Five

I squinted at my watch and started fully awake when I saw it was eight forty-five. I staggered to the bathroom, stared helplessly at my hair, which looked on one side like my hamster’s bedding when he’d just been let back into a clean cage and gone wild, and on the other side like a patch of flattened bracken where deer have been sleeping. I wet my hands to dab at it and then shrieked as a knock came—bam, bam, bam—on the door. It sounded exactly the same as the knock last night. No doubt, I thought scurrying to answer, it was the cops again.

I opened up and got as far as “How did you know where” when a young man in Hello Kitty shorty pyjamas shoved past me, leapt across the floor, and dived into my bed.

“Emm,” I said.

“Can I stay here?” he said. He had the covers clutched to his chin, a chiseled chin with perfect stubble and a dimple you could have filled with melted chocolate and dipped marshmallows in.

“Emm,” I said.

“I saw the bed was slept in so I knew someone was here,” he said. “Can I use your phone?”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” I said.

“I’m Todd,” he said. “I live next door. In 214. But I just got up and went into the bathroom and there is a s-p-i-d-e-r the size of Godzilla’s grandpa in the shower. So if I could just stay here and use your phone to call Roger—my hubs; he’s at work—to come and kill it, that would be a really big help to me.”

“Or,” I said, “I could go and kill the sp—it for you.”

He had pulled the covers up to his eyes when I started to say the word, but he let it drop again. “For reals?” he said. “It is bigger than my first apartment.”

“I’ll take care of it for you,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, getting up and springing over to the window. He looked out, peering towards his own room, as if the spider might be following him. “You have to kill it dead. Don’t save it and lie to me. And you have to take the body away. Don’t put it in my trashcan. And you have to clear up any … residue.”

“Got it,” I said, and took a step out onto the walkway.

“And don’t bring it back in here, whatever you do!” Todd shouted after me. “And don’t drop it over the railing. And if you can’t find it, don’t tell me you’ve killed it because it might still be in there.”

“I’ve got it!” I shouted back.

“Can I still use your phone to call Roger?” he was saying as the door of 214 closed behind me.

It was the same room as mine: same size, same shape, same doors, but the furniture was carved with birds and fruit and painted in peacock colours. An enormous oil portrait of … could have been Deborah Kerr … hung above the bed and there was a gif of a waterfall looping on the eight-foot telly. Frog-shaped foot mats led in a winding path from an impressive cross-trainer near the front window towards the bathroom. I followed them to the bathroom door and peeked round it.

The Last Ditch towels had been banished. There was a hanging holder, every one of its ten cubbyholes stuffed with one of the plushest, thickest, blackest bath sheets I had ever seen. Two matching robes with satin lapels hung from the door-back hooks, and enough cosmetics to fill the ground floor of any Macy’s were crowded around the basin.

I pulled back the shower curtain—also not Last Ditch standard-
issue; more like the roof of a Bedouin tent—and peered in, poised to run if Godzilla’s grandpa was hauling itself up the near edge and heading my way. There was nothing there.

I stepped closer and looked into the plughole. Still nothing. I checked the tiles and the inside of the shower curtain and eventually, on the high windowsill, apparently about to leave of its own accord, I saw a little pale brown spider with thin, thready legs. The whole thing was smaller than a lentil.

Shaking my head, I ran through the options my promises to Todd had left me, then I put one finger on it and squished it. I held my finger under the tap, turned it on and washed away the remains, not wanting to waste a whole sheet of loo roll.

“’Tis gone,” I said, coming back into my own room. Todd was under the covers again.

“I heard the faucet,” he said. “Did you just wash it down the sink? Because they come back.”

“I didn’t just wash it away,” I told him. “It’s dead.”

“What did you—No! Don’t tell me! But what did—No!”

“It’s not out the window. It’s not in your bin. It’s not over the rail. It’s not back here with me. It’s gone.”

“Where? Don’t tell me!”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go. I need to bail a friend out of jail this morning and I’m running late.”

“Would you like to borrow a hat?” Todd said.

“It’s too hot to wear a hat,” I said.

“Hot?” he echoed. “It’s not going to be hot today. I’ll get a hat for you,” he added, standing. “The judge is never going to let your friend walk free with your hair like that.”

For the second time since I’d arrived at the Last Ditch, I laughed.

I passed on the hat, gave my key to Todd so he could “straighten up in gratitude” (I hadn’t left anything there anyway), and headed back across the tracks. A warm wind blew through the underpass like the blast of a hairdryer and already the day felt flattened out by the heat; not recovered from yesterday’s and not nearly ready for today’s. I fanned my sundress and snapped my knicker elastic to get a quick draft up there, then I was out of the shadows again.

I arrived at the cop shop just as Plainclothes from last night was leaving.

“Oh good,” she said, stopping with the front door open, balancing a coffee cup, three fat cardboard folders, and a teddy bear origamied out of folded nappies. “Mizz Visalia is outta here any minute. She’s gonna need you.”

“She’s getting bail?”

“She’s going up to Madding for arraignment.” Madding was the county town, where the courthouse was. Arraignment was … an American thing, like escrow and credenzas. I nodded with my eyes narrowed to look shrewd. “The judge is a Cuento kid, like me,” the cop said. “Mizz Vi taught him piano and probably Sunday School too. She’ll be out before they stop serving pancakes at the Red Raccoon.”

“He’s going to let a murderer walk free because she taught him piano?” I said.

“Uh, no. He’s going to let an old lady out on steep bail because three firefighters were helping her change a tire on the freeway at the same time the Bombaro neighbors heard the explosion. Look, are you coming or aren’t you?” She was straining towards her coffee cup, looking a bit like a gorilla pursing up to strip a branch of its leaves.

“Can I help?” I said.

She snapped her chin into her neck and frowned at me. “I can’t let you carry evidence files,” she said. Neither one of us mentioned the teddy bear.

“I better get a wiggle on then,” I said. “I’m going to have to bus it up there.”

The cop sighed, managed to squint at her watch despite the armload of stuff, and then contorted herself in a way I didn’t understand until I heard a chirp behind me.

“Get in and I’ll give you a ride,” she said, nodding at a dusty car sitting in the twenty-minute spot near the door. “Just need to ditch some of this first.”

“Great,” I said. “Can we swing back by the Swiss Sisters?” It was the drive-through coffee shop where she’d obviously already been. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, which I took to be a yes.

I stopped with the car door open and one foot in and called to her. “Ma’am?”

Two uniformed cops coming out of the door gave me a smirk and said, “Her name is Mike.”

“Thank you,” I said. I raised my voice: “Mike? Can I just ask—
explosion? Did the old boy literally … ?”

“Literally,” Mike said.

“Shit.”

“That too.” We both shuddered and went our separate ways.

∞

“This is my first ever hurl in a panda,” I said, minutes later. “Ride in a cop car,” I translated as she frowned. “What are the chances of you putting your mee-maw on? Siren, I mean. Not Grandma. Oy.”

“How do you counsel people if they can’t understand a word you say?” she asked me. “Nil, by the way. No lights, no music.”

“It’s a good metaphor for the challenges of miscommun—Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“I can’t comment on the case,” Mike said. She had twisted round in her seat to check the freeway as she hurtled up the on-ramp, closer and closer to the car in front, which was dawdling.

“Careful,” I said. I couldn’t help it.

“Really?” she asked me, indicating, pulling out past the dawdler, joining the traffic stream, and taking a sip of her coffee all at the same time. “You gonna help me drive? How about solving the case as well while I bark up the wrong tree, Mrs. Fletcher?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Here’s my question: why is she being arraigned on and bailed at if she’s got an alibi from three firemen?”

“Because my boss reckons a timing device was removed postmortem.”

“Wouldn’t she need to be there to remove it?”

“Someone would,” Mike said. “Thank your stars there’s a camera on that office doorway.”

That shut me up. I knew I couldn’t have gone up to a body blown apart like some kind of X-rated Tom and Jerry gag and fiddled with the wiring to make an alibi. But the cops didn’t seem to know that there was a back way out of the office building into an alley. Or to have considered the possibility of me leaving by the balcony and shinning down a very convenient pepper tree inches away.

“You know there’s a back door into the alley, don’t you?” I heard myself saying. “And a pepper tree to climb down.”

Mike said nothing for a minute or two. Then she sighed. “Yeah, we were hoping you wouldn’t think of that,” she answered eventually. “Truth is, the camera on the front door isn’t what alibied you.” I waited. “It’s the camera in the room next door, filming you through the air vent.”

“What?”

“We’ve been working on busting a little prostitution racket that uses those offices.”

“Jesus Christ, I thought that was the motel!”

“With Noleen watching? Shehh, right.”

“I was filmed the whole time I was in there? Isn’t that a violation of something?”

“Did you read the rental agreement?”

“Of course not.” I was thinking hard about the two hours I had spent in the room. Mostly I had been flinching, cowering, and yoga breathing. Mostly. “I picked my nose,” I said.

“And wiped it on a Kleenex and put the Kleenex in the trash,” Mike said. “Yeah, I know. Your momma brought you up right.”

I slid down in my seat and looked out the window. Everyone picks their nose. The Queen picks her nose. And craps. And farts and lifts the sheets to sniff. There’s no need to be embarrassed, and a trained counsellor is the last person on earth not to understand that.

“I burped at a funeral once,” Mike said. “Through a microphone, in the middle of a eulogy.”

“I once trailed a toilet paper tail all the way from the dispenser back to my seat in a restaurant. On a first date.”

“I don’t use a Kleenex when I pick my nose,” Mike told me. “We done?”

∞

The courthouse was bewildering: jammed with bodies, ringing from its shining floor to its buzzing strip lights with beeps, shouts, slams, laughter, weeping, and somehow, above anything else, a thousand whispered conversations, their intensity making up for their lack of actual volume so it felt, sitting in the long corridor, like being inside a beehive with a queen-off brewing.

The courtroom itself, when I got inside it about quarter to ten, was an oasis. Set up to hold a jury, press, public spectators, and lawyers as well as criminals (alleged criminals? defendants? prisoners? accused Americans?), this morning it was home to two bored-looking uniformed guys, one on each door, a secretary-type person, and a little rag bag of sorry-looking individuals in the front row—possibly lawyers, possibly their clients (clients! That couldn’t offend anyone), possibly both mixed together. Then a door in the blonde wood panelling swept open and the judge swirled in like a dementor—black robe, black eyes, black looks for everyone. The uniforms and the secretary sat up and the little straggle of whoever-they-were in the front row cowered even lower.

We all rose. Because the Honourable Judge Something I Didn’t Catch was suddenly presiding. It was exactly like being in an episode of Columbo. Except that I usually understood Columbo, and every word uttered in Judge Dementor’s court that morning was beyond me.
People stood up, people sat down. They said things calmly, then a bit louder. The judge said numbers, banged his gavel, and it all started again. The only time I had ever been more mystified was watching American football. Here in the court there weren’t even colour-coded pom-poms or people being stretchered off to help me decipher the doings.

So my attention was drifting a bit when, in the middle of a long string of numbers and letters, I heard “Visalia Maria Bombaro” and sat up. Mizz Vi being brought into court all in orange made even the most hard-bitten lawyers give a double-take and look at the judge. Aw, come on, they seemed to say. What next? Stamping on puppies?

She was on the arm of a buxom cop, at least a foot taller than her, who glowed with good health and copious bronzer, so it was partly by comparison that my client looked like such a withered little twig.

She had always been slight, her calves thinner than her ankles above high-heeled pumps that made her totter as she walked, and her neck reedy above her collar, making me think of a baby bird stretching up, cheeping, out of its nest.

After a night in jail, though, one jaded sigh from a public defender could have blown her away. Her hair, usually a translucent mauve-tinged cloud, was lying flat on her head with stripes of her pink scalp showing through. Her lips wobbled, and even from where I sat, I could see that one corner of her mouth was wet with spittle. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap, not quite managing to stop them trembling. The Amazonian cop looked at how Mizz Vi’s feet didn’t reach the floor, turned, skewered the judge with that look I had learned was called stink-eye, and walked away with mouth pursed and head shaking.

This time, because I cared, I paid more attention and I gleaned some sense from among the streams of words. “Collusion in the unlawful killing of Clovis Alfredo Bombaro” was pretty hard to miss and also “flight risk.”

The Amazonian cop tutted loudly and then, when the judge swung round to glare at her, she pretended she was sucking something from between her teeth, doing a lot of work with her tongue and one of her acrylics to convince him.

Bail was discussed, figures batted back and forth, and then one of the lawyers, a scruffy sort in a pale-grey shiny suit and brown loafers, pointed out that Mizz Vi’s assets were, to all intents and purposes, frozen, since her spouse had just died. The judge rubbed his chin and I thought (although it might have been my imagination) that he turned slightly away from the buxom cop, who I also thought (and this was not my imagination at all) terrified him.

Recognizance, surety, property percentage … my mind was wandering again when all of a sudden I heard something that snapped me back like a bungee. Someone in the court had said my name. Whoever it was, was still talking.

“… mental-health professional currently counseling Mrs. Bombaro and present in court today.”

Mizz Vi was searching the room with her swimmy, pink-edged eyes. When she caught sight of me, she lifted a hand as if to touch me, although we were separated by twenty feet. A little cry escaped her and she mouthed “Lexy” too quietly for anyone to hear. Seeing a friendly face was just too much for her. Her bottom lip quivered and she fished a hanky out of her sleeve and pressed it to her eyes. There was a collective swishing sound in the court as everyone present said something that included the word shame. The woman on one side of me said “… should be ashamed of himself,” and the man on the other said, “Damn shame.” The overall effect was of twenty strangers shushing Mizz Vi gently. She cried harder, overcome by their kindness maybe.

“Ms. Campbell?” said the judge.

“M’lord?” I blurted. “Your grace-judge-justice … Yessir?”

“Honor,” said the judge coldly.

“Of course,” I said. “Your Honour. Your absolute and obvious Honour.”

“You are Mrs. Bombaro’s … ”

“Marriage guidance counsellor,” I said. Someone snorted. Who could blame them? “Family therapist?” I tried. “Yes, therapist.”

“And you will continue to be available to Mrs. Bombaro if she is released on recognizance?”

“I … ” I said, thinking of my missed plane. And maybe because I’m Scottish he thought I meant yes. Aye, aye, captain. Well, I suppose I’d just said m’lord.

“Good,” he said with a curt nod. A nod that could have cracked a walnut under his chin. “And how would you describe your standing in the community?”

“Uh,” I said.

One of the lawyers stood up. “Ms. Campbell is a legal permanent resident, the spouse of a prominent citizen, and a registered notary public.”

“Who’s willing to cosign a bail bond?” said the judge.

“Yes,” the lawyer said.

“Hang on,” I said, but then I glanced at Visalia again. She was peering over her hanky and her eyes, while mostly still glistening with tears, were also now shining with faint hope. “I’m divorced. But otherwise, what he said. And yes.”

The judge nodded then went back to long knotted strings of total gobbledygook and numbers again. The lawyers understood him, clearly; they chipped in with argumentative strings of their own. Without anything that sounded like a resolution to me, suddenly His Honour banged the gavel again and Mizz Vi was helped to her feet by the Amazon, now grimly pleased—she gave the judge a look that said lucky for you you did the right thing this time—and the old lady went tottering away into the depths of the courthouse again, waving her hankie over her shoulder in my direction and making the court collectively say “aw” because everyone said something with the word adorable in it this time.

“You coming?” Mike was at my shoulder.

“Coming … back to Cuento?” I guessed.

“Coming to do what you said you would,” said Mike. “Job one’s easy. Job two’s a doozy.” She strode out of the court with me scuttling after her.

“Job two?” I said when we were out in the mayhem of the corridor again. I couldn’t imagine what would ever make me bring a kid to a courthouse, but several local families seemed to think a trial was just an excuse for a picnic. There were children of all ages from infants to hulking, sulking teenagers all over the benches now, little ones marching up and staring at other little ones, big ones stealing surreptitious glances at other big ones. Aunties and grannies were cracking out the Tupperware left and right, passing round paper napkins, pouring Coke into red plastic cups. People had cut up fruit. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an uncle wheel in a grill and start some burgers.

“Mizz Vi has to ID the body,” Mike said. “And you need to hold her hand. Like you said you would. To the judge.”

“I … ” I said again.

“Yeah, like that,” Mike said and walked away laughing.

When she came out through the metal door twenty minutes later, though, I’d have needed a heart of stone wrapped in lead to deny her anything. I was feeling a bit better anyway, because the whole bail bond deal took less than fifteen minutes and got done right there in the hallway. The bail bondsman cracked open a hard briefcase with a printer inside and showed me where to sign. It might have taken longer if I’d read what I was signing, but the guy seemed busy and I was filled with the milk of human kindness in the form of an egg salad sandwich donated by the matriarch of a family sharing the same bench. She’d poured me out a cup of coffee from an enormous flask too and shushed me with a wink when I realized it was only half coffee and the other half was rum. I soaked up some of it with a slice of warm banana bread and was dabbing my lips with a Snoopy napkin when Mizz Vi, in a pink dress and a little pink cardi now, but still on the strong arm of the buxom cop, came pattering my way.

“Lexy!” she said. “Oh, Lexy! Oh, Clovis! Oh!”

“Now you take care, won’t you?” said the cop. Her face was made for scowling at prisoners—I imagined her whole résumé to snag this job could have been just a mug shot—but she was smiling at Mizz Visalia, a fierce and toothy smile that didn’t reach up as far as her frown to lift it.

“Oh, Val!” said Mizz Visalia. “You’ve been so kind! Everyone’s been so kind! Tell the girls in the back there I said goodbye, won’t you? I feel just awful that I didn’t get to go back and visit with them again. They were so very sweet to me in the night. I couldn’t stop crying, Lexy. I disturbed them all and some of them were very … drained.”

“Hammered,” said the cop.

“But they were so kind! Oh! Oh! What am I going to do?”

The short answer was that she was going to go and look at the corpse of her husband that had been blown apart. To what extent I didn’t really care to imagine, although I knew I’d find out for sure pretty soon.

“Now, now,” I said. “Take a couple of deep breaths, Visalia. Big breath in and let it all go.”

Mizz Vi took a big breath in and used it to say, “Is that banana bread I can smell?” She clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. The keeper of the Tupperware had heard her and pressed a slice on her, with a cup of the “coffee” to wash it down.

“Oh! You are so kind!” said Mizz Vi. “The police do their best, I’m sure. But dinner last night was a protein bar and breakfast this morning was … well, they called it oatmeal.” She took a bite of the bread and slurp of the “coffee” and smiled. “Just the way I like it,” she said.

I believed her. We had touched on it in therapy, the way Visalia medicated with peach slings when Clovis got “that way he gets.” She called them smoothies and said they helped her “cleanse.” Clovis told me they were three parts gin to any peach involved and “that way he got” meant anytime he tried to resume the marital relations that she’d renounced in the early nineties. I was never sure if she blunted her sense with booze and then welcomed him back or if she drank till she passed out and that made him stop asking. It wasn’t the healthiest marriage I’d ever seen, put it that way.

In the back of Mike’s unmarked on the way to the morgue, Mizz Vi certainly seemed pretty cleansed by the coffee. She had stopped yelping and I had never heard her speak so highly of her husband.

“I can’t believe Cousin Clovis is gone,” she said.

“Clov—” I began, but since he was dead I was no longer their marriage guidance counsellor, so it was no longer my business.

“He was always so very alive,” she said. I nodded. If it was none of my business, then it wasn’t my place to contradict her. Two weeks ago she had thrown a cushion at him in my office and called him a slug. “He was a force of nature,” she said now. I nodded again. Forces of nature technically included drizzle and ground fog. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”

“Go to your sister in Bend, Oregon?” I suggested, since that was what she had been planning, quite gleefully, to do without him twenty-four hours ago.

“I wasn’t going to sign,” she said. “I was going to agree to what he had asked me.”

“You weren’t going to sign the divorce papers?” I said. I caught Mike’s eye in the driving mirror. “What had he asked you?”

“To go back to Trapani with him and spend our golden years where we belong.”

“Back?” I said. I knew both Clovis and Visalia had been born in central California, in different branches of the same family of exuberant recent immigrants, hence the names.

“Back,” said Mizz Vi firmly. “Back to the true life of our hearts. To the lemon groves, to the harbor side, to the shade of the olive trees … with white-glove concierge service and a full spa.”

“Clovis and you were going to Sicily?” I said. “What about … ? Now, don’t react. Remember what we talked about. There is nothing talismanic or dangerous in the speaking of a name. Agreed?”

“I never disagreed,” said Visalia, for all the world like she hadn’t spewed pea soup while her head spun any time I’d raised the subject before.

“What about Barbara?”

Mizz Vi hissed like a snake. Like a set of straighteners on damp hair. She drew back her lips and hissed.

“Have it your own way,” I said. I wasn’t on the strongest ground anyway, because of course “Brandeee” didn’t really have three es. I just pretended it did because I hated her. “But I thought Clovis was meeting Barbara at the San Francisco airport and going to the Cayman Islands?”

“He dumped the bitch,” said Mizz Vi. “He told her the store was closed, he was renewing his vows to me, his wife, and together we were going home.”

Home. To a place they had never been except on holiday. To a place their ancestors had left. It was the American way, and it bugged the haggis out of me. I had lost count of the number of times someone had found out I was Scottish and cried, “Me too!” Then I’d ask how long they’d been in the States and they’d clarify: one of their great-grandparents hailed from Paisley; the other seven were from God knows where and my “fellow Scot” had been born and raised in Missouri. I blinked at Visalia trying to remember what we were talking about.

“So … why were you driving to our therapy session separately?” I said, but Madding isn’t a big town, so Mike was slowing and turning already.

California. The missions were painted the colour of clotted cream with gingerbread pan tiles and verdigris window frames. It’s very pretty and, having found a look that worked, California—like Her Majesty and Anna Wintour—stuck with it. High schools, nail bars, Whole Foods, dog pounds … there’s nothing that doesn’t look better Mission-style. Including, as we now saw, morgues. Mike pulled up at what would be valet-parking for check-in if this were really the resort hotel it looked like, and I hopped out and ran round to haul Mizz Vi to her feet.

The hairdryer was set at blowtorch now, at nearly lunchtime. We stepped inside to the air-conditioning and stood waiting under the safe disposal of sharps poster for Mike to park and join us.

“I want to thank you, Lexy,” Visalia said.

“No need,” I assured her.

“First you saved my marriage and now you’re saving me from going through this alone. I can’t tell you how much that means. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Shoosh,” I said. “That’s what I’m … the saving the marriage bit is what you paid me to … and this is … don’t mention it.”

“I’ve never been more truly grateful for anything in my life.”

“Stop.”

See, the thing American people forget with their rampant sincerity and their open expressions of heartfelt gratitude is that whoever you’re thanking has to think up something to say back. In Dundee, if you were waiting at the mortuary with a pal to ID her husband’s body, she’d have said:

“You sure you’ve got time to hang about? You can go, if you like.”

And then I could have said:

“Nah, you’re all right.”

Which does the same job and nobody’s squirming.