“A lot of names and numbers?”
“Anybody who matters. Guy definitely had big-name friends.”
“Shit.”
I walk a few blocks to my car and drive west toward Coldwater Canyon, turning onto Mulholland and feeling lost like I always do up here. My headlights cut through dark, hypnotizing curves. Houses appear like small stars in the thicket; the scents of jacaranda and cottonwoods blow over me. You can feel the money in the seclusion, like a small heaven feeding off the land below, but there are stiffs here too: overdoses, suicides, drunken drownings in pools—the kinds of deaths that figure in battles over wills and possessions. I find Michael J. Gallagher’s house—set back a ways, but no gate. Low-slung and angled, long windows, a roof of strange degrees, as if something landed from another planet. An odd silver, a glass jewel.
A small dog’s claws clatter in the foyer; a Latina voice shoos it away. She opens the door. Doesn’t know what’s happened. She lets me in and hurries to her purse, hands me documents I don’t want.
“Legal,” says Maria Sanchez. “I very legal.”
“I’m not here for that. I’m Detective Sam Carver.”
I pass her papers back and give her the news. She wobbles a bit. Doesn’t make a sound, steadying herself on a table beneath a mirror. She points me into the living room—three steps down, Iranian carpets, lived-in stately furniture, rich fabrics surrounded by abstract canvases on white walls and a long window looking out into the dark arroyo. She’s from Colombia and has worked as Gallagher’s cook and housekeeper for seven years. She sleeps here some nights in the last room down the far hall. Maria’s in her early forties. A few threads of gray run through her long hair, but her face is barely lined, and she reminds me of a haunted, regal character in a John Rechy story.
“How could this happen to Mr. Michael?” she says, her fists tight in her lap, her eyes blinking. She doesn’t know much. Gallagher worked long hours, and few people came to the house, except for an occasional office party. He spoke of no enemies and never seemed at odds. He drank wine and gin and listened to Celtic—that word comes out of her mouth funny—ballads and American blues. “Music always,” she says. “I no see him much. He left notes. We sat by the pool every Wednesday morning and drank coffee. We talk about my chores and my home. About his place too. Ireland. His family came to here a long time ago. He told me about making buildings. One time, he spread drawings of buildings all over the pool deck.” She takes a breath and relaxes her fists. “He stood over them. He said it was like what God felt when he imagined the world. I don’t think a man should think like he knows God’s mind. But I understood. Out of nothing, something comes.”
“Your English is good.”
“Not so good,” she says, trying a half smile. “I take classes at the church. I teach to new people coming.”
“Were you sleeping with him?”
She turns away and blushes. I open my notebook and write her name in pencil.
“No. Not like that,” she says. “That is foolish for someone like me. You can’t live in the life you clean. I did not know Mr. Michael that way. But people have other things.”
“How well did you know his wife?”
“Miss Miranda. She gone more than two years ago. Never come back. I don’t think. I never saw her again. They seemed happy and then they weren’t. I don’t know why. They were unhappy before she left. You know how people can be that way just being together.”
“What did she do?”
“Miss Miranda was a lawyer. She worked for Disney.”
“Did he have other women?”
“Not my business. He never bring anyone here.”
We walk out by the pool. Still and quiet. I can feel Gallagher, see where he played God by the water. It must have been tempting to think so, to look out over the skyline and see a glimmer from your imagination rise in darkness. I stand a while longer. Suspended. Maria breathes beside me. “Sometimes,” she says, “a mountain lion comes. Mr. Michael and I saw him one night. We shut off all lights in house. He walked along the pool. Quiet. He stopped and looked around. He looked lost, but I think he was waiting for another lion. None came. Mr. Michael put his arm around me. He never do that before. We stood for a long time, even after the lion go.”
Chapter 3
My detective won’t get much from the maid.
Sweet little Maria with her bus pass and her novenas.
It’s cold in this curve. My Beemer’s lights out, I’ll wait and follow him back to town. My man: Detective Sam Carver. Don’t you think it’s a pretty name? Blunt but with an air of mystery, the way the last r rolls out and softly vanishes. I keep a picture of him from an old newspaper story. Black hair a few centimeters too long, trim waist, straight shoulders, and quick, dark eyes. Sharp profile and hands that move with a bird’s grace; he’s got that look some men have who know secrets that whisper around you like falling snow. I’ve never heard his voice, his sound. I wonder about it. Is it a rasp? A slight baritone? I’m sure it has gravity. You can just tell. I know him from afar. We have never met. That will change. But, to be honest, I do know him. I hacked him. Slid in on spyware. No firewalls. Laughable password: Cop1. I mean, c’mon. So much in a laptop. Diaries, pictures, bank statements, confessions, and dreams. We pretend it’s all safe, locked in a cloud or sealed on a zip drive. Have Snowden and the Russians taught us nothing about how easy it is to peek? Hacking is a hobby I picked up from Justin Ionelli, the guy (young man) who took my virginity (during the act, in a narrow bed in an attic room aglow with computers, he chanted “Dylan, Dylan, Dylan” in my ear as if summoning a Buddhist deity) when we were both underclassmen at Stanford. Justin was a noodge, but very smart in the parallel-universe kind of way. He spun code like spirals of DNA, floating it across screens and setting it to music. Beautiful. Really. He taught me how to manipulate twists of numbers and glimmers of letters, so that scrims fell away and the ether—that other dimension—shone with the hardness of pure light. “It is,” Justin once said, his fingers tapping wildly, his boy-genius exuberance uncontainable, “like being a magician.”
I like this new game I’m playing. There’s a trace of smoke in my dress from my little barrel fire. Before the earlier, let us say, incident, I was at a Mahler concert at Disney Hall with Jacob, a movie producer who’s crazy about me and conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The music was good but nowhere near as enticing as the flame afterward. I can still see the beauty of those embers and specks of Gallagher’s blood vanishing into the air. Like a Mayan offering. This is my thinking: Architects, of which I am one, can get away with murder. We are precise, every line a purpose, every angle a need. We anticipate and correct. Did you ever navigate an easement? Untangle the subterranean? Well, then, you don’t know. We aspire to perfection and delight in calculation. We defy gravity.
Yes, I will be good at this. One never thinks one will become a killer. We don’t start out that way. Do we? There’s a devilish epiphany to it, though. But the tears afterward troubled me. Perhaps I’m doubting myself, questioning my cause. If I were still in analysis, this would be many hours of chatter-babble with Dr. Peterson, a pleasant pale-eyed man, but how could he pretend to know me? Anyone. I wonder what our session would sound like if I told him about Gallagher?
“You what?”
“Killed a man.”
Gulp, startled twitch of his eyes, readjusting glasses, notepad slipping off knee.
“Dylan, this is such a setback. We were making progress. How?”
“With a knife.”
“No. How in your mind?”
“Oh, that.”
I wink.
Talk, talk, talk without absolution. I’ve stopped all that. Quit the meds too. I’m free, back to me, not a blurry composite courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry. Clarity is ascendant. I see like a raven. The side effect, though, is smoking. I smoke now. A small price. It’s so peaceful out he
re, moonlight in the thicket. I crack the window and light up. The match strike, the smoke. I love the way it fills me.
I tilt the seat back and settle in. I play it over in my mind, the way Gallagher’s body slipped from my embrace to the sidewalk. He deserved it. The why is not important now; I’ll revisit the why and play out the rules of vengeance and forgiveness after it’s all finished. I’ve done a lot of that already. I’ve considered every variable, like the grid of a fine building, every weight a counterweight, every angle a balance of beauty and purpose. There will be others. Bodies, I mean. Oh, yes. Did you know that soldiers who killed close up in battle carried inside them the face of the first one? But it faded over time and became ingrained in a mosaic of other faces until it was nothing special, just a prick of light, like a strange planet in the mind.
Why do I keep shaking? Little shivers run through me. Am I not as tough as I thought? I sound tough inside, the words going through my head, the fierceness I feel. But there are other things too, softer parts of me I thought were gone; they play and swirl like a river. Take a breath. Relax. I was careful to leave no clues. But one wonders, with DNA, microscopes, and infrared thingies. You could find a lot.
You can’t find me.
What a night it’s been. I keep the cigarette ember low. The air is cool, bracing; mist rolls in from the ocean. I turn on the radio. All those frequencies out there moving toward us, so much music and talk; those deep, calming voices of men at the lower end of the dial. Jazz DJs are the coolest. Every sentence a seduction. “Here’s Miles from his blue period.” You can hear it, right? The pause and purr and then that high, soft trumpet like a slender, slow arrow finding you in the dark. I blow smoke and feel a tingle. I don’t think of the other thing I feel. I’ll leave it alone and maybe it will slide away. I didn’t expect it, but I should have. It’s like a prickly-edged whisper.
Movement. I push my face to the windshield. My detective bends into that old Porsche of his, a battered thing from the late eighties, I think, but it fits him: lean, compact, a bit of rust. His taillights glow. He backs up slow, straightens, and heads down the canyon. I wait a moment, crush out my cigarette, and slide behind him. Too early for him to suspect anything. I’m just a girl on a milk run in the middle of the night, still in my concert dress. “Oh, Officer, if you could just give me a warning.” How many times has that worked? Legs slightly open, a flash of silk, the dashboard light, the scent of leather, the glimpse of possibility. Men are so easily disarmed. My glove box overflows with warnings.
My detective—he’s not like the others, I’m sure—snakes along dim roads and finally hits the 101 in the fast lane. I trail a few cars behind in the middle. It’s the in-between time that is the darkest, those early a.m. hours when the unreconciled ride. How fitting. My detective accelerates, skimming past the Hollywood Bowl and the Capitol Records building. I’d like to race him, my black hair flying like a piece of night. Monteverdi blaring. But that’s too bold. One day, maybe. We clear Silver Lake. I pull farther back and follow him to Temple and on to his apartment on Hill in the old Metro Station, a restored 1920s Italianate building that sits catty-corner to the Biltmore and the aesthetic tragedy of Pershing Square.
I pass and blow him a kiss he doesn’t see, turning left toward Disney Hall, which is the color of the moon. It absorbs what illuminates it. Frank Gehry knew what he was doing. I despise Frank, but I admire how his abstract ornament—some say it resembles a ship, but I think it looks like a Picasso face of sliced silver—beckons from over the city. I cruise into Angelino Heights, thinking about who I am, distilling myself into a single line: insomniac daughter of a madwoman and the kindest of fathers.
Chapter 4
The maid knew nothing. She handed me a rosary on the way out the door. “Pray,” she said. A crime scene unit is at the Coldwater Canyon house bagging Gallagher’s laptop and things from his home office, medicine cabinets, and whatever else strikes them. Ortiz has left a message: “Hey, Carver, the mayor’s office keeps crawling up my ass. Jesus. We gotta get somewhere on this quick. Know I’m stating the obvious, but you know these kinds of cases. Everyone sticking their fingers in. Never hear from them when a mother in Compton catches a stray. Fucking rich, huh. Why aren’t we rich? You ever think about that? Give enough money and someone will care about your sorry ass. Call me. Oh, and destroy this message. And, oh, the Times called. What’s that chick’s name again? The pain-in-the-ass one. I referred her to PA, but you know how that goes.”
I pour a drink and look over Hill Street. Four a.m. Esmeralda sleeps against the old Hotel Clark in a clump of bags, suitcases, boxes, and scarves. She’s a little black Sisyphus, probably weighs no more than ninety pounds, pushing her belongings every day up and down the sidewalk. The Clark’s been closed for years, gates locked, graffiti on the door, piss in the corners. The city’s been trying to clean up the street as part of the Renaissance—a word spoken these days without a trace of smirk—and a lot of the homeless have moved on. But Esmeralda stays, peeking up from beneath her tarp. I watch her from up here on many nights as drunken couples from Perch stumble past her and make out in the Clark’s doorway until an Uber comes.
I sit at the piano, an ancient upright I bought years ago from a junk man in Watts. The keys are the color of tea and the pedals are slack. I’ve been playing since I was a boy, taught by Miss Holloway, who smelled of cigarettes and bourbon and once performed in orchestras in Pittsburgh and St. Louis. She was funny and sly and loved Art Tatum, Jimi Hendrix, the B side of Abbey Road, and Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather.” “Turn the great noise around you into music, Sam.” She said that all the time. I’m not very good, but when I can’t sleep, I close my eyes and play soft, mostly standards and a few of my own compositions, which I’ve never written down. I like the way the keys feel beneath my fingers, the sounds that rise, the notes, restless souls meandering through the night. I know myself when I play. Who I am and the quiet that runs through me. Not as engaged as I should be, my mother used to say. She’d push me to parties and sleepovers, but I never really fit—at least, back then—into the lives of others. I wasn’t weird, just solitary. I did have a moment of notoriety when Sarah Cullen, the reigning queen of the popular kids, kissed me in the hall and said with tenth-grade thespian aplomb: “Sam, take me for a pizza. I must get away from these children.” We ate two slices each at Sal’s and returned before sixth period, with Sarah whispering to me, “You said twenty-three words the whole time. I counted. This may not work as I had hoped.” I leaned in and kissed her. “That,” she said, patting my cheek and disappearing into Algebra, “must have taken courage.”
I like the night, the stillness, the conniving characters in old movies and the things that come unexpected. I saw a coyote when I was playing about a year ago. He flashed in the window on the empty street, a bit of magic against the buildings. They do that. Just appear. Like Sofía Vergara walking the Palisades, or Maria’s lion roaming in the canyon. Making you wonder whether it’s a dream or real. I play a little more, press an F major, and stand. I boil water and go down and check on Esmeralda with a cup of tea and a bottle of whiskey.
“Why you waking me up? Go bother your own mother. Standing there like a ghost. Creepy, is what it is. Go home. Go to sleep. It’s the devil’s hour.”
“I told you, my mother’s ill in Boston.”
“Dying?”
“No. Her mind.”
“Well, I can’t be your mother. I’m too busy.”
“It’s cold tonight.”
“Cold don’t know me. You took me outta my dream. A good dream, I think it was.” She crinkles the tarp back, and her bony black face, bordered by a yellow scarf, looks up. “What are you holding?”
“Whiskey or tea?”
“Mmmmm. How about ten dollars?”
“Nope.”
“Then pour some whiskey into the tea. A little more. Good.”
I hand her the mug.
She sips, and I sit beside her.
“You out here this late means you can’t sleep. Means you got a body. So you come bug Esmeralda. Some Jesus guy was out here early trying to drag me to a shelter. Why does someone always want to put a roof over my head? I got my setup. Just want to be left alone. You’re not so bad, I guess. But you need a life, a girl or something. Pour a little more whiskey. Who’s the dead guy?”
“Some architect from Coldwater Canyon.”
“Heard about it. Chaplin Hotel over on Main, right? Throat slit.”
“How’d you know?”
“Street, man. Full of whispers. You know that. They rob him?”
“Nope.”
“Mmmmm.”
Esmeralda’s sane tonight. On bad nights, she’s a jumble of words and thoughts in the wind. Rails and cries and speaks in tongues. I wonder what she sees at those moments, the invisible self she screams at, like bees inside her, making her run zigzag and crazy. She’s good tonight. She hands me the mug and pulls up the tarp. “I’m going to sleep.” I sit for a while. Nothing moving. I close my eyes and lean back on the wall and look across the street to my building and my lighted window, alone against the darkened others. Two skateboarders pass. The sound of a siren approaches from the east, grows louder, and fades in the west. A bus filled with Latino faces passes. Dawn is not far off, but the twilight, helped by the whiskey and Esmeralda’s breathing, is calm and cool, the air clean. Most people don’t know how cold it can get in LA. The sky can press down gray and make you think of Cleveland or Berlin.
I slip a ten under Esmeralda’s tarp and head around the corner to the Little Easy. It’s way after hours, but I know Lenny—rag in hand, bow tie askew, dirty shirt, the scent of Old Spice—will be counting receipts and sitting in front of the expensive stuff near a painting of a man who looks like Napoleon.
“It’s almost breakfast, Sam. Have a quick one and be on your way.”
My Detective Page 2
