“Breakfast.”
“I never figured you for a cook.”
“Omelets, toast, feta, melon, slightly fresh.”
“You trying to impress? I’m not the marrying type.”
“I feel good, you know. I wanted to make breakfast.”
“Did you make coffee, too?”
“Oh, sorry. Here.”
“Hey, Carver …”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“Being like I imagined. We don’t get many of those.”
“You too.”
“I’m still going to Washington.”
“I know.”
“Maybe …”
“Let’s just eat and drink coffee.”
“And do it one more time.”
She winks. I don’t say a word.
“Play me something on that piano.”
“When you come back from Washington for a visit, I’ll play you a song.”
“Okay, Carver, okay. Where’d you get this feta?”
“That Armenian market up near Western. You know it?”
“It’s good. You look rested, Carver.”
“It’s been a long month.”
“You like it, don’t you? The endless hours. The work.” She waves a hand across the room. “Nice place. These carpets, very tasteful. That picture. It’s from Sudan, isn’t it? Those colors and how tall the women are. Where’s that icon from? Bulgaria, Romania? You get around, or did. But you know, Carver, it doesn’t feel lived in. It feels like we’re in a borrowed house. I only feel half your spirit here. You need to spend more time here, listening to your records, letting home grow into you. You’ll never solve all the murders. Too many. Every one you put down, another one comes.”
“Like newspaper stories.”
“Yeah, a little, I guess. I can put them aside when I have to. I don’t know if you can. You’re indivisible with death. What would you do without a victim? You ever think of that? It’s the ones you don’t expect, right? The ones lying there that shouldn’t be there, as if they stepped into the wrong scene. The others, the criminals, dealers, and pervs—they deserved it, right? There’s a logic and a symmetry to it. But not the unexpected ones. What do you figure for these architects: deserving or victims?”
She reaches over and pours us coffee. Her hair falls across her open blouse.
“Somewhere between. I don’t know enough to know what side they’ll end up on. They were pricks, though. Very good at what they did. Full of hubris. You know what I like about this job? Going layer by layer. A guy on a street, right? He’s a mystery. You pass him. Catch his eye. But he goes on and you may never see him again. Who is he? Every day I get a mystery guy or woman. I see what they never wanted seen. Even the innocent ones. They have something, some dark, hidden piece.”
“That’s life. Being human.”
“Yes, but how different all those pieces are. My father was an unexpected one. He shouldn’t have been. He couldn’t dole out or absorb enough pain. It was like living with a beaten dog. How could it have ended any other way but violently? My aunt Maggie says that. Once he was gone, all the rooms in the house were different. His watch, his wallet, a ring, pictures, shoes, boxing gloves, his shirt draped over a chair. They were all there, but one by one, they disappeared, and the house held him but didn’t.”
She stands and holds me, my head to her breast, her hair around me, the scent of her. She takes off her blouse and sits on my lap, light as a bird’s wing. She rests her head on my shoulder. We sit in silence. I remember a poem I read years ago about banked fires and the chronic aches of a house, the hurt inside those who live there. It is not like that now; the minutes bring a different poem, one I haven’t read but feel inside. The eggs, plates, coffee cups, and melon are arranged like a still life in the sun. I feel her breath, her warmth. I rise and carry her down the hall in this borrowed home of my half-life. I smiled at the way she said that over breakfast. There was truth in it. She puts her lips to my ear, and we cross into the bedroom. “Hey, Carver,” she says, “I have this fantasy.”
She’s gone when I get out of the shower. “It was lovely. S.” I look at the note for a while, hold it to the window light, as if maybe a clue lingers between the letters. I pour coffee and feel, at least for a moment, that the day, a few clouds to the west but all else clear, is mine. I put on Rubber Soul, wash the dishes, sweep the place. The unsolved things can wait. I press Susan’s words into James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. I flip the record to the B side and feel the sudden joy I felt when I would take the train from Newport to New York with my mother and we’d speed silver along the coast, the great city rising. “A dream built by men,” my mother would say. We’d go to a show, walk through Central Park, eat ice cream, and take the last train home. It was in the years after my father died.
My phone buzzes. Ortiz.
Chapter 17
I’m not angry.
No rant, no screed.
I marvel at my restraint. How I hold it together. That bitch. Oops. A slip. Sorry. I’ll be good. But why, Sam? Why? Why the distraction? No, I didn’t see what you did last night. But you wrote two lines about her in your laptop. “Susan and I danced. She calls me Carver.” Cursory, yes, nothing explicit, but I can tell. Nobody just dances. I’m sure you’ll write more when you have time. But there’s no future there. I’m the one for you. I don’t blame you, though. You don’t know I exist. But, Sam (if she can call you Carver, I can call you Sam), you must feel an inkling of me. I am the one you seek. The doer, the perp. The woman in raincoat and fedora, your fantasy. Or so I thought.
I’ve been known to expect too much, to bore in. I know, it’s annoying; I can be too focused. But, Sam, really, this girl, this child, this new-breed Martha Gellhorn. Is that what you want? A scribe? I understand, though, I do. She’s been after you. I knew all along, and, in a way I don’t like to admit, I admire her. A clever, patient one. Writing that story about you, pretending to have ethics, appearing saintlike. Clever designs, that girl. Men. Why do they fall so? I wish I had her, let’s call it charm, the way she lingers after she’s gone. Susan. The name floats alone on the screen. Susan. Five letters that carry the weight of a book. That, my detective, is dangerous. Write a poem and be done with it; smile for a few days; enjoy the postdance glow. But, Sam, really, let’s get back to the game.
You’re looking for Stephen Jensen. Where, oh, where could he be?
I know.
I am clever too. Cleverer than she. You’ll see. But there’s the question. What to do with Jensen? That has been the dilemma from the beginning. Gallagher and Jamieson. No problemas. Verdicts handed down, sentences carried out. But Jensen—he’s the crooked line, the slanted portico. He’s nudged us into the muted grays of moral quandary. Vengeance or forgiveness. Venom or antidote. Which is stronger? I had thought the tender part of me was gone, but it is there, deep, like a voice in a well. I’ve been reading about complicity. I’m quite the reader these days. Insatiable, looking for parables like mine. The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge thrived on those too pitiful to speak out or resist—all those Germans and Cambodians who looked the other way, went on, pretended not to see the stained horizon. Are the weak blameless? They took part. They went through the actions. Some froze, yes, but even inaction is a kind of terrorism. Can the spineless be absolved? What capacity for forgiveness must the injured possess toward the guilty?
A sin lasts long after its commission. It marks all that follows. But it will fade if we let it. Should we? I don’t think I’m being too grandiose to suggest these are the real questions for humankind. I’m only a fleck, I know. I’m not a country, a state, a people. I’m a footnote, an aggrieved asterisk. But does that make the injustice any less? I think not. You know this. I know what you write, how you think. I’ve been deep in your files. You believe in sanctity and forgivene
ss, but forgiveness can be granted only if sanctity is violated. Hello, paradox. You hold them both inside—strange Christian twins, I think, but you’re not religious. Okay, maybe a few nostalgic cold, candlelit Sundays in a New England pew. Not a true believer. Not even after your father was killed and you, like me now, wanted vengeance. But then you didn’t. Why? How did you soothe the seething fire? Maybe because you were still a boy. Children outgrow what adults cannot. Or perhaps it is something else, some gene I do not possess. It’s what mystifies me about you. What I love about you. Did I say “love”? Yes.
What to do with Stephen Jensen? Forget about Montana or wherever his Ethiopian wife, an unknowing innocent, pointed you. Jensen is much closer. Oh, yes. In a safe place. While I decide. It’s always about what I decide. That’s what you need to know. You come to the place I’ve been and see what I’ve done. One step behind. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up.
I went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena the other day, just to get out, you know, to see beautiful things from long ago. They hung so hushed and brilliant. We humans can be magnificent when we want to. I wandered past brocaded frames and through the scents of aftershave from security guards, buttoned and watchful in their blazers and shiny black shoes. Squeak, squeak. I found myself among the impressionists. Edgar Degas, to be specific. So watery, insubstantial; mists of ballerinas, really, nothing precise. But lovely. Like gauze puffs in pastel-colored rain. They made me want to dance. I did a pirouette.
“Miss,” said a guard waving his finger. “No dancing.”
“But don’t they make you want to?”
“Miss,” he said stepping toward me. “They are beautiful. I see them every day. But no dancing.”
But I think he understood my burst of joy. The hall was quiet. Only Degas, the guard, and me. What would I have said to Degas? “Très bien, monsieur.” Perhaps I would have invited him for a glass of wine and showed him my designs, and he would have shown me his sketches. We would have sat in the courtyard amid flagstones and statues and talked of Gauguin, Paris, wars, Andy Warhol, punk rockers, the internet, and then gone our separate ways. As strangers do. When I stepped away from the ballerinas, my eyes drifted left. I gasped. No kidding, I did. There she was: Actress in Her Dressing Room. Painted around 1875 and reworked twenty years later. She stood facing a mirror. A gown unfurled around her like a scarlet sea. So slim, her waist; her dresser looking on in the gaslight. It was damp in the painting, a bit of makeup powder in the air, perhaps—you know, the dreary kind from the old theaters. But what took my breath was her face in the mirror. It did not fit the woman with her back to me. I expected refinement, an angular, aristocratic beauty. But no, the face in the mirror was scary, as if reflecting a jaded heart, a mind in disarray. Skin pale, incandescent almost, blunt line of lipstick, long nose, dark splotches for eyes. It was a face hanging in a black dream. Severe. So ready to bite, like a viper, a woman peering into a self no one but her sees. The world knows only her mask. But Degas gave us the terrifying and real inside.
I couldn’t move, Sam. I stood staring into her face. It was me. Degas had painted me in a garret. With no words, he understood. How did he know the inside of a creature not yet born? I know what you’re thinking. Art speaks to our spirit, finds us, and gives us back ourselves. Yes. But still. That was me and the face no one sees. Jamieson may have glimpsed it before the end. The way he looked at me in that last second, as if he had finally met truth. I wept when the knife went in. I knelt before him and pushed it deep, and blood mixed with tears.
But still, what to do with Jensen?
Chapter 18
The mayor appears in front of City Hall before twenty or so reporters and bloggers. Ortiz and I are off to the side, behind the chief and the commissioners. Bursts of blue and silver. Lenses press in and microphones crowd the air. I look around, hoping to see Susan, but she’s gone, maybe on her way to Washington. An aide whispers in the mayor’s ear; the commissioners nod. The mayor unleashes brisk, clean sentences that dissolve without much substance. He says the killer or killers will be caught and that these “heinous” crimes will not stop the city’s Renaissance. Rebirth. Revival. He sounds a bit messianic. He praises Gallagher and Jamieson and the architects and firms that are reimagining Los Angeles. “Our great city,” he says, poking the air with his thumb the way they do, “is rising with splendor in a new century.” A few print scribes roll their eyes, but the mayor—trim, perfect haircut, gleaming shoes, eyes afire—presses on with adjectives and references to Paris and Rome. He doesn’t mention New York; the mayor never mentions New York.
“What the fuck,” whispers Ortiz. “We got two dead guys and he’s talking aesthetics.”
“Diversion. Get the bodies out of the way. Focus on the dream. Stay on the dream.”
Ortiz shoots me a sideways glance.
“You’re chirpy today,” he says. “Unlike yourself.”
“I slept well.”
“Make an arrest so we all can sleep well.”
“Why we here?”
“Show of force. Calm the city. Mayor’s on the case. Politics. There’s talk the mayor might run for president. First Latino prez. How about that? He’s a Jew and an Italian too. Covers a lot of bases. Don’t look at me like that. It could happen. Look who’s in there now. Anyway, the big money’s watching,” says Ortiz, checking his phone, craving a cigarette. “It’s amazing how the world works. Shit going on we don’t see. Cocktail party shit, Beverly Hills dinners. Malibu houses you never see, you know. Big tucked-away houses full of rich people. All kinds. The invisibles. Tale of Two Cities bullshit.”
“Dickens is dense, though, don’t you think?”
“Whatever. I’m just saying.”
“Maybe the rich are thinking the Renaissance isn’t in good hands.”
“They’re spooked for sure. Financial crimes are one thing. They don’t bother the one percent. They’re like tickets for speeding or watering your lawn during a drought. Put a check in the mail. But the rich don’t like stiffs, especially their own.” He cuts me another glance. “You grew up rich, though, right, kind of? Your dad’s family, right? You don’t look like you’re rich now, but you have this thing that you once might have been. A trace of money.” I shoot him a glance. “Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean. Once, you had money, that’s all I’m saying, so you know most likely how the rich might think. No sin in that. It’s a plus knowing the arrangement of forks and what to do with a wine cork. Good survival skills.”
“You’re a font of insight and wisdom …”
He raises one eyebrow; the mayor drones on.
“You may not remember,” says Ortiz. “You weren’t here then, but O. J. freaked out the rich. Upset the Brentwood bubble. Blood on the poolside. A madman on the loose in a Bronco. What a roller-coaster day that was.” He catches his voice getting loud and lowers it. “A thing like that gets the rich extrapolating. One thing leads to another, and pretty soon someone’s coming through the window for the jewels. They spook, man. Easily. It’s an equilibrium thing. All their bullshit master-of-the-universe talk, especially those Hollywood guys, but the rich are pussies. My opinion. You, I’m sure, would know better. Even Phil Spector, that crazy shit, freaked them out, running around with that wild hair and a gun. The list is long.”
“So you’re thinking …”
“Get me a perp I can parade in front of the cameras.”
“Might be a woman.”
“I don’t give a shit if it’s fucking Marge Simpson.”
He nods to the chief, fingers his mustache. Sometimes when I look at Ortiz, I see him as he’ll be twenty years from now, retired if he doesn’t have a heart attack, sitting on Hermosa Beach with a cooler and a radio, listening to soccer games from South America. He’ll be slimmer, grayer, calmer, holding hands with his wife in the sand, going to church during Lent, and making fun of the cop shows on Netflix and Hulu. If I’m s
till around, I might even drive down and visit him, eat hamburgers and smoke cigars and remember days like today, laughing at the crazy shit cops and mayors get into.
Ortiz collects old maps. He rolled one out to me once, of California in the early 1800s. He traced the lines slowly and methodically, mentioning this town and that, how this boundary would move and that one stay the same, how phantom gold was once to the north, and how water would come in from Colorado and other points east and funnel across the dryness into farms and cities and how, without it, the land could not provide. Ortiz likes the feel of the paper, yellow edges, mountains and deserts, the lay of roads, the outline of the ocean, a great empty space pressing against the coast.
“You ever notice?” I say.
“What?”
“Reporters and cops are a lot alike.”
“How so? I hate the fuckers.”
“Clothes, for one thing. Look at them and look at us. Check the shoes, the jackets. Different styles, maybe, but same quality.”
“I think we dress better.”
“And bitching.”
“They bitch better. Like they’re carrying around the world’s sins.”
He tamps his mustache.
“The public likes us more,” he says.
“Debatable.”
The mayor wraps up, takes a few questions, and disappears in an SUV. The chief calls on a few hands. Sharp, curt answers. The press hates that. The mikes go down and it’s done as a guy on a bike, wearing no shirt and a Viking helmet, rides past, doing tricks and figure eights and singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” He stops and bows. A few coins and a dollar are thrown his way. He collects them and pedals toward Little Tokyo and skid row.
“LA,” says Ortiz. “Land of loonies.”
I look around.
“Where’s that Times chick who’s always bothering you? Thought this would be right up her alley.”
“Don’t know.”
“Consider it a blessing. Where you off to?”
My Detective Page 14
