Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (5 page)

To herself she called the twins who had originally leased the house from her the Boyz in the Hood. Dustin and Tustin Quinn both studied computer science at the California State University at the old Fort Ord and no doubt had a promising future, but after all, what she cared about was the present, and when they had come to Paul’s condo to talk to Nina about the rental ad, she had almost turned them down. She didn’t want a couple of scruffy male students, she wanted a sweet lady who looked like Aunt Helen, would cultivate an herb garden, and scrub the floor each morning in the predawn.

Unfortunately, only students wanted to rent the place. Built in the twenties, the whole house was heated by a single wall fixture in the living room. The stove had been old in Aunt Helen’s time, and there were no hookups for a washer or dryer. You had to cart the dirty clothes to the Washeteria in town. Apparently, elderly gardening ladies chose to live in more modern digs because none applied.

The Boyz had rented the place in May, hoping to stay through the summer and possibly fall. In early June Wish had moved in with them for the summer. Nina had suggested it, knowing the twins would welcome the help with the rent. Wish seemed to like them.

One of the Boyz now trotted out to meet them, shirtless, wearing baggy shorts and fat-tongued athletic shoes, no socks, a backward baseball hat on his head, a bottle of Gatorade in his hand. “My tenant,” Nina told Paul as he slammed the front door.

“Hey.” The young man nodded to them and blocked their way. He was stocky, buzz cut, and earnest, with a round pink face and round mouth. “How’s it going, Nina? Dus is just finishing up the sweeping. We wanted to clean up before you got here.”

So Dusty was dusting. “Hi, Tustin,” she said. “This is Paul van Wagoner.”

“Good to meet you. Any word about Wish?”

“No sign of him.” The fast swish of a broom mixed with the yelp of Eminem’s 2002 CD drifted through the open window. When Nina had lived there, right after Aunt Helen had passed on, it had been sea lions yelping from the kelp beds a few hundred yards off that she heard, but new millennia bring new kinds of song.

She had rented the house out ever since, and now she saw with landlord’s angst that the white paint was faded and peeling in places, and the roof was minus some shingles. “We’re sorry to raise up a storm if he’s just gone home to Tahoe or something…” Tustin was saying.

“No, you did right to call,” Paul said. “He hasn’t been home. We talked to his mother.”

Tustin really wanted to get the story out, or else he was delaying their entry while Dustin madly cleaned up, Nina couldn’t decide which. He launched into it, standing right there in the yard with the white picket fence.

“I don’t even want to think about him and that fire. We were watching TV when his buddy showed up. Gave him a beer, invited him to dinner. Danny is his name. He was dressed like he was posted on a mission to Iraq or something. He takes Wish aside to tell him something he doesn’t want us to hear, then he says to Wish, ‘Man, you want in or not? You wanna be broke forever?’

“Well, at the mention of money, Wish’s eyes lit up. I have to admit Dus and I wanted to know what was going on, but Danny and Wish went into his room. I heard him ask Wish, ‘You still got your camera?’ Wish said ‘Yeah, but I gotta go to Tahoe tomorrow. I don’t think this is such a good idea.’ He was reluctant, you know?”

“Wait a minute,” Paul said, holding up a hand to slow him down. “What’s not a good idea?”

Tustin shrugged. “Who knows? They shut the door. All I know is, he was pushing Wish to go somewhere. Told him he could be home that night-this was Tuesday-in plenty of time to pack for Tahoe.

“We could hear them arguing. Wish wasn’t up for it. And then Danny’s voice, loud, insisting, talking some more about money. He had an accusatory tone, like, ‘You turned on me, man, you’re such a wuss.’ Then it would get quiet in there, like they were whispering.

“My brother and I went into the living room and sat down to watch the baseball game on TV and eat our pot pies. Wish and Danny came out, and Wish acted embarrassed. He had his backpack and we said, like, where you headed, man? He just shook his head, but when Danny went into the can Wish motioned to me to come into the kitchen and said, ‘Listen. I’m going to Robles Ridge. Okay? Just in case anything happens.’

“‘What’s going to happen?’ I said, but he just shook his head.”

Dustin finally appeared at the front door. He gave some signal to his brother, who said, “We can go in now.” They mounted the three steps to the welcome mat. Dustin, in scruffy cutoffs and bare feet, held the screen open for them. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Inside, to Nina’s relief, aside from scuffs on the hardwood, dirty fingerprints around the light switches, and overlooked dustballs in the corners, the main room looked okay. However, closed doors to the two bedrooms beckoned. She resolved to have a look before they left. She sat down on the sprung couch with Paul.

Dustin, who acted the householder while his brother did duty as the greeter, went into the kitchen and she heard the fridge door open. In a minute he came back with Gatorade for all. Nina was hungry. Gatorade would do. She unscrewed the top.

“So what’s the news?” Dustin said, getting right to it after the introductions.

“No news,” Paul said. The Boyz looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Tustin was telling us about Danny’s visit,” Nina said. “Go ahead. But maybe you could turn down the music?”

Dustin went over to the stereo and Eminem stopped cleaning out his closet and dissing his mama over Dr. Dre’s menacing arrangement. She thought of Bob’s complaints when she made him clean out
his
closet. Maybe he too would become famous someday from telling the world about his mean mom.

“Yeah. So. Where was I? Right, Wish says, ‘Robles Ridge, just in case.’ ”

Dustin broke in, “So Tus says, ‘You better tell us more than that,’ just as this loser Danny came back into the kitchen, and this made Danny bullshit.”

“Told us to fuck off,” Tustin added, “only he was less polite.”

“What a poser,” Dustin said.

“Drugs?” Paul asked.

“He didn’t stagger or laugh a lot or smell funny and his pupils were normal-sized.”

“We looked,” Tustin added.

“I could see Danny and Wish went way back. At one point Danny was going on like, ‘See, the whole cop-school thing, that’s to prove you’re not afraid. But you are, aren’t you, Willis?’

“And then they left.” Dustin took a long swig of Gatorade. A few pounds heavier than his brother, he had apple cheeks and a more innocent air. Nina could see the Boyz in a few years in identical suits, staring at computer screens through identical glasses, juggling mortgages and families, saving consumer capitalism.

The Boyz came from Rhodes, Iowa. She wondered where they would end up.

Paul had been taking notes. He took over. “Describe what they were wearing.”

“Danny had on a camouflage jacket, like I said,” Tustin replied. “Jeans. He wore the shirt buttoned up, and I had the impression he had a lot of stuff in his pockets. I asked him if he was Army, but he said he got the jacket up at the Moss Landing military-surplus store. I didn’t really think he was even ex-military, not with the ponytail.”

“Shoes?”

“Sorry, I never noticed. Wish was wearing his Doc Martens, I remember that. The only reason I noticed Wish’s boots was he talked about buying them, how expensive they were. He thought about it for a long time…”

“What else did Danny wear?”

The twins looked at each other and shrugged. “I think the T-shirt under the jacket was white. I could see the neck part,” Tustin said.

“What did his teeth look like?”

“Teeth. He wasn’t a smiler. Why do you ask?” Dustin said. “Oh. Dental records. Damn. Of course. Danny’s missing too, is that it? And the firebug, it could be he’s the victim. But you only have the one victim. Well, Wish and Danny are both tall and skinny, although I’d say Danny’s more muscular. Both Indian-looking.”

“Native American-looking,” Tustin said.

“Danny’s hair is longer.”

“I don’t know where Danny is,” Paul said. “He may not be missing. Any idea where he lives?”

The Boyz shook their heads. Dustin said, “But they talked about Danny’s uncle. His name was-”

“Ben,” Tustin said.

“That’s it, Ben. He called him
Tío
. Seems like Wish knew him too.”

“Did you hear the last name Cervantes?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Still, that’ll help.”

Dustin and Tustin nodded several times.

Nina went on, “What kind of camera did Wish take with him?”

“A Canon. Digital, with a megazoom lens. He just bought it at Costco with some birthday money and his first paycheck.”

“What was Wish wearing?”

“Uh, denims. Denim jacket. I don’t know what underneath. Same old Bob Marley T-shirt as always, I guess,” Tustin said.

“He’s a good guy,” Dustin said. “Quiet and no creepy habits.”

“Let’s check his room,” Paul said, getting up. Tustin led the way down the short dark hall. Nina’s memories of the place flooded up, Aunt Helen and her mother cooking on Easter Sunday in the kitchen, Nina years later carrying Bob from the bedroom when he woke up coughing with a high fever one night, through that very hall, out to the rattletrap Chevy she drove then, and the doctor saying he had pneumonia… those had been desperate times. She put her hand on Paul’s broad back in front of her.

They crowded into the smaller bedroom at the rear of the house, Bob’s kindergarten bedroom. Wish had taken down the blinds over the window in back and left the window open. Sunflower heads waved through it from the tiny overgrown backyard and the room felt swept by air.

Wish’s bookshelf, full of the thick textbooks on criminal justice he had studied the previous year, sat in one corner. Aunt Helen’s old upholstered chair in a yellow-and-green flower pattern sat in the other, and there was just room for a conference table squeezed along the wall, stacked high with auto tools, comic books, CDs and DVDs and a DVD player under the tiny TV.

In the closet, T-shirts, ten or twelve of them, folded on the upper shelf, an empty duffel on the floor, and several plaid flannel shirts that Nina recognized from Tahoe.

The room smelled like Wish, a dusty outdoors smell, the scent of a living breathing person, and this even more than his shirts frightened Nina. Wish might really be dead. He had been her friend, a cheerful, innocent, eager spirit in her life, too young to be an equal, too old to be a son. Paul too seemed moved. He searched with irritable, feverish efficiency, running his hands over the shirts, checking pockets, unfolding cuffed pants, pushing behind baskets on the closet shelf, searching.

“Nothing,” he said.

Nina, at the conference table, said, “Here’s his organizer.” Sandy had given him one of those leather notebooks full of index tabs and pockets for his twenty-first birthday. In gold letters on the cover she read, “Willis Whitefeather.” She opened it. Tabs for addresses, calendars, notes, expenses. Flipping through it, she saw many small crabbed notes and doodles.

She turned to the addresses and looked under the C’s and D’s.

“Got it,” she said. “A phone number with the name
Danny
right beside it.”

Paul came over and wrote it down. He said to the Boyz, “We’re going to borrow this.”

“Paul, it might be evidence. Maybe we should just shut the door and leave it-”

“Put it in your purse,” Paul said. Nina opened her mouth and closed it. She put the organizer in her purse.

They said a few reassuring words to the Boyz and went outside. Nina held her heavy purse protectively, as though Wish’s life were in there. She was thinking that Sandy would want the organizer. Wish had left so little behind.

They stopped at the Bookshelf on Lighthouse for coffee. Nina leafed through the book.

“What else is in there?” Paul said, bringing coffees and a sandwich for Nina.

“Remember how he draws on his notes? He’s worse than I am,” Nina said. She showed him a penciled sketch of a sunflower. “He must have been lying on his bed and just picked up his pencil and drew this. I saw the flower outside his window. He can’t be dead, Paul.”

“He can’t. What else?”

“Well, on the calendar for this week, an eye appointment. I remember he was saying he thought he needed glasses. That’s it.”

“No girlfriend down here yet, I guess. I saw a photo of Brandy Taylor on the bookshelf.”

Thinking of Wish’s attraction to a young witness a few months before, Nina felt even worse. Wish had been downright noble about reconciling Brandy with her fiancé.

“He got pulled in casually by his friend,” she said. “He just went along for the ride. Who knows what Danny told him? He couldn’t have known there would be a fire.” She swallowed some of her tuna sandwich and opened the notebook to the tab marked Notes.

“Oh, Paul. He wrote down some self-improvement stuff here. He tried so hard.”

“Tries.”

“Tries. Listen to this: ‘Goals: B-plus average. Get a girlfriend. Note: must like hiking. Be cool with Mom, be patient. Show Paul’ ”-Nina faltered and her voice thickened-“‘show Paul I am the best.’ ”

There was a long silence.

“You know he idealizes you,” Nina said finally. “He jumped at the chance to come down here and learn from you.”

Paul’s jaw clenched. “Give me your cell phone.” He pulled out the note he’d made with Danny’s phone number.

Danny didn’t answer, and Paul didn’t want to leave a phony message. “We’ll try again,” he said. “Let’s go over to my office. Wish might have called or stopped by.”

“Good. I want to call Community Hospital.”

“Davy’s certainly already done that.”

“Well, I’m going to do it again. Then I’ll call the morgue and see if they’re finished.”

On the way back over the hill to Carmel, Nina said, “I hadn’t been in Aunt Helen’s house for a while. The cleaners are supposed to tell me if they notice any problems.”

“Looked okay to me.”

“I meant to check the Boyz’ bedroom, see what they chucked in there when we called and said we were coming.”

Paul pulled into the passing lane. “They rent the place. It’s theirs. Leave them alone.”