Everything but the Squeal

“The Demerol,” she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “What else? The way it happened, it looks like he had his hand behind her head, gripping the base of her neck, like he was forcing her to go down on him. Jesus, she was a baby. Anyway, the break is simple and clean, like she jerked backward with so much force-that would have been the Demerol, numbing her, hiding the pain from her-and when he shoved down, the bones went and it was all over. The Demerol says it was probably accidental. If he'd planned to kill her, he wouldn't have given her the Demerol. It was to make the whole thing tougher to remember.”

“Maybe the Demerol was supposed to dull the pain.”

“Oh, no,” Yoshino said in an entirely new tone of voice. “He wanted her to feel the pain. You haven't seen this.” She pulled the sheet down to the girl's hips. There was a raw circular discoloration in the center of her abdomen.

“Look,” she said tightly. “Before the Demerol, he put his cigar out in her navel.”

Nobody looked. Hammond stared at the opposite wall, and Yoshino gazed at the two of us. I looked at a mental image of Aimee Sorrell, captured in a Polaroid with an angry burn where her belly button should have been.

“She's not the one,” I said again.

“Well,” Yoshino said, “whoever she was, I hope someone shoots him between the eyes before he gets to those fizzwits on the California Supreme Court.”

She covered the girl again and slid the drawer closed before she led us to the sliding door and let us out.

“Where you going tonight, Yoshino?” I asked before the door could close.

“Out with my husband,” she said. “It's our fifteenth anniversary.” She looked from Hammond to me. “How’d you know I was going out?”

“Your hair,” I said. “It looks terrific.”

“No kidding?” Yoshino said, raising her hand to give it a proprietary pat. “I hope so. It took decades.”

“It was worth it,” I said. Hammond gave a snort and headed down the hallway.

I put my hand on the sliding door, and she looked up at me inquiringly.

“Call me if there's another one who's been burned that way,” I said, slipping a card into her hand. “Anyone with a burned belly button.”

“I only do official work,” she said, sliding the door sharply closed. I barely got my fingers out in time.

Hammond was waiting for me halfway down the hall.

“What about my hair?” he asked, all tough guy again.

“The Red Dog tonight,” I said. “Nine o'clock. Your hair will look perfect. You want me to talk to the cops? Bring me the right cop to talk to.”

His mouth twisted. “That one's not so easy,” he said.

“Do it, Al,” I said. “Otherwise, I'm on my own.”

5

Aurora

It was still only ten-forty-five, but I felt like I'd been awake for weeks. The world, as seen through the gritty glass of a downtown phone booth, was briefly bright. Even down here, directly across the street from police headquarters in Parker Center, traffic was light. The Saturday before Easter Sunday is usually a nice, peaceful day. I dialed my own number and listened to my answering machine go through its usual rigmarole.

“Hey, Simeon,” Roxanne said, ever effervescent. I dated Roxanne occasionally, and now that Eleanor was in China I was seeing more of her than usual. “I have hidden eggs everywhere, and not even the big detective is going to find one of them. At least, not without a body search, which is a clue, I guess. What I mean is that I hope you haven't forgotten that you're supposed to be here tonight and that we're going to do eggs tomorrow morning. I'm tending bar at McGinty's until eleven, and I expect to see you there just before we close. If you're not, I've saved a dozen raw eggs and you'll find them in your bed when you get home. They'll be broken, like my heart. Be there, buster, and no excuses.” She hung up.

I'd forgotten all about it. For the tenth time I resolved to get an appointment book and write things down in it. Other people showed up where they were supposed to be. Appointment books had to be the secret. Eleanor's appointment book was thicker than the OxfordEnglishDictionary and a lot worse organized, and she was always where she was supposed to be. At the moment, unfortunately, she was supposed to be in China.

The second call was from my mother. “Well, Billy be damned,” she said, getting right to the point,` “if I'd known I was going to spend my life talking to a machine, I'd have given birth to a battery, too. At least you'd be grateful. And speaking of you, I'm sure you remember that you promised to come by tomorrow. I'm sure you know how much your father and I are looking forward to it. Bring Eleanor, if she's speaking to you.” I heard my father's voice in the background. “No,” my mother said, “it's that damned machine again.” Then there was a dial tone. That was how long it had been since I'd talked to my mother. Eleanor had left three weeks ago.

The machine had promised three messages, so I hung on, watching a little Mexican girl, decked prematurely in her Easter best, argue with her mother about something. Her plump brown sturdy legs beneath half a mile of white ruffled crinoline anchored themselves to the sidewalk as permanently as an Ice Age as she tugged her mother in the direction she wanted to go. In about eight years, she'd be the age of the girl on the slab.

“Mr. Grist?” It was a voice I didn't recognize. “This is Jane Sorrell. Something has happened. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I need to see you. Please come. I don't know what I'm going to do.”

I pressed my forehead against the glass of the telephone booth and watched the little Mexican girl, victorious, lead her mother down the street in the desired direction. Good for her. Somebody loved her.

To get to the hotel, I headed west on Olympic and then, after miles of stunted architecture and Korean neon signs, swung north on Doheny toward Beverly Hills. Alice was so sluggish and unresponsive that it felt as though she were reading my mind. I didn't want to see Mrs. Sorrell. I didn't want to see Mr. Sorrell. I wanted to go home and spend Easter with my mother and father and pretend that I sold aluminum siding or something that never rusted, never warped, and always looked shiny and new and hopeful. I didn't want anything to do with families that had rotted and turned brown at the edges like Annie's avocado-and-clam dip.

I was in a fine humor as I chugged up the driveway to the hotel. The clown who opened the driver's door, stuffed into a uniform that looked like something willed to him by the Philip Morris bellboy, didn't do much to raise my spirits.

“Yes, sir,” he said with a bright smile as he estimated my income and looked Alice over. It was the smile a talent agent saves for a client who isn't working. “We don't get many of these, this far north of the border. We'll be real sure to park her where we can keep an eye on her.”

“Park her on your chest,” I said, climbing out. “I sure hope you don't have to live on your tips.”

“I usually know what to expect,” he said. He aimed Alice toward some unmapped area of the parking lot, the part they reserve for Volkswagen vans with psychedelic designs painted on them.

Mrs. Sorrell hadn't given me her room number, so I had to go through the formality of finding a house phone. As always these days, they were located behind a bouquet of eight-foot flowers that looked like Venus's-flytraps bred to eat airplanes.

“Yeah?” said a new voice, a sullen, young-sounding voice that I'd never heard before. It could have been a girl or a prepubescent boy.

“Is Mrs. Sorrell there, please?” I asked, yanking upward on the frayed bootstraps of whatever residue of courtesy I had left.

“No,” the new voice said. Its owner hung up.

I resisted the urge to rip the phone out of the wall and feed it to the flowers, and once again requested the operator to connect me with the Sorrell suite.

“Listen,” I said the moment the phone was lifted on the other end. “I've had to endure a lot of things today, not the least of which was a parking attendant so snotty that he should blow his nose into a parachute, and if you