Anything for You--A Novel

by Saul Black

  “He hit him,” Rachel said. “He hit him with…” She swallowed; fresh tears welled. The words wouldn’t come.

  “Take your time,” Valerie said. “I know how hard this is for you.”

  Rachel shook her head. Partly a denial of the memory itself—willing it not to be true—but partly, Valerie understood, a denial of what she, Valerie, had just said. I know how hard this is for you. How could she know?

  Rachel closed her eyes again. Opened them. She was forcing herself through. The grief was plain, but there was rage, too, that it had happened right in front of her, in her own beautiful warm familiar home filled with their history and love and life—and there had been nothing she could do to stop it.

  “He hit him with the … hammer…” Her mouth contorted. “He hit him so hard … Oh God … What am I going to say to Elspeth? What am I going to say?”

  Valerie waited again. Longer this time. Rachel Grant just kept shaking her head. Swallowing, swallowing, as the images played on a loop from which she would never, now, escape, the movie that would run and run.

  “I must have screamed,” she said eventually. “He … I ran at him. I ran at him but he … I don’t even remember feeling it. And then he just kept … He just…”

  “He stabbed Adam?”

  “Yes.”

  Pause.

  “He kept on … He just kept on…” Rachel trembled. “I tried to get up. I tried to.”

  “You did everything you could,” Valerie said. “More than many people would have done. Please remember that.”

  Rachel shook her head again. They were all just words to her. She’d watched her husband dying and been powerless to stop it. By definition nothing she’d done was enough.

  “I guess I passed out,” she said. “He must have thought I was dead.”

  A note of coldness here. Rachel Grant’s delayed realization that her own life had almost been taken. What that would have done to her daughter.

  “When I opened my eyes he was gone. Adam wasn’t moving. I went to him but I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel anything … He was just…”

  She had crawled to her purse by the French windows. Cell phone. Nine-one-one. While the blood hurried out of her body, dragging her senses with it.

  “The French windows weren’t open when you went to bed?” Valerie asked.

  “No.”

  “And the alarm?”

  “What?”

  “The alarm wasn’t tripped?”

  “No. I don’t … I went up before Adam. He set the alarm.”

  “You know that he set it?”

  “Why wouldn’t he set it? He…”

  “Is it possible he forgot?”

  “No … No. He wouldn’t forget.”

  “But you didn’t see him do it?”

  Rachel stirred with helpless impatience. “I didn’t see him do it but why wouldn’t he do it? What the fuck—”

  “We have to learn everything we can about the perpetrator. It’ll help us catch him. If he had the ability to deal with a sophisticated alarm system, that’s relevant information. It means we’re not looking for an amateur, and probably not an opportunist. It means this is someone who planned this ahead. It means it’s more than likely someone who’s been watching your place for a while. It’s possible someone in the neighborhood might have seen him. I promise you, I’m only asking these questions to maximize our chances of getting him.”

  Rachel turned away. With contempt, Valerie knew. Not just at what had happened, but at the inevitability of all that had to happen, all that had to go on happening, in spite of it. For the survivors of horror, the most sickening thing was their survival. Rachel Grant would either get past that—reassemble some new mangled version of herself from the wreckage of the old—or she wouldn’t, and instead live the rest of her life like a violently broken machine, one that remembered its functions but could no longer perform them.

  “I don’t know for a fact that he set the alarm,” Rachel said, her face still turned away. “I just don’t know why he wouldn’t.”

  There was a knock at the door. Valerie got up and opened it to Riordan, a uniformed officer in her midtwenties she recognized from the station.

  “We have Elspeth Grant here with us,” Riordan said.

  Valerie stepped out into the corridor. Elspeth Grant, in blue jeans and a white cheesecloth hippie shirt, looked about thirteen. Thick, long dark hair and large eyes that made Valerie think of an exquisitely realistic puppet. “Pretty” wasn’t quite the word. The girl had a petite dramatic glamor that at just the wrong angle might be ugly. The remnants of last night’s heavily applied eyeliner (illicit, Valerie imagined, but indulged in for the sleepover) were still visible. Maybe as recently as six months ago she would have been described as a child. Now the accents of young womanhood were insinuating themselves. At the moment, however, she looked taut and bright with fear.

  Standing next to her was an officer from Victim Support, a tall, fair-haired woman in pastel Gap casuals.

  “Carrie Wheeler,” she said, shaking hands with Valerie.

  “Valerie Hart.” Again Valerie edited out “Homicide,” this time for Elspeth Grant’s benefit. “SFPD. Could I speak with you for a moment?”

  The two women stepped a few paces away and lowered their voices.

  “You know the story?” Valerie asked.

  “Home intrusion, father dead, mother just about alive. Nothing more than that. And the kid’s still in the dark.”

  “You’ll go in with her? It’ll steady the mother.”

  “That’s Mrs. Grant’s call, but yeah, I’ll go in to start with.”

  Valerie glanced back at Elspeth. The girl was tracking the exchange. It was familiarly dismal to Valerie to know what was coming to her. And a relief to know that this time it didn’t fall to her to break the news. She remembered kissing Adam Grant, their mouths sour from the evening’s booze and chili olives. The first touch of his hand between her legs. Lifting her hips to make it easier for him to pull her panties off. She remembered not being sure if it was going to be any good between them. She remembered not caring. The images put a connection between her and Elspeth Grant, as if a phantom umbilicus joined them. Valerie resisted the urge to put her hand over her abdomen.

  “Okay,” she said to Carrie Wheeler. “I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got to go talk to the exec on duty. Meantime tell the officer no one goes in or out of the room except you and the girl. I’ll be back shortly.”

  Valerie watched Carrie Wheeler say a few quiet words to Elspeth, who absorbed them with a look of incomprehension.

  At the door, Elspeth glanced back at her.

  As if she felt the connection, too.

  9

  July 31, 2017

  There was nothing wrong with the Volvo’s air-conditioning, but she killed it and rolled the windows down instead, let the in-rushing night air love her up like an incubus, her hair, her skin, her sweat-damp clothes. The cooling of her underarms was particularly delicious. Post-murder one craved elemental molestation, apparently, the cold water of the lake, the darkness of the evergreens—and now the desert’s mineral breath. Childhood came back, with its sensual certainties. She thought of the stones and pebbles out here revolving their shadows through the blazing afternoons. Mute planetary clockwork, without witness.

  Without witness.

  You better hope. Pray. Not bother to care.

  That, bizarrely, was easy. Pure liberty was pure levity, at least in its first hours.

  She eased off the gas. The innocent don’t rush. Remember that.

  Deep down she’d known it would be the desert in the end. Even driving to the lake house she’d taken a mental inventory of the yard tools. Only two mattered: Shovel. Wheelbarrow. The image of the body floating up wouldn’t give her peace. She’d played it out according to plan, but the shift at the end had seemed inevitable. Inevitable because it was harder. For the murderer, she intuited now, the hardest option was always the best. An ironicall
y punitive inversion of Occam’s razor. She’d gone back to education, after Larry, after the bad years, after her rescue. Opening books again after having drifted so far from them had filled her with frail joy. Now her education was like leftover foreign currency she knew she’d never bother changing back. Murder, it turned out, closed certain doors. She wasn’t complaining. It opened others. Oddly, not into godlessness. If anything, the Divine page had been refreshed, albeit with an identity the priests and teachers of her childhood would find abhorrent. God was neither benevolent nor malign. In fact he had only two characteristics: infinite creativity and insatiable detached interest in its products. Auschwitz and the Sistine Chapel. Mandela and the gulags. Love and hatred. Cruelty and compassion. Birth and death.

  She took a swig from the bottle she’d opened and turned hard right off the empty road straight into the scrub. She found herself smiling as the alcohol went into her and warmed her empty belly. Superficially because the tequila was Don Julio Real (around $350 a bottle) and she remembered a vestige of political guilt the first time she’d bought it. Not superficially because after all the meticulous planning this felt like a crazy trip off-piste, absurdly high risk. She knew where she was—no one owned the land, it wasn’t an area of natural beauty, it wasn’t protected, no one bothered coming here—but it still felt like a red rag to the contingency bull.

  And while we’re on the subject, missy, how about you quit it with the fucking tequila? All you need is to be pulled over for drunk driving.

  Not likely. As far as her eye could see there was nothing but empty Californian scrub, pale dust and creosote bush and desert mallow. Black sky and the stars coming all the way down to the ground. She was well off the road—and the road had been empty.

  Without witness. She thought of the bat whirring past her head as she’d stared down at his body. The world insisted life went on.

  It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.

  She wanted to drive farther but the Volvo didn’t like the terrain. Hit soft sand or lose a tire to some rogue thorn and then what? You’d think that if you could kill a man you could change a tire, but the prospect filled her knees and wrists with urgent weakness. She stopped the car, turned off the engine, and got out.

  Into silence. Silence with a remote masculine personality. It was as if she were in the presence of one of the Olympian gods. For a few moments she just stood there, limbs humming with their recently added-to history, newly enriched by all these things it turned out they’d been able to do. Make a clean, deep incision with the scalpel. You don’t want a serrated blade going through anything but bone. Not that it mattered in this case, of course. The guidelines were for those trying to save life and minimize damage. Whereas, hilariously, the amputative world was her oyster. Buzz saw, guillotine, piano wire, hatchet. She could have gnawed them off if she’d been that way inclined.

  You’re unspooling. The tequila. Shit. Okay. Get a grip.

  She opened the trunk and took out the shovel. She put on the scrubs with a bristling sensation of television and reality intersecting. All the cop shows. CSI.

  Thirsty. Goddammit, should have stopped for water. This is, genius, the desert.

  She found a half-empty Evian in the driver’s door well, drank that, knew it was enough, would have to be enough. The constellations observed. Her grandmother told her once when she was small that the stars were pins holding down God’s diagram of Eternal Truth.

  She walked a few paces from the car to a spot where there was room between the low bushes.

  Then, thinking of beautiful Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, she put her foot on the shovel and began to dig.

  10

  August 6, 2017

  “You okay?” Nick said to Valerie.

  “Sorry,” Valerie said. “Just ignore me.”

  It was late. They were in bed together. Nick had been kissing his way up her legs, from the tips of her toes to the tendons between her parted thighs. He knew her well enough to sense a wrong note.

  “In that case, fine,” he said. “Turn over, bitch.”

  She tugged his hair, acknowledging the joke, though even a cursory laugh was beyond her.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  No matter the circumstances, these were never good words. Valerie felt Nick’s first (and given their history, entirely natural) thought. A small electric current went through him. She sensed him checking it, forcing himself not to jump to conclusions, although (again, given their history) the conclusions needed a lot less than a jump to get him there.

  “I shouldn’t be on the Adam Grant case,” she said.

  Which was enough information. She felt his body slacken, letting the dull understanding in. He waited a few moments before speaking.

  “You’re right,” he said. “You shouldn’t be on the case.”

  He moved up the bed. (Yeah, away from my cunt, Valerie thought. Now that we’ve added another name to the list of guys I let into it. Except I didn’t, in this instance.)

  “I didn’t fuck him,” she said. “I took him home, but it didn’t fly.”

  Nick waited again. Not, she knew, because he didn’t believe her, but because he was trying to decide whether technical non-consummation made a difference, professionally.

  “We both know that doesn’t make a difference,” he said.

  “It was four years ago and it was nothing. He might as well have slept on the couch.”

  “If that were really true you wouldn’t be telling me this.”

  A pause. More Nick cogitation.

  “You’re not telling me this because you want my opinion on whether you should work the case,” he said. “You’re telling me this because you’ve already decided to work the case.”

  “I’m telling you because I want you to be okay with it.”

  They lay in silence. Their apartment was a friendly intelligence around them, not wanting anything to go wrong.

  Nick put his hand back between her legs. Rested it there, gently.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I think. It’s a bad idea professionally for all the reasons you know. But it’s your career, so it’s your call. As far as being okay with the fact that you fooled around with this guy … That depends.”

  “On what?”

  Nick moved his hand against her. She was, in spite of the conversation, wet. Their desire for each other was sly and more or less reliable.

  “On how enthusiastically you fuck my brains out right now.”

  * * *

  Valerie got into the station just after 8 A.M., sipping her regulation cappuccino. Will Fraser was already at their shared desk. The office windows showed a clear turquoise sky.

  “Look,” Will said. “What you get up to in the privacy of your own home is your business, but I know I speak for everyone here when I say we’d all really appreciate it if you didn’t advertise it quite so obviously.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You. Glowing. It’s obscene.”

  “It’s hair conditioner.”

  “It’s deep sexual satisfaction. And no one likes to see it. I’m just saying. For your own good, dial it down.”

  Valerie took her seat and woke the snoozing desktop. Laura Flynn came in, holding a file.

  “She’s been at it again,” Will said to Laura. “In my opinion less than two hours ago.”

  “And now she gets even happier,” Laura said, dropping the file in front of Valerie. “We got the forensics back on the Adam Grant murder. It’s a no-brainer. Take a look.”

  Will joined Valerie as she opened the file. The first page was a rap sheet for “Dwight Jenner, aka DJ, aka Shiner,” mug shots showing a white guy in his late twenties with short, dark greasy hair and three-day stubble.

  “Got your Mr. Bowie’s thing going on there with his eyes,” Valerie said, having noted that they appeared to be of different colors. Laura was a big Bowie fan.

  “Same look, different cause,” Laura said. “This is complet
e heterochromia, one blue, one green, caused by a melanin deficiency inherited at birth. Bowie’s—God rest his lady-grinning soul—was anisocoria, which is when one pupil is bigger than the other. Allegedly caused by a fight with a friend when he was fifteen that left the pupil permanently dilated.”

  “I always thought he looked like Glenda Jackson,” Will said.

  “That’s not a problem for me,” Laura said. “I’d fuck her, too.”

  Valerie speed-read the sheet. A string of burglary and assault charges, culminating in six of a seven-year stint in San Quentin for his part in an armed robbery that left a gas station cashier dead, though Jenner hadn’t, himself, pulled the trigger.

  “Adam Grant put him away,” Valerie said.

  “Yeah. Jenner got out eighteen months ago. Prints and DNA slam dunk. All over the scene. Including Rachel’s nightdress. The knife, the hammer. And the body of Adam Grant.”

  “So he’s a moron.”

  “Christ knows. But not a sharp tool, I’m guessing.”

  “Sharp enough to get past the Grants’ security gizmos?”

  “They weren’t set,” Valerie said. “I checked. The alarm keeps a forty-eight-hour data record. They hadn’t been set since the night before. According to Rachel it was her husband’s job. For whatever reason, he didn’t do it. He’d drunk quite a bit. It’s possible he just forgot.” She checked the release papers. “Okay, we’ve got a parole officer and an address as of six months back. Let’s go talk to Mr. Jenner.”