Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [12]
“It would have been three in the afternoon,” I reminded Andrew.
He nodded, peering up. “Exterior video cameras?”
I scoped the cornice of the brick frontier-style building. “No such luck.”
Peering through the gate I saw polished spheres and tarot cards in the window of Crystal Dreams, along with a cockamamy assortment of straw hats, brand-name backpacks, headphones and handbags, most likely stolen. I took out my pad and sketched the scene, indicating the vitamin store that was adjacent, the greeting card shop on the other side, making note of the position of the fountain and the shuttered carts where a stalker could hide. I sat on a bench and let Juliana’s presence come to me: an unformed girl with an ordinary longhaired look who doesn’t want to feel ordinary.
“Her A-list friends are waiting at Johnny Rockets the next block down. If she has the goods, no problem. If she doesn’t, she’s sitting here, scared out of her mind about how she’s ever going to show her face in school.”
“Maybe she doesn’t care,” said Andrew.
I shook my head. “She’s vulnerable. Needy. Her violin fell apart, for God’s sake. She can’t go back to the cool kids with nothing.”
Andrew sat heavily beside me.
“I’m too old for this.”
“Get outta town,” I said of the empty Promenade. “This is the most exciting part.”
“I’m just saying, don’t get carried away.”
“With what?”
“Overidentifying. You don’t know anything about this girl.”
But I felt that I did. I knew something. She was an outsider who wanted to belong.
“What if she gets on a bus?” I riffed. “Winds up on the Strip. Or the Beverly Center, runs out of steam. She’s a good girl, doesn’t do this kind of thing. It’s late, she better call Mom, but she doesn’t. Why?”
Andrew: “Because she’s come into harm’s way.”
We sat in silence. A wind blew up. Strings of white lightbulbs flexed and dipped.
“What do you say, baby? Let’s go home.”
I snuggled against him. “How about Amsterdam?”
He had heard such improbabilities before and indulged me with an arm around the shoulder.
“Although,” I considered, “I’d take the Sandpiper motel.”
“The one up the coast? That was just a shitty little beach joint.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He was silent, fingering my hair, and we watched the lights, like birds caught in a net, straining to release a flight of radiance from the gloomy trees.
I wish I had asked how he really felt about what happened at the Sandpiper, but I was afraid to push. I sensed he was backpedaling from the idea of living together, and that made me tentative. Still, it was a mistake. I wish I had understood more about the things he said up the coast in Cambria. I wish I had taken that quiet moment on the bench, before everything broke loose, to ask the questions that kept nosing up like shoots too green to tell what fine—or hideous—flowering might unfold.
“Come on, it’s freezing.”
I took his big warm hand. “I hope Juliana isn’t on the street tonight.”
I had become aware of a homeless African-American man on a nearby bench, fists in pockets. Every time his eyes fluttered closed, he jerked himself awake. Now another transient, a white guy with a huge belly, was lumbering toward a doorway.
Andrew was suddenly on his feet.
“Where’re you going?”
“That’s Willie John Black. Hey, Willie!”
The man looked over slowly.
Andrew said, “Remember me?”
“Sure I remember you,” he said, but seemed to need a little help.
“Detective Berringer.”
“Of course.” The man raised a hand, which was weighted down by a small, filthy, formerly yellow day pack. “How are you, Detective?”
“Good. How are you, my man?”
“Well, I was just going to claim this doorway. It’s a double, you see.”
It was the entrance to a vintage clothing store with side-by-side glass doors, room enough to lie down and stretch out. Willie lowered his small pack and a bedroll.
“Just put down my gear …”
Every move was shaky and painfully deliberate. I made him for fifty or sixty: matted white hair and a full white beard stained yellow around the lips. He wore a clean blue sweatshirt