by Jon Talton
“Who the hell is that? A man or a woman?”
“A woman. She was her best friend.”
“Did she visit?”
Tim said that Addison had visited several times, but they never left O.B.
“Addison didn’t know anything about Grace’s, you know, business.”
“I need her contact information.” Then I asked when he had seen Grace last.
“The morning of April twenty-second. I had classes. When I came home, she was gone. I never even got a text goodbye. All her stuff is still here. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Are you afraid she’s gone back to the life?”
He shook his head. “She said she was done and I believed her. She got rid of her old phone, even. We were good together.” He sighed. “I wanted to save her from the past.”
Tim Lewis looked like a weak reed of a white knight, but his sincerity was obvious. I had gone through my white-knight phase. Now I was covered with tarnish. I made him go through the day she disappeared in detail. He had gone to classes at eight-thirty that morning. Grace was with the baby at home. When he returned around three that afternoon, she was gone. All she took was her purse and cell phone. She always carried pepper spray and a knife in that purse. Nothing had seemed unusual in their apartment.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I filed a missing person’s report the next day. The cops made me wait twenty-four hours and even then they didn’t take me very seriously. I could tell. They thought she’d left me. They said she was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do unless I had evidence of foul play. Of course, I couldn’t tell them she used to be a call girl.” He shook his head. “Anyway, AFP pays the cops off. Grace warned me. I was sure I’d eventually hear from her. I called hospitals for a week. Nothing.”
Grace would have been dead by the time he went to the police. But things fell through the cracks in every police department.
“Where’s her family?”
“They lived in Arizona.”
I asked him to get me their address and he did.
“What about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”
“She was an only child.”
I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought, dear old dad. I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”
“I have no idea. I swear!”
So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.
Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.
“My parents live up in Riverside. It’s a boring hellhole.”
“My advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”
He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.
Go.
Now.
I handed him my business card.
“Private investigator,” he said quietly. “Are you trying to find out who killed Grace?”
“Yes.”
“I want to hire you.”
“We already have a client.”
He repeated his request. “I’ve got to know what happened to Grace. And I want the bastard who killed her to burn.” Misery shone in his watery, pale eyes.
“Okay.”
He reached under the cushions of the sofa and I tensed.
“Here’s five hundred.” He handed me a wad of cash. “Is that enough for a start?”
“Sure. But I’ll do this pro-bono.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want your charity. I want you to work for me, and cash talks. Grace taught me that.”
I realized it might be good to have a living client, especially because the man who had hired us yesterday was dead and Peralta had lied to the Phoenix Police, saying he had never even come into our office. I took the cash and wrote out a receipt for it on a blank sheet of paper.
He rooted around in the kitchen and returned with a flash drive. “This has her client list. The regulars.”
“Have you seen it?”
He shook his head. I could understand why he wouldn’t want to look.
I took it and told him we’d be in touch, but that he should call me when he got to Riverside.
His voice stopped me as I was halfway out the door.
“Thank you again for changing the baby. Do you have kids?”
I didn’t answer.
“They totally change the way you look at life.”
9
Personal history: the day I arrived in San Diego to take an Assistant Professor of History position at the same university that Grace Hunter would later attend, I drove all the way to the end of Interstate 8. It put me in Ocean Beach. I had never been there before. Unlike today, when I was growing up Phoenicians didn’t go to San Diego every summer by the tens of thousands. I had visited the city a total of one time before, staying at Hotel Circle in Mission Valley. I had no idea of this magical enclave called Ocean Beach.
But that day I had taken the freeway as far as it would go. After growing up in the desert and then spending several years completing my Ph.D. and teaching in the Midwest, it was as if I had landed in my own little paradise. Ocean Beach immediately felt like home. That evening I walked the 1,971 feet to the end of the municipal pier, turned around, and looked at the neighborhood as it rose up to the spine of the Point Loma Peninsula. The lights in the houses looked like Japanese lanterns and I made a vow out loud:
“I’ll never leave.”
A few hours before, I had rented my apartment a block-and-a-half from the ocean. I was neither a surfer nor much of a beach person. As a native Phoenician, the idea of tanning went along with the promise of ruined skin soon and melanoma later. But I loved O.B. The only thing that could pry me out was that I loved Patty more.
Patty.
I met her at the ugly main San Diego State University library. We both reached for the same book at the same time, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. She was an English professor and, with the Sharon Stone jaw line, classic Wayfarers, and lush wheat-yellow hair, you might mistake her for another shallow Southern California beauty. With the millionaire developer father and house in La Jolla, you might assume she was spoiled, too.
I never made that mistake. I judge a woman by the books she reaches for.
My life was so unfurnished when we met. I had a fairly new doctorate in history, boxes of books, and the old house in Phoenix that had belonged to my grandparents, now rented out. I happily let her help make me the man I became, in all good ways. She taught me how to open a Champagne bottle like a man of the world. Opened my ears to jazz.
Patty appreciated my love of history, ability to dress well, being “debonair,” as she put it, for turning out well-balanced and kind, despite having lost my parents before I could even remember them. She called me a mensch, one of the best compliments I ever received.
It pleased her that I loved ethnic food and had a very dry sense of humor and possessed an eclectic past that included working for five years as a deputy sheriff trained by a tough older cop named Peralta. I had published my first book, Rocky Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Intermountain West, and it had been favorably reviewed. This also pleased her. We made a sophisticated, good-looking couple. But I knew I was marrying up.
She spoke French well. Not well enough to satisfy the most obnoxious waiter in Paris, but her French was better than my Spanish. Thanks to Patty, I learned fun and useful phrases: cherchez la femme, which proved to be true in cracking one cold case. Dragueur, a skirt chaser. Terribles simplificateurs: the world was full of those, Arizona especially. Billets-doux: love letters, the writing of which she excelled. La petit mort: orgasm. T
he vocabulary she had taught me was coming back now with the sea breeze.
It was things like this that made me cluelessly happy being with her.
I was one of the few who were allowed to call her Patty. To the rest of the world, she was Patricia. She teased me about spray-painting her name on a wall of I-5. For a long time, I wondered if we would have stayed together if I had committed that simple act of vandalism, decorating the concrete spaghetti with eight letters, leaving drivers to wonder what passion had stirred a man to do such a thing?
A man who would have done that could have kept up when she got on tenure track at the University of California at San Diego, an infinitely more prestigious appointment. He would not have been content being a good teacher, nor would he have bridled at the intentionally dull and social-science-y conventions of academic historiography.
He would have realized that even if I didn’t feel in competition with her, she expected me to overachieve, as her father had demanded of her. The impetuous one with the spray paint would have done more than appreciate, support, and learn from her seemingly infinite avocations, from cooking to film history and painting. He would have tried harder to match her imaginative gift giving even though it couldn’t be done.
That man sure as hell would have focused on publishing more so as to ensure tenure at second-rate San Diego State.
Who knows? I can argue this history one way and then the other. Participants don’t usually make good historians. Even Churchill had his flaws. As for Patty, she was needy and broken, too. She was as insecure as I was. Our insecurities together acted as an accelerant to burn up our marriage. I taught her things of the world, too, made her happy for a time. The collapse of our marriage wasn’t all my fault. Just mostly my fault.
I am too close to the events to recount them dispassionately.
I do know two things. One is that we married too soon. We weren’t the people we would become. And I know a simple, transcendent fact…
10
She was the Glory Fuck of My Young Life.
11
Now I stood at the end of the same pier, the longest on the West Coast if I remembered correctly. A man fished off the south side and pairs of lovers strolled out toward me. My chest was tight and I could feel my heart trying to make its escape, my throat tightening. It was merely a panic attack. I knew that now. They never came in situations where a normal person would panic, only when I was quiet and alone. If I couldn’t stop them, at least I could get away from other people so the attacks wouldn’t cause me to do something inappropriate. Like tell the truth. Whatever.
I thought again about Patty. Contrary to Peralta’s baiting, I wasn’t afraid of seeing her. It would be nice, actually, to know she was happy.
As for my native prudence, that had gone away in the preceding months. Now I had barged into a stranger’s apartment and assaulted a man with a move that could kill, and I wasn’t even a cop anymore. Get me a can of spray paint.
I wondered if she remarried and had children.
Now it was hard to imagine that lost love as even real, especially after Lindsey.
I remembered the Fussell book Patty and I had both been reaching for. Writing about World War I, he meditated about how our age couldn’t understand why hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had gone “over the top” to certain death from German machine gunners for something as abstract as honor. But for them, that sense of honor and obligation was as real as our age, drowning in illegitimacy and irony, is for us.
What a pity. Quel dommage.
I had brought Lindsey to O.B. exactly once, when we had first become a couple and I worried that I was falling for her too fast, this magical younger woman with the fair skin and nearly black hair. She had browsed the postcards and made fun of the tourists. The memories caused me to pull out my iPhone and text her:
“I’m in San Diego with Peralta, on a case.”
It was a fool’s errand. She wouldn’t respond. I didn’t say I loved her, even though I did. Why set myself up for the disappointment of her silence? She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring now. I still wore mine, even though I operated heavy equipment: large-caliber firearms. I studied my ring and my hands that had changed the baby. I didn’t even know the baby’s name, but I remembered his tiny hands and arms struggling against me, struggling against a world of trouble.
This little soul who hadn’t asked to be brought into that world. I didn’t even know his name.
That tattooed kid who was his father had better be on his way to Riverside.
Lindsey had worried whether she would make a good mother.
Now this child’s mother was dead. After meeting America’s Finest Pimp and learning about Grace’s venture as Scarlett, I wondered if the man in our office yesterday had been right to question the circumstances of her death. He hadn’t said a word about Grace being a call girl. Had he not known? Hell, I didn’t even know who he really was.
The pimp had mentioned a big man, an enforcer, someone he was afraid of enough to clear out and leave us alone. Was that the big man from yesterday, assassinated on Grand Avenue? And who was Edward, someone else the pimp feared?
Too damned many questions and barely twenty-four hours into our first case. I felt only my lack of ability. This was not what I had done as the Sheriff’s Office Historian. It was no cold case but was uncomfortably warm. Maybe I should have chucked Robin’s fancy that I be Peralta’s partner and found some community college where I could teach.
The idea of coming to San Diego wasn’t unpleasant because of Patty. It was bitter because San Diego represented my spectacular failures.
Looking up the hill at O.B., I remembered that I had broken my vow. I had left my little paradise.
The phone buzzed in my hand. The screen read: “Peralta.”
I gave him an abbreviated report over the comforting noise of the surf. The beach wasn’t crowded and the onshore flow was still keeping things soothingly cool.
“I went to Balboa Park,” he said. “Really beautiful.”
I agreed. It was a very un-Peralta like thing to do.
“It was where they held the 1915 Panama-California Exposition,” he went on.
Yes, I knew that, but quietly noticed his uncharacteristic interest in something that didn’t involve law enforcement.
“We’re checked in to the Marriott on K Street. Know it?”
It was in the Gaslamp Quarter which had been built long after I had left, but I knew how to get there.
“Your key is at the front desk.”
My own room. I wouldn’t have to listen to him snore. He hung up before I could ask how his end of the investigation had gone.
“Mister?”
The small voice behind me went with a small, slender girl with long brown hair that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a week.
“Do you want a date?”
I told her I didn’t.
“I’ll suck your cock for twenty bucks.”
She was jonesing from whatever she was addicted to, visibly shaking, looking like a drowned kitten. I asked her how old she was.
“Eighteen,” she said. “I’ll suck your cock for twenty bucks. I need to get something to eat. I know a place we can go.”
She looked sixteen at the most, probably younger. I asked her if I could call a shelter for her, told her she didn’t have to live on the streets. She asked if I was a cop.
“Not anymore.”
“I’ll suck you for fifteen.”
I left her there and walked off the pier and up Newport Avenue to catch the bus back downtown. My heart decided to stay inside me, at least for a while.
The phone buzzed again. Lindsey had actually answered me.
Her text read, “Be careful, Dave.”
12
San Diego had changed extensively since I had lived there, and, unlike Phoenix, mostly f
or the good. It was a major high-tech center now, not merely a tourist-and-Navy town. It had less population than Phoenix but surpassed it in almost any measure of quality. About the only thing that seemed the same was the mediocrity of the newspaper, formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune, now under new ownership with its name contracted to U-T. It sounded like a far campus of the University of Texas, but I’m sure a consultant charged big bucks for a new “brand.”
Downtown, thrown away in the 1960s and 1970s, had made a stunning comeback, including the Gaslamp Quarter with its lovingly restored historic buildings and Horton Plaza urban mall. Nobody would know it used to be skid row. Walking to the Marriott, I was struck for the gazillionth time how Anglo the city seemed, even though it sat right on the Mexican border. The barrios south and east of downtown had been carefully tucked away and so it remained.
I showed my driver’s license at the front desk and got my key card to a room on the eighth floor. Before going up, I went into the business center and booted up the computer. I am a lifelong Mac user and couldn’t understand why anyone would use Windows. So I waited, and waited.
Then I plugged in the flash drive and clicked on the icon.
A window popped up and the screen went blank. Then Grace Hunter was talking to me.
“Hi, babe. I bet you’d like to know what’s on this drive. But if you don’t have the code, too bad.”
A white box appeared and I had nothing to enter. The screen went dark again. But for a few seconds she had been alive. I could see her allure with her wide smile, the elegant movement to push her hair out of her face, the sexy taunt in her voice. I popped out the drive and stuck it in my pocket.
When I stepped out of the elevator, a woman was walking toward me: black, shoulder-length hair, attractive if older, elegantly dressed. As she came closer, I was sure I was wrong. I saw plenty of ghosts in my dreams.
But, no…
“Sharon?”
“David!”
