Twelve

So how did you find them?” I said to Todd once we were on our way. “These potential witnesses.”

“I looked on the Voyager website for stories the day after the reunion, got some names, found one who lives in Cuento and still has an entry in the phone book, and that’s where we’re going.”

“One?”

“I’m sure the first one will be able to give us addresses for some more, even if just to get rid of us. Don’t you think?”

“So you’re not planning a charm offensive then?” I said. “Bad cop, worse cop, is it?”

“Might be a struggle if Mike got there before us,” said Todd. “And I bet she did. I bet she went straight from sneering at our lead in front of us to scampering off to chase it behind our backs.”

But, when we got to the house where the Beteo County alumnus of 1968 lived and knocked on the door, it was clear that the visit was a bolt from the blue.

We were up in the mountain streets, not as fancy-schmancy as The Oaks but still pretty well-to-do. California status symbols took me a while to decode. None of the houses are old and none of the gardens are big, so the Georgian-rectory-with-a-paddock-ometer I’d always used to peg poshness was no use to me now. And at first one two-tone wooden house looked much like the next one. They both looked like sheds. I knew better now. If the street ran in a straight line between one stop sign and the next, you were still climbing the ladder. If the street had pointless bends in it or—best of all—was a loop, you’d arrived. If there was a half-moon window high above the front door so it looked like you’d got an upstairs, but really it was just a dusting nightmare and made the whole place feel weird, you’d really arrived. And then there was one that incensed me. If your drive was made of tarmac, you’d only recently arrived on Loopy Avenue. But if your drive was made of red bricks laid out in a pattern, you’d had time to get your feet under you. That was the thing I couldn’t get over. There were bricks everywhere. Acres of bricks. Miles of bricks. But they were all lying on the ground, and the houses—in this state beset by wood-chewing pests of unimagined variety and appetite—were still wooden. Millions of dollars’ worth of caulk-guzzling, paint-inhaling wood was available for termites on any given day.

As we wound our way around the loops of Lassen Avenue, pulled up at the foot of a long drive with the bricks laid out in a giant-fish-scale design and looked at a house with a half-moon window above the front door and an extra arched window even higher than that, I was already imagining the people who would open the door to a sea of beige, offer us a bottle of water from a fridge bigger than my once-beloved Nissan Micra, and lead us to the farthest away spot in the ground floor where bums could be parked so we would see how huge and tidy their house was.

I’ve seldom been more wrong. For a start, the front porch was still decorated for Halloween, four days after the fact, and not because the decorations were so impressive they were worth saving. There was a cornucopial pile of gourds stacked around the front door and some cornstalks lashed to the deck supports, and all over these were plastic spiders and fake cobwebs of the dollar-store type. Luminous skeletons, dull now in the morning light, swung above the porch rail with their shrouds billowing and their plastic shin bones clacking. There must have been a seated skeleton too, because its cobwebbed armchair was still there.

Todd clucked his disapproval. “Honestly, all she needs to do is vacuum off those gross webs—Brrrrr!—and she would be good through Thanksgiving.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m new here, but I know.” I had removed the black cats and orange glittery BOO! sign first thing Thursday, cut up the carved pumpkin for compost, and let the rest of the squash stay on, with the addition of some brown ribbons and a few feathers. They weren’t turkey feathers but they did the job. “Sshh,” I added, hearing movement in the house.

The door yawned open on a woman I couldn’t believe for a minute was sixty-eight. She had chestnut curls down her back and fake lashes sweeping her cheeks as she blinked at us.

“Mrs. Heedles?” Todd said.

“Ms.,” said the woman, which explained a bit. She was divorced and not averse to trying again.

“We’d like to talk to you about Thomas Shatner,” I said.

She turned to face me. “Thomas … Shatner?” She seemed bemused; not actually able to frown much, but puzzled.

“From high school,” said Todd. She turned to face him now. She was swiveling from the hips instead of moving her eyes or her neck. The eyes I could understand. Those lashes looked heavy and the glue holding them on couldn’t be a picnic, but was her neck fused? Can you lift your neck so much you can’t turn it?

“Ah yes,” she said. “From high school. You better come in.”

The house, beyond the porch, was ready for a photo shoot. We did indeed parade through a succession of rooms, past floral arrangements and thick rugs still showing hoover marks, to get to a little den, snug, family room, and/or parlor at the back of the house near the glittering granite kitchen.

“Can I get you anything?” Ms. Heedles said. “Coffee? Juice? Water?”

“We’re good,” said Todd. “So you went to high school with Thomas Shatner?”

“I did,” she said.

“And did you keep in touch?” I chipped in.

“I did not,” her voice had dropped an octave and her mouth turned down at the corners as far as it could go. Not far, what with the collagen hiking up her cheeks and the Joker twist to her lips, but I shivered.

“But he was at the reunion,” said Todd. It wasn’t a question.

“I couldn’t say. There were a lot of people there I didn’t recognise. Some people have let themselves go so completely.”

I nodded. And some people had made themselves over so completely. I was willing to bet a lot of the class of ’68 didn’t recognise this Little Divorcée Annie.

“He had that very distinctive gap between his front teeth,” I reminded her.

She winced. She physically winced. It was an extreme reaction to suboptimal orthodontistry, even for these parts. She was swallowing repeatedly and her face was turning pale.

“Are you okay?” I said. I glanced at Todd. Had we hit the jackpot with our first throw? Had we found Tam’s murderer, who was now remembering the gap between his front teeth and the look on his face when she shot him in the belly?

“Fine,” she said, unconvincingly. She swallowed again. Then she shot to her feet and bolted away along a corridor. We heard one unpleasantly liquid belch before a door slammed shut.

When she came back, her face was mottled and her eyes were swimming. “Forgive me,” she said. “A little digestive upset.”

“Oh?” said Todd. “We wondered where you went.”

The thought that we hadn’t heard her being so unladylike as to honk up in her powder room seemed to calm her.

“What did you want to ask about Thomas?” she said.

“Can I get you some tea?” I said.

“Or ginger ale?” Todd added.

She shook her head. “No thank you. I’m not the best person to ask if you’re trying to get in touch with him,” she said. “I’m the wrong Maureen. The wrong Mo. Mo Tafoya went to the same middle school and elementary as Tam, besides high school. She might be in touch still.”

“In touch … with Tam?” I said.

“But can’t you find him in a database or whatever you call it?” she said. “Don’t you have records? He’s not missing, is he? You said he was at the reunion.”

“We’re not—” I began.

Todd laid a hand on my arm. Well, like a vise lays itself, he did. I’d have finger marks in the morning. “Thomas Shatner is dead, Ms. Heedles,” he said.

“Is he,” she replied, her voice flat. “What did he die of.” It wasn’t a question. It sounded like a lament.

“You didn’t know?” I said.

“No.” Her voice was more animated now and, as she rolled the thought around, her face came alive again too. Maybe it was just that her stomach had stopped pitching. But I didn’t think so.

“And what do you make of the news?” I said.

“What do I make of it?” she echoed. “What do I make of the thought of Thomas Shatner being dead and rotting and flies eating his eyes and rats feasting on his flesh?” she said. Pretty safe bet her stomach had calmed down. “I say good.” She delivered it like a punch.

“That sounds personal,” I said. “I know you said you fell out
of touch, but were you ever close to Tam?” Woman scorned, I was thinking.

“Close?” she said. “Of course not. Thomas Shatner didn’t have relationships with women.” I felt Todd stir at my side. “Thomas Shatner wasn’t the type to get ‘close’ to any woman. I’m surprised you don’t know that if you’re investigating his life. At long, long last.”

“Ms. Heedles,” Todd said, “we’re very grateful to you for speaking so plainly. Because we do indeed think Tam’s murder is a hate crime.”

“Hate crime!” she said. Her stomach might be settled but there was enough bile in those two words to strip the enamel off her teeth and leave her hard wood floors in need of refinishing. “What ‘hate crime’? What a lot of nonsense!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I said. “Gay bashing is a hate crime whether you like it or not.”

She stared at me in frozen effrontery, blinking metronomically and opening her eyes very wide between blinks. After a moment, she shook her head and gave a mirthless laugh. “This country is going to the dogs! And if it’s a crime to say so, then arrest me. If freedom of speech has been suspended completely, just get the cuffs out and take me downtown.”

It was long overdue. I cleared my throat, put on my best innocent voice, and said, “We didn’t mean to mislead you, Ms. Heedles, but we’re not police.”

We were out of there before the cistern on her powder room loo had finished filling. It gave a final-sounding little hiss just as the door slammed shut behind us.

“Not a towering success,” I said, standing on the porch, scraping a wisp of fake cobweb off my calf.

“What?” said Todd. “You’re kidding. We’ve got confirmation of the hate crime hunch. We’ve got another witness’s name—Maureen Tafoya. And we’ve definitely got a suspect.”

“You think so too?” I said.

“She had a flashback when you mentioned his teeth,” Todd said. “She saw him dead, for sure.”

“Can I help you?” said a voice from behind us. I was still facing the door dealing with the fake cobweb, which was sticky stuff, but I saw Todd’s eyes flash and his cheeks flush. I know the signs. I sucked my stomach in and put a smile on my face before I turned round. And right enough, there before us on the path was a young man of great beauty and enormous ego—going by the skinny fit of his outdoorsy gear, which had plenty of zips and straps but was otherwise painted on and not with a thick brush either. His face fell when he saw me.

“We’re leaving,” I said. “So no.”

He was staring at me, with a look so frozen, so hostile, so outraged by my very existence that I could feel my hackles rise. I wanted to take a handful of tampons out of my bag and juggle with them or take my bra off down my sleeve and fling it at him.

“Right, right, right, good,” he said. “I’m just visiting. My aunt Mo. Is she in? Is she a friend of yours?” He was talking to Todd, but he managed to force himself to turn to me. “Or yours?”

“The mildest of acquaintances,” I said. “And, like he said, we were leaving anyway. Enjoy your visit.”

We edged round him on the path despite the broad shoulders he had to go with his narrow hips, meaning we practically had to limbo past him. He was wearing walking boots that wouldn’t have disgraced a terminator but he didn’t seem keen to step onto the grass.

“Weirdo,” said Todd as we got back in the Jeep. Pretty Boy had parked an inch from our front bumper, his Keep Tahoe Blue and Get Down in Monterey stickers close enough for us to tell he’d had them for years and wasn’t some newbie, despite the head-to-toe Patagonia couture. I smiled at Todd. It was kind of him to pretend he didn’t know why Mr. Beautiful had nearly swooned at the sight of him then nearly gagged at the sight of me.

“Letting the side down a bit, he was,” I said.

“Huh?” said Todd.

“Random predation? Such a cliché.”

“Pred … ?” said Todd, once again being kind enough to pretend he had no clue what I meant. “I didn’t get that vibe off him, but you’re the expert.”

I considered capitalising on that admission with a bit of a nag about Trinity Solutions, then bit my lip. We had enough going on today.

It wasn’t hard to find Mo Tafoya. She was right there in the phone book, just where Todd said she would be, right there on 14th Street in the older part of town. Her path was short and made of poured concrete, the block was straight from one stop sign to another, and the house was a ranch. But at some point someone had decided to throw up a high gable and add a pointless window above the door. The Tafoyas weren’t hoboes.

They were no better at seasonal housekeeping than Ms. Heedles, though. The porch was another abandoned collection of black cat silhouettes and crêpe paper witches’ hats. At least they’d removed whatever horror had been set up in the rocking chair in the corner. It was still wound round with dirty bandages but contained no Freddy, Caspar, or random zombie.

It was no stretch to believe the woman who answered this door to our knock was sixty-eight. She had the hair I was planning to have when I was seventy-five: long, grey, and wild. She wore the clothes I was planning to start wearing when I was eighty: a hemp kaftan with a serape on top, woollen socks underneath a pair of Birkenstocks. But she had a face I hoped I’d never see looking back at me from the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were pink and her cheeks were pale. Her mouth trembled, and when she spoke, her voice was faint and wavering.

“Yes?” she said.

“Mrs. Tafoya?” said Todd. “Maureen Tafoya?”

“Yes?” she said. She glanced at me.

“It’s about Thomas Shatner,” Todd said.

“He’s dead,” she blurted. “Did you know?”

“Yes,” I said. “And we’d like to talk to you about him. If you’ve got a minute.”

“You?” she said. Todd and I shared a glance. Neither of us knew what she was asking. “I mean,” she went on, “are you the police?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. My name is Lexy Campbell and this is Todd Kroger. It was me, well us, who found him. His body. Tam. Thomas.”

“Tam,” said Mo Tafoya. “You found him, you say? You better come in.”

Inside, the house went with the hemp kaftan rather than the plastic witch hats. It smelled strongly of incense and curry and it was a realtor’s nightmare. The walls were red, all the way up to the dizzy heights of the cathedral ceiling, and the ceiling itself was stencilled in cobalt blue and a shade of orange that would put a pumpkin to shame. There were rugs and cushions thrown around like there’d just been a search in a souk and in the middle of the painted coffee table, a brass hookah with at least six coiled pipes sat in pride of place.

“Nice … ” Todd said, before words failed him.

I actually liked it, so I took over. “What a beautiful house,” I said. “So colourful, Mrs. Tafoya. How long have you lived here?”

“Mo, please. Since it was built,” she said. She threw herself down onto a pile of cushions that might have had a couch underneath it somewhere. “We moved in in 1970 as soon as we got married and we’ve been here ever since. They’ll carry me out feet first.”

“Lovely,” I said. “I mean, not death. But you know … home.”

I meant that too. People staying put seemed normal to me. People chasing all over with their stuff in a U-Haul seemed weird. I wasn’t a good advert for it anymore, seeing as how I was here in California, but I still appreciated the commitment.

“Well, Cuento’s not the place it was,” said Mo. “It used to be a community, not a dorm.”

It was tough to know how to answer that. Everyone thinks the world just about staggered on until they came along then fell to bits. It’s only natural.

“So you knew Tam was dead?” I said, getting down to business. Mo Tafoya froze and stared. “Only, not everyone seems to.”

“I read the article in the paper,” she said.

“It didn’t name him,” Todd pointed out.

“Well, no, I mean, not the first report. No, it didn’t. But he’s been IDed now. Not at first but now. They’ve identified him now.” Mo gulped when she finally managed to stop talking, but at least she didn’t bolt for the bog. She just sat there with her lip trembling and her eyes swimming and stared back at us.

“They ID’d him from the high school yearbook,” I said.

She closed her eyes and drew her brows up as if she was fighting some enormous internal agony. “Oh,” she whispered.

I watched her for a while, noticing the way her eyes darted back and forth behind her closed lids and the way she had bunched up a fistful of bright serape in each hand, twisting them as if she was trying to milk a goat. I turned to Todd with my eyebrows raised. He shrugged.

“We think it was a hate crime,” I said. “A gay bashing.”

Mo Tafoya’s head dropped forward so that her hanks of hair fell over her face like two long grey curtains. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s what it was.”

Her head was curled right down now. If she opened her eyes she’d be staring at her belly button. It must have taken decades of yoga to get a spine that bendy.

“Did you see him at the reunion?” I said. “You were at the reunion, weren’t you? You with your love of community.”

Mo lifted her head and opened her eyes. “I was,” she said. “It was a wonderful night. We can show these kids a thing or two about having a party! They think they invented all-night dancing. We were the originals.”

“And did you see Tam?” I said.

“Thomas was there,” Mo said. “I stayed away from him.”

“Oh?” said Todd. “Why was that?”

Mo shook her head and said nothing. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears.

“And what was the dress code?” I said. “For the reunion?” I added, when she didn’t answer. Because the clobber we’d found Tam in—minus the hat—didn’t say party. Californians are casual to a fault. You can go weeks without seeing a man in a tie or a woman in tights, as long as you stay out of banks, but the mom jeans and blue crew-neck weren’t partywear. I’d have expected a sixty-eight-year-old man—gay or straight—to have at least a Hawaiian shirt on.

“Dress code?” Mo said. “Sm—smart casual? Business … optional?”

“Right,” I said. “So you didn’t speak to Tam. Who did you see him speaking to?” She shrugged. “Can you remember? Did you see him leave?” She shook her head. “Who did he leave with? What sort of time?” Shrug. “Do you know where he was staying while he was in town?” Shake. “Was there a block booking for the out-of-towners? Or might he have stayed with a friend?” Shrug. “Who was his best friend at high school?”

“John Worth,” Mo said. “John was the senior class president. Captain of the football team.”

“Did he date the head cheerleader?” I said. I knew this stuff from films. It still tickled me that it was true. It was like suddenly meeting Hogwarts alumni.

“Briefly,” Mo said, reminding me these people were real.

“And does John still live in Cuento?” I said.

“His sister does. She lives in the old place. John’s staying there while he’s in town.”

“Great,” I said. “And where’s that? Do you have a phone number?”

“For John Worth?” I didn’t know if her squeak of disbelief was because I thought she’d hand his number over to a stranger or because even fifty years later she couldn’t imagine having the phone number of the captain of the football team. “No, no, no. No phone number. Why would I need a phone number?”

“Okay,” Todd said. “We’ll find him. Is his sister’s name Worth too? Did she ever marry?”

“Women don’t have to change their names when they marry, young man,” Mo said. “I’ve been happily married to my Herm since 1970 and I’m still proud to be Maureen Tafoya.”

“Well, you go, girl,” said Todd. “Pride is indeed a wonderful thing.”

Mo’s eyebrows drew up into hooks again, turning her eyes diamond-shaped. She gave Todd a beseeching look as we both stood, thanked her for her time, and said goodbye.