Laguna Heat Page 11

  ELEVEN

  The proprietress of Forest Avenue Books welcomed Shephard with one of the overly grateful smiles worn by the owners of floundering businesses. She was old, pert, and leather-faced, and studied Shephard with the intensity of a hawk over a good field. He introduced himself and brought Hope Creeley’s Bible from his pocket.

  “I’d like to know if you sold this book recently,” he said.

  The woman introduced herself as Sally Megroz. When she took the book, her bony hands dipped from the weight.

  She flipped to the first page and brought her face close to the paper, nodding.

  “That’s me,” she said. “Sold it early in the week. Let’s see just when it was.”

  She worked her way to the register desk and pulled a dusty, flimsy cardboard box from under the counter. With a lick of her finger she parted the stuffing of pink receipts. She brought three close to her face before she nodded again and looked up.

  “Monday the twenty-fifth. Three dollars because it was used. Only book I’ll sell used.” She handed Shephard the slip and stepped back. “You know about Hope Creeley, I suppose.” Her voice was suddenly accusing.

  “Yes,” he answered. “Did you know her?”

  “Did I know her? Of course I knew her. She was a regular customer. I don’t understand why there are always enough police to write parking tickets on my customers but not enough to keep something like that from happening.” She met Shephard’s stare with a defiant raise of the chin.

  “We do what we can, Mrs. Megroz. What did the person who bought this Bible look like?”

  “A very nice older man. Came in about two. I had him pegged for religion or self-help when he walked in. I try to guess which section they’ll head for. I was right.” Self-help or religion, he thought, Jesus. She returned the receipt to her derelict box.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Shorter than you but taller than me. Medium kind of build. Older gentleman, graying and very sweet. He wore a beard. He was dressed in old clothes, so at first I thought he was one of the new winos in town. They come in for the summer from the harsher climes, you know.” Come south from Sacramento for the summer, Shephard noted.

  “Did you talk with him?”

  “Yes, in fact he admired the painting there.” She turned and pointed to a violent seascape hanging on the wall behind her. A ship was being dashed on the rocks of some unforgiving coast, its crew flinging themselves into the sea. He thought of his ruined print of Hopper’s Nighthawks.

  “Admired it?”

  “Very much,” Mrs. Megroz said defensively, as if Shephard’s judgment in art was suspect, or perhaps retarded. “He said the strokes were very confident and the colors well orchestrated. I added that the emotion was what I liked. Not that all paintings should be so extreme. But I admired the gumption, you might say. He said that the painting was obviously done from the heart, not the brain.”

  “What else? Anything?”

  “That is all I remember.”

  “And he paid cash?”

  “He did.”

  “Tell me,” Shephard said as he brought the Identikit sketch from his coat pocket. “Have you ever seen this man?”

  Sally Megroz brought the drawing to her nose and for a long time it didn’t come down. When it did, her face had gone pale. “Monday. That’s him,” she said quietly. “Why is such a nice man as that wanted?”

  “He killed Hope Creeley, Mrs. Megroz.” Shephard let the statement take effect before he continued. “And anything you can tell me may help us find him. Unless you’d rather have me writing parking tickets.” He looked through the glass door to the cars jammed into the parking slots on Forest Avenue.

  “He got one,” she said.

  “One what?”

  “A parking ticket!” Sally Megroz’s voice climbed an octave as she spoke. Her eyes narrowed, as if she were getting some kind of revenge, long overdue. She recalled how he had paid the money, gone to the door, then turned around and come back in. He said the police were giving him a ticket so he may as well browse a minute longer. “Damn the cops again, scaring away my customers,” she added. “But I eat my words, sir. I’m damned happy about this.” Her chin trembled and tears welled in her eyes.

  Shephard steadied her frailty with a consoling hand. “You’ve done well, Mrs. Megroz,” he said, inwardly grinning at his good fortune and the high bureaucratic irony of a killer being issued a parking ticket. “Can you tell me what kind of a woman Hope Creeley was?”

  Sally Megroz’s face hardened into a mask of loyalty, compliance, eagerness to help. She described Hope Creeley as a very private and very kind woman. She was a great reader of biography and history. She had recently brought a collection of pictures and a diary to the Historical Society, a donation that had thrilled both Mrs. Megroz and the society director.

  On the inside track of his memory, Shephard heard again the second caller on Creeley’s answering machine.

  “Dorothea?”

  “Dorothea Schilling. We were so happy to get them. Hope was very aware of the sweep of history in our little town.” Shephard put the Bible back in his pocket. Sally Megroz took a step forward and spoke confidentially. “If you want to know about her, you should get Dorothea to show you the photographs and diary. Really, she was more an acquaintance than a true friend. A very private woman.”

  Like Tim Algernon, the very private man, Shephard thought. And like Algernon, a former member of the prestigious Surfside Sail and Tennis Club of Newport Beach.

  “Did you see his car?” Shephard asked hopefully.

  She turned her pale gray eyes to him and shook her head slowly. “At my age, these old eyes miss a little. I could see Tammy the meter maid writing a ticket out the window and the car was red. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you.”

  “You’ve been very helpful.” Shephard gave her a card and shook a cool, unresisting hand. “If you think of anything that might help us, give me a call. Immediately, if you see that man again.”

  He stopped at a pay phone to relay the parking ticket search to Pavlik. The crime scene investigator had rebounded since his grim encounter with Hope Creeley; his voice was excited again, his words coming quickly. Robbins and Yee had started early on the body, he said. Robbins had called to report that again turpentine had been splashed in liberal amounts over the body. Yee’s lab had already issued a preliminary cause of death, unremarkable considering the evidence: death by burning. Pavlik took to the parking ticket search like a bird to the sky, ringing off in a hurry and telling Shephard to call in an hour. “Let’s nail this sonofabitch,” he said.

  Dorothea Schilling of the Laguna Beach Historical Society looked historical, Shephard thought as he introduced himself. She was bundled in a pink sweater, even though the day was already eighty and the musty Society rooms were unventilated and stifling.

  After Shephard asked to see Hope Creeley’s recent donations to the Society, Dorothea led him to the back of a second room and pointed to a lumpy couch. “Right here is where you sit,” she said. With his back to the doorway, sinking into the couch so far he wondered if he’d ever get back out, Shephard waited for her to return. Some time later she was back, pushing a dull gray cart with a loose wheel that squeaked and wobbled. Finally she was before him, smiling, offering a low, wide box that bulged at the sides. “I thought you might like some peace and quiet,” she said.

  He studied the box. “How about the diary, Dorothea? May I see that too?”

  She shook her head gravely. “I’m sorry, but Hope’s desire is that the diary remain sealed until five years after her death. It’s a matter of—”

  Shephard brought out his badge. “I forgot to mention, Dorothea, that this is police business.”

  She nodded, brows furrowing. A moment later she was back with a heavy, leather-bound book.

  He felt like the prisoner of an overly kind aunt, but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant. She brought him a cup of instant coffee so strong that it was
undrinkable, so hot that the plastic spoon had wilted into uselessness. He thanked her profusely, smiling as she hobbled off to the front room cinching the bright sweater around her neck.

  The box contained newspaper clippings taped to notebook paper. The articles were yellowed and weakened by time, and the tape had collected a dark residue of dust around its edges. But each sheet was dated in the upper right corner, and they were arranged chronologically. Shephard set the stack on the couch beside him, glanced at the vile coffee, and started at the beginning.

  Hope Augustine had first surfaced in the press in 1943, when she was pictured in the Laguna Week News as one of several local women honored for her work with the Red Cross. She was third from the left in the group shot, a dreamy smile on her face, her hair held severely back with a clip. The article said that she had recently returned from service overseas. Later that year she was again pictured in the Laguna Week News, this time for organizing a volunteer support group for the South Laguna Hospital. The group called themselves the Angelitos—Little Angels—and the other women were like Hope Augustine: young, pretty, happy. They had dedicated themselves to outpatient care and fund raising. Hope was president. She was quoted succinctly in the short article: “I think work like this is the least we can do in wartime.”

  A year later she was pictured in the engagements column of the same paper. Her betrothed was Burton Creeley, an accountant and partner in the newly formed Surfside Sail and Tennis Club in Newport Beach.

  No wonder she was a member, Shephard thought. Had she known Tim Algernon then?

  Apparently, Hope Augustine had become Hope Creeley and moved to Newport Beach, five miles north of Laguna on the same unspoiled coast. The Newport Ensign picked up her story again in late 1944, when she was pictured as the new bride of businessman Creeley. He was beside her in the wedding shot, a frail, dapper man who was five years her senior. The couple appeared regularly through 1944 and 1945, favorite targets of party-going photographers. They were pictured aboard yachts, at ground-breaking ceremonies for additions to the Surfside Club, in tennis garb at post-tournament parties. One photograph was similar to the one he’d seen in Creeley’s house: Hope and Burton standing on the Surfside court, a trophy at their feet. The happy couple continued their public lives through the forties, always surrounded by the postwar gaiety and newfound opulence of the Surfside Club.

  Then Burton Creeley was dead. An article dated September 26, 1951, said that fishermen had discovered his body dashed against the rocks of the Newport jetty. The next day’s Santa Ana Register said that Creeley was known to swim every evening in the ocean, sometimes in the channel at Newport, sometimes south in Laguna Beach where the currents were known to be treacherous. Burton Creeley was officially classified as the victim of a swimming accident by the Newport Beach Police on September 29.

  But on the next day, the Register ran a short article with a large headline, claiming that Creeley had been seen by two friends in Laguna shortly before the accident had taken place. A follow-up story stated that the friends turned out to be two gas station attendants who “believed” they recognized Creeley from newspaper photos. A Newport Beach police captain wryly questioned how a body could wash six miles north, around a jetty, and end up in the Newport Channel in less than a night.

  The press lost interest, and Hope Creeley disappeared from the public eye for twenty-four years.

  Shephard felt a keen sadness as he looked at the next picture. It was dated November 28, 1975, and showed Hope Creeley, thin and undeniably without happiness, staring back at the photographer. She had organized a support group for the South Laguna Hospital again, and again they called themselves the Angelitos.

  Hope Creeley had never looked so far away from heaven, Shephard thought. The women around her were young and vibrant, as she had once been, but Hope Creeley looked pained. Her eyes were still large, but her face had shrunk around them, sagging heavily at the mouth. A year later she was pictured again, this time receiving an award from the hospital’s board chairman, whose beefy grin dominated the one-column shot.

  Hope Creeley’s forced and very minor smile was the last one of her public life.

  Shephard turned the last clipping onto the pile beside him and lit a cigarette. A sad life and a sadder death, he thought. But why would an avenging God come to make His misery hers? Hadn’t she had enough?

  The cigarette tasted raw and bad. He dropped it into an ashtray and watched the smoke lift upward through the stale air. Behind him, from the Historical Society lobby, he heard Dorothea Schilling sneeze, open a drawer, dryly blow her nose. She doesn’t even know yet, he thought.

  He hefted the leather-bound diary onto his lap. As he scanned through the book, he saw that the handwriting evolved from a graceful, purposeful flow to a more pragmatic curtness, and finally into wild scribbles that made up the last several entries.

  The opening passage was dated January 1952. Four months after her husband’s death, Shephard thought. He felt the pain in her words as he read:

  I have fulfilled one half of my New Year’s resolution by beginning this diary, and I’ll fill the other half when I join the Angelitos again. The truth is I’m awfully tired of the support group, even though momma and everyone else tells me to get out of the house and participate. But every time I feel any energy, it takes me back to a time when such things meant something to me. Now, being part of a group is just like taking dead flowers and putting them in the vase I used to put Burt’s roses in. And speaking of that vase, I put it on the kitchen table today and watched the sunlight break through it into a small rainbow. It was lovely but I cried. I feel him everywhere. Mother says I should slowly remove such things from my life and only hold onto the good memories. This seems like good advice, to hold onto only good things. But I’m not sure what to do with the vase. Can good things hurt, too?

  Shephard pondered the question respectfully as he turned to the next entry. It was two months later, March 21, 1952:

  I’m still having the cramps and jitters inside me. When I think of loving Burt, they get worse and it’s like my mind is trying to forget but my body wants to remember. Sometimes I wake up so hungry for him that my face is wet from tears, and other things are wet too. It isn’t easy for a woman to be alone after being loved by her husband so much. I know that I was not the only woman he made love to, but I know that he never loved her the way he loved me. She is a slut, but I’m not bitter. There is simply no room for bitterness. My heart actually feels like there is something around it, squeezing sometimes. I shopped for two again today, but I felt bad by the time I got to the cereal and had to put my sunglasses on. I still haven’t joined the girls at the hospital yet. But so sweet, some of the letters the patients have written. Maybe when I put some weight back on. Ten pounds down from only a hundred to start with and all the clothes look funny. Still never hungry. It feels so strange when men look at me now.

  The next entry, made on March 26, 1952, unnerved him:

  Poor Wade Shephard and poor Colleen. Just because bad things happen to us is no reason to forget the bad things that befall others. Wade and I had dinner once last week but we didn’t find much to talk about and it was a very dark event. He got drunk and I did, too, but it was not a cheerful drunk but a gloomy one and over early. People like us should be good for each other. But I would rather be with someone whose life has been easier on them. I’m sure he thought the same of me. Joe was still very nice to arrange it. He has been so good, getting his pharmacist to fill the prescriptions for me, and no charge, even. The pills, they make me feel dumb and warm and forgetful. I guess sadness gets bigger when you share it Wade has lost weight, too. Must have looked funny to the others at the club, two weight-losers and mate losers. At least Burton was an accident. I have no doubt that Azul killed Colleen, he was such a violent and uncaring man. I’ll never understand what so many of the women saw in him. Joe was most helpful in helping me prepare my testimony. Good God, my problems are small compared to Colleen’s. Or Wade’s.
Wish I could sleep regular hours. Sleep, now there’s a powerful drug.

  Shephard finished the entry and tried to picture his father and Hope Creeley dining in some dark corner of the Surfside Restaurant, forcing conversation and drinking for relief. But Hope Creeley’s cramps and jitters seemed to transfer themselves to his own stomach. The passage about Wade and Colleen was violation. He felt awkward, angry—the same feelings that he had had as a child, a fist-clenching, biting, wildly violent passion to destroy the mention of his mother’s death, yet to preserve her memory inviolate. Shephard lit another cigarette and let the calming nicotine swarm his brain. The memory of his mother was not memory at all, he thought, but the creation of it. He had never known her. Yet he had labored to imagine what he might have known. And the Zaharas and Creeleys of the world were intruders, the memory-wreckers. Safe and warm, he thought. What better judge than me to edit my own past?

  A trickle of sweat dropped down his back as he wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Drop it, he thought. Healing waters. Unprofessional, intrusive, destructive. He pressed ahead. The next entry was made one year after Burton’s death, September 26, 1952:

  Exactly a year now since Burt drowned. It was a lovely day today but it made me remember because seasons will make us do that Even without the lights and decorations, if December came around you would still think of Christmas. It’s in the blood, I guess. A very busy month, moving to Laguna. The Surfside was simply too haunted for me—having to see the things that made me happy and even the things that didn’t, like Helene. And all the people talking behind my back about her and Burt. Nobody says anything to me. I feel sorry for her. But Laguna is small and beautiful and not so many people know me, so they don’t look at me with those damned pitying eyes. Everything is growing so fast, so many new people. Something inside of me is changing. I don’t have the pains and cramps so often and my bones don’t feel like they’re made of iron anymore. I got out of bed early today. I no longer like my bed so much. Not that I want another man. Think about Burton so much still. Had my first period in a year last week. Think I was bleeding when he died. My new neighbors here are quite nice. The Ottens on the left and Laras on the right. The little Lara girl is so cute, all cheeks and freckles. Of all the things Burt left me, I wish that one of them could have been a child.