Kind of Blue by Miles Corwin Page B

afternoon meeting with Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, in the high desert. Lancaster, the northern tip of the county was more than a hundred miles from San Pedro, the southern tip. Fortunately, because it was a weekend, traffic was light. I sped through downtown, cut over a few freeways, and began to traverse the San Gabriel Mountains. I rolled down a window and inhaled the rich acorny scent of the chaparral. But after I reached the summit and started to slalom down the mountain, I was hit with a blast of desert heat and quickly rolled my window back up and flipped on the air conditioner. San Pedro had been cool and misty, in the low sixties; now it was at least thirty degrees hotter. Southern California, I thought, must have more microclimates than a Brazilian rain forest.
    At a roadside lookout bordered by spiky Joshua trees, I stopped and stretched my legs. Everything seemed outsized here: the vast dun-colored expanse; the big sky, scorched white at the horizon and electricblue overhead; the limitless vistas. I looked back at the San Gabriels, the escarpment veined with snow that sparkled in the brilliant light.
    I hopped back in the car and continued my descent. When I reached Lancaster, I exited the freeway and swung down a road rippling with heat waves, past lizards darting across the asphalt, past a few isolated ranches studded with metal grain silos. I had never visited this edge of the county and was amazed at the beauty of the high desert in springtime. Entire hillsides were thick with orange poppies, ablaze in the late afternoon light. When I spotted a rural mailbox flanked by bales of hay, I juddered down a pitted dirt road and stopped in front of a weathered white clapboard farmhouse with a broad wooden porch. I climbed out of the car and stretched. The air was still; then a hot puff of wind from the Mojave riffled the leaves of the cottonwoods that shaded the house.
    “Quiet out here, isn’t it?”
    Startled, I whirled around and saw Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, walking around the side of the house, clutching a can of Bud. She was a big woman, not fat, but definitely packing too many pounds to be wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless blouse. From a distance, she looked like she was in her twenties, but when she approached me, I saw the fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the crinkling at her neck from too much desert sun and realized she was about forty.
    “Come on,” she said. I followed her to a wooden deck behind the house. I set my briefcase down and we sat side by side on canvas lawn chairs, looking out onto a vast furrowed field. She finished her beer in a swallow, flipped open an ice chest, grabbed two more, and handed one to me. I shook my head.
    “Smart cop,” she said. “When we were still together, Pete got caught drinking on the job one afternoon and got suspended.”
    “Today they’re so hard-assed they’d probably fire him,” I said.
    She popped open her beer, twisted off the tab, and tossed it into the dirt. “I’m not really a drinker, despite this,” she said, raising the can. “At least not a drinker like Pete. It’s just—the past few days. Well, you know.”
    She slurred her words and her eyes were glassy and bright. I figured she was mixing antidepressants with her beer. There was something brittle about her manner, and I sensed that if I started peppering her with questions she might shatter.
    “What do you grow here?” I asked, motioning toward the fields.
    “Onions.”
    “Doesn’t smell like onions.”
    “We just planted last month. Don’t start harvesting until late summer. When I married Pete and I moved to Pedro, there were still some tuna canneries out on Terminal Island. I’d smell that tuna and think of the onion fields back home.”
    “You grew up here?”
    She lit a Winston and waved away the smoke. “Yeah. This is my folks’ place. After I left Pete, I moved back home with our daughter.”
    “You really came from different worlds.”
    She took a few