9

The funeral is a lovely affair, done up with all the taste and black velvet the Simmons family could rustle up on such short notice. There’s an open coffin—mahogany, with gold inlay—Rupert inside, looking to all the world like he’s just getting in a good forty winks. There’s a preacher, droning on about the youth of society, about how they take so much for granted, yet are so reluctant to ask for help. There’s Louise and her elderly father, a smattering of aunts and uncles, all looking pale and weak and shattered and, more than anything else, confused.

Louise found him. At least, that’s what Ernie told me, and I have no reason to doubt either one of them. As it is, Louise has been somewhat incommunicado for the last few days, dealing with the petty tasks that the death of a loved one brings on: phone calls to the mortuary, to the clergy, to caterers. Duties that are best left to someone else—anyone else—are unfortunately the domain of the bereaved, and as a result, I’ve gotten in barely a word of condolence to my partner’s ex-wife.

And then there’s the whole issue of guilt. If not a sea of it, a river, perhaps.

Rupert’s note read BECAUSE I HAVE NO MEANING, and that was the end of that. Five words, each one a little BB pellet into my heart. The self-blame game goes like this: had he not been deprogrammed, had he not been locked up, had he not been taken from the Progressive compound and thrown into my trunk in the first place, Rupert Simmons would be alive and well today. Worshiping his ancestors and prattling on about the truth behind Progress, sure, but at least he’d have vital signs and a healthy, active scent. As it is, his smell has disappeared from the corpse in the box before me, and I can barely bring myself to stop sniffing for that cappuccino and cream.

“And so we see,” the preacher is saying, “that life is not a gift. It is a privilege granted to us. . . .”

Seconal. One of the few mammal-oriented drugs that has similar effects on our kind, and that’s what they found, a big bottle of it clutched in Rupert Simmons’s right hand. He hadn’t even undressed before downing somewhere around 2,000 milligrams, roughly twenty times the recommended dosage for these sleep inducers, which means he entered the world of the dead still tied up beneath the buckles and the girdles and the zippers and the latex. Maybe it was a message to all of us: See what you did? See how you made life so unbearable for me? Maybe it wasn’t. No way to know, since a note reading BECAUSE I HAVE NO MEANING leaves a lot open to interpretation. I think I like it better that way.

An elderly gentleman to my left smelling of stale graham crackers and codfish covertly hands me a small stash of basil, like a fan passing a joint at a rock concert. I take a nibble, instantly feeling the slow mellow rush spreading through my veins, warming me up from the inside out, and pass it on to Ernie, who samples and continues the chain. This is how we deal with death: an herb, a gnaw, and let’s move on with the whole ugly shebang. The preacher, though—a human, I gather, from the way he won’t quit babbling—isn’t hip to the scene.

“. . . and so it is with young Rupert, who in death cannot tell us why he felt he had no meaning in life. . . .”

It had been going well, or so we thought. Rupert was back in his old apartment, meeting up with his previously estranged group of friends, and had been talking about finding a job with a nonprofit organization. “One of the environmentals,” he told us over the phone two days after that dinner at Trader Vic’s. “Saving the rain forests.” And as I’ve still got a few relatives back in South America eking out a living beneath the jungle canopy, I thought it a fabulous idea. Bo told us that a job search was one of the first stages of reintroduction to everyday life, that it indicated that the patient—that Rupert—was interested in rejoining society. He’d even expressed interest in volunteering for a cult-awareness group for young at-risk dinos, another idea we all greeted with enthusiasm.

Plus, he was talking to his old high school girlfriend for the first time in a few years, and they’d already made plans to go out on a pre-pre-date at a local Spanish tapas restaurant. Again, Bo was optimistic: “A little nookie don’t hurt anyone.” What’s more, Louise said he’d begun playing the guitar and cooking dinners again, and already a blush of normalcy had returned to his eerily youthful hide. Thumbs-up status on all accounts.

Doesn’t sound to me like he had no meaning. Then again, some folks have a talent for putting up a good facade even when their infrastructure is shot through with rotting beams and crumbling struts. Rupert must have been one of them.

On the night of March 21st, Rupert had invited his sister and her husband to come over the next morning for one of his special brunches, a meal the young T-Rex was known by his friends and family to have perfected during his world travels. All manner of ethnic foodstuffs went into these elaborate presentations—quail’s eggs, green pancakes, sushi, tandoori shrimp—and he somehow managed to combine the disparate flavors into a meal that would make Wolfgang Puck’s naturally brown hide tarnish green with envy.

Terrell—big as a house, dumb as the stucco—wasn’t able to make it to brunch that morning, so it was just Louise, alone and unprepared, who found herself confused when the doorbell didn’t bring her brother. And it was Louise who found herself pounding on the door after a few minutes had passed with no answer from within. And it was Louise who eventually got the landlord to unlock the door, and it was Louise who found her brother, dead, slumped across an unmade bed with a bottle in his hand and a five-word suicide note by his head.

While Louise wept and held her brother in her arms, the landlord—an Ornithomimus who was drunk off his ass on cilantro but functional enough to use modern appliances—dialed the dino division of the cops and the morgue, and soon enough the place was swarming with badges. They scoped the scene, took samples, and, once a rapid inquest had been processed at Dan Patterson’s request—a result, of course, of my own request—declared the death to be what we all knew it was: a suicide.

Dr. Beauregard was beside himself with guilt, calling nearly every day from Memphis to proclaim his sorrow at Rupert’s passing.

“I can’t believe this happened,” he kept saying. “The boy seemed so . . . His behavior pattern never indicated . . . This just ain’t right. . . .”

We didn’t blame him. At least Ernie and I didn’t blame him, and Louise certainly professed to bear no ill will toward the doctor. Still, he sent flower arrangement after flower arrangement, even spicing up a few with the odd medicinal herb here and there, anything to assuage Louise’s sorrow and his own feelings of failure.

He even sent back the check for services rendered. Now that’s a doctor for you.

“Please follow me outside for the interment,” the preacher is saying, finishing up his epic tribute to a dino he barely even knew, “where we will return young Rupert to the ground from whence he came.” I’ve never understood this—are we supposed to be made of dirt? I consider raising my hand, but the preacher has already moved past me, down the aisle and into the bright light of day.

“Vincent!” Ernie hisses. I look over—he’s cocking his head toward the back of the small funeral crowd. Behind the array of foreign and domestic automobiles is a long stretch limo, five-window style, green as the hide on a Hadrosaur’s behind.

“That just pull up?” I whisper back, and Ernie nods.

A chauffeur, duded up to the nines in an emerald tuxedo, hops out of the driver’s seat and runs around to the passenger door. It’s quite the jog. With a flourish, he pulls open the door, and I only wish I were more surprised at what gets out.

It’s Circe, and she’s dressed to mourn. Long black overcoat, green velvet dress down to the perfectly sculpted latex ankles, sensible pumps padding through the damp dirt below.

“What the hell’s she doing here?” Ernie asks, a bit too loudly. A number of the bereaved turn to shush us, but Ernie does a stupendous job of ignoring them.

“She must have thought of herself as a friend,” I say, finding myself defending the leader of the Progressives. “Friends come to these things.”

“Friends don’t brainwash each other.”

“Nothing you can do about it. I’m sure she wants to pay her respects, that’s all.”

Ernie starts to rise from his seat—“I’ll show her respect”—but I’m able to grab his forearm and force him back down before he starts anything unseemly. The progress he’s made with Louise over the past few weeks has put him in a much better mood; causing a scene at her brother’s funeral might land him back in the mammal house for good.

“Let it go,” I counsel. “Let her watch, and let her leave.”

And that’s all she seems to do. Circe takes her place at the back of the gathering, and as the preacher continues his endless sermon, I can almost feel her stare boring through the back of my head, as if she were trying to crawl into my brain and gaze out through my eyes, to place herself in my position. But every time I turn around she’s looking somewhere else, seemingly focused entirely on the clergyman and his dubious words of wisdom.

“Ashes to ashes,” the preacher is chanting as the gears turn and Rupert’s coffin is lowered into the ground, “dust to dust . . .” It’s a human ritual but serves us well nevertheless. The days of burning our corpses or letting them sink to a watery grave are all in the past. We’re just like the mammals, nothing more than pack rats when it comes to our dead nowadays, secreting them in boxes underground as if we might want to dig them up again should they come in handy at some point in the future.

As the funeral comes to a close and the group disbands, Rupert’s friends and family empathizing with one another in a huge cat’s cradle of consolation, I feel a familiar presence rise up behind me. It’s the smell that gives it away, more than anything else, that wild concoction of herbs accompanied by an intense burst of pine boiling out of her pores—a common dinosaur scent somehow elevated to another level.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I say even before I’ve finished turning around.

“Nor I you,” replies Circe. She’s at least three inches taller than me—new ground for a dame—and I find myself unable to look away from that gaze. “Do you have a cold?” she asks.

She’s referring to the fact that I’m pinching my nostrils closed with two fingers from my right hand, doing my best to shut out that intoxicating scent. The last thing I need right now is another trip back to the Jurassic. Then again, maybe it’s the first thing I need. As it is, the evolutionary process hasn’t completely localized all of my scent-sniffing glands in my nose; scents are still partially the domain of my taste buds, and I can smell every inch of this Progressive leader each time my tongue comes in contact with the pheromone-laced air.

“Yes,” I reply. “My sinuses are all a mess. Forgive me.”

“Did you know him well?”

“On and off,” I explain. “Friend of a friend. Last time I saw him was the night that the . . . club . . . met up at your place.”

Her laugh is high, airy, and if it weren’t for the circumstances, she would most likely let it transform into a full-fledged giggle. “Oh, it’s not my place,” she says. “It belongs to all of us. Tell me, did you enjoy yourself the other evening?”

“It was . . . educational,” I say.

“That is what we strive for,” replies Circe. “Then again, all work and no play . . .” And for a second, I’m pretty sure I can feel her pinching my rump. But her hands aren’t anywhere near my derriere, and a quick 360 spin shows me that I must be hallucinating. I clamp my nostrils tighter, shutting out the last remaining olfactory vestiges of those evil weeds. “Perhaps you might like to come to another session.”

I’m about to reply in the negative—the strong negative, the desperation negative—when my fingers fail me. Muscles loosening up, blatantly disregarding my orders to clench, engaging in full-scale mutiny even as my brain screams at them to fall in line. But soon my nostrils are wide open and flaring of their own accord—I’ll have to add them to my blacklist of misbehaving body parts—and sucking in Circe’s sweet scent.

“I’d love to come back,” I find myself saying. Somewhere, Ernie’s calling for me to come to the car, to say goodbye and to hurry up, and somewhere else I’m telling him to hold on one second. But right here and right now it’s just me, a verdant goddess named Circe, and the tallest, thickest, most fragrant jungle anyone’s seen this side of the Triassic. Trees burst from the ground, soaring into the sky; vines surround us, reaching out with their leafy fingers, caressing our bodies as they entangle me and this perfect female Velociraptor in a vortex of lush foliage. We’re not running this time, but even standing still I feel that sense of urgency, that raw natural power welling up within, bursting with pure energy. Holding my face—holding hers—tongues whipping out, lashing at one another, teeth clashing in the furious rush for pleasure, growls and roars forming deep within our throats, calling out in a language I don’t even know—

And suddenly I’m back in my Lincoln, driving out of the main gates of the funeral home.

“. . . which is why I have to suspect her motives,” Ernie is saying. “I’m not telling you she’s wrong or she’s evil or anything, but I want you to watch out.”

“Right . . .” I respond, trying to get a bearing on the conversation. Where was I just now? Who was I just now? “What was that part about watching out, again?” I ask.

Ernie slaps the dashboard. “Damn it, I knew you weren’t listening to me.”

“I was—I was—it . . . You wanted me to watch out . . .”

“For Circe,” he supplies.

“Why?”

Ernie doesn’t even try to suppress a sigh. It bursts out of his lips, a long, drawn-out wheeze of frustration. “ ’Cause every time you talk to her you get all googly-eyed.”

We do not discuss it further. The rest of the ride home is uneventful, but when we arrive back at the office and step out of the car, a funny thing happens: I find myself unable to control my lips. This is not your basic Vincent Rubio careless talk—this is a fully undeveloped thought coming to the forefront, blindsiding me even before I have a chance to choke off my throat and cut off the air to my own vocal cords.

“You wanna check out another Progressive meeting?” I hear myself saying.

Ernie takes a step back, ducking as if I’ve swung a bat at his head. “I don’t think you said what I think you said.”

“It might be fun. See what they’re really all about.”

“Kid, you feeling okay?”

And that’s all the time it takes to regain control over my rogue brain. I throw the offending part in the stockade and shake my head, attempting to banish all remaining inklings to a nonintrusive nook in my noggin. “Just thinking we could do some more snoop work, see if any other kids are messed up in this,” I lie. I wish I could tell Ernie the truth, that I don’t know where either the thought or the words came from, but I fear that’d freak him out more than the fib. Certainly gives me the willies.

“Forget about it,” says Ernie. “And forget about all the Progress crap. It’s over. Progress is behind us.”

“Progress is behind us,” I repeat. I think I will make that my mantra for the week, once an hour, twice before bedtime. And if, after all that time and all those repetitions, I can still smell that powerful, pleasurable, pungent scent—as I can now, on my clothes, in my hair, on my skin, behind every bush and every tree and every passerby—then I will make it my mantra for the next month. And the year. And the decade, if need be. Yes, it’s settled.

* * *

 

It’s been a quiet few weeks in the office. Minsky hasn’t bothered us in quite some time, instead leaving short messages of apology on our machine, which we listen to, laugh at, and erase. Louise, meanwhile, is managing to work through her grief with a little help from Ernie, who sees her and the new husband a few times a week for dinner. It’s a little weird if you ask me, the ex hanging out with the new couple all the time, but if Terrell doesn’t complain, I certainly won’t. I get the feeling that the guy isn’t home a lot, and maybe Ernie is providing some comfort for his ex-wife at a time when she desperately needs it. Maybe he just wants to screw her. Don’t ask me; I’m no shrink.

Teitelbaum, the T-Rex who owns and runs TruTel Enterprises, a massive PI firm here in the basin, was kind enough—hah, he doesn’t even know how to spell the word kind—to throw a few cases our way. I’d like to say that we reciprocate, that Ernie and I occasionally find ourselves so swamped with work that we have to pass on clients to others, but it’s simply not the case. We do okay for ourselves—I’ve got a home, nice clothes, a car that’s nearly paid for, and I get in the occasional special stash from time to time—but it’s not like we can afford to be trading cases back and forth with the big boys. As it happens, Teitelbaum doesn’t expect us to hand over our clients. He just wants our souls.

“Two thousand in fees, flat deal,” he announced, flipping a case file onto the desk in front of me. I’d come down at six in the morning at Teitelbaum’s request, and I wasn’t in the mood to be lowballed by Jabba the Hutt.

“Missing-persons case, right? That could take months.”

“Yeah, and . . .?”

“And two thousand won’t begin to cover it.”

“Do what you want,” he told me, knowing exactly which body part—well, parts—he had me by. “I can give it to Sutherland.”

“He’s a hack.”

“He’s a cheap hack. And he doesn’t bitch like you do. You want it or not, Rubio?”

I agreed to the fee. Ernie would kill me for doing it, but I had no choice. We’re hard up for cash.

So we’re running down some missing persons, we’re trailing a few deadbeat dads, we’re spying on a few salacious spouses. Still, it’s a job, and it pays the bills. Even with Teitelbaum skinning us alive.

If the jerk’s going to take half of our fees, though, I’m going to make sure to use his facilities as often as possible. As a result, I find myself spending a perfectly lovely Los Angeles spring afternoon—temperature in the low seventies, not a cloud in the sky, smog in remission for the week—holed up inside a darkroom, squinting at blurry negatives and nearly passing out from the overpowering smell of photographic chemicals.

The guy we’re trailing is a Raptor, a two-bit con artist who makes a play out of taking old ladies for a run and then splitting town with their cars and their cash. Unfortunately for him, he scammed the grandmother of Tommy Troubadour, a local lounge lizard with reputed ties to the mob—the dino one, I mean—and I can only hope he’ll enjoy eating his meals through a straw for the rest of his life.

Here’s a nice photo of the slimy Raptor now, coming out of an ’89 Oldsmobile with a member of the Social Security set on his arm. His greasy black hair contrasts horribly with her blue coif, and even through the black-and-white of the photo it’s a painful sight. The contrast isn’t quite right, though, so I dunk the print again, waiting for the images to sharpen. I should be timing the developing process with a stopwatch, but sometimes I like to feel my way around the procedure instead. Photo-developing for snoop work always takes me somewhere between the spiritual intuition of the artistic process and the workaday photoboard cut-and-paste of a third-grade science fair project, and I like to take my time and find a decent midpoint.

I’m almost to where I want to be—there’s the image now, coming in nice and clear, the son of a bitch’s face center-frame and ready to be identified—when the darkroom curtain pulls open, a blast of fluorescent light nearly blowing me off my feet.

“What the hell—” I shout, trying to protect a string of negatives that have yet to be developed. “Shut the outer door first, you moron.”

“Ooh, man, Vincent, I am so sorry.” I can’t see who it is behind the glare, but it only takes a second to place the voice. Sutherland. “I am so, so sorry.”

“I got it, you’re sorry. Now shut the fucking door!” I hate to resort to vulgarity, but the cretin isn’t reacting to direct commands.

“Right,” he says. “Right, right.” And finally, the light from outside is extinguished, leaving us in red-tinted darkness. He grins sheepishly, points to the print in my hands. “Photo looks okay.”

“ ‘Course it looks okay, it’s developed already. I got three rolls back there strung up you might have just burned out.”

“I am so sorry—”

“Enough. Do you need something, Sutherland?”

He doesn’t even have the self-respect to look away or seem ashamed when he responds. “Please. I’m not too good at this.”

I grab a cartridge of exposed film from Sutherland’s hand and help the guy begin the developing process—hell, I’d do it for him if it would get him out of here any quicker.

“So,” he says as I pull his film from the canister, “how’s tricks?”

“Tricks are fine. If you’re gonna stand around, you might as well watch what I’m doing. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“Certainly, absolutely.” Sutherland makes a play out of taking great note of my movements, humming and yes-ing under his breath, but I know the guy’s just putting on a show. None of this is going to stick with him; his brain is Teflon-coated. But meanwhile, he’s standing behind me all the while, rancid breath combining with that rotten-egg scent to create a horrorshow of unequaled proportions for my sensitive snout.

“Listen,” I blurt out after an unbearable five minutes have passed, “why don’t I just do this for you, huh? I’ll leave the photos here, you come back and pick ’em up later.”

“Would you?” he asks innocently, and I know that I’m being played for a chump. But it’s a small price to pay in order to secure the return of my privacy and a relatively odor-free environment. “That’s . . . that’s great of you, Rubio. Tell ya what. I’ll take you to that herb joint up on Franklin later tonight, my treat.”

“Not necessary,” I say. “Not my kinda place.” I know the establishment of which he speaks; it’s a small run-down dive of a basil bar where the waitresses are hooked on the very stuff they’re doling out. Vacant eyes and lazy tails are the name of the game at the Pesto Palace, and it just serves to depress me every time I step inside. The Hollywood bars have that effect on me, for some reason, and I make it a point to avoid them as much as possible.

“Hey,” he says, “how’d y’all do at that wacked-out Progressive thing?”

I shrug and say, “We made out. Did what we came there to do. You?”

“A whole mess,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong—I got my info all right, and Mr. Teitelbaum was real happy with me. Real happy.” He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a wallet stuffed to bursting with receipts and coupons. From within the depths, he extracts a business card and hands it to me. HORACE “HAPPY” SUTHERLAND, it reads—and I’ve never known the guy’s first name or this moronic nickname until just now—EXECUTIVE SECOND VICE PRESIDENT OF INVESTIGATIONS. “That’s almost like partner,” he confides.

“How pleasing.”

“But a lotta weird shit went down after I got back, I’ll tell ya.” Sutherland shoves that wallet back into his pants pocket and makes to leave. But something in that last sentence has grabbed me. Maybe it was his tone, his quick delivery, or maybe it’s just a buried suspicion of my own snagging a reason to show its ugly face, but I reach out and grab Sutherland by the shoulder.

“What do you mean, ‘weird shit’?”

“What do you mean by what do I mean?” He pulls away, eyeing me carefully.

“Don’t start with—look, you said weird shit went down, I’m just asking what it was. Idle chitchat.”

Sutherland sighs, tries to turn away again and meets up with my body wedged between him and the blackout curtain. “It was a mess,” he says. “You don’t want to know. Just wasting your time.”

“Humor me.” With every moment of stalling, I’ve become more interested.

The Triceratops shrugs and takes a seat on the developing table—his butt spilling over the sides, pants nearly dipping into the pool of chemicals—and opens up. “We had this case come in, some woman whose daughter had disappeared. Only this note left behind said she’d found Progress and all that jazz.”

I’ve heard of such things. “Go on.”

“When you saw me at the party, I was there looking for the girl. Picked up on her scent, followed her when she went to the powder room, and had a little confrontation. First she claimed to be someone else, said I was crazy, but I’d smelled her old sheets from her bedroom at home, and this here is one dino who doesn’t forget a scent. It was her all right, and so I pressed her and I pressed her and I pressed her and finally she admitted it, but wouldn’t come back with me. My orders were not to get physical, so I let her go. Disappeared into the crowd and I couldn’t find her the rest of the night. Good appetizers, though.

“So I returned to the office, relayed my information, and they sent in a team to extract her—that was their term, extract her—from the compound. A few days later, I hear they’ve got her at home and she’s all better, Mr. Teitelbaum gives me a promotion and a raise, and everything’s hunky dory.”

“Seems fine to me,” I say. “Nothing messy there.”

“That’s what I thought. Then I get called into the big man’s office a few days ago, and he tells me that the girl is dead, and I have to submit all my documents from the trip. I mean, all my notes and everything. Like I keep these things—pain in the ass, right? So I have to go digging through my files—”

“Wait a second,” I interrupt, my mouth having taken a few seconds to catch up with my suddenly racing thoughts, “did you say she was dead?”

“Hm? Yeah, ain’t that a shame? We get her outta that cult, turn the girl’s life around, and then poof, she’s gone.”

“How’d she die?” I’m up off the stool now, volume raising, voice echoing in the small chamber.

“You’re very excitable today, you know that?”

“Sutherland . . .” I snarl.

“Car accident, it was a car accident.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what I expected, but a car accident wasn’t on the list.

Sutherland notices my disappointment, and elaborates further. “She hit a pole.”

Now we’re talking. Next to the overdone overdose, the single-car accident is the bread and butter of the suicidal set. “Was she by herself?”

“Solo accident, that’s what they said, out on some deserted road up near Angeles Crest.” He’s talking the mountains, the Angeles Crest National Forest, a favorite spot of serial killers thanks to the excellent canopy coverage it provides a rotting corpse. Suicides like it up there, too—something about getting away from the smog and the noise and the heat and the traffic and just hanging out with a blue jay and the wind for your last minutes on earth, I suppose.

“I’ll see you later,” I hear myself saying, even as my legs are moving me past Sutherland, past the safelight and the developing table and the trays of chemicals, and through the inner blackout curtain.

“Wait!” Sutherland cries out. “What about my pictures?”

“Take ’em to the Fotomat,” I reply. The outer door opens—bright light poking sharp needles into my eyes, but I pay it no mind—and then closes behind me, and I don’t even know if the hack PI can hear me anymore. Tell the truth, I don’t really care. I’ve got something else developing.