No Human Involved - Barbara Seranella Read online

  She eyed him suspiciously from beneath the brim of her hat. "You the fella the city sent?" she asked.

  "I'm just taking a walk," he told her.

  "Funny place to be walking," she said. "I'm supposed to meet a man from the city You sure you're not him?"

  "No, ma'am. What are you meeting about?"

  "We think they're dumping raw sewage here. We've had certain, uh, material wash up in the lagoon. The city denies it, so I'm meeting with an inspector to show him."

  "You think it originated from here?"

  Instead of answering him, she pushed forward. He followed and was treated to a history lesson of the wetlands and of the local environmentalists ongoing battle with the Summa Corporation to restore the marshes.

  Ignoring the "NO TRESPASS1NG" signs, they walked inland through a narrow path cut through stalks of wild licorice and Indian tobacco. The woman called out the various names of the plant life as they passed by At the Lincoln overpass she paused and pointed downward.

  "Last month we strung a net across the channel here," she explained. "We've been trying to crack down on dumping? She pointed to the buoys floating across the water. Mace noticed that she had cut her hand. A thin trickle of blood dripped out of a rent in the parchment-like skin. He pulled a hand-kerchief from his pocket and blotted the blood as she explained how the net was weighted. Mace reached down and pulled a stick out of his shoe; a large spider ran down his pants leg and he shook it off. Foxtails wove into his socks and pricked his ankles. He wished he'd worn jeans instead of slacks.

  He retumed his attention to where the woman pointed. If the body parts had been dumped upriver, they would have been tangled in the net. That meant the arm had been dumped downriver from Lincoln. That still didn't account for the sand and vegetation. If the murderer meant to bury the arm, how had it been transported over the six-foot berm bordering the Ballona Creek Channel? Did the guy think twice about burying his dismembered victim, dig a piece up, and toss it into the water? It would have been safer to leave the meat-laden bones to the feral dogs and turkey vultures that patrolled the marsh. After a day nothing would be

  left but scattered bones.

  They climbed through an opening in the chain-link fence erected by the city to designate its claim on the property and walked along the four-foot-wide easement bordering the banks of the concrete-enclosed creek. The woman pointed to a great blue heron flying low over the water. The two of them paused to admire the bird's grace in flight, long legs trailing, neck curved delicately as it scanned the water for food. Spotting something, the bird dove; a sigh of appreciation escaped the two humans' lips. Mace could understand this woman's passion to preserve a habitat for these animals. The water rippled subtly, he noted with surprise, away from the ocean.

  "Tide's coming in," the woman said, as if reading his thoughts.

  At the Culver overpass they again climbed through a hole in the fence, crossed the busy street, and then went back down into the wetlands. The land wasn't as flat nearer to the sea. Patches of sow's thistle vied for space among the invasive pampas grass. Feathery white plumes nodded in the gentle breeze. The breeze also carried a medicinal scent from nearby eucalyptus trees. Mace noted that the pods were abloom, encouraged by the previous fortnight's downpour.

  They came to the charred remains of an abandoned building. She explained that the concrete foundation and blackened timber were all that was left of the old UCLA crew house.

  "Loyola Marymount University begged Howard Hughes for the use of the building after UCLA moved closer to the marina," she explained. "Hughes owned all this land. UCLA didn't want Loyola to get it. Burned down mysteriously a couple years back." She put a knowing finger to the side of her nose and fixed Mace with a look that said she had her own suspicions about the origins of that blaze.

  Mace nodded and studied the site of the old crew house. The overgrown trees encircled what was now only a blackened collection of pilings. Dense overgrowth held fast wind-broken branches. The lifeless boughs hung there, dead and brown. Long slender leaves pointed downward and the silk from spent pod blossoms intertwined with the twiggy stems. The trunks of the trees were swathed in shabby robes of peeling bark. They made Mace think of ancient bearded Druids crowded around some smoldering campfire.

  "We used to have a problem with transients camping out here," the woman said. "But why should they sleep outdoors when there are perfectly sound and conveniently abandoned homes just a few miles to the south?"

  Mace looked to where she pointed, but all he could see were the red tile roofs and whitewashed walls of the Spanish-style buildings that marked the northernmost point of Loyola Marymount University The chapels delicate steeple was silhouetted against the hazy morning sky high on the Westchester bluffs. White rocks spelled out the letters, LMU, on the hillside.

  The woman was referring to the ghost town on the other side of the bluffs, the formerly thriving suburb of Palisades Del Rey, a collection of single-family dwellings with ocean views. The free zone was the area's official name, an innocent-sounding euphemism for what amounted to the forced eviction of an entire community.

  Mace nodded. "I used to work with a guy whose family had a house there. They held out and fought the city's claim of eminent domain."

  "They were smart, then," she said. "The people who sold at the first price the city offered didn't do so well. Have you been up there lately? It's eerie. Paved streets leading nowhere. A few of the homes are still there, waiting to be moved somewhere else, somewhere other than the flight path of the jumbo jets."

  "The guy I worked with had some high-placed friends in the city government," Mace said. "That always helps."

  Mace learned that the wetlands of Ballona, until just recently were wetlands in name only Deprived of the water that had once seeped out to nourish the marsh, the teeming ecosystem had been laid to waste. The wetlands were just now starting to come back. It was thanks to the leaking flap gates, she explained, that separated creek and marsh. Mace pointed to a plant that he recognized as being the same as what he had recovered from the arm.

  "That's pickle weed," she said, glancing casually at the gray-green succulent leaves, "grows pretty much exclusively in the marsh here to the south of the river. You'll also find some up in the Malibu dunes."

  "And this?" he asked, pulling a prickly pod from a bush.

  "Castor bean. lt's poisonous, you know."

  He didn't think the victim died of poison. He shook his head and allowed himself a wry smile.

  She pushed past him, intent on the ground.

  "Aha!" she said, spotting something. She bent down and scooped up a handful of sandy dirt. "You see this?" From the handful of earth in her hand, she plucked a pinch of sprouts and rubbed them between her fingers. She sniffed at the ground-up plants, then gestured for Mace to do the same. The plant had a familiar bite to it.

  "What is that?" he asked.

  "Tomato plants." She stared at him as if he were the stupidest person to ever cross her path. "How the hell you think these got here? Sure sign of raw sewage. Don't they teach you fellas anything?"

  Behind the woman, a green Chevrolet with a city seal on the passenger door pulled up to the curb. She turned when she heard the car door open.

  "There he is," the woman said. "Let's see him deny it now." She put two fingers to her mouth and whistled shrilly in the direction of the fat inspector getting out of his car. The dog at her heels raised his head and waved his tail feebly They waited while the man waddled to where they stood, using his clipboard to help him balance.

  "We have proof," the woman proclaimed. She shoved her damning evidence under the inspector"s nose.

  The inspector smoothed down his tie and straightened the plastic name tag clipped importantly to his lapel. He looked down at his clipboard, then pointed at Mace. "Who's this?"

  Mace flipped open the leather case that held his badge. "Police." He winked at the woman. "Answer the lady"

  "We've given your complaint serious attenti
on." The man consulted his clipboard. "On the evening of January thirtieth, engineers at the Hyperion Water Treatment Plant recorded an incident. We had heavy rains that evening if you remember. A quarter-inch had been predicted."

  "I remember that night," the woman said. "It rained for hours. We were watching Roots; it was part eight."

  "That was part of the incident." The man made a deliberate show of fingering his official badge and hitching his pants before he found his place in his paperwork and continued, obviously relishing his man-with-the-clipboard moment. "Fifty-one per-cent of the viewing public were also watching. At the first commercial, so many toilets flushed simultaneously throughout the city that water pressure dropped to almost nothing for six minutes."

  Mace nodded; he'd read about that.

  "What goes down," the inspector continued, "must come out. The engineers at Hyperion, who had been monitoring the already brimming sewers all evening, were forced to take emergency action. There was no way the facility could handle the resulting flood of waste water. They were forced to open the emergency flood gates at the Culver Boulevard pumping station."

  "I knew it," the woman said, patting her dog on his bony head. "We were right."

  The inspector rolled his eyes.

  "I've been instructed to assure you that it won't happen again." He busied himself marking something off on his paperwork. No doubt to be filed in triplicate somewhere, Mace thought.

  Mace excused himself and walked back to study the banks running along the marsh side of the creek. Three feet up the bank he found a residue of scum: tiny balls of styrofoam, traces of salt, a thin layer of sand that came away easily when he brushed his hand across the concrete. He returned to his car and drove to the Coast Guard station. There he studied tidal charts. On the evening of the 30th, he learned, between the hours of 6:39 RM. and 11:06 P.M., low tide dipped to 1.5 feet. Excited now, he returned to the flap gates and shined his flashlight into the culvert beneath the easement. He called the department from a pay phone and spoke with the watch commander.

  "I think I've figured out how the arm from the Ballona Creek victim ended up where it did," he told the duty officer. "I'm going to need a diving team."

  The divers met Mace at the flap gates downstream from the UCLA crew house. The flap gates that had swung open when the level of water in the creek dropped below the flooded level of the wet-lands, releasing God-knows-what-all into the ocean. The arm must have been carried upstream by the returning tide, Mace deduced. If they were lucky, maybe the team would recover a head and, more importantly a mouthful of teeth. Twenty minutes later, the divers surfaced with a grim find: two decomposed human legs, flecks of red polish still visible on the toenails. That was all, no head. Mace called Carol and asked her to meet him at the coroner's office. By noon, they were huddled over the rotting limbs.

  From the length of the bones and degree of muscle and fat, Carol was able to estimate stature. She explained to him that by the age of twenty-five, thigh and shin bones reach the stage of maximum development known as ossification; the bones harden into their final length. She checked the soft tissue of the bone for hardening and found it still soft, putting the girl's age at somewhere in her late teens or early twenties. They made casts of the feet and of the whole legs and reconstructed their original shapes from estimations of water absorption. The culvert was drained, but nothing more was found that was pertinent to the case. A skull was recovered, obviously canine.

  He and Carol spent the rest of the afternoon going over every inch of the body parts. "At least they're a matched set, a left and a right," she said, showing Mace that she could be an optimist. Then they got lucky X-rays revealed a bullet from a .22 lodged in the muscle of one of the quadriceps, perfectly preserved. They photographed the ballistic fingerprints of the bullet and added this new evidence to the file.

  Unfortunately there wasn't much else. They were unable to find the bullet's entry wound. No doubt the surrounding charred skin left from the heat of the bullet had disintegrated quickly in the shallow salt water. Carol found spots of motor oil on the right calf in what appeared to be a spray pattern. They then addressed the question of how the legs and arm had been severed from the torso. They discovered ligature marks left by a heavy chain. The reddish links of bruises on the wrist and in similar indentations on the skin of the ankles indicated that the bruising had occurred while the victim was alive. Carol measured the width and length of the links with a micrometer. She announced that two different chains appeared to have been used.

  That night, Mace bought a whole chicken and took it to his father's house. Wrapping thin chains around the tips of the bird's legs and wings, he attempted to pull the bird apart over the double sink in the kitchen. Digger watched from a chair with mild curiosity

  "Wouldn't it be easier if you cooked it first?" he finally asked.

  "No, it has to be raw," Mace answered. "But you've got a good point." He grabbed a cleaver and hacked at the joints. The legs pulled apart from the carcass, still tearing flesh and muscle in mimicry of his partial corpse. "Good thinking. Thanks."

  Digger smiled and asked, "You gonna make potatoes, too?"

  Mace couldn't wait to tell everyone how Digger had come through for him.

  5

  MUNCH SPENT SUNDAY HUDDLED IN HER CAR. Traffic was light. She couldn't stop yawning in between the shaking and sweating. She wondered if they were looking for her. Her bones ached. She smoked and waited.

  At midday she got out and stretched. The oleanders provided a thick screen from the street. She opened the trunk of the car and found an old army blanket that she wrapped around her shoulders. She'd read once that oleander was poisonous, and she wondered briefly how many leaves she would have to chew. With her luck, she'd just get more sick, if that were possible. She returned to the cave of her back seat and huddled in the blanket.

  ***

  By four o'clock on Monday morning she decided it was a bad hour to be awake, no matter where you were. The night is at its darkest and coldest. It's a lonely hour, not that you would want to meet anyone else out and about. She watched the clock on the dashboard rotate. Occasionally she felt the rumble of the ground as a big truck passed. At five-fifteen the sky began to lighten. By six, lights were coming on in the homes around her. The boulevard began to hum as the residents around her went about their daily business. She was out of cigarettes.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and over her clothes. The green knit top she had grabbed in Saturday night's flight fit reasonably well and almost matched the paisley jeans she had snatched. She wished she'd taken the time to grab some socks.

  She crossed the road and tried to get her bearings. She saw a car approaching and looked down. Then she realized she was being ridiculous. She doubted very much that her picture had made the evening news or the morning papers. Guys were getting killed all the time, all over the city and you never heard about it unless it was some rich guy or something. Flower George hardly qualified. God, was he really dead? She could barely believe it, but she had been there—so she knew.

  She looked ahead of her, farther up the road, no sense in looking back. In the distance, a yellow Denny's sign glowed. She stumbled down the shoulder of the boulevard under cover of the bushes and tall weeds. She wasn't sure where she was, but they probably wouldn't think to look for her here. In the Denny's bathroom she washed her face and counted her money It was still only fourteen dollars.

  Cigarettes, she needed cigarettes.

  She rolled up the cuffs of the pants and tucked in the shirt before she went back out into the restaurant. The cashier made change for her. Munch put her quarters in the machine and pulled the knob under the Pall Malls. When she lit a match, the smell of sulphur made her stomach grip in anticipation. "The Monster" was calling.

  "Gonna have breakfast, honey?" The waitress was too cheerful in her pink dress and white sensible shoes. Her smile was sincere enough, it just hurt the eyes. A name tag over her right breast read,

  "
HI, I'M RUBY."

  Munch counted the change in her hand. "No. I ain't having nothing."

  "Let me give you a cup of coffee."

  "Why would you do that?"

  "You look like you could use a little help."

  "I'1l have a cup. Black. But I'll pay for it." She wondered if the waitress was a lesbo or something.

  "Here you go." Ruby slid a stack of buttered toast and jam in front of her. "The last guy didn't want his order of toast. I'd already made it. Shame for it to go to waste, don't you think?"

  Munch shrugged and eyed the woman warily. When Ruby went to the back to get an order, Munch took a bite. The hot food opened the floodgates of her salivary glands. The buttered toast was even better with strawberry jam. This was the way she imagined food would taste in the country fresh off the farm. She ate the whole plateful.

  The waitress returned to refill her coffee.

  "Thanks."

  "You're welcome, hon."

  Munch drank the second cup, left a thirty-five-cent tip, and pocketed the rest of the jam. When the waitress was busy with another customer, she left. The Denny's was on a busy intersection; cars rode each others' bumpers six deep in every direction. She stepped out into the street and sized up the neighborhood. It was mostly businesses: car wash, locksmith, an Italian deli. Across the street was an auto shop identified by a faded wooden sign lit with a solitary spotlight. Happy Jack's Auto Repair appeared to be open. The lube bay doors were raised and a mechanic labored under the hood of a large sedan. In the office window a red and white sign propped up with a vase of daisies read, "NOW HIRING." She crossed the street and tried to ignore the cramps in her stomach.

  The office of Happy Jack's Auto Repair was a permanently anchored trailer set on cinderblocks. Three wooden steps led to a front door made of galvanized steel that looked as if it had been kicked in once or twice. Filing cabinets and posters advertising Gabriel Shock Absorber specials filled the back wall.

  The door was open and there was a man inside speaking on the phone. He was fiftyish and heavy-set. She climbed the stairs and rapped lightly on the door. The man acknowledged her presence with a raised index finger, then swiveled around till he faced the back wall, leaving her to study the bald spot on the back of his head. His tone was consoling and he repeatedly rubbed his temples with a callused hand as he spoke to his caller. She sat on a bench under the window and leafed through a Road and Track magazine till he finished his call.