The direction of his gaze masked by his sunglasses, Joe could see that the beauties’ interest in the beefcake was pretence. They were not wearing sunglasses, and while they chattered and laughed and encouraged their admirers, they glanced surreptitiously at Joe.
He walked away and did not look back.
As he took some of the beach with him in his shoes, so he strove to take the indifference of the ocean with him in his heart.
Nevertheless, he could not help but wonder what police agency could boast such astonishingly beautiful women on its force. He had known some female cops who were as lovely and sexy as any movie star, but the redhead and her friend exceeded even celluloid standards.
In the parking lot, he half expected the men in the Hawaiian shirts to be watching his Honda. If they had it staked out, their surveillance post was well concealed.
Joe drove out of the lot and turned right on Pacific Coast Highway, checking his rear-view mirror. He was not being followed. Perhaps they had realized their error and were frantically looking for the right man.
From Wilshire Boulevard to the San Diego Freeway, north to the Ventura Freeway and then east, he drove out of the cooling influence of the sea breezes into the furnace heat of the San Fernando Valley. In the August glare, these suburbs looked as hot and hard-baked as kiln-fired pottery.
Three hundred acres of low rolling hills and shallow vales and broad lawns comprised the memorial park, a city of the deceased, Los Angeles of the dead, divided into neighbourhoods by gracefully winding service roads. Famous actors and ordinary salesmen were buried here, rock-‘n’-roll stars and reporters’ families, side by side in the intimate democracy of death.
Joe drove past two small burial services in progress: cars parked along the curb, ranks of folding chairs set up on the grass, mounds of grave earth covered with soft green tarps. At each site, the mourners sat hunched, stifled in their black dresses and black suits, oppressed by heat as well as by grief and by a sense of their own mortality.
The cemetery included a few elaborate crypts and low-walled family garden plots, but there were no granite forests of vertical monuments and headstones. Some had chosen to entomb the remains of their loved ones in niches in the walls of communal mausoleums. Others preferred the bosom of the earth, where graves were marked only with bronze plaques in flat stone tablets flush with the ground, so as not to disturb the park like setting.
Joe had put Michelle and the girls to rest on a gently rising hillside shaded by a scattering of stone pines and Indian laurels. Squirrels scampered across the grass on milder days than this, and rabbits came out at twilight. He believed that his three treasured women would have preferred this to the hard scape of a mausoleum, where there would not be the sound of wind-stirred trees on breezy evenings.
Far beyond the second of the two burial services, he parked at the curb, switched off the engine, and got out of the Honda. He stood beside the car in the hundred-degree heat, gathering his courage.
When he started up the gentle slope, he didn’t look toward their graves. If he were to see the site from a distance, the approach to it would be daunting, and he would turn back. Even after an entire year, each visit was as disturbing to him as if he had come here to view not their burial plots but their battered bodies in a morgue. Wondering how many years would pass before his pain diminished, he ascended the rise with his head down, eyes on the ground, slump-shouldered in the heat, like an old dray horse following a long-familiar route, going home.
Consequently, he didn’t see the woman at the graves until he was only ten or fifteen feet from her. Surprised, he halted.
She stood just out of the sun, in pine shadows. Her back was half to him. With a Polaroid camera, she was snapping photographs of the flush-set markers.
“Who’re you?” he asked.
She didn’t hear him, perhaps because he had spoken softly, perhaps because she was so intent upon her photography.