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12.
Saturday evening, Mary-Shane and Ann got together at Crank’s.
Mary-Shane parked in the brightly lit, most fashionable part of Canoga Avenue. Several blocks over, the age-green copper spires of the Burtongale Building taunted her, lit by spotlights and flying a large American flag that gently luffed in the wind. Ann said: “C’mon, let’s make eyes and have eyes made at us.” Crank’s was a popular dress-up bar along Canoga Avenue. They walked up granite steps to a warm oak doorway piped with shining brass tubes. Husky blond men with Crank’s logo T-shirts and suspenders checked ID. “That’s a nice start,” Ann whispered to Mary-Shane while glancing back at a muscular bicep. A thin man in a business suit, too old and not right, said something charming to Mary-Shane. She raked him with The Icy Look, and the glitter went out of his smile, like a neon light with a rock through it.
“Not too crowded,” Ann said. They found a small table set into the wall. A waitress in a mini-tux, tray held high, took their orders of house white.
Mary-Shane thumped Anne’s back. “Good choice, Beagle Face. Glad we decided to dress up.”
“Thanks, Rat Breath. Good to party a little again.”
“You call this partying? Geez, I would never have imagined, when I was chain-smoking Camels and swilling beer with Frank and the boys, that in ten years I’d be sitting in a place like this wondering if I should sip Chablis or Burgundy.” The interior was all mirrors, but cool because the light had an understated bluish brightness that made faces and hands appear fluorescent. Brass tubing arced among graceful potted palms. The mirrors, coated with art-deco figures in white latex, gave an impression of boundless space: trippy space, pounded by heavy speakers extruding a thick paste of metal-sounding music. Crank’s was hip, and hip meant music without deafness. Talk, however aerated, was in. So was Looking.
“That one,” Ann said, pointing. “There. No, there.”
Mary-Shane finally saw him, a man with a nice smile who seemed entranced by his heavy blonde companion, listening to her every word. “Nice,” Mary-Shane said. “He doesn’t look scroungy, so probably no drugs. Trim, so he must work out. Isn’t swilling his drink, hasn’t scratched his balls.”
Mary-Shane and Ann clinked glasses. The clinking caught the eyes of the man with the blonde, and a look of startled speculation crossed his upper face, changing the eyes, while the smile remained frozen. Watch it,” Mary-Shane said. “He’s a faker. He’s seen you.”
Ann was smiling across the room, nodding.
“Oh Jesus. I knew something was going to happen tonight. Fast work there, Beagle-Face.”
Ann put her glass down with a knowing, secret smile. “I just enjoy the game a little bit. Try myself to see if I’m rusty.”
“I’m going to the ladies’ room,” Mary-Shane said.
“Wish me luck. Hey whattaya know. He’s telling her he must go to the bathroom.” She pulled in her chin and made a deep Transylvanian voice: “Dahlink, I must go shake my hose.”
Laughing, Mary-Shane escaped just before the guy returned; he glided in like a black and white fish, angling slightly toward Ann with an expressionless but appraising look at Mary-Shane. What a feat, Mary-Shane thought, he should be in a circus. How could a person present two different faces to two different persons at the same time? He curved in like a dolphin, fins laid back and relaxed as in a dancer’s bow. With one side of his face he looked suggestively into Ann’s eyes while with the other side of his face he sized up Mary-Shane.
She picked up her purse and threaded her way through the crowd.
That was when she saw Lt. Vic Lara of the San Tomas Police, whom she had met at the Medical Examiner’s morgue, and her breath caught. Lara’s eyes, like pencils shading in a drawing, started at her toes and moved up to her curls. His eyes had a warm, cocky twinkle, and his chin moved back in a smile. “Haven’t we met somewhere before?”
“Maybe.”
“Let me buy you a drink,” Lara said.
“I’m with a friend.”
“Now are you cold or just shy?”
“Oh why not?” Mary-Shane said.
“Great.” He held the chair for her. Glasses came: wine for her, scotch for him.
“So we meet again,” she said feeling witless. His eyes, when he looked at her a certain way, reminded her of old pain and she wished he’d quit doing that.
He moved a toothpick around on his lips. “I was kind of surprised to see you’re on the police beat. Gets pretty gory.”
“I quickly noticed that somehow. How do you deal with it every day, Lieutenant?” It occurred to her that this man could be a source of valuable information for her news reporting, not to be mention the big story she was developing—if only she wasn’t so thoroughly scared of him and yet attracted to him..
“Vic. Call me Vic. Hey, do I get the feeling I’m being interviewed?”
She folded her hands on the table. “Do reporters make you nervous?”
He slapped his forehead. “Reporters. Naw. Pretty girls. Women who are sure of themselves and stare into your soul. Like you.”
She laughed. “Very theatrical. Must be the Latin blood.”
“Now there you’ve hit it right on the head. I’m Mexican-Puerto Rican.” He made sawing motions with his forearms. “Salsa, baby. Sabes?”
“I like a little salsa now and then. Say if you trashed that toothpick I probably could see into your soul.”
The toothpick sailed away in an arc. He opened his mouth wide.
She looked in. “Well, you have a lot of fillings...”
He snapped his mouth shut. “What are you, a dentist now?”
She laughed. “Just a struggling obituary writer.”
He placed his hands over hers. “I was going to ask you for your phone number.”
“You presume greatly, Lt. Lara. Here, I have something in my purse that I want to show you.” She placed it before him.
“A tooth?” Vic asked, regarding the object.
She said: “I found it outside the zoo.” There was a ringing in her ears, a rush of blood, and she wasn’t sure why she was doing this.
“Oh?” He placed a new toothpick carefully in the “o” of his lips while his eyes appraised her. Again, that feeling scraped her soul. What was it Vic Lara did to her? He looked at the tooth but did not touch it. “Now why did you pick up this old thing? Isn’t it better to let old things lie where they are?”
“You too, huh?”
“Wait,” he said raising a hand as though he were cleaving a pound of truth. “Why were you wandering around outside the zoo?” His eyes looked surprised and interested.
“I wasn’t wandering,” she said, “I was throwing up.”
He stared.
“I was grossed out by the smell of Smith’s blood.”
“You’re going to be police reporter. Get used to it.”
“I’m working on it, Vic. I’m with you here, aren’t I?”
He stopped laughing. “You could do worse.”
She whacked him. “I know. Stop treating me like a sister, will you?”
He reached for her hand. “Okay.” He helicoptered close with puckered lips.
She felt starved and wanted to take him home to bed but she put her finger over his lips. “First things first, Vic.”
He sat back. “All right, tell me exactly where you found this tooth.”
“About a thousand feet from the entrance. On a bald spot of sand and scrub.”
He nodded. “And?”
She looked at the tooth, confused. “I thought it might be important. A man murdered a thousand feet away. How on earth does an adult tooth...” She looked up, suddenly at a loss.
“You said murdered. This is getting very interesting.” He yawned, still not touching the tooth.
“Blow it out your ear,” she said. She swept the tooth into her purse and rummaged for the list of names. “I had something else to show you. I was going to call you. At work. Business only.” She showed him her piece of paper. “I did some checking and found out that these people have died suddenly while working at the zoo during the past year.”
He took the list and this time, his jaws genuinely slid apart. “How did you do this?”
Ann waved to her from a distance.
“Excuse me a minute.” She hurried to Ann’s side. “What trouble are you getting in now? And where’s the shark man?”
“Oh, him. The dolphin. He was going to drive his wife home and then...”
“Wife! I had a feeling.”
“And then he was going to come back for me. I told him to take a hike.”
“Can you wait just a few minutes? I met a policeman I know and I want to ask him some questions about a case.”
Ann laughed outright. Then she frowned. “You’re serious. You, Mary-Shane MacLemore, are meeting with a cop to discuss a case.”
“A murder. Hang in, I’ll just see Vic for a few minutes.”
“Oh, Vic is it now?” Ann ribbed.
When she returned to the bar, Lara was leaning his chin on his hand and looking down at the piece of paper. “Mary-Shane...” He swallowed hard. “This is classified police information. Where did you get it?”
“I looked things up.”
“This is very sensitive information.”
“For whom? The Burtongales?”
“Mary-Shane, I’m impressed.”
“Oh?” She sipped her wine, secretly gratified that he was impressed with her research. Hell, she was.
He took her hand and squeezed it with just enough force to hurt.
“Ouch, Vic.”
“Honey, don’t look any further into this matter, okay? Please.” He leaned close and she could smell the smoke and scotch on his breath. He glanced down at her hand and when he saw that he had hurt it he cradled it like a wounded bird in both of his hard hands and blew on it.
She got chills up and down her back. Her hair tingled on the nape of her neck. She pulled her hands away and hid them under the table, sealed over by her breasts. “Vic, I need a break. If I want to make it as a reporter, I need a big story. I’m not going to back away from this.”
There was theater on his face as his gaze bounced from wall to wall as if trying to catch something elusive. “Madre. This woman cannot let things rest when I tell her.”
“I am NOT one of your giggly little mujeres, Vic.”
“So much I gather. With a name like a cowboy, nothing surprises me.”
She ran through her standard explanation about her name, knowing it by rote so well that she knew when to stop for breaths. “My Mother was Doris Mary-Shane and my Daddy was Wayne Lull. I was baptized Mary Lull. Daddy thought that was so awful he stuck in Mother’s maiden name, so I became Mary-Shane Lull. I dropped the Mary; and I’ve kept my married (widowed) name, so now I’m Mary-Shane MacLemore, and I like it that way.”
He made a face. “Why not Martha? That’s a nice name. Or Linda? You know Linda means beautiful?” He leaned close.
She leaned her face close to his. “You know Mary-Shane means mysterious, sensuous, and intriguing?”
He closed his eyes. “I could easily be convinced.” He opened his eyes.
She gathered her purse. “Thanks for the drink.”
“The number,” he said.
“Oh yes.” She tore a deposit slip from her bank book.
“Maybe we can work together,” he said, folding the slip very carefully. “Maybe we can get our arms around this situation.”
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