When Emily notices me looking at the tattoo, her cheeks turn rosy, but she holds up her arm proudly. “I got it because of what Ernesto and the others were saying about our father. And I’m not sorry.”
Holzner shakes his head, conveying that contrary to what I first believed, Emily Lansing hasn’t held it together at all: that he’s failed her as a father, just as he failed me; that she doesn’t belong here, but she has no place else to go; and that he can no longer protect her. Yes, a parent’s shake of the head can convey all that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The following Monday, I walk into the office to find Eleanor Dworsky chatting with her son, Brandon. She gives me a big wave, but he looks away.
“Brandon is a machinist,” Eleanor says. “Unusual in this day and age. Someone who’s actually a member of the dying proletariat class, as Moses calls it. Unemployed, unfortunately. That’s more typical. So he had to move in with his mother and stepfather. We live in a small two-bedroom condominium that’s almost too small for Moses alone. He’s a large man. Brandon wants the job he wants, won’t take anything beneath his skill level. Unfortunately, that job doesn’t seem to exist. Don’t you think he should look for something else, at least temporarily, so he can move back out?”
He walks over to the reception chair and slouches.
“Not my business, Eleanor,” I say.
Eleanor dons her reading glasses—she always appears birdlike, but these glasses make her look like a hen. She riffles through a stack of Post-It notes and reads from one: “Lovely is in the back and anxious to see you.”
“You needed a written reminder to tell me that?”
“I’m a record keeper and a note taker. It’s the way I keep Moses organized. Oh my heavens, you should’ve seen him before I came to work with him.”
“Is he in?”
“Down at the Hall of Records on an icky child-custody case.” She hands me the Post-It. “So you won’t forget to talk to Lovely.”
I start toward Lovely’s makeshift office, but Eleanor calls me back.
“Moses wanted me to ask you how the meeting with Charles Sedgwick went,” she says. “It’s been almost a week. I almost forgot to ask you because I didn’t write it down.”
“Nothing to tell. It was a total waste of time. Sedgwick won’t talk.”
“What a shame. After you traveled all that way.”
I go to Lovely’s office. She’s at her desk, sipping coffee from a disposable cup and devouring one of those Etiwanda donuts that Eleanor is always buying.
“What’s up?” I say.
Though I spoke quietly, she shrieks, “Damn it, Parker, don’t scare a girl like that.” She slides the pink pastry box toward me.
“Why are you eating those?”
“Because they taste good?” She leaves the “duh” unspoken.
“Eleanor said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” She wriggles her finger at me so I’ll close the door. When it’s shut, she says, “Belinda Hayes. She wants to meet with you.”
“Where did you see Belinda Hayes?”
“This morning at The Barrista, at about seven a.m. She was looking for you, skulking around, all nervous. I recognized her, and when I approached her she tried to leave, but when I told her who I was she relaxed.”
“What did she want?”
“She said there was a misunderstanding, that she’ll only talk to you or Ian.”
“She’s not going to talk to Ian.”
“She made me promise I wouldn’t tell a soul other than you. She said you should just go up to her house, she’s almost always there. Don’t call her. She’s worried that her phones are bugged and that her e-mails are being hacked by the NSA.”
I try to tamp down my excitement at the thought that Hayes has changed her mind about testifying for us.
“I’ll go out there right now,” I say.
“I’m going with you. You blew it last time.”
“Let’s go,” I say. “Just let me take the lead in the interview.”
She picks up the doughnut box and follows me to the reception area. As I pass, Eleanor holds up a pad of Post-It notes and says, “Any messages before you leave?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I exit the 210 Freeway and drive through the shabby flatland and up the canyon road to Belinda Hayes’s house. I park the car, and Lovely gets out and hurries onto the porch. She knocks on the door, and when Hayes doesn’t answer, she starts pounding on it.
“If she’s home you’re going to scare her to death,” I say.
She goes to a window and tries to peek through the bars. “There’s nobody in the living room. Or, not that I can see.”
“Calm down, Lovely.”
“I can’t calm down. The coffee and the sugar from all those doughnuts made me hyper.”
“Sugar doesn’t really do that.”
“It does when I’m about to get my period. Just let me do this.” She goes to the side of the house and looks in both windows. “Clothes and crap on the floor, and the bed’s unmade. This place is a shambles. These windows are so filthy dirty. It’s like she’s erected an ecumenical religious shrine in a pigsty. This is our key witness?”
“She lives better than most witnesses in these criminal cases. At least her address isn’t a cell-block number.”
“Not anymore.” She goes to the back fence, which is made of termite-ridden redwood. She tries to open the gate, but it’s locked. When she rattles it, there’s a growl and a deep bark, and a dog of uncertain breed, but undoubtedly part pit bull, batters a loose wooden fence slat with his snout and barks ferociously. I didn’t notice him when I last visited. Hayes has obviously gotten him for protection.
“Jesus,” Lovely shrieks, running back to me so quickly that for a moment I think she’s going to jump into my arms.
“You’ve never been afraid of dogs.”
“I’m afraid of those kind. They should be illegal.”
“He’s just doing his job, and you’re annoying him.”
She walks over to my Lexus, retrieves the pastry box from the front seat, takes out a doughnut, and leans against the car while she devours it.
I look up at the sky, blue except for some translucent white cirrus clouds fanned out like harrowing specters from some psychedelic cartoon. In the low foothills of the North Valley, the sun heats by compression, and the morning is becoming warm—a typical December day in Los Angeles.
The dog won’t stop barking.
I spend the next twenty minutes trying to get my smart phone to work, but there’s no cellular connection this far up in the foothills. I read an e-mail I received earlier from an ex-client, asking for some advice about a dispute with his insurance carrier. At the moment, insurance law seems a lot more appealing than biding my time on a dusty hill, waiting to meet with a sociopath on whose testimony my entire case depends.
“Let’s get out of here, Parker,” Lovely says after another twenty minutes. “It’s hot. And that dog is driving me crazy.”
“We’re here. Give her five more minutes.”
She takes the box of doughnuts from the hood, opens the lid, and offers me what’s left—about a third of a greasy apple fritter. When I decline, she says, “Who would’ve thought? You’re eating healthier than I am.” She reaches in and picks up the fritter, but puts it down again when Hayes’s white van pulls into the driveway.
“Finally,” Lovely says.
Hayes gets out of the van and shields her eyes from the sun—oddly with the hand in which she’s carrying her keys. She looks in our direction, takes three steps toward us, and vomits, the gross bile spewing out like rank water from a broken sewer line. Only when I process that Hayes has crumpled to the ground like bent cardboard and only when I recognize the metallic rat-a-tat of gunfire do I realize that she didn’t vomit, but rather has been shot in the head, and that what I took for half-digested gazpacho and kale salad was blood and brain matter and skull shards splattering onto her d
riveway.
The gunfire continues, its location uncertain because of the echo off the canyon walls. Bullets shatter the driver’s side windows in my Lexus, which means we can’t even think about trying to get into my car and driving away. As I reconnoiter the terrain, I’m brave and analytical. Then I feel a violent tug at my belt and hear Lovely Diamond say, “Get down, Parker! Under the car!” She’s already taken cover, and I fall to the ground and try to fit myself next to her. My body is so heavy, my breathing is so labored, that I feel as if I’ve been transported to an alien planet with ten times earth’s gravitational pull.
We lie pressed to the ground, eye to eye but strangely unconnected. Perhaps we’re instinctively focusing only on individual survival. I try to shake off the stupor so I can get on with the process of reasoning. Holzner’s advice about overcoming fear suddenly makes sense—think only about your immediate priority, which for me is staying completely covered by the car chassis.
I reach into my pocket, grope for my cell phone, and punch in 9-1-1. No ring, no response. I check the screen. No cellular connection in this god-forsaken place. From the way the bullets are hitting my car, I guess that the sniper is somewhere on a hill overlooking the front of Hayes’s property. Or so it appears until gunfire starts coming from the opposite direction.
“Why are they trying to kill us, Parker? We can’t identify them.”
“They don’t know that. And anyway, they’re not sure of what Hayes told us.”
“Unless she’s the collateral damage and we’re the targets.”
The firing is so rapid and ceaseless that the area sounds like a battle zone—or what I imagine a battle zone sounds like. Although the nearest neighbors are at least a quarter of a mile away, they must hear the shooting. At least, I hope so. I think of my half brother, Dylan, who fought and died in a real war. How could he have had the courage to volunteer?
“Why don’t they just come down and finish us?” Lovely says, as much to herself as to me.
She’s prescient, because as soon as she finishes uttering those words, the sound of gunfire seems closer.
“They’re making their way down to us,” I say and begin crawling out from under the car.
“Jesus, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to use the phone in the house. I need her house keys.”
“That’s insane. You’ll never be able to get them without being shot.”
“If they’re coming for us, we have to do something.” I manage to squeeze out from under the car, and only then do I realize how the gravel and rock have bruised and scratched my face and body. Mimicking actors in soldier films, I use my elbows to scoot across to where Hayes is lying, keeping low and close to my car and hoping the house is high enough to block a shot from the sniper to my right. When I reach the exposed gap between my Lexus and the van, I pause. I’m breathing hard, sucking in valley dust. I refuse to look at Hayes until it’s absolutely necessary, but her prone body never escapes my peripheral field.
Two crows swoop down and alight near the corpse. When I bang my fist against the fender of the Lexus to scare them away, Lovely screams, curses at me, and implores me to get back under the car. One of the crows flies off, but the other gives me an indifferent look and takes a tentative peck at Hayes’s head. I turn away and force myself to sprint from behind the Lexus to the van, and that sudden movement frightens the hideous bird.
I command myself to focus only on getting the house key.
On hands and knees, I duck-walk over to Hayes. She’s lying on her left side. The top half of her face is an unrecognizable mishmash of macerated flesh and bone. Her mouth is frozen in a subrictal frown more reminiscent of those crows than a human being. She’s still holding her keys. It takes no effort to open her fingers and take them. The death grip metaphor is a myth, at least for Belinda Hayes.
Three bullets clang off Hayes’s vehicle.
“Stay put, Parker!” Lovely shouts from under the car.
I keep low, take a deep breath, and prepare to dash across the driveway to the front door. Then I hear sirens. Thank God for those neighbors, whoever they are.
The shooting stops abruptly. Behind me, where the shot that killed Belinda Hayes came from, there’s a growl of an engine, possibly a motorcycle, but I’m not sure, and I’m not going to stand up to find out. Whatever that vehicle is, it flees the scene with Doppler aggression. Moments later, above Hayes’s house where the second sniper was located, a blue Mercedes-Benz speeds down the hill on a street or fire road I didn’t know existed. I catch a quick glimpse of the driver before the window is rolled up. Though I can’t be sure, she looks like the Sanctified Assembly’s head Celestial Warrior, Mariko Heim.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
After ninety-seven minutes of interrogation, the cops finally let Lovely and me drive out of that horrible gravel graveyard in a rental car that Lovely’s firm arranged for us, a newer-model Lexus (she insisted on that make). The cops impound my bullet-ridden car as evidence. She and I don’t speak for a long time. When I glance over, I see that she’s crying.
“It was ghastly,” I say. “But we’ll be okay. We are okay.”
She tries to speak but can’t through the tears. She’s so distraught that I pull the car over to the curb, cut the engine, reach over and take her hand.
“I’m sorry, Parker,” she whispers.
“For what?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t understand. You have nothing to be—”
She draws away and leans back against the door. When she composes herself, she says, “How could I have told you to go?”
“You have a son to worry about. And you were right. My life is unpredictable. And I’m certainly not father material.”
“I was so stupid. I almost lost you. We almost lost each other.” She looks at me with plaintive eyes, revealing a rare vulnerability.
I start the engine and drive until I see a building called the El Rincon Inn, a white structure with an adobe-tile roof and red doors and trim.
“It’s not the Ritz,” I say. “It’s not even a Radisson.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve missed you so much.”
I finally cut the engine, get out of the car, and open the passenger door for her. She extends her hand as if we were royalty just arrived at a lavish ball. With arms around each other, we walk into a lobby. Whatever the desk clerk thinks of our tattered and bloodied professional clothing, she asks no questions.
We find the room, and help each other forget the horror of the day, remind each other that we should never have been apart.
The Los Angeles Police Department received this message five hours after the murder of Belinda Hayes:
Subject: Communiqué #2
To: Chief Pig of the LAPD
From: JB
Judgment Day has dawned. The turncoat Belinda Hayes sold out the revolution. Her body lies moldering in the trash heap of betrayal.
We demand the immediate dismissal of charges against Ian Holzner, the release from political prison of Charles Sedgwick, the dismantling of the Gestapo NSA, the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. Military troops from Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region, and the imprisonment of the capitalist billionaires that control this country.
We and the oppressed people of the world will continue to exploit the vulnerabilities of Imperialist America until our demands are met. We are numerous. Free Ian!
~JB
The homicide detectives assigned to the investigation insist that Holzner is JB, that he somehow masterminded the killing from my apartment—never mind that he’s under house arrest or that he has no cell phone or access to my laptop, which I’ve password-protected and carry everywhere. Never mind that I don’t have a landline. Never mind that the killers tried to murder me, his own son.
As for Mariko Heim, I think she showed up at The Barrista so she could determine whether I’ll reveal the Assembly’s dark secrets. She’s not interested in exposing them, as she claimed, but in h
iding them. She probably concluded that I pose an ongoing risk. I know things and won’t hesitate to reveal them if ever the time is right. As for my identification of her, the cops say she has an alibi—what that is, they won’t reveal. The Sanctified Assembly must be covering for her. They also maintain that if Lovely and I were the targets, we would’ve been dead long before Hayes arrived home. Maybe so. Or maybe Heim and her people weren’t in position in time to do that.
Now, two days after the shooting, my mother and I sit in my living room, arguing with each other. As soon as we raise our voices, Ian and Lovely escape to the balcony. He leans against the wall, his usual gymnast’s posture replaced by slumped shoulders, a bowed spine, and stiff legs. He hasn’t been working out for the past couple of weeks—no multiple sets of push-ups, pull-ups, and squats. Men his age lose muscle tone quickly—another milestone to look forward to if I live as long as he has, which after the shooting at Hayes’s house is highly debatable. Lovely, wearing black slacks and a vanilla wool turtleneck, follows him outside and assumes an identical posture. They both stare silently out at the ocean, the morning sun shimmering off the surface like burnished chrome. Emily Lansing has been remanded to the care of the deputy US Marshal downstairs.
Why are my mother and I arguing? I want the revered Quiana to put pressure on the Assembly elders to stop protecting Heim, but she won’t do it.
“You just have to snap your fingers,” I say.
“For the tenth time, it doesn’t work that way anymore. It’s not nineteen ninety, Parker. There’s a new generation of devotees who—”
“But you’re the Assembly’s patron saint.”
“Stop the sarcasm. It’s disrespectful; I’m still your mother. And after all these years it’s gotten tiresome. You’re forty years old.”
“It’s not sarcasm, it’s the truth. Bradley Kelly became a god, and you’ve been canonized, on your way to sainthood. Which gives you the power to force Heim to come clean. I don’t get why you’re afraid of her.”
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