Silent Joe (11 page)

I jumped the fence and walked to the door. Then I dialed Blazak's number on my cell phone. I picked the lock, went in, found the lights. Heard my voice on Blazak's answering machine. Saw the alarm pad on the wall. As soon as his machine got my message and clicked off I used his phone to call time, then put the handset beside the receiver. I could trip all the alarms I wanted then, but they couldn't call out.

A lobby. Old carpet, veneer wall panels, a countertop of peeling vinyl. The glass case under the counter was empty and dirty. There had been lights fixed inside the case, but there was nothing but wires now.

The room behind the lobby was large, with low ceilings and very good fluorescent lighting. No windows, pegboard walls, one door. There were six circular stands arranged in a semicircle. The two on the left were long guns. The two in the middle were carbines and saddle rifles. The two on the right looked like military stuff. There were free-standing cases along three of the walls: pistols, automatics, machine pistols, derringers, knives, bayonets, swords, daggers, exotic martial arts weapons—
nunchuks,
throwing stars, throwing darts, throwing knives—blackjacks, metal knuckles, straight razors. Even an open case of antipersonnel bombs—the little finned ovals designed to penetrate helmets and skulls when dropped from above.

I toured. The place looked like something a TV-addled twelve-year would dream about. Or a deranged high schooler. Over two hundred guns, a hundred knives and exotic weapons. The ammunition was still in cases, stacked and organized along the far wall.

Beside the ammo cases was a stairway that led to a loft. In the loft I found a desk, two sofas with blankets and pillows on them, two chairs, TV and computer, a bathroom and kitchenette. There was a coffee table between the sofas, complete with weapon-freak magazines, and an ashtray fashioned from the bottom inch of a large artillery shell.

In the ashtray were two half-smoked cigars. One was a Macanudo, other didn't have a label. There was also a white stick with a small purple circle on the end. Beside the tray was a book of matches from Bamboo 33.

The kitchenette had a small refrigerator that contained unspoiled milk and orange juice, bread, apples. The sell-by date on the milk was one week away. The apples were firm and the bread unopened. On the counter almost-ripe bananas and a package of cookies that were not stale. I turned on the TV: a cartoon channel.

The bathroom had more magazines and a big can of room deodorant on the sink counter. Dirty mirror, clean toilet bowl, rattling fan.

I took some toilet paper and went back to the ashtray where I wrapped the cigar butts and put them in my pocket. Then the white stick. While I was picking out the stick I saw the Davidoff cigar label, neatly cut through the narrow part, still in its circular shape. I got another piece of toilet and took it, too.

I hoped Melissa, my friend in the crime lab, might be able to get DNA for me. Human saliva is rich in it.

Someone had been using the place to crash. Recently. The food and drinks weren't a week old yet. The cartoon channel didn't seem like pick for Crazy Alex Blazak. He'd probably graduated to Power Rangers. And it was hard to picture him working on a grape sucker.

Late that night Bo Warren knocked on my front door. When I opened it he smiled at me. His eyes looked merry in the porch light.

"Joe, I just had to tell you, nobody on Earth can do what you did to me today and not pay a high price for it."

"I guess that's fair warning, sir."

"Could be any place, any time."

"I heard Marchant got pretty close to Savannah down in Rancho Santa Fe."

Warren shook his head. "Morons. So help us out, Joe. Do what your father did. Find her. The offer stands, the million if you do."

"You guys spend millions like I spend quarters."

"That's called
noblesse oblige,
you dumb ape. And don't forget trickle-down."

"What do you care if the Bureau finds her first?"

"Jack doesn't want her shot, for one thing. Alex either. Doesn't want a bunch of press in on it. Just a nice, quiet reunion is what that million is all about."

I thought about Crazy Alex and his calm, polite sister. "I'll try to find her, regardless of the money."

He looked at me hard, then. "Why bother?"

"I liked her."

He shook his head slightly, like I was crazy. "You're like that Guatemalan the Newport cops iced."

"In what way?"

"Trying to get inside. Trying to get where the big people are. Using crude tools and blunt instruments."

"I think you've got that wrong."

"We'll see."

He made a gun out of his finger and shot me in the gut, then in the head.

"Night, Joe. Don't let the bedbugs bite."

That night I dreamed poppies because I always dream poppies, a bright orange blanket of them that stretches up a mountain, but when I move closer I see they are not flowers but flames, and they are not on a mountain but on a human cheek magnified greatly, and that cheek is mine. Then I dream the pain.

I dreamed thick cables. Black pliant cables dangling all around me, covering me, smothering me. All I can do is try to climb them. I grab. I pull. I gather. Then I dream the pain. And when I wake up I'm clawing the scars on my face, trying to pull them away.

I dreamed waves eating away beaches, revealing bone. Of rain washing rocks that bleed. Of a desert wind that melts the sand and leaves gristle, gums, teeth. Of thick ivy consuming tree trunks made of skin.

I don't remember the agony, only that there was awareness of agony. I remember understanding that an overwhelming and decisive event happening to me, that it involved one of the two great presences in my life. I remember sudden darkness and sudden light. I remember, later, the patient pulse of scars taking shape, the endless hours it took them to form. To me, that time was geologic. Surgeons. Grafts. Transplants. Patches. Gauze, mirrors, ointments. Half face, Half horror.

And after all the time that's gone by, these hard scars are still wired to the past like an alarm, and when I brush them now they ignite a moment twenty-three years ago that was loud, crazy and murderous. It's still happening.

Oh, and I dreamed the faces of beautiful women.

I always do.

O
n Monday the FBI launched its public manhunt for Alex Blazak.

The story of Alex, the disturbed twenty-one-year-old, hit the papers that morning and TV that evening. Plenty of good photographs, accounts of his violence, many references to the fact that he was a "firearms dealer," which he wasn't, and a "suspected trafficker in illegal weapons," which he was.

Over the next two days there were two hot sightings of Alex, and the Bureau's Emergency Response Team rolled on both of them. But Marchant couldn't get his men out fast enough either time. It was like Alex had a sixth sense. One sighting was up in the mountain resort of Big Bear. Alex had rented a spacious two-bedroom chalet on the north shore. The second was a hotel up on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

According to the news, the witnesses said that Savannah was with him in both places. I thought of the fresh food in Alex's warehouse, the unopened loaf of bread, the not-quite-yellow bananas and the sell-by dates on the milk and juice. And I had to believe that somehow, Alex had done what I had failed to do that night. He'd found her in the fog and gotten her into his car. After what happened at Lind Street, she was probably glad to see him. A kidnapping brother must have been an improvement over five murderers in overcoats. I tacked a map to my kitchen wall and drew red circles around the three sightings. Now he had her again and he was moving often and quickly, one step ahead of the snapping jaws of the Bureau. I wondered when, in all running, he'd try to ransom her again. Why didn't he just use his tennis bag million to clear out, dump his sister and head to Mexico?

I called Marchant twice a day but he didn't call back. I figured maybe he was catching his breath.

A friend of Will's at Anaheim Medical Center gave me twice-daily updates on the condition of murder suspect Ike Cao: unchanged, extremely critical condition, unconscious in the ICU, round-the-clock security by the sheriff department.

Dr. Norman Zussman called me twice more, and ordered me to return his call as soon as possible to set up a counseling appointment for the Deputy-Involved Shooting.

Reluctantly, I did.

June Dauer of KFOC called to confirm our interview. It fell on the day of Will's funeral, but I confirmed it anyway, because her voice was so; hopeful and pleasant to listen to.

We buried Will on the first day of summer. It was Thursday, eight days after his death.

The Reverend Daniel Alter presided over a very crowded memorial service that was held in his enormous tinted-glass house of worship Chapel of Light. But the mourners numbered over two thousand and when
all the seats were filled the overflow crowd was herded into an auditorium with huge closed-circuit monitors on all four walls.

My brothers, true blood sons of Will and Mary Ann, sat on either of me at the memorial service.

Will, Jr. wept. He's ten years older than me, married with three children, a patent attorney, lives up in Seattle. Glenn, two years younger Will, Jr., is married also, with young twins. They live in San Jose, where Glenn heads a company that runs fiber optic cable into new subdivision. He stared straight ahead like he was seeing nothing, or maybe everything. Mary Ann sat nearest the aisle, shrouded in black. I could hear quiet sobs throughout the memorial service, and for most of it her eyes were focused on the floor.

The casket was mahogany and silver. It was donated by friends of Will's who owned the cemetery where he would be buried. Mary Ann decided to leave it open for viewing after talking to us three boys and the Reverend Alter. Glenn said to leave it closed because of the pain that Will's face would cause his loved ones. Ditto Daniel. Will, Jr. voted open, for the same reason. I voted open, too, because I wanted to see him again.

The dais was covered with white roses, thousands of them, draping from stand to floor, pouring like a liquid over the purple carpet and proscenium steps. They were donated by one of Will's friends, who owned a chain of flower stores.

Will's burial suit was given by a friend with his own line of Italian designed clothing. His fingers were manicured by Mary Ann's cosmetologist, no charge, of course.

With some fanfare, the Grove Club Foundation created a memorial fund that would benefit the new Hillview Home for Children. That morning the Orange County
Journal
reported that close to two million dollars had been donated in just three days—with a million of it coming from Jack and Lorna Blazak.

The Reverend Alter was very moving that day. He's one of the most emotional evangelists I've ever heard, but his performances are never loud or rhetorical or histrionic. They're solid and deeply felt. Or at least they seem that way. He may be a fine actor, but when his voice caught and his throat tightened and the tears ran off his face like rain, well, it got to me.

. and God's merciful hands have received you back, Will Trona, you, who offered helping hands to so many. . . .
I stared at my own hands, fingers intertwined, the pulse in my right wrist steady and blue. For whatever reasons, I kept an eye on the thick yellow electrical cord trailed by the video cam dedicated to stage left. Funny how your mind will focus on the irrelevant when something important is taking place. But the yellow cord made me think of the two cars trapping us in the alley. Almost everything I saw made me think of those cars and the men inside them. I wondered if Rick Birch had requested log of calls made to and from Will's cell phone that night.

...
so as we mourn this death let us not forget to celebrate this life

Big jerks of Will, Jr.'s chest. He's always been an emotional guy. Once he shot a sparrow with a BB gun, cried hard. I told him not to shoot things for fun. He took it to heart. Because of my face, people like to think I’ve got insight, moral weight. As if the uglier you are on the outside the more beautiful you are inside. Nice little formula, but not true. The only thing I had over Junior was I knew what pain felt like, and I'd figured the sparrow did, too.

I set my hand on my brother's knee. I gave him one of my monogrammed handkerchiefs Will taught me to always carry for the ladies. Before leaving home, I put four of them into various pockets of my black funeral jacket. I'd already given one to Mom. Two down.

…. and let rapture of God's glory be felt in the rapture our sadness. . . .

I turned around just once to look at the crowd, a sea of grieving faces stretching all the way back to the blue glass walls that rose in dizzying bevels into the pale June sky.

Just when I thought the service was over, the upper glass walls of the Chapel of Light receded into the lower sections and a great warm huff air swept in. A collective murmur. Then thousands of white doves rose from behind the Reverend Alter. He spread his arms skyward and it looked like they were flying out his fingers. Their wings beat loud and climbed in the hushed chapel and you could hear the panic beginning them. But then they realized that the sky was all around them on four sides and they lifted away into the afternoon. They were pen-raised birds never flown before. White feathers dusted us as we made our way out of the chapel for the cemetery. I thought of Savannah Blazak, going over wall and into the cool suburban night.