Phoenix Noir

“No. Get this—10236 North Forty-eighth Street. Body in the pool.” I saw the fresh-sawed stubs on the palm tree by my face and had a brain-wave. “There’s a ladder lying on the ground out front—” The Mexicans had been trimming the palm trees; I’d seen the dead palm fronds on the curb. “It’d be a killer shot from the roof.” And maybe the cops wouldn’t see her before she got it.

The click in my ear coincided with silence; somebody’d turned off the falls. I pocketed the phone and rejoined the party.

One cop was missing; so was the Mexican woman. The palm tree trimmers were edging slowly toward the side of the house, eyes focused on the cop talking to Cooney. The little blond boy had joined Chloe on the lounger—not willingly.

“I wanna see!”

“Knock it off, Tyrone! Mom’ll be here any minute! Get back here, I said! The cops are gonna put you in jail if you get near that pool!”

“Aw, will not, fuckface!”

“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I said. I don’t have kids myself, but I have nieces and nephews. I learned the Voice of Doom from my siblings.

Tyrone gave me a startled glance.

“Siddown,” I said, in the same tone of voice.

He did, muttering “Crap” under his breath.

“See?” his sister hissed at him.

Sirens were coming. I could hear the roar of a fire engine over the scream of an ambulance. 911 was taking no chances.

A minute later, the pool gate clanged open and four EMTs charged in, intent on rescue. One grabbed a pool skimmer and began trying to snag the body with it.

“Hey!” The cop grabbed his arm. “The guy’s dead, god-damnit! This is a murder scene!”

“He’s not dead till a doctor says so,” a female EMT informed him.

“Back off!” He’d wrestled the skimmer away from the EMT and stood with it braced like a quarterstaff, daring any of them to mess with his body. “He’s fuckin’ dead!”

“He will be if you don’t let us get him out of there!”

“What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. Here?” said a voice behind me. Whoever it was had a pretty good Voice of Doom too; it cut through the argument like a hot wire through ice cream.

I turned to see a tall blond woman in a sun hat, Hawaiian shirt flapping open over a white bikini. Chloe and Tyrone’s mother; the breast implants must be hereditary.

“Cooney!” she barked. “What are you doing? What’s—” She caught sight of the guy in the pool and stopped dead, her mouth hanging open far enough for me to see that one of her molars was gold.

Cooney came trundling over, sweating and apologetic.

“It’s okay, Pammy—”

“Don’t call me Pammy! Who are you?” she demanded, swiveling a laser eye on me. “Are you in charge here? Who’s that in my swimming pool?”

“Tom Kolodzi, ma’am,” I said, offering her a hand. “Do you know the man in the pool?”

“Of course not!” she snapped, taking my hand by reflex. Hers was cold and damp and covered by a latex glove. She let go fast, peeling the glove off with a snap. “Sorry. I was drowning squirrels in the garage.”

“Squirrels?”

“Ground squirrels,” she said through her teeth. “They eat the goddamn plantings. Are they going to get that—him—out of the pool?” Her eyes kept sliding toward the water, where the body had resumed its dead man’s float. Another siren—police, this time.

Slamming car doors and a radio crackle, and the brass was with us. The homicide lieutenant didn’t glance at me, and made short work of the EMTs, who retreated, muttering, under the edge of the patio roof, from which misters had begun to spray. The Mexican tree trimmers had evaporated during the cops’ confrontation with the EMTs. The scene-of-crime people arrived on homicide’s heels, and a police photographer was taking shots of everything in sight, including me and the squirrel-killer. I wanted to look up at the roof to see if Paulie had made it, but didn’t want to draw attention to her if she had.

The dead guy beached, flotsam in a navy-blue wool suit. Everybody leaned forward to look at his face—not least, Pammy.

I was looking at her, and saw the blood leave her face and her mist-on tan go yellow. Saw her glance, laser-sharp, at Chloe. Chloe’s mouth fell open, and her mother grabbed her shoulder, fingers digging in, before she could squeak.

“Take your brother in the house, darling,” Pammy said, in a pleasant mommy voice. “He doesn’t need to see this, and neither do you.” Chloe nodded like a robot, and took Tyrone’s hand. He didn’t resist; he’d seen the dead guy’s face too, and was the color of skim milk.

Nobody looks good soaking wet and dead, but this guy probably wasn’t a GQ model on his best day. Maybe fifty, with a good-sized gut, long strands of graying hair on a balding head. Weak chin, and a nose that was trying to make up for it.

There was a little black hole in his shirt front. The shirt was white, pasted to his body; I could see the curly black hairs on his chest through the cloth. I looked away in time to see Cooney, who was talking to one of the plainclothes people, glance in my direction and shake his head with a puzzled frown. Time to go.