My Detective

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “Screw you, Carver.”

  Click. I throw the phone on the counter. Jensen’s out there. I don’t think he’s dead. No body. No sign of his car. No bead on his phone. She’s clever. What did she do with him? Gallagher’s death was visceral and quick. Jamieson’s was a spectacle. Jensen is different. He doesn’t fit. He raped her, but not like the other two; there was no rabid pleasure in it. Jensen’s not ready-made for revenge. He’s her key to what happened. Or maybe I’m wrong and he’s in a ditch with his heart cut out. So far, though, she’s been smart, untraceable. But they begin to crack. They all do. No matter how well planned, killing takes parts of you and makes them something else, and the perfect crime starts to unravel—slowly at first, but then with unsettling speed.

  Seven a.m. The city’s moving. A guy in a Dr. Seuss hat is walking through traffic, flipping the bird and yelling bat-shit verse I can’t hear. Esmeralda and her scarves and bags are gone from in front of the Clark. She must be eating breakfast at the Mission. I scroll through the news. North Korea’s launched another test missile, the Arctic melts and shrinks, ISIS is battling in Mosul, and Princess Leia has died. I remember her, so young with her laser gun and funny doughnut-twisted hair, running through galaxies. You think you know the ones like her, the sly, clever ones who stay in your life like relatives; famous ones who don’t seem to age until, one day, they’re gray, troubled, and then gone. Even they can’t last. I close the laptop, pour a new coffee, and sit by the window. I feel beaten. I play out the strands of the case, draw lines with a pencil. It’s an old habit that makes me feel closer to things. I reopen the laptop and watch the video again. Who is she? So pretty and ruined in her mask. For a few seconds, she seems to look right at the camera—a glimmer of eyes, then gone. I click it off and call Wanita. No, he’s not dead, I tell her. We haven’t found him. No, he’s not in Montana. Then I tell her flat.

  “Your husband, Gallagher, and Jamieson raped a woman years ago, before you were married. We believe that the woman—we have no name—kidnapped him and may be holding him in the Los Angeles area.”

  I let it sink in. I can hear Wanita breathing.

  “Stephen wouldn’t rape anyone,” she says, swallowing a sob.

  “He did.”

  “He’s too gentle. Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  A gasp, a fissure of pain. Her whole world changed in a few sentences.

  “My God, this is not what I know. Stephen? My Stephen? No. You would know if you knew him. How could this be? This is a mistake, Detective. I know him like I know the lines on my own hand. A man can’t keep secrets. He can’t be someone else. For years? No. It’s impossible.”

  She trails off, following any thought that leads away from the truth. She quiets. I let time pass.

  “Do you think he’ll be killed?” she says.

  “I don’t know.”

  A longer silence hangs. It goes on for more than a minute. I wonder whether she’s standing at the window, looking at the ocean. An intake of breath. Another. She tries to say something but can’t. She hangs up.

  I shower, pour a last coffee, and head out to the firms of Gallagher and Jamieson.

  Gallagher’s mentor, Arthur Kimmel, perched up in his office on the thirtieth floor, offers little and says less. Young architects dart around him.

  “We have a contract deadline,” he says, running a hand through his silver hair and glancing at me with kind impatience. He is no longer the man in mourning I saw days ago at the funeral. “I don’t know anything about a video like that. I cannot believe Michael would be mixed up in such a thing. Three architects raping a woman. My God. As I told you before, Detective, Michael was an egotist, a narcissist.” He leans over a desk and writes numbers on a blueprint. “Michael could have made his mark. He was consumed with work. I never suspected any tendencies like that. He was married. I told you about Miranda. Did you see her? She may know more. My God. A video like that.” He pauses, steps closer, whispers. “You don’t think this video would ever get, you know, made public. It could be quite damaging to the firm.”

  “With the Renaissance and all,” I say.

  He cuts me a smirk. “I hear that word a lot these days. I may have even used it myself. ‘Renaissance,’” he says. “Let’s hope so. I see a lack of uniformity, though. A lot of rushing, Detective. Too much money, perhaps. Money and politics change aesthetics. Rome and Florence. They’re beautiful, man’s realization of his dreams. But what compromises were made? To politics, the Church, the money men. We’ll never know.” He steps back and moves toward the window. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling.”

  “Is there anything more you can think of about Gallagher? I don’t believe a man could do something like that and not show some inkling. You follow me? A rape like that doesn’t happen out of nowhere. Not in my experience. You ever suspect anything along those lines, something in his character? An offhand comment, any revelation? He saw a prostitute, you know.”

  “I read about that. In that awful hotel on Main.”

  Kimmel looks at me and walks to the window.

  “If all our secrets were exposed, Detective, the world would slip its axis.” He closes his eyes, feels the sun on his face, turns back to me. “But to answer your question, no. I never suspected anything like that about Michael. I didn’t know about his prostitute. Michael knew how I admired Miranda. He would never have told me about that. I wonder if she knew. Perhaps that is what broke them up. He never told me why. Neither did she. When I think about it now, it must have been something ugly.” He pauses, takes a moment to himself, turns back toward the window. I see only the back of him, a silhouette against the sky. “A couple can survive most things, but some are unfixable. Surely, you have some of those, Detective. I do. ‘Dark vapors.’ Didn’t Shakespeare or Beckett or somebody call them that?”

  I join him at the window and look out on the city.

  “It’s terrifying and beautiful at once,” he says, “the unfinished.”

  I leave him. I walk amid sirens and the clatter of construction. Los Angeles is changing. Though it’s not my city, I have adopted it. And there are moments, especially at dusk, when the palms scratch against the last bits of sun, and a hard, clarifying coolness settles in and the winds gust from the canyons and the ocean, cleansing and quieting as night falls, when it leaves me spellbound. You can raise all the pretty buildings you want, but they will pale against what existed long before the first architect arrived. That is the sacred lie of LA: the belief that we can tame a cruel, unsparing paradise, a place not imagined for us but where we have nonetheless brought our strange, restless, unattainable dreams.

  I call Ortiz. No answer. I arrive at McKinley, Jamieson, and Burns.

  “Detective Carver, you sounded quite furtive on the phone,” says Matthew McKinley, tamping down a billow of white hair and sliding a pen into the pocket of his ironed blue Oxford shirt. He is russet, well shaved. He points to a chair. “Please sit. Is there a development? An arrest? How may I help you?”

  I tell him about the video.

  “Oh, my,” he says. “That’s horrible, frightening.” He blots his forehead with a handkerchief and reaches for the tumbler of water on his desk. “This is quite unnerving. How does one respond to such a thing? Paul Jamieson did this? You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “With Gallagher. I told you when we first met, I never liked him. A schemer. Like a petulant little crow. Who was the other, Stephen Jensen? I don’t know him well. What can I say, Detective? You work with a young, talented man. You try to instill something. Not just about architecture but about life. A little wisdom. Is that naive? Does that sound ridiculous? I hope not. I would hope there’s some civility left. A sense of handing things down. But this is not Paul Jamieson. This subversion can’t be his legacy.”

  “It happened at Jamieson’s house, his old house. They raped her while opera played. Così
fan tutte, as it happens.”

  “Why Mozart for such a thing?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “The woman was in a mask, you say?”

  “Yes. A Venetian mask, the kind they wear at Carnevale.”

  “Poor thing. My God. And you think she may be doing this as revenge.”

  “There are other possibilities, but yes. This seems the most likely given what we know.”

  “Who is she?”

  “No identity. The mask never came off.” I pour myself some water. “Jamieson had started with you back then. He had been in LA only a short while. Is there anything you can remember about that time?”

  “That was years ago, Detective. I can’t recall. This is all so overwhelming.”

  “Jamieson used an escort service. The last time you and I spoke, you thought that was impossible.”

  “Why would he? He had women all the time. I can’t understand any of this. This secret life. He didn’t have that in here,” says McKinley, waving a hand around the office. “He was pure in here. It was always the work—how to make it better, how to make function conform to beauty. That was his gift—not the other way around, the easy way. He loved the old Italians. I think I told you that. He could have been great, Detective. He had that potential. He was maturing.” He stops and shakes his head. “And all the time, he had this other life. How? My wife—she died a few years ago of cancer—adored Paul. He often came to our house for dinner. Sometimes, he’d bring a date. Intelligent and beautiful like him. You can be a little envious of that when you get older, Detective. You’re too young, but one day you’ll know. The excellence of youth—that’s what my wife called it.”

  “What about these women? Did he ever talk about them?”

  “Nobody in particular. They came and went. I can’t recall his ever going out with anyone too long. As I said, he brought a few to dinner, or we’d see him with someone at the symphony or the opera. One was in a dance company, I think. She ate like a bird. There was a lawyer, and an actress who had a part in one of those streaming things. She loved martinis.”

  The old man leans back, looks at the ceiling, down to his hands. A large black-and-white photograph of a desert hangs on the wall. Dunes like waves, the coming moon. I stand and walk to it. Let the old man think. I look at the other walls. All deserts. McKinley steps beside me. “They’re magnificent, aren’t they?” he says. “Scoured. Repositories of time. They make me wonder, Detective, about man’s audacity in seeking to fill nature with his own images. I look at these photographs when I’m designing a new building. They remind me that the space we fill is sacred. Our buildings must reflect that in some way.” He shakes his head, lifts a hand as if batting away a thought. “Just an old man talking.”

  “You’re crying.”

  “Yes.”

  He wipes his eyes and sits back at his desk.

  “This has all been too much.”

  He folds his handkerchief.

  “Have you noticed there are no women in our office, Detective?”

  “No, I hadn’t.”

  “Not one. Paul wanted it that way. I fought him on it a few times. We had very good women prospects over the years. But Paul always said no. He didn’t think women made good architects. He never actually said that, but the subtext was clear enough. Once, when I pressed on the fact that we should hire one very qualified girl who could have complemented him—his designs, I mean—he cut me off. I saw rage in his eyes. Very brief, like a flash. I had never seen that in him before.” He pulls his pen from his pocket and fidgets with it. “We’re not the best profession for women. In that way, we’re like the military. A boys’ club. Only twenty percent of all architects are women, did you know that? Why would you? But it’s true. They’re paid much less than men. It’s not remotely fair, I know, but it’s the way of things.” He rubs a hand across his mouth and says nothing for a long while. “You know, a few years back, they made an Architect Barbie. She had black-rimmed glasses, a hard hat, blueprints, and, of course, she was blond. There was a black one too, I think … Or is it ‘African American’? Terminologies change so often these days.”

  He leans forward and clasps his hands.

  “I think women can be brilliant architects,” he says. “I should have fought Paul on that, and we should have hired a few. I relented, though. I thought his talent was that great. I almost hired a woman about the same time I hired Paul, before I knew how he felt about such things. She was striking. Tall. Fit. She’d sent me her designs, and I liked them. She blended the classical and the modern. Unique. Sparse but with a flourish, here and there, of the Old World. Time frozen and time moving. She and Paul together would have been a wonderful team. As I said, she would have complemented him, and he her.” McKinley narrows his eyes, puts a hand to his chin. “What was her name? It was a different name for a girl. Oh, yes. Dylan Cross. I hesitated, and she accepted another job. She’s still around. Works for a small firm in the city.”

  “Did they know each other?”

  “I don’t think so. He never mentioned her. I haven’t seen much of her work since. She did a lovely church out near Joshua Tree. It rises like magic off the high desert. Quite something. Classical, modern, organic. Hard to pull off, Detective. That was years ago. It was written up in a trade magazine. Not much else of hers comes to mind. That happens sometimes. Early brilliance often fades in this profession, for some reason or other. Like poets.”

  I write the name “Dylan Cross” in my notebook.

  “Thank you, Mr. McKinley.”

  I stand.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been much help,” he says, wiping his eyes. “I feel betrayed. A fool, almost. Thinking you know somebody so well, and you don’t know them at all.”

  “That’s pretty common.”

  “Is it? That’s a shame. But I guess you would know.”

  I turn to leave. McKinley sits at his desk, dazed and so much smaller than when we first met. I stop in a café and order an Americano. The place is nearly empty. I sit in the back and phone Miranda in New York.

  “Yes, Detective. Of course I recall. It was my dead husband we talked about, after all.”

  I could sense the pot in her voice. Syllables floated.

  “Did you know about the video?” I ask.

  An audible inhalation.

  “So you found the laptop. I thought he had thrown it in the ocean.”

  “We got it off Paul Jamieson’s flash drive.”

  “Boys will be boys. Keeping their little souvenirs.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “What to say, Detective? How to put that into words? I saw it and fled. It broke me. That’s not too strong a term, believe me. I thought this man and I were having quite a life. We had problems, sure, but who doesn’t? We had a house and a view and a pool and a maid and a mountain lion in the hills. I had no idea. I don’t think I was tricking myself. I thought we were really good, maybe. I don’t know; there were things. But they were put-the-toilet-seat-down tolerable things, like all relationships have. Then one day, he’s frantic. He found that his laptop had been hacked. He had it on in his home office. He was enraged, looking in the screen like a madman. Scrolling and checking files. Cursing. He called Jamieson.” Another inhalation. “I was in the kitchen and he walked to the pool so I wouldn’t hear. I went into his office and hit a key on his laptop. The screen lit up. Usually, he clicks it off and closes it. But he didn’t. He was that out of sorts. I saw only a minute or two of it. It was terrible. They were naked like animals, dogs around this woman in a mask. I kept listening for him to come back in. He had so many files.” An inhalation and a long breath out. A crack in her voice. “One of me. Did you know that? Taking a shower. Was that on Jamieson’s flash drive? My husband, the Peeping Tom. On his own wife. What kind of man does that? It’s an overused word these days, but I felt violated, Detecti
ve. In my own shower. I wanted to see more, but I heard him coming back in and I hurried out.”

  Another breath in.

  “I confronted him later that night. It was a terrible fight. I was so angry I couldn’t cry. He told me the video of the girl in the mask was from before we married. He said it was an escort they hired. A woman to play a part. I asked why. What kind of perversion was this? That really set him off. ‘Perversion.’ The word really got to him. He came at me but stopped. I saw for the first time who he was. In full. I hadn’t seen enough of the video to know if it was a play as he said, or an honest-to-God rape. I didn’t know. Was she acting? I hadn’t seen enough of it. Or maybe I didn’t want to. But I had to get out. He stormed out of the house and went and threw the laptop in the ocean. He called Jamieson again when he got back. We slept in separate rooms that night. At dawn, I stood in his doorway and asked why he filmed me in the shower. He said people are the most beautiful when they don’t know they’re being watched. I told him he was sick.”

  Another sharp breath in and a long one out. A sip of something. Crying.

  “I moved into a hotel. A few weeks later, I got a job and moved here. Never went back. When he was killed, when you came to visit, I suspected it might have had something to do with the laptop. I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t see everything that was there. Who knows how many incriminating, lurid things he kept? How much did you see?”

  “Only the video of the girl in the mask. More than an hour of it.”

  “I saw only a few minutes.”

  “It wasn’t a play. They raped her.”

  “God. He and Jamieson?”

  “And Stephen Jensen.”

  “I didn’t see him. Who was the girl? They didn’t kill her, I hope.”

  “We don’t know who she is. The mask stays on her the whole time.”

  “I’m glad they’re dead.”

  Silence.

  “Jensen’s missing,” I say. “We think it’s the woman. Going after them one by one. She may have been the one who hacked your husband’s computer.”