Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  “There are no photos of Angela Doubleday.”

  “Not by me.”

  “There are no photos of Angela Doubleday because you underestimated the speed of the fire. You set it at the top of the hill and ran down. People always underestimate brushfires around here when the Santa Anas blow. You probably didn’t think the fire would get that big and move that fast. But it did, and if you’re lucky and smart enough to cut a deal, you’ll fall a second time for manslaughter. If you’re not smart enough to cooperate, you’ll go down for murder.”

  Graves pretended to search my books for contraband while she obliquely watched the interrogation. I didn’t believe anything Claymore said. I turned to her. She crouched to lift the corner of my futon, showing her back to me.

  “Somebody burned to death in the fire,” I guessed.

  “Bingo.”

  “Doubleday?”

  “Her house. Shake you up a little?”

  “Every woman’s death diminishes me.”

  “We’ll see how a life sentence diminishes you,” Claymore countered. “Or maybe you’ll get the death penalty. We execute murderers by lethal injection here. She burns, you get the hot shot. Poetic justice.”

  The news bullpen at Scandal Times occupied the second floor of a two-story former sewage-works warehouse converted to office use near the crossroads of the Ronald Reagan and Golden State freeways in Pacoima. The only walls were those screening the bathrooms. Even on a slow news day, the noise cranked just short of deafening. The paper defined scandal broadly enough to allow the usual tabloid fare—freaks of nature and alien abductions, usually depicted as evidence of government conspiracy—but excelled most in its coverage of celebrity scandals, where it was the most authoritative source of rumor, if not fact.

  Frank Adams sat sprawled against the back of his chair as I approached, ragged high-tops propped on the corner of the desk while his fingers banged at the desktop computer keyboard nestled in his lap. Nobody ever accused Scandal Times’s lead investigative reporter of handsomeness, not even his mother, and long ago Frank had learned to turn his appearance to advantage. His eyes were razor-blue slits of light in a haplessly round face. He was fifty pounds overweight and didn’t care. He carried the weight as a disguise, excess flesh puffing from his jowls like a mask. His hair hung over his ears in a lank gesture of antistyle, and his preferred dress, day or night, featured windbreakers and torn-neck T-shirts depicting one Chicago-area team or another, worn over faded blue jeans two sizes too large, all signaling the great care he took in caring little about his appearance. When he interviewed a subject, his head down as he jotted quotes into a reporter’s notepad, he looked like just another fat-boy loser. The subject might say a little more than prudence dictated, and think nothing of it, until the next issue roasted his liver on page 1.

  “Tell me you brought photos of the fire,” he said loud as a jackhammer.

  I stared at him over the top of my thrift-special shades. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I didn’t nod or shake my head. I just stared. It took him some time, but his keen, journalistic eye finally picked out the change in my appearance. He said I looked like somebody tagged me with a left hook. I told him how it happened. He dropped his feet and if he didn’t exactly sit up straight, his habitual slouch grew less pronounced. When I told him the fire cop considered me his chief suspect, he commented, “That’s great,” without apparent irony. “We still got another six hours to deadline, should be able to wrap it up in time for this week’s issue. You driving?”

  He speared the corner of his mouth with a cigarette and fingered his silver Zippo like a strand of rosary beads as he led the way out the office and down the stairs to the street. The moment his face broke into fresh air the Zippo flamed and he sucked a good quarter inch of ash onto the tip of the cigarette.

  I coughed, lungs still aching from the fire.

  “I hope that isn’t a political statement,” he said, trailing smoke. “They haven’t outlawed smoking on the street, not yet anyway.”

  “I smoked half of Malibu yesterday. I think I can handle the secondhand smoke from your cig.”

  “If it bothers you,” he suggested, “walk upwind.”

  Along Pacific Coast Highway the waves crashed to shore like rolling sheets of glass. Frank balanced a laptop computer on his knees and tapped out paragraph after paragraph of my eyewitness account, an unlit cigarette dangling like a pacifier from his lips. The Rott hung his head out the window behind me and snapped at the air, certain anything that slapped him in the face could be bit. He began to whine at the first scent of burn, just north of Trancas Canyon. I didn’t know whether he was traumatized by memories of the fire or by the fear that I was going to abandon him. He was a good animal, but I reminded myself that he wasn’t mine. He’d need to go the following day to the animal shelter over the hills from Malibu. I parked in the lot above El Matador State Beach and left the Rott in the car, ragtop up but windows rolled down a crack for air, while I led Frank across the highway. We hiked slowly up the ridge I’d come down the day before. Frank wasn’t in good enough shape to catch the bus. That morning, neither was I. Halfway up the hill I stopped to rest, covering my discomfort with a question. “The piece you’re going to write, what’s the headline?” The air rasped in my lungs like aspirated alcohol.

  “‘Burn, Stars, Burn!’”

  “Catchy.”

  Frank’s smiles were rare things of beauty, a sudden bloom of lips that softened the edge of his glance. He took advantage of the pause to light another cigarette, then puffed merrily up the hill. “I’m going for the Pulitzer on this one.”

  It hurt so much when I laughed that I coughed up soot from the day before.

  “What, you think the Pulitzer review committee is prejudiced?”

  “Not at all. When they get around to tabloid journalists, sometime after they honor greeting-card scribes and graffiti artists, your name is certain to be at the top of the list.”

  “You can make all the fun you want but this is going to be a major story. Granted, nothing new about Malibu brushfires, and celebrities have been burned out of their homes before. But this is the first one to result in a celebrity fatality. That’s what makes it so special.”

  “You’re twisted.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I take it then Angela Doubleday was killed in the fire?”

  “We can only hope.”

  I skirted Frank on the ridge and headed toward the outcrop of rock where I had concealed myself to photograph the Doubleday estate. “No positive ID then?”

  “The body was burned beyond recognition, my sources say, but nobody’s seen her since the fire and her accountant is panicking.” Frank studied the crest of the hill, then swept his gaze down the ridge to the estate. He slipped a long, narrow notebook from his back pocket and a cheap ballpoint from the neck of his T-shirt. “The gunman, you figure him for the arsonist?”

  “I thought he was the bodyguard at the time.”

  “Why run down the hill? He was no nature boy, the way you describe him. Why not set the fire near a road and drive away?”

  “Maybe he was stupid, lit the fire from the downhill side.”

  “And suddenly found himself separated from his car by the same fire he’d set?” A staccato sound, more bark than laugh, boomed down the hillside. Frank didn’t laugh often, but when he did he put his lungs into it. “Anybody that stupid would have gotten himself killed in puberty, but we’ll let that go for now. There was somebody in the house, you said?”

  “Not the chauffeur. Somebody I’d never seen before. He came out once to look up the hill.”

  “Think he spotted you?”

  “I didn’t think so at the time, but how else does the gunman know I’m there, unless he stumbles over me by mistake?”

  “Okay, the guy lights the match, runs down the hill rather than up it for one reason or another, sees you hanging around the bushes with a camera. You photographed him, didn’t you?”

  �
��I didn’t ask him for a date.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  I closed my eyes, saw the picture I’d taken the moment before his bullet slammed the viewfinder into my eye. It would have been a great photograph too, the bastard. “Blue steel automatic, black grips. Not a popgun, a 9 millimeter, Beretta or one of the knockoffs. And the guy had hairy knuckles.”

  “What do I care the guy had hairy knuckles?”

  “I thought you wanted to win the Pulitzer. That kind of detail’s important, you want to win the big prizes.”

  “Right.” He back-pocketed the notebook and lifted the Nikon from my bag. “Take a few steps down the hill and point toward the ruins so I can get both in one shot.”

  “I don’t want my picture in the paper.”

  “C’mon, everybody wants to be a star.”

  “Not me.” I’d been in the paper too many times. Bad times.

  “What else is gonna convince this fire cop to back off? The story has to be about you and it has to show your beautiful, innocent face. Don’t laugh. You look like a choir girl.”

  “Right. One with a nose stud and a cut above her eye.”

  “He won’t be able to frame you for this, not with your story on the front page. Are you afraid of the arsonist? Is that why the hesitation?”

  “I just don’t like to see my picture in the paper.”

  “This arsonist, he already shot you once. Did it kill you?”

  “No.”

  “Did it even put you in the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “That clinches it. You’re bulletproof. But if the past is any indication of your future, you’re not jail proof.”

  I posed for the shot.

  An hour before dawn the approaching wail of a siren stirred an ancient memory in the Rott’s blood, and he answered with a low, mournful howl. He lay just off the edge of the futon, ears pricked and head raised from the pillow he’d made of crossed paws. I like to sleep. I don’t like being woken at 5:00 A.M. two days running. I told him to shut up. He tipped his nose to the ceiling and sang. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t hit the high notes, and he couldn’t harmonize either. To add to all his other problems, the poor animal was tone-deaf. I said, “It’s not another dog, you idiot, it’s a siren. We live in a high-crime area. Sirens blow by here every night. If you howl at every one, you’ll lose your voice. No teeth and no voice, then what kind of a dog will you be? You won’t have a bite or a bark.”

  The siren receded and abruptly clipped to silence some blocks to the south. The Rott listened intently, as though divining whether the other canine had successfully mated or killed, and coming to some unfathomable animal conclusion, he turned two circles to his left, four to his right, dropped to the floor, and fell asleep again.

  I wasn’t so lucky. I kicked around the sheets while the sky turned gunmetal gray. The Rott slept like a hibernating bear. I gave up all hope of sleep and put on my running clothes. A month after my release from prison I took up jogging because every morning I liked to remind myself there were no walls to stop me. I kicked the Rott in the butt to wake him and tied a length of rope to his collar. When he realized we were going for a walk he pranced like he was happy I’d awakened him. It usually took me a good hour to go from sleep to my first smile of the day, but the Rott could do it in less than ten seconds. Maybe he could teach me something.

  I’d never run with a dog before and within fifty yards of the front door it was pretty clear the Rott had never run with a human either. Our ideas about what constituted a morning run were completely different. My routine was to set a slow but constant pace at the start, then to accelerate when the endorphins kicked in. The Rott preferred to race ahead until a scent distracted him, then stop to sniff or lift his leg, sometimes both, depending on what it was. I tried to pull him along on the end of the rope, but my shoulder gave out before his neck did. I’m not even sure he was aware I pulled on him. A fifteen-minute mile into the run I gave up and untied the rope. What did I care if he ran off? I was taking him to the pound that day. If he disappeared I’d have one less thing to do.

  Freed of the rope, the Rott raced ahead, then fell behind, then raced ahead again, rarely straying more than a five-second sprint from my side. My endorphins kicked in and I ran, lungs still raw from the smoke, until I spotted a newsprint photograph of a familiar face behind the plastic shield of a boardwalk news vending machine. I pulled up, fed a couple of quarters into the slot, slipped a new copy of Scandal Times from behind the shield. The Rott loped to my side and sniffed at the paper, probably wondering if he could eat it. I rolled the paper into a tube and continued the run.

  The face on the front page was mine.

  The moment I shut the Rott on the opposite side of the bathroom door, intending to shower in privacy, the animal began to whine, as though he feared something terrible was about to happen to one of us. I turned on the shower, thinking I wouldn’t hear him under the stream of water, but knew that wasn’t the right thing to do and leaned back to turn the knob. The Rott bulled open the door the moment the latch clicked and dropped heavily to the floor. I said, “All this anxiety, it’s about the pound, isn’t it?”

  The Rott glanced up at the sound of my voice, a wounded look in his eyes, then laid his head on crossed paws and sighed.

  “You’re a good dog, don’t get me wrong. I mean, okay, the howling-at-five-in-the-morning thing, that’s got to stop, but otherwise I don’t have a problem with you. The thing is you’re not my dog, you’re big as a horse and I live in a place barely big enough for me. Besides, you probably have owners out looking for you, and the place they’re going to look? Right, the pound. It’s not so bad there, really. Lots of other dogs like yourself. It’s not like prison at all. Think of it as more like summer camp.”

  The Rott closed his eyes. I stepped into the shower. The water stung like hell, the scrapes on my skin still raw. I don’t think the Rott believed me. I didn’t believe myself. I’d be taking him to a place where half his cell mates would be gassed within the week. He’d probably survive. A big and handsome pure breed, someone would be sure to want him. But then they’d see his mouth, think it over, decide to wait for one with teeth to come along. Still, it was none of my business. You can’t save every lost cat, dog, or boy who crosses your path. Most of the time, you can’t even save yourself.

  The Agoura office of the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control serves a hundred square miles of mostly rural communities on the western fringes of the county, including Malibu. There were two ways to get there from Venice Beach: muscling through thirty-five miles of freeway traffic or taking the coast road and snaking inland through the canyons. It was another beautiful day, 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 180 degrees of sky cupping the earth and sea like a blue bowl. I took the coast road. The route took longer to travel, but I thought I’d enjoy the drive. I did, until a Chevy sedan the color of a paper bag locked its sights onto my rear bumper southeast of the Doubleday ruins and gave me a three-second burst of siren. I dropped my eyes to the speedometer. The Cadillac was rolling five miles per hour below the limit. I pulled to a stop in a legal zone by the side of the road. When I saw the mirrored reflection of the fire cop launch out of the unmarked Chevy I understood that I hadn’t been pulled over for a traffic violation. His left hand hung freely in sight and his right hand seemed to tug at the back of his jacket, as though he carried a backup piece under his belt. The Rott whined in the passenger seat. I turned my glance from the rearview mirror to reassure him, but I didn’t take my hands from the wheel. The fire cop coughed sharply behind my ear. The Rott turned his big black head toward the backseat.

  “Afternoon, Officer. Can I help you with something?”

  I wanted to be polite to him, no matter how much trouble he was intent on making for me. He asked for my license and registration. It was a formality.

  “Are you aware you were driving erratically?”

  “You’re not a traffic cop. What do you care?”
r />   I smiled, to show I meant no offense.

  “Have you consumed any alcoholic drinks in the past eight hours?”

  “No.”

  “Then can you explain the pint bottle of Wild Turkey in the backseat?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. The neck and shoulders of the bottle poked from a brown paper bag. The seal had been broken and the glass shone clear. I doubted a single drop remained. For a moment, I feared someone had tossed it onto the backseat when the ragtop had been down and I’d missed seeing it, lying there in plain view, but that didn’t explain how the fire cop knew the brand of a bottle whose label was concealed by the lip of the paper bag. He’d carried it behind his back and coughed to conceal the noise when it dropped onto the seat. I said, “You breath-test me, I’ll read zero-point-zero.”

  He told me to step out of the car. I stared at him. He looked like he meant it. I didn’t want to get out of the car because that was the first step toward the back of his car. Maybe he’d search the passenger compartment, find a pack of matches, and call it evidence of arson. “This is harassment. You had no probable cause to pull me over and you have no right to ask me out of the car.”

  “You want probable cause?”

  He stepped back and kicked out my left taillight. The fire cop’s partner jumped from the cruiser before the plastic hit the pavement. The speed of her move and the look of confused allegiance on her face convinced me this wasn’t being played by the book. I clenched the steering wheel in both fists and stared straight ahead.

  Claymore leaned over the door frame. From his breath I understood how he’d known the label on the bottle inside the bag. He whispered, “You think you can show me up and get away with it? You think that piece-of-shit article in that tabloid rag is going to save you? It’s nothing. You’re nothing. You’re an ex-con. You were on the hill when the fire started. You started it. You think that fire was hot? Just wait. I’m gonna roast your ass.”

  “I told the truth to the reporter. No law against that.”