by A. D. Miller
Nyman left his car and knocked on the door. Sarah, opening it, looked at him in surprise and said:
“It’s a little late, don’t you think?”
Her husband was standing beside the fireplace. Above him, on the mantle, his younger self smiled down from the black-and-white wedding photo. Freed grabbed an iron poker from a stand beside the fireplace and took a step toward Nyman, his voice low and guttural.
“Get out of my house.”
Nyman put his hands in his pockets and nodded to the poker. “You don’t think a knife would be more appropriate?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Eric Trujillo was murdered with something like a steak knife. The kid you were so eager to put suspicion on when I first talked to you.”
“That has nothing to do with me.”
“Then you won’t mind letting me have a look at your knives?”
Sarah moved between the two men and held out her hands. “It’s too late for this. What we all need is some sleep.”
Freed threw the poker against the fireplace and moved off into the hallway, walking with long, lunging strides. His wife picked up the poker and put it back on its hook.
Nyman said: “I need to talk to him, Mrs. Freed.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“He went to Ethan Kovac’s house tonight. In the Palisades. Did he tell you he was going there?”
Before she could answer, Freed came back into the room holding a glass and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Without looking at Nyman or his wife, he stalked into the hallway; after a moment came the sound of a door closing and a lock being turned.
Sarah looked helplessly at Nyman, then followed her husband. When she was gone, Nyman went into the kitchen.
Beside the sink, slotted into a block of wood, was a set of kitchen knives. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he brought the knives out one by one and examined the blades. There was nothing on them—no blood or scuffs or damage—to suggest that any had been recently used.
“You’re certainly persistent, aren’t you?”
Nyman slid the last knife back into its slot and turned to look at Sarah, who’d come in from the front room. She went to the refrigerator, took out the bottle of wine she’d drunk from earlier, poured two glasses, and handed one to Nyman.
“He locked himself in the study,” she said, leaning against the counter and taking a drink. “Our entire marriage, he’s never locked me out before. I’ve never seen him like this.”
“Will he talk to me?”
“He says if you go near him, he’ll kill you. I think a part of him even thinks he’d do it.”
“Why’d he go to Kovac’s tonight?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t know he was friends with Kovac.”
“What about a woman named Bridget Becker?”
“Becker?” Sarah shook her head. “Never heard of her.”
Nyman took a drink and put the glass aside. “Your husband’s acting like a guilty man, Mrs. Freed.”
“Trust me, I’m aware of that. But he couldn’t have killed those people. He was in Boston on Wednesday and in Santa Barbara with me on Saturday. It’s impossible.”
“He could’ve hired someone to do the killings for him.”
She gave a little shiver of revulsion. “You think of the worst scenarios.”
“It’s part of the job.”
“What about trusting your instincts? Isn’t that part of the job? Don’t your instincts tell you Michael’s innocent?”
“I don’t put much stock in instincts.”
“No, I’m not surprised. You’re very cold and clinical, aren’t you?”
Nyman didn’t answer. Beside him the ticking of the wall-clock seemed to echo in the quiet house. Sarah looked down at her glass and shook her head.
“I wish I could give you my instincts. Being married to someone for so long, you find out who they are, the good parts and the bad. I know every side of Michael, and none of them could commit a crime like that.”
Nyman told her she was lucky. “In my experience, there’s always a part of another person that stays hidden.”
“If they want it to stay hidden, then yes. But Michael’s never been like that.”
“You’re lucky.”
After a pause, she said tentatively: “Your wife. She kept things from you?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
Nyman took the cigarettes from his pocket, started to take one out, then stopped. With a restless movement he put the pack in his pocket and reached for his wine.
“Have you ever noticed,” he said, “that when you first wake up in the morning, there’s always a moment when you can’t remember who you are? It only lasts for a second. Then you think about your job, or something you did the night before, and that brings it back. The memories.”
Sarah’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “I hadn’t noticed, no. Does it matter?”
“That’s what I meant about the hidden part. There’s an emptiness at the center of a person, I think. All your thoughts and feelings come out of it, but you only get a glimpse of it occasionally and indirectly. Out of the corner of your eye, so to speak.”
“I don’t think I follow you, Tom.”
“My wife,” he said, “had certain problems, and for a long time I thought I could save her. I thought there was some kind of core inside her, and if I could heal the core, she’d be the person she was supposed to be.”
Sarah waited for him to go on.
“I don’t know if your husband’s guilty or not, Mrs. Freed, but don’t waste time thinking you can save him. There’s no core you can get to, in him or in anyone else.”
She said that her husband wasn’t in need of saving. “And I don’t agree with anything you just said. You might’ve been through something bad with your wife, but that doesn’t mean it’s true of everybody.”
“It doesn’t matter much either way, in the end.”
“I think it does,” Sarah said. “And I’m sorry about what happened to her, whatever it was.”
It seemed for a time that Nyman wasn’t going to respond. Then, with a grim smile, he said:
“There are jugular veins on either side of the neck. If you cut one of them”—he took a knife from the block of wood and gestured with it, moving it above the skin of his neck—“if you cut one of them deep enough, even if you miss the artery, death from hemorrhagic shock will come within a few hours.”
She looked at him and said nothing.
Looking down at the blade, Nyman said: “Of course she was very considerate. There’s a place down by the marina—a jetty that goes out into the water. On one side is a little sliver of beach where nobody ever goes. She did it down there, where I wouldn’t be the one to find her.”
“I’m sorry, Tom.”
“It took three days,” Nyman said, “for someone on the jetty to notice. The coroner’s office called me and I went down to identify her.”
Nyman put the knife back in its slot.
In the darkness beyond the kitchen, there was a sound of soft footsteps. The Freeds’ younger son came in from the hallway, holding a stuffed dog.
The boy looked warily at Nyman, then walked stiff-legged to his mother, saying that he’d had a bad dream. She kneeled down and spoke him to him in a quiet voice, putting an arm around his shoulder.
Nyman left the house and went out into the night.
Chapter 42
It was almost five when he parked in his usual spot on Via Marina. Sailboats bobbed at their berths across the channel. Farther away, among the houses in the Del Rey hills, lights winked on here and there as the earliest risers left their beds.
He followed the grass along Channel Walk until he came to the concrete path of the jetty. The brackish smell of seawater was mixed with the smell of tackle and live bait.
At the end of the jetty, sitting on overturned buckets, fishermen were preparing their lines with mackerel and anchovy. To Nyman’s left, lapping with
small waves, was the sliver of beach no one ever visited.
He sat down on his usual bench and looked back at the land. The lights of Venice ran away to the north, merging with those of Santa Monica and the Palisades and then, as the land jutted west, bleeding into the glow of Malibu.
He sat for half an hour with his arms crossed and his face creased in thought. More than once he opened his notebook to make a note in the margins or draw a question mark next to a note he’d made earlier.
Sometime before six he closed his eyes. When he opened them again the sun was above the mountains and the L.A. basin was filled with light.
He got up from the bench and paused for a moment to look down at the sliver of beach. The tide was rising and waves were moving closer to the wall of the jetty, washing away the tracks of birds and leaving clean white sand behind.
He walked back to his car.
* * *
In Glassell Park, at the corner of Verdugo and Holt, he found the house Voss had told him about: an old Craftsman painted a dusty green, its eaves inlaid with stained-glass windows. Parked in the driveway was Grace Salas’ red Prius. Walking around the car, Nyman found no major dents or scratches.
Laughter came through the front door as he rang the bell. The door was opened by a smiling young woman who looked at him expectantly, her eyebrows raised.
Nyman said that he needed to speak to the councilmember. “My name’s Tom Nyman.”
“Mom’s in the kitchen with the kids. You’re one of the new aides?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
Her eyebrows dropped and her smile went away. Without a word, she turned and led him down a hallway that opened into a kitchen. Grace Salas, in the same black suit he’d first seen her in, was cooking pancakes. Three young kids were waiting at the table.
“You have a visitor, Mom,” the woman said.
Salas glanced over her shoulder, recognized Nyman, and looked away again, busying herself with the pancakes. By the time she brought the food over to the table her features were composed.
“Let me see your hands,” she said to the kids.
Two of the kids held out their hands; the third ran to the sink. Salas put down the plates and said to Nyman:
“You can wait in the office down the hall. I’ll be with you in a second.”
Nyman followed the hallway to a cluttered room lined with bookshelves. An orange-and-white cat, thin with age, lay stretched in the patch of sunshine that fell across the rug. Nyman was reading the spines of the books on the shelves when Salas came in.
“Well, now you’ve tracked me down at home, just like your friend. I hope you’re not planning to be as rude as he was.”
Nyman said that he wasn’t planning anything. “I just want to know why you decided to give twenty thousand dollars to Meridian Resources.”
Salas walked to a chair and made a show of clearing away the papers that were piled on the cushion. With her face averted, she said:
“You’re referring to the council motion?”
“Yes.”
She put the papers on a shelf. “That’s just part of the job. Making sure local organizations get support.”
“Even if the organization isn’t in your district?”
She smiled. “You read Voss’ column.”
“I did.”
“That’s Richard for you: always looking for a controversy. The fact is, in a place like L.A., councilmembers have to look beyond their own little neighborhoods. The city’s too interconnected.”
“But why Meridian?”
“Why not? They do good work.”
“What kind of work?”
“Environmental advocacy, for the most part. I believe their main focus is alternative energy.”
“You believe?”
“That’s what I’ve been told, yes.”
“By who?”
Her gaze went to a clock on the wall. “By Michael Freed, as a matter of fact. Meridian’s director is a former student of his.”
“Bridget Becker?”
“That’s right.”
“So Freed asked you for twenty thousand dollars for his former student?”
“Of course not. You make it sound like a payment. He told me that Meridian was a deserving organization.”
“And what’s his relationship with Becker?”
“Well, he was her professor. I assume he’s kind of a mentor.”
“Where female students are concerned, he has a reputation of being more than a mentor.”
Salas laughed. “Trust me, Tom, I’m not interested in academic gossip. All I know is that Freed assured me Meridian was worthy of our support.”
“Have you ever dropped by Meridian’s offices, councilmember?”
“Not personally.”
“Have you tried calling them?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Would you be surprised to hear that their phone’s been disconnected and that their office has been leased to someone else?”
Nothing surprised her anymore, she said. “And it’s not my job to keep tabs on every charity in the city.”
“But it’s your job to give Michael Freed twenty thousand dollars when he asks for it?”
“He didn’t ask for it. I’ve already told you that. There’s no need to badger me with the same questions.”
Nyman said: “You’ve heard these questions before, haven’t you? First from Alana, and then from Eric Trujillo.”
“No.”
“Did they threaten to expose you?”
Looking again at the clock, she said she was late for a meeting at City Hall. “You’ll have to find another time to harass me.”
“How can I get in touch with Bridget Becker?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea. I’ve never met the woman.”
“What about Ethan Kovac? Did you know he also donated to Meridian?”
“No, I didn’t, and it means nothing to me. Now if you don’t leave, I’m going to call the police.”
Nyman said he would show himself out. When he reached the driveway Salas’ daughter was loading the kids into the Prius. She pretended not to see him and Nyman went by without speaking to her, making his way back to his car.
He was lowering himself into the driver’s seat when his phone rang. Recognizing Joseph’s number, he opened the phone and said:
“I hope you have good news for me.”
“A little good and a little bad,” Joseph said. “The good news is, I found our friend at Water and Power, and he’s not dead.”
“That is good. What’s the bad news?”
“He can’t tell us much about Bridget Becker, aside from the fact that Meridian leased the shop in Hollywood for a brief time three years ago.”
“And then disappeared?”
“More or less. She left a forwarding address, but the bills they sent there never got paid.”
“What’s at the forwarding address? Another store?”
It was an apartment, Joseph said, on Gossett Drive in Beverly Hills.
Nyman took down the number, thanked him for his help, and drove west in the thickening morning traffic.
Chapter 43
Gossett Drive was a palm-lined street of closely set houses and apartment complexes. The address Joseph had given him belonged to a cream-and-beige, two-story complex with an open courtyard at the center. A stepladder was leaning over the bottlebrush hedge at the front of the building; in the grass was a toolbox and a new mesh window-screen still in its cardboard frame.
The security door stood open, held in place by a rubber wedge. Nyman passed through the door and came into the central courtyard, where the sun shone down on a murky swimming pool.
Apartments were ranged around the courtyard, each with its own stoop and letterbox. Crossing to number six, he pressed the button beside the door.
A bell chimed in the front room, but there was no answering sound of footsteps. Moving to one of the windows, he was looking through the glass when a voice sai
d behind him:
“Don’t bother. They moved out three weeks ago.”
Nyman turned. A man in slippers and a robe stood beside the pool, holding a coffee mug. He was in his late thirties or early forties; his eyes were dark and sleepy and bored.
“Saw you from my kitchen,” he said, nodding to another apartment. “You see everything in this building. I’m Chris, by the way. The manager.”
“Tom Nyman.”
The man nodded but didn’t come any closer. Running his gaze over Nyman, he seemed to come to a conclusion.
“You’re a cop.”
“Close,” Nyman said. “A private investigator.”
“And you’re looking for the Egans?”
“Who are the Egans?”
“The people who lived in number six. Nice couple. Moved out at the end of June.”
Nyman said: “I’m looking for Bridget Becker.”
Some of the boredom went out of the man’s eyes. “In that case, you’re a little late. She hasn’t lived here for two or three years.”
“Do you know where I can find her?”
Yawning, Chris turned toward his apartment and gestured for Nyman to follow. “Come in and sit down,” he said, “and we’ll talk about it.”
His apartment was crowded with furniture, all of it heavy and ornate. Cheap oil paintings in gilt frames hung on the walls, interspersed with playbills and cast photos from theater productions. Nyman recognized Chris in a few of the photos, younger and thinner.
He waved Nyman into a wingback chair and sat down in a matching chair across from him, so close that their knees were almost touching. Reaching into the drawer of a side table, he took out a plastic bag filled with loosely rolled joints.
“Smoke?” he said.
“No thanks.”
“Mind if I do?”
“Go ahead.”
He lit a joint and sat back in the chair. The robe hung loose at the sides of his body, exposing patches of hairy skin.
Exhaling smoke, he said: “She left him, didn’t she?”
“Pardon?”
“Bridget. She had a fiancé when she lived here. I always figured she’d leave him after a few years.”
