by Daniel Pyne
“That’s Daddy’s,” the older girl said gravely. Riley asked, and she said her name was Carly. “With a y.”
Riley turned the phone on. Someone had been keeping it charged. The Basque woman spoke to Finn again, low, animated, and he could understand only a fraction of it; Riley had Carly’s full attention, and Finn was intent on watching them both.
“She likes to listen to his voice on it,” Carly explained, meaning Jade, who had crept out to the top of the steps and squatted with her arms around her knees, a tiny curl of girl, to glare down at them from under her bangs. Carly said, “Jade found it under the chair where Daddy was dead.”
Finn flashed back on the scene as he had shot it: cops confronting Albert at the door, the girls running to their father. Adults tried to stop them, Carly was caught but Jade had twisted away, resisting, low, letting her stubborn legs go limp, flopping down on her knees where she would have been eye-level with the overturned chair, and reached under with the perfect-sized hand to gather her father’s phone.
“Daddy’s still alive on it,” Jade said.
“He’s not,” argued Carly.
Riley scrolled screens to find the message application; Carly, impatient, crowded in, took the phone away, and deftly pulled up Charlie’s voice message:
“Hey, this is Charlie, leave me a message, I’ll get right back to you.”
Jade echoed, “Right back to you.”
“Are there messages people left for him?” Riley asked.
“I can’t read the names,” said Carly.
But she clicked through to the voice mail archive, handed the phone back to Riley, and let Riley play the last message that Charlie had received, the day he died. Its incoming call ID read: ALBERT ZAPPACOSTA.
A voice broke, low: “I want you to stop.”
“Grampy,” Jade said.
“Just . . . stop. Get out of our lives, you’ve done enough damage, it’s time to let my daughter heal.” There was a whistling static of hesitation. “You don’t deserve her. If you weren’t the father of my grandkids you’d’ve been dead by my own two hands long ago. I’m—”
Riley cut it off before it went too far. There was an uneasy silence.
Carly said, “Grampa Z. was always mad at Daddy.”
Finn waited for Riley to look up at him, her hunch confirmed. But she just stared at the screen, lost in thought, and scrolled back one message. No more than ten minutes before Albert’s call, there was another one. The screen ID said: WILLA.
Her voice was fragile, there was street noise behind it, “Okay, I’m on my way over. I should be there by oh-sixteen-hun—um, sorry—four, or ten after, at the latest.” They heard her unhappy sigh. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me again.” Another, longer pause, and then, barely audible, “Charlie, if this turns out to be another one of your epic fails . . . oh, golly, I’m gonna kill you.”
The message ended there. Jade and Carly were motionless, caught up in the spell of their mother’s voice. Riley finally looked at Finn. He shrugged, completely confounded now.
Circles within circles.
8
A WAXING GIBBOUS MOON hung in a pale blue cloudless morning framed by the skylight.
Riley stared up at it, alone in Finn’s bed.
Sunrise angled through the big front windows like a surprise party, a welcome disruption of the ceaseless summer dirge of marine layer, casting from what remained of the line-hung photographs a gap-toothed crazy quilt of square shadows across the studio floor. Like a map of her life. There was a faint smell of baked dust and photo developer. The scuffle of blankets under one of his worktables revealed that Finn had slept fitfully there. Presently he was up, slouched in Riley’s wheelchair, watching for her slow awakening. He had been watching for a while, as if hopeful she would feel the weight of his gaze and look over.
She didn’t.
On their return from Albert Zappacosta’s house with Chinese takeout last night, Finn had been called to a hit-and-run out in Bixby Knolls, multiple victims, multiple crime scenes, so Riley was left alone with the accumulating contradictions roiling the Charlie Ko murder, along with her doubts and her new normal and the lukewarm orange-peel chicken that she ate with a fork. The phone evidence of Albert’s threats against Charlie Ko had been trumped by Willa’s call minutes earlier; Riley began to think that Finn was right about his pictures, they were telling a story she wanted told, and by rearranging them she could contrive at least a couple of other versions equally convincing and patently false.
Frustrated, she started to reassemble the full mosaic of the crime scene Finn had hastily removed from her hospital room, hoping that she could start all over. But after tacking up the lower rows of its foundation, she realized she wouldn’t, from her chair, be able reach high enough to finish.
Tears erupted, unchecked. She was alone for the first time since the shooting and no one would see her cry. At first she was worried that Finn would walk in and see her pitiable deliquescence, but then thought, would that be such a bad thing?
She turned off the lights and gave in, sat sobbing until she was all wrung out. It didn’t really make her feel any better, and finally she banged into the bathroom, washed her face, rolled to the hidden latch in the kitchen, and lowered the Murphy bed.
Finn came shuffling in after midnight, and she pretended to be asleep. Her back turned to the room, she could see his reflection in the big windows when he flicked on the bathroom light and its soft illumination threw wild shadows on the walls.
She watched Finn shrug off his backpack and cross to her, and for a moment she tensed, worried he was going to join her in bed. She’d pulled off all her clothes and left them clumped on the floor where she could reach them. But he just gently rearranged the sheet over her, and then the duvet, unnecessarily, because her body’s thermostat was all out of whack and—hot, cold, clammy, night sweats followed by chills—she’d tugged it off for a reason.
She smelled a faint sour of beer on his breath.
She heard him get blankets from a closet, toss them down beneath the desk, and then in the windows’ reflection saw him stop and notice the wall of pictures. Finn’s shadow reflection drifted across the loft to pick up the sheaf of remaining dog-eared photographs from where she’d dropped them, and she watched him spend the next half hour completing her crime scene tableau, worrying the damaged puzzle pieces as best he could and working in a hazy half-darkness that eventually lulled her to sleep.
Now the oily odor of freshly ground coffee reached her because Finn was in the kitchen, striped with that rare June morning sunlight, measuring out some dark roast. Riley twisted around to face him, wondering if he was pretending not to notice her watching, or whether he was really so intent on his French press that all else fell away. She doubted it was the coffee.
The French press looked like it had never been used. And she’d already remarked yesterday on the dozens of discarded Starbucks cups in the big studio wastebasket, belying a habit fueled more by convenience than precision. She lifted and wormed herself backward the way she’d practiced because there wouldn’t always be an electric bed, to sit up propped on pillows against the wall and run a hand through her tangled hair. She needed a shower, wondered how that would work, here, when, so far, all her showers since the shooting had been facilitated by nurses and female attendants in the big wheelchair-friendly hospital room stalls.
How long can you go without a shower, in a new normal?
All Finn had was a claw-foot tub with a circular curtain and an overhead spout.
Eventually Finn looked up and met her eyes. Riley gave nothing away. And Finn, well, she could tell from how he couldn’t hold her gaze that he was still pretty much at sea where she was concerned, and she had to admit that she enjoyed his unmooring, and her part in it.
She said, “What.” There was a challenge in it.
He hesitat
ed. She could almost feel him working up his courage. “So are we just going to pretend we never knew each other in your new normal? Is that the plan?” Even adrift, he was resolute, indefatigable, and it wasn’t the proud obstinance of Terry Lennox, it was something else. A mystery. And Riley did love solving them.
There were so many possible answers to his question, some of them even honest, but she said, almost believing it, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Finn stared back at her. He was right, Riley thought, about her being a lousy liar. The front doorbell buzzed.
“I’m still trying to decide how much of the past I want to bring into the future,” Riley said.
Locks snapped and the door was opened by Arden, who, tellingly, also knew the correct sequence. She was pissed, saw only Finn at first, and went at him. “We are friends. Whatever else has happened, or could, potentially, happen, someday, circumstances providing—you’re the person I can come to and know won’t judge me for not necessarily making the best decisions and maybe you’re probably thinking and I don’t blame you it gets a little one-sided, but I took care of you when you had the mumps, don’t forget, and the thing with the weird bugs in your crisper, I solved that, so—yeah, we’re friends, that’s undebatable. And the thing is friends don’t keep secrets from—”
Arden was a good five steps inside the loft and two steps past Finn, who’d come around the kitchen island too late to cut her off, when she registered: (a) Riley’s wheelchair, (b) women’s clothing piled on the floor, and (c) Riley in bed, wearing only the sheet and a sleepy smile. “Oh.”
“Hi, I’m Riley.”
“Arden.” Riley watched as tumblers in Arden’s brain spun.
“Riley’s that cop who got shot,” Finn explained.
Riley added, “Finn’s been helping me with a case.”
Arden blushed, then, and looked at Finn almost abashed, and blurted out, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Finn was pretty slow on the uptake, Riley thought, and as Arden started to retreat out the open door, it was Riley who stopped her: “Arden?”
Riley could see the heartbreak in Arden’s brave smile. There was nothing to be done about it, but this was somebody she already had decided she could grow to like, and a friend she didn’t want Finn to lose.
“I’ve got kind of a situation here maybe you’d be willing to help me with,” Riley said. Arden said nothing, stayed in the doorway, her expression guarded. Riley knew she needed to get this just right. “Finn being Finn,” Riley said, “our partnership, if you want to call it that, doesn’t include certain . . . personal, intimate, not necessarily crime-related exigencies.”
“Finn being Finn,” Arden agreed.
“One example: my stuff, which you can see is piled where I thought I could get to it, but I’m not so sure. Another is personal hygiene, which, in my current condition, still as new to me as anyone, requires a certain amount of assistance that Finn—”
“—being Finn,” Arden was warming to it.
“—exactly—and his shower, which looks, honestly, not just insurmountable for me but, like, also probably a breeding ground for biological weapons yet undiscovered. More immediately, there’s just getting my pants back on.”
“His shower.” Arden rolled her eyes as if there was no need to say anything more.
“I could get the jeans off okay last night when I went to sleep,” Riley allowed, “but they’re a bitch to get back on and, well . . .” She glanced to Finn and let her voice trail off and watched Arden begin to understand that Riley had never meant to be her rival.
Nodding, Arden said, “He’s all thumbs,” and Riley wondered, a little jealously, which surprised her, if Arden had some personal knowledge of it.
“I’m not,” Finn protested.
Arden came back in, pulled the door closed, and ignored him, picking up clothes after she wheeled Riley’s chair to the bed and asking, “You want to get clean or get dressed or both?”
—
WILLA KO WAS unnecessarily prevaricating. Thinking, Riley guessed, she could find a gap between guilty and innocent and somehow squeeze through it.
Which would be what?
“I never said I shot him, ma’am.”
The good soldier wore the requisite jail jumpsuit, and her public defender, Aaron, or Baron, Riley hadn’t paid attention when he mumbled his name, had shown up in some unfortunate dad jorts and a polo shirt, hair all scrunched flat on one side where he’d evidently been napping hard, not that long ago, telltale pink of a nascent sunburn, not expecting a call from Riley asking him to bring his client in for another talk.
She had arranged to have Willa brought from the women’s jail to the Long Beach Police Department where Riley was fairly certain weekend staff would allow some leeway on her duty status. Even on a Saturday, it wasn’t hard to coordinate all the moving parts of her fishing expedition, but it was afternoon by the time, showered and dressed, she made Finn wait in his car in the parking lot and rolled alone through the lobby, down the familiar corridors, enjoying the shouts and greetings of the short-staffed weekend watch she encountered.
The public defender nursed a frozen coffee drink and looked to be ruing his lost leisure as Riley, who made it clear to him beforehand that she was only moonlighting this case, tried to guide his client toward an uncomfortable truth.
“No,” Riley admitted, “you just said it in a way that suggests you could be lying, so that you’d be arrested and arraigned.”
“I pled not guilty.”
“Jeffrey Dahmer pled not guilty.” Riley pushed herself up straighter in her chair, folded her hands together. “And said he didn’t do it. Sergeant, we found Charlie’s phone. There’s a threat from your dad on it, made not more than thirty minutes before Charlie was killed.”
Willa said nothing. No reaction. No emotion.
“Here’s what I think you think happened,” Riley said: “Your dad had your gun. He saw Charlie was trying to pull you back into his circle of hell, went to warn him off, they argued, it got confusing . . . you came home too late and found Charlie dead. Girls gone. Dad? The math of it was easy. Blood on you, cops showing up. You hid the gun, made sure your prints were all over it—hid it where anybody could and would find it.” Willa said nothing, but there were tears running down her face. “You’re taking the fall for your father.”
Willa looked guilty of something for the first time.
Riley watched the public defender shift uncomfortably. “If you found his phone, and it’s been in the hands of others, I doubt it’s admissible,” he pointed out.
“And anyway,” Willa offered, abruptly defiant, “it’s got my voice on it, too.”
Her attorney frowned. “Excuse me?”
“You heard my message, right?” Willa was staring at Riley, resolute. “I called him before my father did. Right? You heard what I said I’d do to him.”
“Can I have a moment with my client?” Aaron or Baron asked, really confused now, but neither Riley nor Willa was paying any attention to him.
“I heard it,” Riley said.
“Okay, then.”
“Are you saying you killed your husband?”
“Do not answer that,” her lawyer said, and Willa didn’t, but Riley wasn’t expecting her to lie about it.
“Your phone message,” Riley said, “changes nothing. Different context, Sergeant. Different inflection—I heard that, too. If he was lying, you said in your message. Which Charlie wasn’t, was he? Just weak.”
Willa shook her head. “Ma’am, I said what I said.”
“I discount the threat. Figure of speech. Or . . . are you confessing to me now? You can’t have it both ways.” Riley knew that was exactly what Willa wanted.
Willa clammed up.
—
THE METRO BLUE LINE ran from Long Beach to d
owntown Los Angeles, but Finn got off midway, where the blue and green lines crossed, a crazy-ass terminal that seemed to hang suspended between the ribbons of elevated traffic ramps connecting the Harbor and the Century Freeways.
Traffic rumbled and hissed above and below and to either side of the platform, arteries thick with chrome and rubber and steel that pulsed past in spasms. The swath of perfect cornflower-blue sky only intensified the surreality of what Finn was doing.
Riley’s sack of cash-fat envelopes was on his lap, along with the journals she had stacked together and fastened with rubber bands. The handoff was scheduled for 10:14, but the green line came in early, and when the passengers straggled off Finn didn’t see anyone who matched the description Riley had given him.
She didn’t explain the money, and he didn’t ask. It had become part of their understanding now that she would tell him what she wanted to tell him, and what she didn’t want to talk about he wouldn’t press for. Finn had never been good at asking questions, anyway; his camera lens usually did it, or provided him with the answers he needed. Words were generally unreliable, in his experience, easily spoken, too often imprecise, usually fraught with misdirection.
“She described you perfect, right down to how you turn your right foot in when you get a little anxious.”
A black man in saggy pants and a spotless white T-shirt sat down on the other end of Finn’s bench and let his huge hands hang off his knees. Finn hadn’t seen him get off the train, and wondered if maybe he had been waiting, watching for a while from somewhere below. He didn’t look like a cop, he was lanky and soft in the wrong places, bald with a full-on James Harden beard, but something about him betrayed a veiled menace. Finn had a fleeting thought that he had seen this man before, but couldn’t remember where, or when.
“You got something for me from Riley Mac?”
Finn held up the bag and the journals. The man made no move to take them.
“How’s she doing?”
“She says to tell you she’s okay.”
