South by Southeast

by Blair Underwood

  If therapy was how she’d gotten over me, she might need another dose, I thought. But I decided it was best not to say it.

  “What did it help you make sense of?” I said.

  “Remember that time we went to Little Ethiopia and I got that cane for your dad? You were looking for Sofia Maitlin’s kid, just breezing through, working your case. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” For a brief moment, April had shadowed me while I interviewed a potential suspect in the Maitlin kidnapping. But I hadn’t had room for April then.

  “I had a phone.”

  “You didn’t want to be friends,” April said.

  “It was hard for me to be around you, too.”

  The air was getting thick. Had we imagined we’d both just said I love you?

  “Who’s Marsha?” April said finally.

  I closed my eyes. Shit. I didn’t want to talk about Marsha.

  “Are you in love with her?” April said.

  “Hell, no,” I said. I’d once thought Marsha reminded me of April, but that part of her was only an act. Marsha wasn’t even her real name. Might as well call her Mata Hari.

  “Chela mentioned her,” April said. “Said she came to breakfast at your house that time?”

  April’s voice was neutral, but breakfast was a special occasion to her. I’d kept her and Chela at such a distance that it had always been a treat for April to eat breakfast at our table. Marsha had crashed my family breakfast only once, but it wasn’t worth explaining.

  “We were working the Maitlin case,” I said. “I can’t tell you much more.”

  April looked surprised. “Why not? We’re just talking. You know I don’t wear my reporter hat in bed. And I’m just a laid-off reporter now, anyway.”

  “You’re starting that blog.”

  April’s blog, “L.A. Tymes,” was a mixture of police, political, and entertainment stories and had won hundreds of followers in a few days. April had impeccable inside information, whether or not she worked for the mainstream media.

  “I’m not asking for my blog, Ten. And I’m not asking if you were sleeping together. We’ve both been dating. That’s not my question.”

  I hadn’t asked about men in her life and didn’t want to. We were different that way.

  “Is she a cop?” April went on.

  “Something like that,” Ten said. “April, I hate the way I sound right now, but I can’t talk about Marsha. It has nothing to do with dating.” I lowered my voice and spoke into her ear, as paranoid as Mother. The one most likely to keep me under surveillance was Marsha herself. “We worked together on the Maitlin case, and that’s all I can say.”

  Covert ops? April mouthed at me. I stared at April, dumbfounded.

  “Chela told me,” she said. “And she said Marsha is really bad news in your life.”

  I had told Chela too much about what happened in Hong Kong, and she had put together some of the pieces on her own. Chela had unleashed April on Marsha.

  “She was,” I said. “But I couldn’t have done the Maitlin case without her.”

  “And you did others.”

  I held up a single finger: one. Memories of Hong Kong were probably in my eyes, too.

  “It’s over?” April said.

  “I don’t want to talk to her, and she isn’t calling. She disappears for a living.”

  “And then reappears,” April said. What had Chela told her? April had drawn a line about what she could accept from me, and Marsha was on the other side of it. She wanted me to understand that right away.

  “I don’t want anything to do with her, and I’m not afraid to tell her. We’re done.”

  “Will you call the therapist?” April said.

  “Give me the number,” I said. “I’ll call today.”

  I wanted to be the man April wanted me to be. I didn’t like the idea of telling a stranger my troubles, but I needed a therapist for Chela. I’d sent the adoption papers she signed to Melanie’s office to examine, but Chela needed more than I could give her. Under the circumstances, the adoption felt anticlimactic.

  “What about a doctor?” April said, nearly a whisper. “Please?”

  That time, I shrugged and kissed her lips. My eyes felt as if they were scratched raw from the tear gas. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at first, but it was a long way from better. “I’ll see how I feel today. Then maybe tomorrow.”

  “You know I’m only bugging you because I love you, right?”

  I smiled. “Always. I love you, too, April.”

  Once I started saying the words, I couldn’t stop.

  THE FIRST LETTER was waiting in my home mailbox that night, in a bright white envelope unmarked except for my name. Inside, a single sheet, a single line, three typewritten words.

  Night-night, Mommy.

  The note made the back of my neck flare. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good news.

  I could think of three or four possible sources of an anonymous note in my mailbox, maybe more: Marsha had first reached me through anonymous emails, and April might have conjured Marsha by calling her name. Maybe I’d been caught on tape somewhere, and Marsha wanted me to know. It was best not to try to guess Marsha’s motives. She’d left a couple of call me messages since Dad’s death, but I wasn’t going to talk to Marsha. Period.

  But Marsha was only the first possibility. It could be a random nut, a childish taunt from Lieutenant Nelson, even Chela’s birth mother suddenly at our doorstep because she’d heard news of the impending adoption. That was my life. An anonymous note could have been from anyone.

  But the flaring on the back of my neck—both hot and cold and stinging enough to make me wince—had nothing to do with Marsha, Nelson or Chela’s ghost of a mother.

  I looked up at the full moon, which seemed only slightly hazy to my tired eyes. I don’t know what made me look up, but I could see Escobar’s boat explode against the backdrop of the night sky. I remembered the falling debris, the shower of sparks. A boating accident was the perfect way to fake your death. Between the fire and the water, it was plausible for the police not to find a trace. What if Escobar had planned one last piece of movie magic?

  If Escobar had faked his death, he would come after me. And he would put a bullshit note in my mailbox that said Night-night, Mommy just because it appealed to the twisted thing he called his mind. He would want me to know he was here.

  I went into the house and fired up my computer to research security companies to better safeguard my home. I had an alarm, but no surveillance cameras covered my front door and driveway. Or my mailbox. What the hell had I been thinking?

  I hadn’t signed on to my computer in days. I had a string of emails from Len, my agent, but I didn’t even read the subject lines. Instead, I went to Google to research cameras like the ones at Club Phoenixx. I didn’t care about the cost. Maybe Mother’s paranoia was contagious, or maybe it was clairvoyance.

  I’d wasted too much time stumbling in a stupor, I realized. It didn’t matter what Detective Hernandez said or what the FBI didn’t say.

  I didn’t know the meaning of Night-night, Mommy then, although it would soon be painfully obvious. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have known on sight.

  But the note in my mailbox only reminded me that I had no time to rest.

  I stopped in mid-step when I saw Marcela at the dining-room table sorting through documents she’d pulled out of the oak filing cabinet my father had kept since I was a kid. One folder was marked Eva, my mother’s name, unopened and cast to the side. I wanted to tell Marcela to take her hands off my daddy’s stuff, just like I was eight years old again.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  She looked up at me above her reading glasses. With her hair swept across her forehead and her face sagging with sadness, she had aged since Dad died. “You said I could find some of his articles.”

  Dad had kept careful records, cutting out every newspaper and magazine story that mentioned his name. Marcela was preparing for her intervie
w. She thought the Star wanted to write Dad’s biography.

  “I would appreciate it,” I said slowly, “if you wouldn’t say anything about me.”

  “You’re his son, Tennyson. Your name will come up.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what you plan to say?”

  “You’ll have to trust me,” Marcela said.

  I leaned on the doorframe for support, running my palm across my hair. Anger with nowhere to go made me tired. “So you’re not trying to air out feelings about what happened. Feelings toward me.”

  Marcela’s eyes flashed. “This interview isn’t about you—it’s about Richard. And his legacy. And his message. If you’re so worried about my feelings, why don’t you ask me how I feel? Don’t hide behind my interview.”

  I heard the pop of gunfire. Smelled the tear gas. And blood, of course.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “You made a terrible mistake,” she said. “Involving him. It was too much.”

  I couldn’t argue with her. My head hung as if my neck had lost its strength.

  We were quiet with that for a moment.

  “I’m sorry.” I said the only thing to say.

  “I know you are,” she said. “I’m sorry, too. I wanted more time with him.”

  I sighed. “Marcela, the problem is, if you say these things during your interview, they’ll twist it around. They’re not your friends. When they pay that kind of money, they’re looking for something juicy.”

  “This isn’t the interview,” Marcela said. “And he would want me to do it.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “Dad? He liked making the papers, not the tabloids.”

  “He would have wanted me to do anything that made me feel . . .” She stopped, choosing her words. “Like I have something to look forward to. Not happy, but . . . less sad. Something exciting. Something different. I can take a cruise to the Mediterranean with that money.”

  “I have money,” I said. “Dad has—” Dad had a savings account, and Marcela was his wife. I couldn’t access the account, but he’d added her name months ago because they ran so many errands together. I’d never expected to get rich after Dad died, but unless he’d left a will, I might only get the hole in my life.

  “I want to use my own money,” Marcela said. “I don’t want anyone to say I married him for the wrong reasons.”

  I pursed my lips. Marcela knew how long it had taken me to warm up to the idea of her.

  “You’re his wife,” I said. “What’s his is yours.”

  Marcela nodded. “I know.”

  “Did he leave a will?” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” Marcela said. “The will was the one thing he wouldn’t plan. He never wanted to talk about it. I asked him many times, but he was superstitious.”

  I had never encouraged Dad to write a will, which suddenly seemed absurd. Now Marcela could close out Dad’s bank account, collect his checks, and move on. I had no legal control over Dad’s estate, not even to try to set something aside for Chela.

  Marcela and I might argue over the tiniest possessions, such as who would keep his antique rolltop desk, which he’d brought to my house when he moved in, salvaged from our old house, a symbol of my childhood. No wonder I’d had doubts about the wedding—if Marcela could have planned what happened, I would have felt jacked.

  “We’re family now, Tennyson,” Marcela said gently. “We’ll work out how to honor each other. But I want to pay for my own cruise, so I’m doing this interview. You don’t want to talk about him to people outside, but I do. We each have a choice.”

  Dad might have said the same thing.

  “Did you see anybody hanging around the house today?” I changed the subject.

  Marcela shook her head. “No. Like who?”

  “Like Gustavo Escobar.”

  Marcela stood up, took a step toward me. “Why would you say that? He’s dead.”

  “Until his body shows up . . .” I shook my head.

  “The police and the FBI investigated. They said he could not have survived the explosion.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m putting up cameras around the whole perimeter, as far as the street.”

  “What perimeter?”

  “The house. The windows. The doors. Everything, Marcela.”

  Marcela studied me with concern in her brow. “Tennyson,” Marcela said, “I’m worried about you—as a nurse, not just as your stepmother.” She had never called herself my stepmother. I didn’t mind the sound of it.

  I’d avoided showing Marcela the Night-night, Mommy note because I didn’t want to worry her needlessly. But the absence of the note made me sound like a nut. Maybe I was a nut.

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” I said.

  “Richard made me promise I’d take care of you,” she said. “You’re stuck with me now.”

  “Same here,” I said.

  “You’re mi familia, Tennyson,” Marcela said, pinching my cheek. “That’s what I’m planning to say about you during the interview. Then I’ll say how lucky I was to have known your father even for a short time. Agreed?”

  I couldn’t disapprove of that. I hugged Marcela, and for the first time in two weeks, the contact didn’t feel forced or obligatory.

  I set up an appointment with the security company and stored my anonymous note in a plastic baggie I kept in my bedroom drawer. Later, I invited April over to watch Cadillac Records on DVD. Chela finally agreed to invite Bernard. That night, April and I held hands on one end of the room, Chela held Bernard’s on the other. I popped popcorn. The grown folks went through two six-packs of Coronas and stayed up late. We sang badly to the movie’s blues and rock and roll. Once in a while, Chela laughed, and Marcela smiled.

  Not a single one of us was related by blood.

  Familia.

  ANTONIJA OBRADOVIC, RAISED as Toni, self-named Louisa, Sara, Katerina, and other names that suited her—but in recent years mostly known as Mother—lifted her head from her pillow. Her bedroom television was at a low volume to keep her company, but she’d heard a sound that wasn’t from the poker championship playing on ESPN.

  It sounded like a baby’s cry.

  Mother had borne only one child, always sickly, so she had learned the sound well in the girl’s short five months of life. She still heard the plaintive, helpless cry at the edge of sleep decades later, but this sound had been louder, sharper.

  The whimper came again. Not a child and not a dream—it was Dragona! Mother knew her dogs, despite the way pain distorted Dragona’s voice. What was wrong with her? Why had the dogs left her bedside? She’d heard them jump from the bed perhaps an hour before, but she’d thought they were only restless. Dragona sounded as if she was outside her door.

  Mother whistled loudly, the whistle that usually brought her lovelies rushing to her side. She had been stern before she was kind, and her dogs were trained well. Mother prided herself on being an expert trainer of both dogs and people.

  But neither dog came right away. When the whimpering was twinned—and Mother was sure Dunja was crying out, too—she felt alarm. Her dogs never cried. Why should they? Since her illness, she’d had the door installed for them in the kitchen so they could come and go without her. And the pain in their whimpers was palpable, mirroring the pain in her own cracked bones where her cancer was eating her.

  “Dunja! Dragona!” she called sharply, and the dogs came toward her in the dark, moving slowly. Mother reached over to turn on her lamp at her bedside, but it only clicked. Was the bulb burned out again? She’d told those stupid boys that she needed her lamp working at all times, since it was the only one she could reach. The hallway light was out, too, so the only light in her room was the pale blue glow of her television.

  Dragona’s cold nose touched her wrist as the dog pushed her muzzle toward her. Dragona whimpered again, a sound to break a mother’s heart. Mother rubbed the soft ball of fur at the top of the dog’s head. She heard Dunja not far behind, but he didn’t join his
sister beside her. She heard his collar as he flopped to the floor.

  “What’s wrong, my sweet?” she said in Serbian. “What’s happened?”

  Then it came to her. Both of the dogs had been poisoned!

  Mother forgot Dragona and reached under her pillow for her favorite .22 she had brought with her from Kosovo after she helped her husband, Bogdan, flee to Subotica during the Kosovo war. She had killed half a dozen men in her lifetime; her first had been the German soldier who tried to rape her during World War II, when killing still made her cry.

  But her little gun was gone. How could that be?

  No light. Her dogs poisoned. No gun.

  Mother felt a stab of fear but also an excitement that had been absent for too long. This was something new. Unexpected.

  A sound came from the hallway, a man’s shoe scraping across her tile.

  “Who’s there?” she called to her doorway. “Who dares enter my house?”

  She had collected many enemies. With all of the publicity and photos of her circulating because of that silly Tennyson, her visitor might be from Kosovo, Moscow, New York, Las Vegas, or someone in Los Angeles who felt cheated or wronged. Some of the girls who had worked for her had been too stupid to count their money properly and perhaps held grudges. Mother didn’t know why someone hid in the shadows of her home, but she knew what it meant.

  Where was that gun? She reached farther behind her pillow, surprised that her heart could still dance with such panic.

  Her hand brushed something hard, but then a telltale clank told her that she’d knocked the gun behind her headboard to the floor. Her coordination was no longer reliable. Mother let out a sour laugh. Yes, this had always been her quarrel with God since the day the Germans killed her parents—God Almighty held a grudge against her and had never played fair for a day.

  A man’s voice said something beyond her doorway, so softly that she couldn’t make out the hurried words, a kind of strange recitation. She could barely hear the voice over her dogs’ unified suffering.

  The man mumbled again.

  “What?” Mother called.

  That voice! Something about that voice . . .