. If that Duke would get up off his backside and find himself a job, you wouldn’t have to do it. By the way, how is Duke?”

  “Pretty much the same. He went for an interview at the Century Plaza. Bar work.”

  “I could never understand what you saw in that man.”

  “I know you didn’t. You never stopped telling me. Even now you don’t stop telling me.”

  “What about your other job? The cosmetics thing?”

  “I think I lost it. Maybe it was too … menstrual.”

  Bonnie’s mother stared at her. “I’m sure I don’t know what on God’s good earth you’re talking about sometimes, Bonnie Mulligan.”

  Bonnie carefully set down her coffee cup. “Mom … what would you do if a rich and famous TV personality invited you to a party?”

  “What? What are you talking about now? Party?”

  Bonnie had promised herself that she wouldn’t tell anybody about Kyle Lennox because she desperately wanted to keep it a secret. She felt that, if she told her mother or Duke or Ray or any of her friends, it would turn out that she had misunderstood what Kyle Lennox said, or maybe the party would just turn out to be a big disappointment, with nobody famous there at all, and she would end up looking like a fool.

  But she was so excited about it that she had to talk about it somehow, to somebody.

  “A party. Like, you know, just some TV actors, and some TV producers, people like that. Not formal. Just a kind of a poolside thing. Champagne, maybe. Swimming.”

  “Who’s going to invite me to anything like that?”

  “A famous TV personality.”

  “I don’t know any famous TV personalities.”

  “I know. But supposing you did. Supposing you knew—I don’t know—Kyle Lennox?”

  Her mother stared at her for a long time, steadily chewing a cookie with her false teeth. “I can’t understand a word, Bonnie. I swear to God.”

  Bonnie looked up at the picture of her father with his cheesy smile. He had shot himself in the garage when Bonnie was fifteen and she could remember his blood being hosed down the driveway. And nobody had understood why.

  Ralph Relents

  That afternoon, around four o’clock, the hospital called and said that Ray could come home. Duke didn’t want to miss All My Children, so Bonnie took the Buick and drove over to pick Ray up. The sky was a deep reddish color, as if God were using a strawberry filter. The temperat
ure was dropping, too, and Bonnie felt that something strange was going to happen.

  She found a space at the far end of the hospital parking lot, but before she could climb out of the car her cell phone played Henry Mancini’s “Dear Heart.” She flipped the phone open and said, “Bonnie’s Trauma Scene Clean. How can we help you?”

  “Bonnie, it’s Ralph.”

  “Ralph! Hi, Ralph.”

  “I just called to make sure that your boy was okay.”

  “He’s okay. I’m at the hospital now to pick him up.”

  “That’s good. What about the assault charges?”

  “I haven’t heard yet. But I think there’s a reasonable chance that the police won’t pursue it. You know, first offense, good character, plus his mom’s a personal friend of Captain O’Hagan.”

  “Well, I hope things work out okay.”

  “Okay. Thanks. How was Pasadena?”

  “I—ah—wanted to apologize about that.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. You needed me there and I couldn’t go. That’s all there is to it.”

  “As a matter of fact, I postponed it till Friday evening. It suited the buyers better. They had so many presentations to see yesterday that they were running nearly a day late.”

  “I see. Well, good luck.”

  “Ah—I was wondering if—well, I was wondering if you’d still like to come with me.”

  Bonnie climbed out of the car and slammed the door twice.

  “I’m not fired?” she asked.

  “That was me being irritable. Of course you’re not fired. Do you think I’d fire one of my very favorite salespersons?”

  “So I’m not fired and you want me to go to Pasadena with you Friday?”

  “If you can get into the office by two-thirty?”

  “I don’t know, Ralph. What time are we supposed to get back?”

  “There’s kind of a business breakfast and then we leave right away. Come on, tell me you’ll come along.”

  “I’m not so sure, Ralph. Somebody has to take care of Ray. Cook him some supper and everything.”