Chapter 3

Travelogue

Sam Bauer jarred himself back into the room. It was easy to lose yourself out here by the sea.

Mr. Turing squirmed in front of him. He turned his head towards the open window facing the Salton Sea. It was only the end of March but the intense heat that would mark the summer was already making itself known. The bright sun lay on the lake surface like a sheet.

Sam Bauer was the only private detective in the Salton Sea town of Mecca and probably the only one between Palm Springs and Mexico. Even that metropolis to the south, El Centro (birthplace of Cher) didn’t have one private detective. There was a part-timer in Borrego Springs but he had died that spring. Sam was on the third floor of an old date warehouse in Mecca, giving him an unencumbered view of the Salton Sea two miles away to the south. Being on the north end of the lake gave Sam a unique view of the sea at its thirty-three mile length, long enough for the southern shore to be lost over the horizon. From this vantage point Sam Bauer might as well have been on an ocean inlet staring out into a blue Pacific or Mediterranean expanse. In many ways there indeed was “no there there”, not because the Salton Sea lacked identity, but because it was easy to become disoriented here and believe you were somewhere else entirely.

There is no dramatic way to come across the Salton Sea from the south. You’re driving on Highway 86 up from El Centro and the road takes you through lush, vivid green flat fields that are crisscrossed with irrigation canals. The impression one gets is synthetic Southeast Asian rice paddies. Knowing that none of this belongs here in the desert gives the effect of the whole place being on life support. The parcels are small grids, unnaturally regular and neat, like fields grown in a lab. Once past Brawley the desert reasserts itself. Unlike the adjacent and relatively lush Sonoran desert of Arizona, with its Palo Verdes and iconic Saguaros, this part of the Mohave is barren with only a few Ocotillos and scrub to interrupt the sand and rock. Drive ten more miles, look to the right and you’ll see a big shallow plain that’s wrapped around a lot of water where you don’t expect any. The lighting in the desert is like the studio lighting of a local TV newscast – it’s glaring and there are no shadows. To wit, the small Chocolate Mountain range that runs along the eastern shore gives the appearance of being a giant cardboard cutout, its third dimension bleached out by the light.

The Salton Sea is a body of water 32 miles long and 17 miles wide, located 150 miles east of San Diego. It sits in desert basin two hundred feet below sea level. Not too many people have heard of it, including most Southern Californians. It's a noticeable feature in any U.S. atlas but try asking someone about it and you’re usually met with a blank stare. Though wedged between the well-ordered beauty of Palm Springs just 40 miles to the north and the fecund Imperial Valley to the south, the area around the Salton Sea is very depressed. Now ringed with failed housing developments, boarded up yacht clubs, marinas and supper clubs, there was a time in the early 60’s when it looked as if the Salton Sea would be a second California coast one hundred miles inland. But then the water started rising. It made perfect sense in its symmetry. The big salt lake hadn’t even come into existence until 1906. It was in that year that an above normal snowfall in the mountains had produced a record runoff in the Colorado River. A faulty flood gate that regulated canal water flow to the Imperial Valley burst open and flooded the plain, inundating the small town of Salton in the process. By the time the Union Pacific Railroad had stemmed the flow by dumping boxcars full of soil into the maw, a body of water had formed in the California desert whose length you could not see across. Because of its shallow depth, the sea should have evaporated in a few years, but irrigation runoff from the nearby farms of the Imperial Valley sustained it, even increasing its size. That same runoff, along with the three rivers that flow into the sea, has also been responsible for the ever-increasing salt content. The broiling Imperial Valley sun evaporates 18 percent of the sea’s volume every year, further concentrating the salt and pollutants.

Several resorts popped up in the late 50’s; housing developments followed, even a couple of yacht clubs. Game fish had been stocked in the years prior, turning the sea into a lucrative sports fishery. In the 1920’s it was trout and carp, but by the 1940’s an ever-increasing salt content killed off those freshwater species, forcing officials to introduce ocean fish such as Corvina and Sargo. By the mid 60’s rising water and constant reports of DDT and Selenium leaching into the lake dashed hopes that the Salton Sea would become a recreation and retirement paradise. It wasn’t long before the whole place went bust; the resorts, the clubs, the little two bedroom ramblers starting in the low 20’s – many are still here, abandoned, some underwater, mocking the dreams of those who thought they could give California a second coast.

Being down here in Mecca did not make for a big caseload. As a licensed investigator Sam’s job included helping investigate workers-comp claims for the plaintiff, interviewing co-workers, getting hospital records, help determine if the aggrieved party had a case. Sam could then turn around and call insurance companies and offer to investigate claims on their end. He could do surveillance work, flush out workers comp cheats, follow them around and catch them water-skiing while they were claiming to be crippled.

And so now Alan Turing sat in front of him, his expensive suit looking out of place in Sam’s office. Turing looked embarrassed; he never made eye contact, his hands never stopped moving. He made no effort at pleasantries.

“I’m afraid what I am asking you to do is a bit of cliché, Mr. Bauer.”

Sam smiled, “I like clichés. They’re a known quantity. Are we talking surveillance here?”

“Yes. My wife. I think she’s not being…” Turing paused, looking down at Sam’s desk. When he resumed he was still not looking him in the eye, “I married her a year ago. She’s beautiful, 20 years younger than I am…”

“You’re suspicious?” Sam said, trying to coax Turing gently and trying to spare his pride.

“Right. She has options – she might be using them with other men.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Do I have to say?”

Sam was taken aback. “Well, no… but I would think you would want me to have as much information as possible.”

“No. I just don’t want to say anything. I could be wrong and then what? Then I’ve just slandered my wife.”

“I’d be the only one who’ll know.”

“It never ends up that way. I’ve already given you too many details. Just follow her for a couple of weeks and tell me what you see. Take pictures. I could be completely wrong. She’s wonderful. I hate to be thinking anything bad of her. You used to be a claims adjuster…”

“Yes, for Aetna.”

“Joe Connell gave me your name. He was your boss.”

“He was several levels up, the Regional VP. I don’t think I ever spoke with him once.”

“He liked you. You made your presence known high up into management. That speaks well of you.”

“What can you tell me about your wife?”

“Well, um, very little. That’s part of the problem. I know nothing about her. I met her two years ago at the Bonaventure in LA. I was there for an industry thing; she was guest at the hotel. I still don’t know why she was there. She didn’t seem to have any friends, her parents dead for years, no family. She didn’t seem to work but lived comfortably in an apartment in Palm Springs.

“This didn’t bother you?”

“It does now. She was beautiful and I fell for her in a second. It’s only in light of my suspicions now that I’m starting to care. For the first time I’m starting to think about that detail – like it’s maybe a pattern.”

“It’s stuff you don’t know and now you wanna know.”

“Check her entire background. Just get me anything – boring, mundane, I don’t care. Follow her around every day when I’m at work then call me each evening.”

Sam nodded, looked at the man’s Hugo Boss suit and realized how stupid Mr. Turing looked in his third floor basement of an office. It made Sam uncomfortable and put his own lack of success into sharp relief. He could feel the depression coming on, the dark funk that would always hit him whenever he thought too much about these things. He had to get him out here fast.

“You know my rate – I’ll keep an eye on your wife for you,” Sam said, cutting to the chase.

“See, I told you this was a cliché case.”