The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller by Noreen Ayres

parking lot full of shadows, she asked if I was sure this was the place to be. I grinned and said of course it was. She kept bumping into my shoulder as we walked up the wooden pathway, while looking over hers. We passed 250 pounds of square meat who only said, “Good evening, ladies.”
    Inside, Lenore lit up the room with her bright pink suit, while I lay low in my dark jacket over a pale gray top. She drank a Stohle from the bottle and said, “Richard said he’d never date a woman who drank straight out of the bottle.”
    “Well, it’s sure a damn good thing Richard’s not here looking to get a date then, isn’t it?”
    “Damn right,” she said, and took a slug.
    The band was playing a not-bad rendition of “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” In a while she whispered, “Do you think it’s safe to go to the john?”
    “I think it’s safe.”
    “Where’s it at?” she said, looking around. I pointed to the alcove and she slid off the stool and managed the course across the floor. When she came back she seemed refreshed and even a little more sober. We stayed while she told me about her growing-up years and I told her some about mine. We took girl-guesses about the assistant she liked at the morgue, and we stayed until the bandleader gave his Roy Orbison mimicry of “Pretty Woman,” then Lenore began to feel queasy and I took her home.
    I said goodbye after promising to stop by in the morning so we could get her car. Then I went home to my dark house and chirping guinea pig, who scolded me harshly for leaving him again. When I bent close, he ran from the smell of Other People’s Smoke in my hair.

TEN

    M ist hung in the valley as I took Jamboree down to I-5, getting my speed up on a long stretch between fields where beans, cabbage, and every kind of pepper grow. Deep in the fields, white-shirted pickers—
rasperos
—were already bent low in the rows.
    Had one of the Does labored there? What about Little Crane? Had she worked the fields before going to the garment factory? Had she looked at the profiles of massive, Spanish-style homes everywhere in this valley and wondered how so many, so very many people, could own them?
    In the distance loomed the two largest free-standing wooden structures in the world, hangars built in the Second World War and covered in tin when steel was in short supply. They used to hold as many as six blimps in their bellies. Through their huge open doors clouds sneak in and drop rain inside.
    Lenore was with me. We were headed to pick up her car. She asked me if I intended to stay in this work a long time.
    “I have to hang around,” I said, “just to piss off my boss.”
    She smiled and said, “Well, I guess you could always take up a sideline selling Rubbermaid products.”
    “Pardon?”
    “You know what they’re calling you, don’t you? The Rubber-maid, darling. They’re calling you The Rubbermaid, because of the condoms you found.”
    “I’ll kill ’em!” I said, narrowly missing a car that cut into my lane. I flanked to the third lane and pinned the horn, while the guy stared stonily ahead.
    Lenore rolled down her window and shot him the finger, then looked at me with wicked triumph in her eyes.
    “Why, Doctor,” I said.
    “The jerk,” she said.
    I let her off at her car and went on to the lab, passing by a handful of pickets outside sheriff’s headquarters. I couldn’t read the signs because the traffic lights were in my favor.
    Joe saw me bustling in as he was coming out of the coffee room and said, “Banker’s hours.”
    “What are you, my spy?”
    He tried to sip his hot coffee. “I’ve got meetings all morning.”
    “What do you think would happen if we called a moratorium on them?” I said. “Just say No More Meetings, and never go?”
    “The world would implode,” he said.
    “I saw pickets down the street. Know what that’s about?”
    “No idea,” he said.
    I looked at him there, handsome in his blue shirt and said, “Hey, big fella, how’d