I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  “Amaryllis … did he do things for you? He did things for you, no? He was a good friend? He brought you food? Food from the bakery?” She nodded. “Did he ever bring your mother food?”

  “No.”

  “But he—”

  “He gave me food for my brother and sister.”

  “That was very nice of him. Very nice. Did he ever meet them?”

  “No. He gave it to me and I gave it to them.”

  “Did he ever bring food to the motel? To the St. George?”

  She shook her head. “He gave it to me.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the bridge.”

  “Where he was living? Did you ever stay with him there? I mean, stay overnight? Did he ever take you anywhere?”

  The psychologist chirped in: “Did he take you to the movies?”

  “Lotsa great movie palaces downtown,” said the detective unctuously. “Historic.”

  “And he never touched you, Amaryllis”—asked the psychologist—“in a way that made you feel funny? You know, that uncomfortable feeling we get in our stomachs when something isn’t quite right? Sometimes when people are sick or lonely they do things like that and it makes your tummy upset—even if they don’t know or mean what they’re doing. Even if they’re your friend. And it’s not your fault, Amaryllis,” she said, grinning like a moron. “It wouldn’t be your fault.”

  “Is Topsy sick?” she asked.

  “Well, we’re not sure,” said the detective. “That’s why we want to talk to him. Now, he said not to tell anyone about leaving you at the bakery. Was there anything else he ever told you not to tell? About any of the things you did together? Even the good things? Did he share secrets with you, like a good friend would? Did he ever tell you he did something bad to anyone? That he hurt someone, even by mistake?”

  “It’s OK to tell, sweetheart. Otherwise, we won’t be able to help your friend.”

  Amaryllis burst into tears, and the psychologist looked into Samson’s eyes, signaling the meeting should end.

  “Thank you, sweetheart. You’ve been very helpful. I didn’t mean to make you cry! Amaryllis—that’s a beautiful name, do you know that? Did your mother give you that name? That’s a beautiful flower. A Christmas flower.”

  He reached into a briefcase and pulled out a stiff plastic envelope. He held it out to her; encased within was a deep-blue handkerchief speckled with gold scallop’d teardrops. “Have you ever seen this before?” he asked.

  She cautiously nodded.

  “Where?”

  “It’s Topsy’s.”

  “Something he wore?”

  “Around his neck.”

  “Did he give it to your mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her jaw clenched and she stared at her shoes. He was losing her again.

  “Know what they call it? An ‘ascot.’ I’d like to return it to him.” He stood up, then bent to kiss her cheek. “Keep getting stronger, now—you’re doin’ great. Isn’t she?”

  “She sure is.”

  “Not mad at me, are you? Can I have a smile?”

  Amaryllis eked one out.

  “Mr. Dowling has something else to tell you,” said the psychologist.

  “I sure do. Saffron and Cody are coming to see you.”

  She looked at him, dumbfounded.

  “We were able to locate them, and they’re on their way.”

  “From what I understand,” said the psychologist, “they should be here either tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  Come they did, later that evening. The woman at the foster home where they’d been placed soon after their departure from the St. George could no longer take care of them. That’s all that was said.

  As curious as we are to observe the intimacies of the reunited, time and good taste have their limits. We shall leave them alone, for their moments together are precious and deserve exile from prying eyes. Briefly, it may be said that upon first seeing Amaryllis, the young babies, three and five years of age, were stunned and insensate, clasping each other in an odd pantomime of displaced, abject fear; then, spoken to in a persistent, cooing, complex language of animal sounds and shared remembrances, they slowly came around until the trio were overwrought to an ecstasy of desperation, Amaryllis coating them with kisses the way a mother licks her cubs clean. Even the stoic, efficient Dézhiree came undone. So let them be: allow the small, improvised party at the cottage—donated cupcakes, candles and bears all around—to proceed behind closed doors.

  Such miracles happen, even at Mac.

  Another reunion is at hand, though not as poignant.

  He had what he needed—the girl’s statement about the ascot’s ownership was incriminating enough for him to now seek charges of rape and murder against John Doe aka Topsy aka William. He would visit the district attorney in the morning.

  When Samson returns to Rampart Detectives, he is pulled up short by the sight of a woman sitting at the end of a bolted row of hard plastic scoop-chairs. His body knows her before his mind can properly assess; one child’s neuroperceptual difficulty is another man’s cognitive dissonance. He takes everything in—flamboyant vintage dress and absurdly glamorous hat upon fiery, fierce-bunned hair; the business end of a stiletto tap-tap-tapping on the cigarette-burned linoleum floor.

  She stands, and the air rushes out of him.

  †After the vagrant’s disturbing visit undid and upended all her missionary work, Lani Mott used the resources of the advocacy office at children’s court to track down one Edith Stein aka Amaryllis Kornfeld, even traveling to El Monte to visit—but to what end? What do you want with this child? asked her CASA supervisor. Because Lani hadn’t said straight out that she wished to be the girl’s advocate. That of course is what she did want, more than anything, yet couldn’t voice because of a lurid, niggardly fear that shamed her no end. She had become a Court-Appointed Special Advocate in such selfless spirit of noblesse oblige; had cheerfully undergone the sometimes-depressing training and even put on a little “graduates’ day dessert” at the house, thoughtfully catered by Gilles. Yet more than a year later, all she had to show for her altruism was one measly case: driving a sullen teenager back and forth from a fancy residential facility to Western Dental to get a retainer. She’d made grandiose excuses to her growingly contemptuous courthouse boss—a death in the family, trouble at work—turning down case after case simply because she didn’t want to travel to certain neighborhoods, where she felt she would be at physical risk. She wouldn’t even go to Leimert Park! Lani Mott had said no so many times that she’d been informed that her days as an advocate were coming to an end. A fired volunteer—now, that was pretty low. But the fact remained: Lani Mott was afraid.

  CHAPTER 25

  Carved Fungi

  An unexpected thing happened when Trinnie and Samson sat down for supper at Ivy at the Shore: she lost focus. The manic, aggrieved woman had used her brother’s office to find him—steeped in fervid self-righteousness, she had relished every step of the ambush. Yet after that first encounter, standing next to him under the fluorescent lights of Rampart, an uncanny light that made everything too real hence not real enough, after they had agreed to see each other that very night, Trinnie was all peace and love as she wended her way back to Saint-Cloud. Climbing from the bath, she felt acutely alive. She chose a simple black shift and left the house with a bounce in her step, the chill air a tonic. The top was down on the Cabriolet.

  Sam Dowling was a childhood friend; well, more a friend of Dodd’s. His family had been poor (they lived south of Olympic) but, like pioneers before them, were determined to give their son a Beverly Hills education. He was one of the few kids at BV—maybe the only one—to have gotten close to her brother, and for that Trinnie was ever grateful. He wasn’t a user, either; she knew he didn’t pal around with Dodd for the perks, and there were plenty. (Not that Trinnie would have cared.) Sam was a gawky, good-hearted boy, clueless in matters of money and social status, the latter of
which her brother was sorely lacking. The future detective’s democratic qualities and all-around innocent kindnesses were rewarded with lavish summer trips, three in a row to their Great Camp on Saranac Lake.

  She knew a few things about him—that he’d married young and become a cop; that he’d been shot twice in the chest during a “routine traffic stop” and not been expected to live; that his marriage was the thing that didn’t survive. When he recovered, he moved to Fiji to soul-search, with Dodd fronting him money to build a small resort for scubaholics. But law enforcement was in his blood, and Fiji was too damn peaceful. He sold the hotel, repaid his friend and returned to L.A. with an eye on a detective’s shield.

  He re-entered Trinnie’s life when her brother called on him to mediate in the awkward business of the stolen book and then again when her husband, Marcus Weiner, the eccentric and beloved Hollywood agent, vanished into thin air.

  Sam Dowling was always “interested.” When he appeared on that terrible morning, standing with Louis Trotter and his children in the lobby of La Colonne—ground zero—looking so fresh and dapper, and the heiress so disheveled, anyone could see in his eyes how he was sorry-grateful the crazy man had left her at last. He tried to insinuate himself into her life, but it was not to be; soon after, she began the years of flight and exile.

  “I’ve been reading about you,” he said.

  “Where?” she asked, surprised. “The AA newsletter?”

  “Internet—I’ve asked Jeeves all about you.”

  “Oh shit. Google’d again.”

  “And that piece in House and Garden, about the maze. At Saint-Cloud.”

  “You’re pretty well read for a cop.”

  The detective was endearingly nervous around her. Physically, his blade-like profile and droll, homespun mouth were reminiscent of Joe DiMaggio’s.

  “Do you ever see my brother?”

  “Not recently. We talk.”

  “And Father?”

  “Nominally.” He laughed, almost to himself. “I know it’s incredible, but he still keeps me on retainer. I’ve told him I don’t want the money, but he insists.”

  “That’s Dad.”

  “A good man. His health?”

  “Great.”

  “Your mom?”

  “Everyone’s fine.”

  They spoke with bemused affection of her father’s monumental funerary quest, then Trinnie broached the subject of Samson being shot (one seemed to follow the other). He said it probably hadn’t been the worst thing, because it got him to slow down and reassess priorities. Trinnie thought his response a bit clichéd, then busted herself for being so cynical—she wasn’t the one who had taken a bullet. His humor and humility won out, and held her attention. She asked if he still spoke to his wife, and Samson said no, not in years.

  Since she had sat down, a familiar-looking middle-aged man had been stealing glances. Trinnie finally met his gaze; he stood and walked over. He was John Burnham, one of the heads of William Morris. A friend of Marcus Weiner’s from the mail room days, Mr. Burnham politely paid his respects without referring to the debacle, adding that he would love to talk to her about designing a maze for his Hancock Park home.

  When he returned to his table, Samson said, “You know, I still have feelers out for Marcus.”

  “I would have thought,” said Trinnie, backtracking, “that you’d have stayed more in touch with my brother.”

  “That’s not often easy—the world he moves in is a little rarefied. I mean, it’s fun to joyride in his jet to some abandoned mental asylum … once.” She laughed, and it made him cocky. “But twice? A bit epic for my taste. That’s your world.”

  “Was that a dig, Detective?”

  “Sorry—that didn’t come out quite right. I just meant ‘to the manor born.’ ”

  “I’m afraid my world has shrunk.”

  “I doubt a shrunken world could hold you, Trinnie.”

  He touched her hand, then withdrew it, sipping his drink. He decided to confess what she already knew. He admitted to finding her husband in the Adirondacks, rehashing everything her father had said, ending with the hospitalization and escape. The only detail she hadn’t heard was how, before his capture, Marcus had taken sanctuary on cold nights at St. John’s in the Wilderness, the family parish.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Katrina—I think he wanted more than anything in the world not to hurt you.”

  “Didn’t do such a good job, did he?”

  Samson started to say something, but she stopped him.

  They sat awhile in silence. When she asked if he’d take her to his apartment, he actually got up to flag down the waiter for the bill.

  Trinnie had never been inside the El Royale. She always imagined the suites to be rococo in that thirties way, and maybe some were, but not Sam’s. Like the detective himself, the rooms were simple, solid and unprepossessing—with the occasional flair.

  They made love without niceties and she felt herself pulled through the maze. He pulled her through. The surgical scar on his chest was like a shadowy imprint of barbed wire. She sobbed and keened as they fucked, but he never stopped advancing and she was glad he didn’t bother with useless questions such as what was the matter and was she OK. She felt the withheld drug of his come, hating the condom and all its second-skin safeties. This was a man she had known as a girl and now he carried her on a litter, on a bier through the bower back to the lake—hallelujah of painted summers at Twig House, Katrina and Dodd taking turns at the Chris-Craft, dizzying bounty of shimmering Saranac space, breaking the godly glass of water surrounding thirty thousand Trotter-owned acres, past great stands of maple and oak steeped in kettle ponds, bogs ringed with hemlock—past Pulpit Rock—past stone chalets and Orientalist sleeping cabins while loons and red-breasted mergansers called from their perches. Louis in black tie and Bluey in Halston sat on the boathouse porch sipping hot buttered rum from an army canteen. At nighttime, the children stormed the gates of heaven: campfires roared amid hullabaloo of square dancing, and the Dowling boy moved as if in a paradisal dream: lanterns led to the darkly dizzying mahogany-clapboard Great Camp with its diamond-fretted windows and white birch bark appliqué—marking pathways past cedar Parthenon replica—past elaborate stickwork of old icehouse to brainstorm siding of breeze-way containing the funicular; they climbed in and ascended—that’s where he first kissed her, smelling girl-breath of cinnamon, spruce and beer. Their destination was the pole-worked bowling alley on the hill where Sinatra and Bobo Rockefeller played. She was twelve, and Samson, fifteen.

  One summer, a servant drove them to Tear of the Clouds lake. Dodd was sick, and Sam had her all to himself. She couldn’t have known what that meant; she couldn’t have known anything about it. The detective never forgot the sights and sounds and smells of that day, and years later revisited those sacred waters in his mind while shrapneled body healed. When he flew back to see the jailed Marcus, he took a side trip there—to all the old haunts—but they were lapsed and foreign, without even the familiar desuetude of rooms after party guests have gone.

  Enfolded in his arms, she felt her husband near. After all, hadn’t Sam Dowling been the last to see him? Now, she came off the lake and was high up La Colonne, high in the boudoir of the tower before it officially sheared—holding court while their vows still held. At the El Royale, she smelled her obsession again … and later, at home at Saint-Cloud, as she fell asleep she too hovered over Twig House before settling into its game-stuffed den where her father kept his whimsical collection of fungi—everyone at the lake had their fungi. Mr. Trotter had commissioned a villager to inscribe one of the pieces in Latin:

  Dive, be not fearful how dark the waves flow;

  Sing through the surge, and bring pearls up to me;

  Deeper, ay, deeper; the fairest lie low.

  Dodd Trotter was excited, and slightly embarrassed. Marcie Millard—and this was something one of his own attorneys subsequently confirmed—Marcie Millard said the general feeling w
as that the Board was poised to react favorably to the proposal of naming a wholly revamped Beverly Vista School in the benefactor’s honor. There was some opposition, she said, but that was to be expected. Things were looking up, yet the question of how to live it down as far as his sister went (should the new name come to pass) whimsically asserted itself.

  It was easy to see why the Board might be seduced. The new facility would include underground parking, a world-class planetarium, a theater-in-the-round (like the high school’s, only larger), pool and gymnasium, a two-acre rooftop park and the kind of library where streaming-video conferencing, “smart” books, virtual homework networks and PowerPoint presentations were de rigueur. Wolfgang Puck came aboard with three menus for the cafeteria—organic, ethnic and traditional American. Yoga, fencing and Wu Shu would be offered, alongside more traditional sporting pursuits; a fund would be created to underwrite uniforms, playground equipment and musical instruments, in perpetuity. Even the backs of classroom chairs would be fitted with flat-panel screens.

  The Quincunx offices weren’t far from the targeted campus, and he often took his “BV walks” after lunch. Dodd apprized the Spanish duplexes, stucco dingbats and occasional multi-units on the school’s periphery, then forged past the hideous dirty pink bungalows stuck on the glum, aging playground; strolled from Elm Street to Gregory Way, then to Rexford Drive—peering through the barred gate at the empty library along the way (what was sadder than an empty library?)—then on to Charleville, where sat the condemned, bell-towered auditorium. One of these early walkabouts had engendered a startling idea: what if he were to build a new P.S. template—the “Lilliputian university”? His friend the good Dr. Goodnight had shown the world it could be done with his Cary Academy in North Carolina, and Courtney Ross had made terrific inroads with her place in the Hamptons … though for a project of commensurate scale or even somewhat smaller “footprint” Dodd would need a tad more land. Just a scoche … still, he resolved to build the complex in such a way that wouldn’t scare off the Board, a design that so artfully concealed its grandness that it would scarcely be noticed. In weaker moments, he thought maybe he should just have his friend Mr. Gehry wrap the whole thing in titanium, bungalows included.