‘Sorry to call so late. I thought I’d go to voicemail.’
‘It’s fine. I was up.’
‘How are you, uh, dealing?’
The question was almost offensively simplistic. Up until now their relationship had been black and white. Work, nothing more. Now they were obliged to acknowledge humanity. Down the years Iwata had taught himself to restrict his own feelings as best he could. But in trying to negotiate the emotions of other people, he was a badger at a chessboard.
‘I’m …’ She laughed softly at the pointlessness of the answer.
‘Listen, Kate. If you need anything.’
‘How about you tell me what you need?’
‘I know you’re going through a lot at the moment. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’ Iwata bit the insides of his cheeks and said it. ‘I need your help.’
‘Of course. With what?’
Iwata had been thinking about it all day, the small, nagging worry at the back of his mind. No clues had been left behind by Meredith’s killer. An enraged john was unlikely to have the presence of mind to remove every trace from both the crime scene and the body. The same went for Talky. And Iwata was troubled by something else. Meredith had been murdered in a dark, desolate place but more or less out in the open. Of course, the smart money was on Talky being the murderer. But there was the matter of his defensive wounds. And now Talky was gone.
Either way, Iwata had to be sure. ‘Kate, I need you to look into something for me.’
Just before midnight, at a back table at Tacos Delta, Iwata leaned back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. He had just finished going through the stack of papers Kate Floccari had brought him.
‘Five trans women in LA County in the last year.’ Iwata looked up from the pages. ‘Only one case solved.’
‘Five that were reported,’ Floccari corrected.
‘All except one of them were strangled.’
‘Kosuke, I dragged the chief coroner out of bed and he told me they’ve had at least twice that many unclaimed bodies of trans women in the last year. Mostly women of colour. Their murder rate is disproportionately high anyway, but that’s a huge spike. Then there’s also the fact that police are misgendering in their reports. Meredith, for starters, was listed as male.’
‘So if we put it all together …’
‘Who knows what the true figure is.’
Iwata looked gravely into the distance. ‘There’s a club in Hollywood where Meredith used to work. A friend of hers, Geneviève, worked there too. Apparently, she just up and vanished. Now, the bouncer told me girls come and go and that might be true, but I don’t like coincidences. Five women in twelve months. Add Meredith, that’s six. And Geneviève is missing.’
Far above the huffing night buses and the sagging telephone cables, up in the chalky hills, the little white stain of the Hollywood sign was illuminated.
‘Iwata, you think there’s someone out there, don’t you? Someone murdering trans women.’
‘I don’t know.’ Iwata rubbed his eyes. ‘But if there is, nobody has caught his scent yet.’
‘I think you just did.’ She balled up her napkin. ‘If he exists.’
Iwata thanked Kate Floccari for the favour and walked her back to the car. Though it had no reason to be, their goodbye felt final somehow. As he watched her tail lights dwindle, Iwata felt the weight of the box she had brought him – the paperwork left by hatred and death.
Walking up the stairs to his apartment, Iwata saw the faint green blinking of his microwave’s unset clock. Another city, another kitchen, another unused appliance. He reached the stairs with his eyes already closed, the only sound on Descanso Drive the jangling of his keys.
Distracted by the usual metronome of self-pity and guilt, he missed it. The absence of cricket noise, the dead lightbulb and, beneath them, the innominate disquiet that intruders always secreted, no matter how silent they were.
Before Iwata could turn he felt the arm around his neck, the hard object in the small of his back, then words in his ear. ‘Your money or your life, motherfucker.’
‘You’re a real barrel of laughs, you know that?’
Grinning, Mingo Palacio released him with a pat on the shoulder and handed him the lightbulb he’d unscrewed. ‘Ah, come on, don’t be like that. Dangerous days call for a sense of humour, Yojimbo.’
‘I’m laughing inside. Coffee?’
‘Wish I could. But I’m here on business.’ He handed over what seemed to be a rolled-up magazine. ‘A little light reading courtesy of my sleazy friends.’
Iwata unrolled it – it was a sex catalogue of some kind. ‘Could they tell you anything about Meredith?’
‘A lot of not much. Nobody really remembers her, doesn’t seem like she was in the game for long. One or two recalled a quiet girl with Talky. Didn’t sound like it was long term, though.’ He shrugged. ‘The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, huh.’
‘So what is this?’ Iwata held up the catalogue.
‘Page fourteen and eighteen. Enjoy your night.’ Mingo descended the stairs, into the street dark.
Back inside his apartment Iwata grabbed a zero per cent beer from the fridge and sat cross-legged at his coffee table with a groan. Taking a long swig, he scanned the catalogue’s offers. Some were circumlocutory, others a little blunter. Then he came to page fourteen.
It was Meredith Nichol.
She had a good half-page spread to herself: no words, just a phone number. The photograph of her was beautiful; someone had clearly put effort into their work. She was naked, her back to the camera, standing against a tremendous blue. She was looking at a night ocean somewhere, anywhere, and the shadows between her shoulder blades, her buttocks, and her inner knees recalled Colville’s Pacific.
Iwata looked at her for a long time.
On page eighteen he found an almost identical photo of an attractive black woman. It was Geneviève. The same phone number was listed beneath. In this image, she was facing the camera, folding her hands across her breasts, looking off to one side. It was the same profound navy-blue ocean, the same essence of night, clear and obfuscated all at once.
Chest prickling, Iwata dialled the number. He licked his lips.
It rang twice. Then the automated woman spoke. The line had been disconnected.
Iwata flipped restlessly through the rest of the catalogue. There was no information on where it had been printed, nor when, nor who by, as though it had simply come to be – a multitude of women, all with numbers on them, like they had been tagged by safari-keepers.
Returning to Geneviève, Iwata looked again. Beyond the hint of shutters to one side there were no details in the room, no landmarks, nothing that said anything beyond: ocean. Meredith’s scene was identical, the shutter slightly more visible. It was as though they had both been photographed in a glass box over the blue.
Iwata dropped the magazine on to the coffee table. Another door opened to another door that led nowhere. He told himself he needed sleep; there was nothing more he could do tonight.
He looked at the magazine on the coffee table again. Seen upside down, he realized there was something there. A white speck.
Iwata fetched his pocket-sized square magnifying glass and peered through it. And now the speck became a white biplane, an advertising banner flying behind it:
FAT FILIPPO’S – WHERE THE EATING TAKES BEATING
Exhilarated, Iwata leapt over the table to his laptop and googled Fat Filippo’s. It was a chintzy all-you-can eat grill on the Pacific Coast Highway, a few miles east of Malibu Pier. He looked again at the image. Assuming the banner-towing plane was advertising locally, it had to have been flying west. Iwata guessed it had flown a loop over Santa Monica at sunset and was heading back to some small landing strip up in Simi Valley. He couldn’t be certain, but it made sense. Santa Monica was where the tourists were and Fat Fillipo would know that a drive out to Malibu was on the cards for many of them.
Taking out his map, Iwata calculate
d the distance between Santa Monica and Malibu Pier to be about twelve miles. The total area of Malibu was some twenty square miles and that didn’t take into account the canyons and mountains to its north.
Iwata’s excitement faded. He had narrowed down the place where the photographs of Meredith and Geneviève had been taken to a fixed area. He didn’t need a cartographer to tell him he had done little more than find the haystack he’d lost his needle in. Thousands of houses, thousands of windows, thousands of ocean views.
Dejected, Iwata took the catalogue, the box of papers Kate Floccari had given him and his sweet bay plant outside. He sat on the balcony and went through the images, the pages, the details. Nobody else seemed to be looking for a pattern in these trans women, but Iwata couldn’t help but see one. Names, ages, birthplaces, physical descriptions, aliases, causes of death – Iwata soaked himself in them.
Benedict Novacek pressed Play on his sound system and John Martyn’s ‘Man in the Station’ submerged the room in the right emotion. The girl stood with her back to him. He knew she was drinking, he could hear the ice moving in her glass. Everything was as it should be.
‘It’s a little dark in here,’ she said. He could almost taste her nervousness.
Novacek pressed the button under the counter and the blinds quietly hummed open. The ocean view revealed itself and, as usual, the girl gasped. The moon on the water rippled like mother of pearl in lacquer. It was his knockout punch. Something about moonbeams on a dark ocean made women take the plunge.
‘How can someone live in such a beautiful place?’ she said, more to herself than to him.
Novacek reached for her name, but names to him were mayflies; they didn’t live long enough to matter. What mattered was keeping the girl pliant, keeping the mood serene, keeping up the hocus-pocus of free choice. ‘Honey, you can come here any time you want.’
She laughed softly at that, then downed her drink. The swiftness of it didn’t communicate any relish, merely that it was time to get this over with.
‘Where do we do it?’
He licked his lips. This one wasn’t perfect but she wasn’t too far off. Benedict Novacek pointed to the room at the back. The door was slightly ajar.
The girl took one last look at the ocean.
7. City Beautiful
Iwata woke up cold. He drank old coffee and left the apartment. Not wanting to face the freeways today, he took the backstreets. As the sun rose it turned the clouds sashimi pink. On empty roads, Iwata glided, first through Silver Lake, skirting Dodger Stadium and Elysian Park, then finally cutting through Montecito Heights.
Our Lady of Solitude was on East Cesar E Chavez Avenue, a little jewel box of a church built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. It was a small funeral, just Charlotte Nichol and a few relatives sitting at the front, the devout giving them a few pews of distance.
The priest spoke both in English and in Spanish. Iwata stood at the back, his attention drifting in and out of the homily. The light through the tall stained-glass windows was so glorious it scarcely felt real. Motes in the sun looked like sand grains settling through shallow water.
‘… Our emotions are God-given, they are a part of who we are. Our hearts rightfully ache over the passing of such a good young man.’ The priest looked around, as though his congregation were much larger than it was. ‘Yet we are not too proud to seek God’s soothing touch, trusting in Him to give us the strength to continue in His path. Loss can cloud us, drag us into questioning what we know in our hearts to be true. So then let us recall Job. “For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” ’
When the service was over Charlotte Nichol saw Iwata but said nothing to him. There was just a dumb pause between them, two people seeing each other through prison visitation glass. Then she was led away by a woman Iwata recognized as Cleo’s aunt.
When the church had emptied out Iwata sat in a pew. He watched the funeral men prepare the casket to be moved. Fresh flowers and fairy lights were strewn throughout the nave, little Mexican touches here and there. The sunlight was even brighter now, chiffon totems of colour. In other circumstances, Iwata would have thought it was a beautiful day.
As he stood to leave he became aware of whispering. Soft ‘k’ sounds, soft ‘s’ sounds, both airy and sticky. Then she emerged from the confessional – a beautiful woman with tattoos, her dark hair up in a ponytail. He caught part of a tattoo beneath her collarbone:
1:1–
She smiled as she passed him.
Getting out of the Bronco, Iwata turned up the collar of his linen shirt against the searing midday sun. He was standing in front of the train tracks on which Meredith Nichol’s body had been found. Beyond them there was a fence blocking off the Los Angeles River below. Iwata could see a man hunched over the thin stream, washing his shoes. On either side of the water the concrete was criss-crossed with the tyre marks of bored young bikers.
To the east and south only warehouses, factories and pylons were visible. Industrial LA rarely saw pedestrians. Beyond through traffic, its streets contained little more than grey dust and coyote tracks – both lifelong Angelenos, present well before fruit, gas and movies had conspired to fabricate a city in the desert.
To the west the sparkling skyscrapers of the financial district shot up into the fierce blue. To the north, the denticulate verge of the San Gabriel Mountains, a hazy indigo in this light.
Iwata had parked on a dusty fringe along the train tracks, behind a Korean wholesaler and a tomato-soup factory. Between them, a large billboard showed two men embracing:
BLACK GAY MEN MATTER TO GOD
Iwata was standing a few hundred yards north of 1st Street Bridge. He crouched over the tracks and inspected the ground. No trains were coming in either direction. There was nothing but dirt and grease in the air. He didn’t know what he had come here for, but he certainly hadn’t found it yet.
Iwata walked along the tracks until he reached the ramp that led up to 1st Street Bridge. A sign told him it had been built in the early 1900s, swept up in the City Beautiful movement. Its neo-classical design was trying to call to mind Paris or Budapest, but it didn’t fit – as if a piece of some belle époque city had been stolen and arbitrarily implanted into this stark industrial district.
Beneath the bridge ran Myers Street, the eastern set of tracks used for freight, the Los Angeles River and the western set of tracks used for passenger rail. On the bridge itself there were four traffic lanes. The tracks for the Metro Gold Line light rail ran between them.
Iwata surveyed the area, the bridge, the tracks, the river, the grey, dead earth. Even at 4 a.m., killing a person out here would have carried the obvious risk of exposure. Whoever had murdered Meredith, whether it was Talky or someone else, had done so out in the open. Iwata had thought this before, but now, seeing the area, it struck him how brazen the killer must have been. Or desperate.
Iwata went back down under the bridge. Huddling in the darkness was a small community of tents and shopping trolleys. The smell of bodily waste clung to the graffiti-laden walls and some kind of fluid leaked down the columns, already encrusted with pigeon droppings. Three rats, as if motivated by an opportunity, scurried along the kerb, dodging cigarette butts and broken glass.
‘Joseph Clemente?’ Iwata called after the single witness in the police report McCrae had given him. He heard back only an echo and the sound of traffic whooshing by overhead. ‘Joseph Clemente, are you there?’
‘He ain’t here,’ an irate voice answered from somewhere. ‘He showers on Wednesdays.’
‘Where?’
‘Where else? The Sanctuary.’
Iwata thanked the voice and left it to its darkness.
Skid Row, blooming out over fifty blocks, was a city of the destitute, the American capital of homelessness. Thousands lived in these streets, or perhaps ‘existed’ was a better word. Many were disabled, many were mentally ill, many were undocumented, many were too young, many w
ere too old. Few had any hope of accessing what little support there was to begin with. They were the marginalized, the vulnerable, the undesirable, and this was their kingdom.
Missing-persons cases had brought Iwata into Skid Row many times – usually the second place he looked after the coroner’s – and each time he entered he was shocked at the human squalor. The smell of piss and gastric juices commingled for blocks. In every slit, in every cranny, the stink of bodies dying, some fast, some slow. The heat could be savage and the street bone dry, yet Skid Row always had a sticky wetness to it, an infinite effluvium. Grimy tents lined the streets like a colourful brigade, an encampment of recruits ready for shipping, though there was only ever one destination. Alleyways trapped warmth like narrow jungle gullies and in them, at night, little nebulas of crack smoke distorted coyote shadows.
A fleet of people in wheelchairs inched along the sidewalks. A laughing man lying under a blanket masturbated furiously, his eyes closed, tears running down his cheeks. A young black woman crouched over a gutter to shit, pages of the morning paper scrunched up in one hand, ignoring the honking of passing cars. Across the road, a man wearing a baggy red T-shirt and a gold chain watched the woman while he sipped from his orange Slurpee. The drug dealers were out in numbers today, joking about their favourite fiends and making amicable conversation. Not so long till Mother’s Day now. Mother’s Day, the 3rd of the month, when mothers had been visited and government cheques had been obtained – market day for the dealers.
On the sidewalk another homeless man was probably dead, his mouth open, one shoe missing. His toes were very brown. His head was resting against a bent street sign which read:
NO LOITERING
A man with a coiled silver beard was weeping over him. A pink blonde woman with a black eye was trying to console him and keep her jeans from falling down at the same time. She reached out and rubbed the tip of his nose with her thumb. ‘Come on, baby. You know you did your best. You did your best.’
Iwata just kept on walking.
At the end of the street a group of pale-faced volunteers were bringing hot dogs and prayer. As they jumped out of their new vans Iwata could hear the group leader warning them to keep their gloves on at all times and to be extremely careful about physical contact.
Sins As Scarlet Page 7
