She was driving over to Hoffman Drugs when her pager bleeped. It read MEET MUNOZ 8210 DE LONGPRE SOONEST. “Dammit,” she said. She took a left on Spaulding Avenue, and then a right, and five blocks farther along De Longpre she saw two police squad cars and a silver Oldsmobile with a red gumball on the roof. A straggle of neighbors and passersby were hanging around outside—the hyenas, Bonnie called them—sniffing out tattered scraps of excitement from somebody else’s tragedy.
She climbed out of the car, and one of the officers lifted the police tape so that she could duck underneath. “The cleanup lady, right? Rather you than me, sweet buns.” Bonnie gave him the finger.
A sharply sloping concrete forecourt led down to the basement garage. The building itself was a three-story block of apartments, stucco-fronted and painted a rusty ocher. A flight of red tiled steps led up to the front entrance, where Lieutenant Dan Munoz was leaning against the railing, smoking a bright green cigar and talking to Bill Clift from the coroner’s department.
Dan saluted Bonnie as she climbed the steps. “Hi, Bonnie. You got here quick.” For a police detective, Dan was almost laughably handsome, with curly chestnut hair and a clean-cut, movie-star jawline. It was his eyes, though, that Bonnie tried to avoid. They were brown and liquid, and she always felt that he knew everything about her just by looking at her—from the recipe she was planning to cook that night right down to the washing instructions on the label of her panties.
Today Dan wore a blue silk suit and a splashy red-and-yellow necktie, and he smelled of Giorgio aftershave. He could have been going out to a swanky dinner instead of examining a crime scene. Bill Clift, on the other hand, was freckled and scruffy with a sagging gray linen coat and eyeglasses that had been glued and reglued and finally taped around the bridge with a grubby Band-Aid.
Dan put his arm around Bonnie’s shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. “If you get on the scene any faster than this, you’ll be able to roll up the rugs before they start murdering each other.”
Bonnie nodded toward the half-open front door. “What’s the deal?”
“Come inside and I’ll show you.”
“I don’t know. I’m real tied up at the moment. I only stopped by because I was on my way to Hoffman’s.”
“Well, it’s a shocker, believe me. Three kids—four, seven and nine. The scenario is, the mother’s away, seeing her elderly folks in San Clemente. The nanny’s been given the night off. The father goes to the kids’ bedroom and shoots them at point-blank range with a pump-action shotgun. Then he goes back to the living room, puts the gun in his mouth and redecorates the wall with the back of his head.”
“Jesus,” said Bonnie. “Any idea why he did it?”
“Just flipped, I guess. Didn’t leave a note or nothing.”
“Where’s the mother now?”
“Still here.” He flipped open his notebook. “Mrs. Bernice Goodman, age thirty-six. That’s why I called you. She’ll be staying with friends this afternoon, but she’s pretty anxious to get the place cleaned up as soon as she can.”
Bonnie hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “Okay—let me look it over. Are you and your people all done here now?”
“Sure, we’re done. Bill, you’re done, aren’t you?”
“All bagged up and ready to roll.”
Dan ushered Bonnie through the front door into a small L-shaped hallway. The walls were cluttered with group photographs of bowling teams, their eyes red, like werewolves, from the camera flash. In one corner stood a large, prickly pot plant and next to it a table crowded with decorative brass paperweights.
“In here,” said Dan. “This is the living area. Well, dying area, I should say.”
Bonnie found herself in a large, cream-painted room. The vertical slatted blinds had been closed, so the light was muted. The room was furnished in a modern, minimalist style, cream leather upholstery and glass coffee tables. The only exception was an antique-type display cabinet in one corner, fussily filled with rosettes and silver cups and bowling trophies.
Although it was so plain, the room had an atmosphere that made Bonnie draw in her breath, as if she had suddenly stepped up to her chest in cold water. Most of the trauma scenes she attended were weeks or even months old. But here the feeling of violent death was so recent and so overwhelming that for a split second she thought that she would have to turn around and leave and never come back.
“Come on,” Dan coaxed her, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.
On the opposite wall hung a large abstract painting: a blue triangle and a white square and a small red dot. It was titled Serenity III. On the facing wall there was a wide, fan-shaped spray of blood and pinkish clots of brain tissue, and a roughly oval hole in the plaster that Bonnie could have fitted her fist into, surrounded by dozens of tiny black speckles. Pellet holes.
The cream leather couch was spattered and smeared all over with blood. As Bonnie walked around it, she could see that the white rug immediately behind it was stained with a glutinous ruby pool. The children’s father had shot himself, and what was left of his head had fallen backward so that, juglike, it had emptied his blood all over the floor.
Dan came and stood beside her. “Sure made his mark, didn’t he?”
Bonnie nodded “He surely did. But that’s the difference between men and women, isn’t it? When women kill themselves, they always make sure they do it on a wipe-clean surface, or in the bathtub. Men—what do they care? They sit right down in the middle of the living room and bang.”
“You sound like you take it personal.”
“Do I? Maybe I do. It’s like adding insult to injury, don’t you think? It’s like the man saying, ‘Not only does my life not matter anymore, and not only does our relationship not matter anymore, but the home we built together, that doesn’t matter anymore, either. Who cares if I spray my head all over it?’”
She looked up at him and said, “Yes, Dan, I do take it personal. I’m a woman. And besides, I have to clean it up.”
“You won’t get that bloodstain out, will you?”
Bonnie hunkered down and ran her hand through the carpet pile. “This is wool and nylon mix. The trouble with wool is, it leaches up blood, and it won’t let go. I have a new enzyme solvent I could try … but you’re going to be left with a brownish mark here no matter what.”
She stood up. “I guess it depends on the widow’s insurance. She could always shift the couch back to cover it.”
Dan raised one eyebrow.
“What?” she said. “I’m trying to be practical, that’s all.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Dan, not every woman can afford to recarpet her home just because her husband was selfish enough to off himself in the middle of the living room.”
“I guess.” He looked around and shook his head. “It just makes you wonder what went through his mind, doesn’t it?”
Bonnie nodded toward the wall. “That was his mind. Look at it now.”
“So what do you think that means, when it comes to the bigger picture?”
“I guess it means that there’s a whole lot of difference between who we are and what we’re made of.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Except that I’m relieved to see that this wall has a washable eggshell finish, so the blood won’t have soaked right through to the plaster.”
“Well, good deal,” said Dan. They looked at each other, and they both knew that their hard-cooked offhandedness was only an act. Nobody who walked into this house and saw what had happened here could fail to be horrified. The muted light, the blood, the terrible emptiness. The endless droning of a single fly.
“How about the bedrooms?” asked Bonnie.