“We’re not playing blackjack. What happened to the saw blade?”

“No idea. I’m good for now. I’m done talking for now, Nick. Let me finish this Jell-O in privacy, will you?”

“Terry.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you dick with me I can’t help you.”

“I understand.”

“You’d better.”

BACK AT HIS DESK Nick returned a call from Laguna Beach PD detective Don Rae. Rae said they still hadn’t seen Bonnett, and one of his snitches was telling him Bonnett had split for Ensenada, down in Baja. Bonnett had a place down there. Rae had a friend on the Ensenada PD who was going to check it out. But another snitch said Bonnett was still around, looking to “punish” whoever killed his friend Janelle. Rae told Nick to be careful with Bonnett-the gun, the knife, and the temper.

“Big guy,” said Rae. “Just be careful.”

“Is his Cessna at Orange County?”

“No. And no flight plan filed, either.”

Nick thanked him and hung up. Wondered if he could handle a twenty-two-year-old six-foot-four-inch 245-pound ex-athlete bent on shooting, stabbing, or kicking the shit out of him. Nick had eight more years of wear and tear. He was four inches shorter. Got dizzy sometimes from the Vonns and that stupid rumble, what, fourteen years ago? And he was only twenty pounds over his high school playing weight of 175, which still left him fifty pounds short if it came to a fight. Some of it was flab, too, with the booze and lousy food and long hours. At least he’d pretty much quit the smokes. Getting old stank. And it still pissed him off that Bonnett’s IQ was the same as his own. Like Bonnett had stolen it or something. Dumb to think that way, he knew. It didn’t make sense.

Nick took a few minutes to compare Howard Langton’s fingerprints with the partial print on the packinghouse lock. Langton’s ten-set was on file with the California Department of Justice, along with those of every credentialed schoolteacher in the state.

Nothing close enough to work with. Nick examined all ten prints but nothing popped.

He called Linda Langton. Said he was just making sure he had the facts right, checking some things that Howard had told him about the night Janelle was murdered. He lobbed her a few easy ones, then got to the only one that mattered.

She told him that her husband had been home all night. Why wouldn’t he be? They had dinner and watched TV. Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton. Later a James Garner movie.

Her voice sounded hostile but she offered nothing at all about a canceled dinner date with Janelle Vonn.

Lobdell called a minute later, said he’d stopped off in Laguna to talk to Price Herald. Herald said he was at home with friends the night Janelle got it. The friends said the same thing. Scared but telling the truth, said Lobdell. All of them more worried about the Boom Boom Bungalow murder. Lobdell doubted that the sour old queen had raped, murdered, and mutilated a nineteen-year-old girl.

So did Nick. “How’s Kevin?”

“The doctor said he looked fine. Took some blood. On the way home I pulled the car over. Came down real hard on Kevin. I told him I didn’t want him moping and sleeping all day on the weekends and looking at me like I’m dog puke. Cussing out his teachers and his mom. I told him if he doesn’t shape up he’s out of my house the day he turns eighteen. Get a job. Or he can do what I did. Join the service.”

“There’s a war going on.”

“He knows that. I’m trying to get him to straighten up and fly right. Trying to motivate him. Shirley started crying, then telling me I was being completely unreasonable. Telling me I just make things worse.”

Nick thought about that scene. Glad he missed it.

“Nick, enjoy those kids of yours while they’re young. They hit thirteen and everything changes. They don’t love you anymore. Don’t even like you. Makes you wonder where they went. You miss them and they’re right there in front of you.”

23

NICK AND LOBDELL walked into Mystic Arts World in Laguna that evening around five. The flyers around town had said that Dr. Timothy Leary would give a brief talk on “Coming Together in the Psychedelic Age.”

The store was larger than it looked from the street. Two entrances and three long sections, and a meditation room in the back. Wild paintings on the walls. Drug paraphernalia, candles, incense and incense holders, brass gewgaws made in China and Turkey and India, odd percussion instruments, sandals and tie-dyed clothing, books on mysticism, psychopharmacology, Oriental religion, tantric and meditational texts, ancient Persian erotica, health foods, an endless selection of Turkish tobacco and clove cigarettes, eight-track tapes of “mystical” music, some of which-a sitar, Nick was pretty sure-boinged and plinked from speakers mounted to the walls on either side of a poster that said “Om Sweet Om.”

“It’s like a Sears for heads,” said Nick.

“I got my sofa from Sears. Don’t squirt any air freshener on yourself, Nicky.”

Nick inhaled the marvelously competing smells: clove and cinnamon, bay leaves and herbal teas, oils for the skin, genitals, hair. He picked up a comic book by R. Crumb. The characters looked harmlessly deranged. Then a book called the I Ching, not an autobiography of a person named Ching but a collection of oddly pithy sayings:

Thus the superior man

Takes thought of misfortune

And arms himself against it in advance.

Then a copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Nick fanned through the mysterious hieroglyphics and read a translation:

I am pure, I am divine, I am might, I have a soul, I have become powerful,

I am glorious, I have brought to you perfume [and] incense [and] natron.

Ronnie Joe Fowler took one look at them and said, “Hey, everybody, the pigs are here.”

“Yeah, we came to talk about your rape charges in Oregon,” said Lobdell.

“Plenty of charges but no crime,” said Fowler. Stocky and strong. Black hair to his shoulders. “Dismissed for lack of evidence.”

“We came for the program,” said Nick.

“Pigs aren’t welcome,” said Fowler.

A man in a loose white shirt and pants stepped in front of Fowler. Offered his hand to Nick. “And why not? It’s all God’s flesh. Hello, gentlemen, I’m Tim.”

Leary was tanned and handsome. Taller and older than Nick had expected. Sun-bleached hair, broad face. An engaging twinkle in his eyes.

Nick shook Leary’s hand but Lobdell turned down the offer.

“We want to turn on, tune in, and drop out,” said Lobdell.

Leary looked at him and laughed. White teeth. Merry eyes. “That’s entirely up to you. You know, my yippie friends in the cities have changed that to ‘turn on, tune in, and kick ass.’”

“I’m not raising my son to turn on,” said Lobdell. “What kind of advice is that to give young people?”

“We don’t give advice to children or anybody else,” said Fowler. “We want people to think for themselves.”

“You’re welcome to stay for the program,” said Leary. “In spite of Ronnie’s bad manners. Right, Ron?”

“Sure. Maybe they’ll learn something.”

“We’d like to learn something about Janelle Vonn,” said Nick.

“I don’t know shit about her,” said Fowler.

“I remember her very clearly,” said Leary. “She had a beauty like my wife, Rosemary. Janelle was so vibrant and alive. She was a piece of God walking on earth. Her energies were shaped like this-”

Leary raised both arms into a V, hands open and fingers spread. “See? It’s a bodily representation of the hexagram for peace, or tai. Receptive above, moving down. Creative below, moving up. It’s the very first hexagram in the I Ching and I recognized it in Janelle immediately.”

“We found some of your LSD in her car,” said Nick.

“My LSD?”

“The Orange Sunshine air freshener.”

“Now, I’ve heard of such a thing,” said Leary. “But I’ve never actually seen one.”