“I’m Dr. Jingler now,” he said. “With each new incarnation I like to change a vowel.”
“Well that’s just fine,” I said. “I hope you never run out of vowels. Let me buy you a drink.”
“I’ll take one of those tankards,” he said, indicating my schooner. Soo was already pulling.
I slapped a stack of bills on the bar.
Dr. Jingler mounted a stool and looked around. “Saw Bad Brains here in ’82.” He had a gulp from his schooner. “Hasn’t changed much.”
“I almost fainted when I saw you on the news,” I said. “I thought you were going to be a cosmologist.”
“I’m a cosmologist at heart, Willie,” he said.
“You can call me Eddie,” I said. “I think we’re safe here among the freaks.” I looked over at a glowering Soo. “Present company excluded.” I returned my attention to Jingler. “Tell me why meteorology.”
“Well, the job was open and weather has always appealed to me. It’s the sort of conversation that everyone enjoys having, and much like psychiatry you can’t go wrong with a bad prediction. And like psychiatry you have these tremendously vague concepts such as El Niño that explain just about everything. Of course you do get the occasional angry letter from airline pilots and so forth, you know: Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies can predict the weather better than you.” He had a chuckle and a gulp of beer. “Oh well, you can’t please them all.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It’s a great gig. I belong on TV.” He looked me over. “You look good, a little thin. You off the meds?”
“Only taking this,” I said, proudly holding up my Asthma Attack.
Soo had primed the jukebox and the air was filled with the steady treacle of Jack Jones and Doris Day. An old kyphotic man entered, hat squashed in his hands, squinting into the darkness and glancing anxiously at a statue of Ahab wielding a harpoon to his left, then down the way at the Jackie Kennedy twins. He smiled when he saw Soo.
Dr. Jingler loosened his tie. “So, tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself since you jumped into the Napa River?”
“Well, I’m dealing records for a friend of mine. Not a bad living. Playing the horses here and there. And I’ve got a place up the hill in a little barrio my father built back in the fifties.”
“Isla Escondida?”
“That’s it.”
“Been there many times,” he said. “But not since the poinsettia days. What’s on your mind anyway? Your message said urgent.”
“Well I’m glad you asked.” I finished my beer and gestured Soo for one more.
“Tell me what it is.”
“You’ve heard about the missing Tijuana prostitutes?”
“I’ve seen the stories.”
“For a long time I thought I knew who the killer was. I thought it was my horseracing buddy, Shelly,” and here I outlined his terrible childhood, hypochondriasis, necro fantasies, claim of multiple personalities, lack of official identity, the scorch marks on his truck, his deep and unannounced excursions into Tijuana, the scrapbook, the cage in his garage, and his fond assertion that the serial killer is the last anyone ever suspects in the neighborhood.
“Most recreational killers are not recreational gamblers,” he observed. “You can only have so much fun.”
“Well, they’re all different, aren’t they?” I said. “I mean you can profile them, but one is an idiot, another like Bundy has an abnormally high IQ, some like Edmund Kemper are funny, some have normal upbringings, hold down regular jobs, are churchgoers, some are married and have children.”
“Are you going somewhere with this, Eddie?”
“It’s just that, well, I’ve been going down to Tijuana on a regular basis myself, to visit the brothels, you know, because of my trouble with women and all that stuff you already know about.”
He only stared at me, his tankard suspended. “What are you saying?”
“It’s just funny that I don’t remember much afterward and I always go to church.”
“Are you saying you think you might be involved in some way with these missing prostitutes?”
“Well, um, possibly, yes.”
“Do you have any specific recollections?”
“I remember names, places.”
“Do you have any proof of malice?”
“None,” I replied.
“And do you feel imperiled or in any way at risk?”
“Always. But here’s the part that bothers me the most. When I decided to drive down to the incinerator at La Zona Basura to have a look at it, I had no problem finding it.”
“It’s a rather obvious structure, billowing smoke and hundreds of feet tall, yes?”
“But I knew right where it was, as if I’d been there before.”
“Hmmm.”
“And Shelly seems to think I’m the killer because of course I’m the one who was court-mandated to a psychiatric hospital and tagged a sexual predator.”
He knuckled his forehead for a time and said, “It seems unlikely that you’d off prostitutes and throw them into a furnace without any recollection of it. I fear that you’re falling back into old patterns of figment and fancy.”
“Let me buy you another one,” I said.
The schooners came. He did not touch his, only kneaded his forehead. “But if you have any real doubts,” he said after a good minute of head rubbing. “Test it empirically. Just go down to Tijuana as you usually do and try to find some of these young ladies you’ve been with. If you can locate enough of them, that should put the matter to rest.”
“You’re a genius, Dr. Jingler,” I said.
“One day I hope to find my true calling,” he said.
34.Back to the Island
I DROVE TO TIJUANA THE NEXT DAY AND PEEKED IN AT A FEW OF THE old hangouts, but I was unable to track down any of my previous amantes. Of course, Tijuana is a heaving metropolis, fluid with ever-flowing international humanity, and so after getting a hotel room at the Santa Cruz (which turned out to be gay!) I decided I had no choice but to apply Jingler’s test directly. After a late leisurely breakfast I cruised about until I found a cluster of floozies in short skirts out in front of the Miramar Hotel.
