I crack the window and light a cigarette. It fills me. I blow the smoke and spirits away. I feel the car around me, shiny and fast. Sing Courtney. “I want to be the girl with the most cake.” Love that line. I’m singing. I’m crying. A storm inside. I wonder whether anyone’s looking. Probably not. Who cares, anyway? This is downtown LA. Crazy is normal. I sit at the light. A homeless guy with a dripping dirty rag approaches. I wave him off, but he steps closer and knocks on the window.
“Clean?”
“No, thank you.”
“C’mon, honey, they’re dirty. A woman needs clean windows. Why you crying? Too pretty to cry.”
“Here.”
I hand him a dollar. He looks at it.
“Can’t hardly do anything with that,” he says.
I hand him a five. He leans down, his face almost touching mine. He is frenetic, his eyes serene, as if two voices are pulling at him.
“I see all,” he says. “All the world when no one’s looking. I see you.”
He laughs and slaps his rag on my hood. He steps back, spins in a slow dance with an imaginary partner. The light changes and I speed away. I glimpse him in the rearview, twirling his rag, pointing toward me and mouthing, I see you.
The wacko shit that ends up here—misplaced molecules and shopping-cart clairvoyants. I’ve just had my LA moment for the day—an unnerving truth whispered by a lunatic with opioid eyes, dog tags, and untied shoes. It’s a pity what they come to, the lost ones, but they see things the rest of us can’t, like animals that sense an earthquake coming. I wipe my eyes, click off Courtney, and focus in silence. I checked my detective’s laptop last night. He created a Gallagher folder. Jottings of what he’s picked up so far. He’s quite the riffer. I can see him working it out—the mechanics, morality, and mystery, like Raymond Chandler (everyone who moves to LA encounters Chandler at least once) meets the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He’s got folders on every murder case he’s handled. Dozens of them. I’ve read only a few, but they would make a great Netflix or Hulu series. Note to self: We Angelenos think the little things we pick up, the tidbits we hear, should be scripted and put on a screen. It is annoying, but it’s how the city works. Everything real can be dreamed again, only better—which, when you think about it, is the splendid lie of our time.
My detective has talked to Kimmel. He knows about Jamieson. He’s planning to go to the funeral. Should I go? I’m an architect. A lot of us will be there, black-draped and mourning a fallen genius. One of us. I can hear them now, prattling through pretend sobs, discussing contracts and will-you-hire-me looks between shovels of dirt. Kimmel will be there, of course, a bereaved father figure from an opera. Jamieson too, no doubt, the grieving friend. The other one too, maybe, but we’ll get to him later—no sense in dragging another name forward before it’s time. We must stay with the plan. Cops look for suspects at funerals. Any crime novel reader knows that. Don’t they? It would be enticing, though. I could fake a tear or two. Look mildly distraught in a shame-of-the-world kind of way. Added bonus: I could see my detective again in the flesh—which, I must say, I have been fantasizing about. Better not. Too risky. Every face a clue. It’s working out, though, much as I expected.
Ohhh, my detective. I didn’t even know he existed until two years ago, when the Times ran a profile on him after he solved the killing of a producer’s assistant director in a labyrinthine—newspaper’s word, not mine—scandal involving a studio exec, a hooker, an illegal from Guatemala, a bit of coke, adultery, a bag of money, a shih tzu, and a house in the Caymans. The body was folded into a dumpster downtown—my detective’s territory. He traced the money, ran down leads, caught a few breaks, and came across an incriminating email involving the dog and the hooker. Annapurna Pictures bought the rights for a movie, but problems with financing and incoherent screenplays delayed shooting; there were murmurs in the trades about another Ishtar. The Times printed a portrait of my man standing inside the Bradbury Building. I thought how beautiful they both were: the terra-cotta and brick, of course, with the intricate iron railings and ceiling of light, as if you’d wandered into an old European train station; and my detective for his face, angled and lonesome, black hair, rumpled, and his caravan eyes, which, I must say, looked right at me—not hard or distant, but as if he recognized me from some sweet past life. Oh, yes. I knew then he would be my detective, my man. You might say it got the ball rolling. The story said he was a cop who worked mostly alone. His boss, Manuel Ortiz, described him as “kind of different, you know, like one of those painter guys who wanders around and sees stuff that fits into other stuff and becomes a picture.” I could tell that the woman who wrote it, Susan Chandler, had a crush on him, though she hid it cleverly in her pretty sentences. She didn’t fool me. She liked my detective, and I felt jealous sitting in my house, my detective looking back at me on my laptop, with Susan Chandler’s words all around him. Tingle. Envy. The story said he came from an Old East family. His father was a murdered boxer whose killers were never found. A few sailors from a Russian-type country merchant vessel were suspects. But they disappeared across the sea at first light, and nothing happened. The case stayed in a folder, as so many do. My detective’s mother was a principal (loves Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson, his files say) who schooled him in the finer ways. He took piano lessons as a boy and went to Berkeley to study literature but switched to criminology in his sophomore year, graduated, spent nine months in Europe, and ended up as a detective at the same LAPD that gave us Rodney King, race riots, and O. J.’s wild Bronco ride. I could tell by reading the story that my detective didn’t like the attention. His quotes were sparse and reluctant. He came off well, though. A man who deserved the notoriety he didn’t want. Rare in this town.
“Dylan,” says John, hurrying into my office. “Did you hear the news about Michael Gallagher?”
“I read it this morning. Terrible.”
John follows me and sits at my drafting desk by the window.
“What was he doing down there at night? I just saw him last week. He was eating lunch at Water Grill with a couple of political types.”
“It’s a shame,” I say.
“You never liked his work.”
“You, either.”
“True. He was a bit pompous,” says John.
“A bit?”
“Okay, grandiosely so. Like his designs. He was one of us, though—an architect, I mean.”
“He wasn’t one of me. But yes, it’s tragic. I thought crime was going down.”
“You think it was a robbery?”
“Who knows?” I say, pointing to my phone.
“Oh, yeah, the conference call,” says John. “Let’s get Chicago on the line.”
Throughout the call, which lasts fifteen minutes, John is somewhere else, thinking about Gallagher and the cruel randomness of the world. John is an internalizer. In another life, he might have been a philosopher or a missionary. Gallagher will bother him all day. He’ll parse it and talk about it and set it to some kind of meaning so that even if it doesn’t make sense, it does. He runs a hand through his blond hair, which these days is longer than usual—Isabella likes it that way—giving him the air of a patrician wild man, although John is anything but patrician. He’s from Oakland, the son of a seamstress and a tailor. He has delicate, tapered hands and, like Isabella, a quiet grace, which I found seductive when he first hired me.
That was years ago. I was so unknowing, so ready to redraw the skyline. I often think of the self who arrived here, innocent, unaware—mature, yes, but naive enough to believe my father’s words that great things awaited. That is the wish of all parents, I suppose, but when it came from my father, who never lied to me and was there when my mother drifted from us into those hidden-mind places she went, I took it as holy. He was the soother of my tantrums and fears, the one who told me, when I was ten and much taller than fourteen-year-olds, that our family came to Ame
rica before the Second World War, from a town called Split along the Croatian coast. “We are a tall people,” he’d say, laughing. “One day, Dylan, you will hang a star.” He loved that expression. “You will hang a star.” My father cast the longest shadow in our neighborhood, but it’s hard growing up tall as a girl. You’re special but in ways you don’t anticipate or want. Sometimes, you try to shrink and pull your bones into themselves, to compress, like a sparrow.
My father celebrated my height and kept telling me to push my shoulders back. “Every soul unique,” he’d say. “Be who you are, Dylan. Rise and be tall.” I did, for the most part. What must I have sounded like when I first landed in LA with my theories on modernism and the suburban metropolis? But the world moves in its own way. Moments are ascribed to us; things happen not of our choosing. But that is of little matter. We know only that afterward we are different. What once existed slips to a place we can’t find anymore, like a voice in the wind, or a dream set on fire.
“Those were the details we needed,” says John as the call goes quiet. “Wonder why it took them so long.”
“You know Mort. He’s scattered, a million things in his head.”
“Thanks for pressing him. I’d like to finish this thing by the end of the year.”
“Agreed.”
“You know, I wonder, do you think Gallagher was on drugs?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Just trying to figure out why he’d be down there. At night.”
“A lot’s changed over there, John. It’s not bad like it was. It’s not even that far away from here. What, six or eight blocks?”
“Yes, but at night.”
John purses his lips, shakes his head, and leaves my office. I exhale.
Tragic. I actually called Gallagher’s death “tragic.” To feign sorrow. I suppose it’s what we killers do. It’s like acting. I order lunch at my desk and close the door. It’s quiet, the light soft, snug in our little firm tucked in a courtyard most people don’t know about, just beyond the Biltmore. The designs for the Carmel library are spread before me. I eat my feta, spinach, and walnut salad and sip a pinot grigio. I want to be alone for a while. I hear John’s muffled voice on the phone down the hall, probably talking to Isabella, laying out his thoughts on Gallagher and why we end up the way we do. I could tell him a lot. I won’t. I cork the pinot and slide it back into my little fridge. Time to work, to imagine lines filling into form and shape.
I’ll stay in here all day. It is the best place to be. I look at the framed photograph on my desk, of me playing tennis at Stanford. So tanned and quick and strong, the look on my face, the fierceness of my eyes locking on the ball, the breath, the racket back, the biceps fine and long. My frame supple as a reed; my father somewhere in the stands. He taught me when I was little—hours and hours of hitting balls, morning and dusk, like pearls on endless strands. When we finished, we’d go to a diner. He would order a beer and I’d get a milkshake and we’d sit against the big window, telling stories, laughing, watching the night fall. Where did that girl go? I think we all must ask that of ourselves. Our interior voice stays the same, but over time, it echoes differently, as if blended with a voice not intuitively our own yet part of us, a voice that has taken on burdens that the voice we started with, our birth voice, cannot endure. Does that make sense? I am no different. But I would love to be her again, to feel the way she felt before she knew the things she shouldn’t. That’s ridiculous, I know, but even bad people—and I’m not saying I am one—had something once, maybe a light that was taken the moment it burned brightest.
Chapter 8
“Jesus, lot of people.”
“You checking up on me?”
“Look to your right.”
“Mayor looks shiny. That a new suit? I never did get the appeal. He’s plastic to me. Never trusted the eyes. Kind of shifty, don’t you think, in that I’ll-say-this-but-really-do-that kind of way?”
“Keep your voice down and don’t be a wiseass,” says Ortiz, looking me over. “You could have dressed a little better, Carver.”
“This is dark,” I say, pointing to my jacket. “Funeral attire. Polished shoes too.”
“Stacked deck today. Police chief, commissioners. Bunch of brass. Reporters. I saw that chick from the Times again. Christ, she’s pushy. You talk to her? These architects carry serious weight. Who would have thought, right? It’s the money, man.”
“And aesthetics.”
“Yeah, that too,” says Ortiz, rolling his eyes. “Building a whole new Rome, and shit. Need these guys, I guess.”
“Hitler wanted to rebuild Berlin to look like ancient Athens.”
“Screw Hitler. Who’s this friend of Gallagher’s? This Jamieson guy?”
I nod left.
“The big blond guy with the sunglasses.”
“You talk to him yet?”
“I will after.”
“Kimmel said he was close to Gallagher, right?”
“Best friends. You want to hold my hand on this?”
Ortiz gives me his best fuck-you glance.
“No. But I think you might need a partner for this one.”
“I work alone.”
“Yea, but a lot of pressure on this case.”
“Let me work it like I do. I’m better that way. Haven’t let you down yet. Besides, you’re my partner.”
“I’m your boss. I got a whole section to run.”
“Which makes you the ideal partner.” I smile.
“All right, I’ll be over by the mayor, but we’re not done talking about this partner thing,” says Ortiz, tamping his black mustache the way he does when he’s distracted by a moment of reflection. “Forest Lawn’s a peaceful goddamn place, huh? Bucolic. Brochure says ‘bucolic.’ I should be planted up here. Nice chapel, good view of the city. Cost my whole pension probably. There’s movie people up here. Michael Jackson’s in some mausoleum. Remember that case? Christ. How’s Gallagher doing it?”
“Cremation.”
“The urn. Probably go that way myself. Tidy and cheap. You ever think about it? The end?”
Ortiz slips toward the mayor’s entourage. The crowd follows a curl of incense into the chapel. The altar is crowded with lilies in glass vases. A priest in green and gold vestments raises his hands. A big red book opens, and the death mass begins. The readings are brisk. Stories of prophets and disciples, dust and paradise. Redemption has become a cheap word, but it is all we have, I guess—a bit of succor for the corrupt soul. Death came so fast to Gallagher that he didn’t have time to atone. I don’t know what his sins were, except maybe the hooker, but is that enough to keep a man out of heaven? He had marks on his soul, though. We all do. Venial and mortal, glowing in the recesses.
The priest swings incense over Gallagher’s bronze urn, and the scent reminds me of when I was a boy on Sundays in St. Mary’s, sitting with my mother and sometimes my father, studying the stained glass and wondering about the weight of the cross and how a man is lifted into the clouds. It is a wondrous story. The sky opening, the tomb, the shroud pushed aside. Perfect story for a cop. The priest’s voice fades. He closes his red book. The altar boys flutter, and the architects file out of the chapel and into the sunlight. They look like the feathers on a crow’s wing stretching through the grass. The mayor shakes a few hands and scurries away.
“Tragic day, Detective,” says Arthur Kimmel, wiping his eyes and folding his handkerchief into his breast pocket. He looks back to the chapel doors and then to me. “If there’s anything you need, let me know. Do you have any leads you can talk about? Are you close to knowing who did this? I talked to the mayor and he assured me you’re doing everything you can.”
“We are. I’m here to talk to Paul Jamieson. I’m hoping he might have insight that could be useful.”
Kimmel looks over grass and hills of stones and symmetrical ro
ws.
“There’s Paul over there. Let me introduce you.”
He hurries forward.
“Paul, this is Detective Sam Carver. He wants to speak with you about Michael. I’ll leave you two.”
Kimmel wanders away. Jamieson and I walk through mourners to the side of the chapel. Men pat him on the back. A woman holding a lily hugs him. He’s about six-two, blond, and packed, with the fading lines of a flanker. His eyes are green, his face smooth as if shaved by a barber. His is the air of a man who lets others tend to the lesser things. He is accustomed, I can tell, to praise and to people humming like bees about him. But the boy in him—I can see him just behind the eyes—is not quite sure what to do with Gallagher’s death, as if it were a sacrilege against men so brazen and sure of themselves.
“I saw Michael two days before he died,” Jamieson says in a voice higher than the rest of him suggests. “We had a burger in Los Feliz and drove to Perch for a few drinks. We were supposed to play tennis Sunday, but …”
He wipes his eyes and slides on sunglasses.
“Was there anything bothering him? Anything different?”
“Not that I could tell. He was himself. He was planning on buying a new car and he had convinced me to take another surfing lesson with him. He wasn’t very good, but he was determined. Neither of us are natives. We’d lived here long enough, though, that Michael said it was a sin we hadn’t learned how to surf. He called someone in Venice, and we decided to start next month.”
My Detective Page 5
