I said, “Anything is fine, as long as you’re with me.”
Alone in the elevator with Mike, I put my arm around his back, brushed my lips across his sleeve. He pulled me into a strong embrace and buried his face in my hair. It was a nice moment that lasted only long enough for the elevator to descend one floor.
Six women officers in maternity uniforms got in at the second floor and rode with us all the way down to the garage. From their conversation I got the impression that they had come from a medical benefits meeting. Mike was unusually quiet and tense around them, not a single comment about the perils of working in the fertility zone or the smell of dill pickles in the air. I put my hand through his, but he wouldn’t look at me.
In the underground garage, we got into his ancient city-issue car and pulled out onto San Pedro Street, headed north through the dusk. Mike still seemed deep in thought, shrouded behind this wall he sometimes drops when something is on his mind.
At the first red light, he pulled himself back to the surface. He turned to me. “Tell me what your dad said.”
“My San Francisco neighbor called him. Remember Jerry, the real estate guy? Someone contacted him and wants to buy my house.”
“No lie?” The light changed and Mike drove ahead across the freeway overpass, the last of rush hour flowing like a river of light below us. “How much are they offering?”
“We didn’t get into that yet. Dad told Jerry that if he had a serious buyer he should go see my Uncle Max and draw up a formal offer.”
“Could be bullshit,” Mike said.
“Could be. I called Lyle and he told me that he had seen some people taking pictures last week. Two men in dark suits. Corporate types.”
The corner of Mike’s mouth drew up in a smirk. “Lyle forget to tell you about them?”
“What’s to tell?”
Lyle was my former housemate. Casey and I acquired him the evening the Loma Prieta earthquake turned his home behind ours in the Marina District of San Francisco into a rubble-filled lot. Our offer of shelter until Lyle rebuilt evolved into something more permanent, something more like family. Lyle, Casey, and I got used to looking out for each other.
When Casey and I moved south to be with Mike, I had to rent out the house to make ends meet. I never had time to worry about where Lyle would go. We found tenants for the house, oceanography graduate students who sprouted a new variety of kelp in the master bathroom tub. And Lyle moved in with my mom and dad in Berkeley to help out with the heavier domestic chores. The arrangement worked well until the grad students’ grant ran out. My house had been vacant since the end of the winter quarter, and the financial drain was ruinous.
Mike parked in a red zone in front of Philippe’s, hung the transmitter of his police radio over the rearview mirror so that he wouldn’t be ticketed. His city parking pass, he called it.
“Can you take Friday afternoon off?” I leaned in close to him as I got out of the car. “I’m thinking we could fly up to San Francisco, check out the house, and see if there’s anything to this offer. Then we’ll have the whole weekend. We could go to Chinatown to watch the big New Year parade. It’s a good party. We’d have fun.”
“That’s a big trip for a weekend.” He wrapped his arm around me. “Are you up to it?”
“Sure. Maybe the kids will come with us. We’re due for a family outing.”
“Might be too soon for you.” He gave me a sidelong appraisal. “Can’t Uncle Max fax the documents to you?”
“I feel like getting out of town.”
He wasn’t listening to me. “Why don’t I fly up tomorrow morning, take a look at the offer with your dad and Max? I can be home by this time tomorrow.”
“I’m fine,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice. We hadn’t moved away from the car. “I am certainly strong enough to read a legal document.”
Mike shook his head all the time I talked. When I paused, he said, “It’s not about reading the papers, it’s about the wear and tear. Two days ago you passed out walking up the stairs.”
“Three days ago I was in the emergency room. But today, I worked all day and I’m perfectly fine. I need to be busy.”
“Give yourself some time. It’s too soon for a big trip.”
I pulled away from him. “There’s a remote possibility I may go to Montreal tomorrow. If I do go, I can be home late Thursday, and we can fly up to San Francisco on Friday afternoon.”
“Maggie,” was as far as he got before he couldn’t say anything more.
His look of deep anguish made me feel sad, and made me feel inadequate all over again. I wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry, Mike.”
“Sorry for what?” He stood rigid.
“I’m sorry about the way things turned out.” I pressed my face against his hard chest and smelled his skin through his crisp shirt. “And I’m okay now. But I don’t know if you are. Sooner or later, you have to talk to me, Mike.”
A panhandler rose from his squat in a nearby doorway, sidled toward us, changed his mind, moved on. Mike didn’t seem to notice. He began to pat my back, as he does when he’s upset, and stood there silent for a long moment. I waited until he figured out what he wanted to say. Or not say. After a while he took a deep breath.
“When Michael got serious with his girlfriend,” Mike said, his voice thick, “I started getting used to the idea that I could be a grandfather in the not-too-distant future. It was a real nice notion, the thought of having a baby in the house again. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, it’s me who’s going to be the father. Me. Old Mike Flint. I’m ready to retire, and you and me are going to have a baby. The reality of it hardly sinks in, and then the baby is gone. Poof. Just gone.”
“A little more than poof,” I said.
“I can’t get the picture of what might have been out of my mind.” His voice wavered. “I liked the picture a whole lot, Maggie.”
I started to pat his back. I was sad, too. But more for Mike than for myself.
“I tried to get the lieutenant to take me off the Pedro case today,” he said. “I don’t have the stomach for it. I listen to these little assholes, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. They talk about how far they’ll go to get a little money for drinking and toking and screwing around, and all the time their babies are crawling around on the police station floor.
“I look at them, and the babies are so damn cute. But no one watches after them the right way. They’re nothing but raw material for the next generation of criminals. Another ten years, I’ll be hooking them up and bringing them in, just like I brought in their moms and dads.”
“You won’t be around in ten years to hook up anybody.”
“It’s just, I get so pissed.” What he didn’t say was, why did they get to have babies when we didn’t? “What a waste.”
I said, “I love you.”
“I know.” He chuckled deep in his throat, a self-deprecating tone. “Can’t for the life of me figure out why.”
“Because you always take me to the nicest places. Are we going to eat, or what?”
“Yeah. We’re going to eat.” He squared his shoulders, adjusting himself as if he had just dropped a heavy load. “I’ll put in for a vacation day Friday. We’ll have a good time this weekend.”
“Good.” I reached up and kissed the underside of his jaw, felt the twelve-hour beard against my lips. “Lyle says he’ll move back into the house until we figure out what to do with it. Just so it won’t look abandoned.”
“Best thing would be to sell,” Mike said. And said it not for the first time. “Let’s hope this offer is legit.”
As we walked down the block toward the restaurant, I mumbled something about the bad real estate market and that we would be lucky if the offer was big enough to cover the mortgage, much less the sales fees. Mike didn’t seem concerned.
The hills of San Francisco around my house are so steep that you can’t always see what’s down the other side until you’re over the crest and headed into, well, wh
atever is down there. That’s how I felt that Tuesday evening—rapidly approaching a blind descent.
The house was after all just a house. And an expensive liability. No question about my attachment to it: The house had sheltered Casey and me through the two Big Ones, the divorce and the earthquake, in that order. Still, it was just a damn house.
Okay, this is the truth: As much as I loved Mike, I always knew that if things didn’t work out between us, I could always go home. Selling my home required a leap of faith in our shared future similar to heading downhill blind.
Philippe’s is a city landmark, a turn-of-the-century sandwich shop about halfway between Olvera Street and Union Station just north of L.A.’s Civic Center. There’s nothing elegant about the place—long tables and sawdust on the floor, an eighty-cent cup of coffee served with the original hot beef dip on a French roll—but it is a constant in the sea of urban change.
I found two window seats at the far end of the narrow dining room while Mike ordered from the counter. Experience taught him to have the food wrapped to go, just in case. He had no more than sat down and added milk to his coffee, when his pager buzzed.
“Wouldn’t you know?” he muttered. He had to put on reading glasses to see the two-line readout. “It’s the office. The mother is in. I gotta go.”
I’m not a crier and I’m not clingy, but I felt like being both as soon as that damn pager beeped. I didn’t know where the sudden flood of emotion came from, and that upset me even more than the surge of tears I had to fight down. While Mike gathered everything together, preparing to leave, I walked over to the counter to grab a handful of napkins we didn’t need just to have a few seconds to myself, to get a grip.
Mike waited for me at the door. I tucked the napkins into the top of his sandwich bag. “No wonder you have mice in the office, always taking meals at your desk.”
“I’ll be home as soon as I can, Maggie.” He took my arm and we walked out.
CHAPTER
4
I called Khanh Nguyen from Parker Center before I said good-bye to Mike.
“I found Minh Tam,” I said. “I have him on videotape.”
“I am impressed,” she said. “My faith in you was well placed. How did you manage to find him so quickly?”
“Knocking on doors,” I said. “The pictures you gave me helped. Someone recognized him.”
“You can assure me that Minh is all right?”
“He is as all right as a homeless man can be.”
“Now that he is found, I hope he will call me.” There was hardly a pause before she asked, “Did you tell Minh about our cousin Bao?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure he believed me.”
“The situation is very difficult to understand,” she said. Her voice thickened, took on a pleading tone. “May I see your tape, Maggie? May I see Minh for myself?”
After what she had been through, the home invasion and all, who could turn her down? Sam and Khanh’s house in ritzy San Marino was only a ten-minute detour if I stopped by on my way home, so I told her I would come that evening.
I turned onto Khanh’s street, looking for addresses. It had been a long time since I visited, and I had never paid much attention to landmarks before because, in the old days, Scotty had always been the driver.
San Marino is an enclave for old money, quiet wealth secreted behind wrought-iron gates and other barricades well camouflaged by landscaping. Security generally was tight, but only Khanh’s house had uniformed guards standing sentinel.
I hesitated before pulling up to the gate and announcing myself. The circular drive inside was lined by half-a-dozen or so sleek Mercedes and Jaguars, enough for a party. Under the circumstances, I knew there was no celebration, I just didn’t want to walk in on something.
Sam and Khanh belonged to a world from which I had been exiled by divorce, the hard-edged, globe-trotting sphere of my ex-husband. Here I was, after several years’ absence, putting in an appearance—an appearance wearing the same blue jeans that had gone sliding down the foul bank of the Los Angeles River early that afternoon. There was some brown stuff I could not identify, a smear, down the back of my left leg.
The Nguyens and their friends were elegant, gracious people, the exiled power elite from a country that existed only in history. The women, always beautiful in designer dresses and real jewelry, would talk about their children at Harvard and Oxford. The men, in perfectly tailored dark suits, talked business and debated what went wrong during the Bay of Pigs.
I am not shy, but in their house I always felt like a clumsy outsider, like a snot-nosed kid peeking through palace gates for a glimpse of the queen.
A guard carrying a cell phone in one hand and a flashlight in the other walked out to meet me. He shone his flashlight into the back of the van, and then turned it on me. “Miss MacGowen?”
When I said, “Yes,” he opened my door and held it for me. “I’ll park your car. Go ahead. You’re expected.”
Security guards watched from behind hedges as I walked up the long drive to the front door. It was too late to turn back, but I hesitated before ringing the bell. Something didn’t feel right. Maybe it was the specter of Scotty. If he was there, I would leave as quickly as I could.
I shuffled the tape I had brought from one hand to the other, knowing that this visit would elevate me to topic number one in a new round of gossip among Scotty’s old clients and their shiny wives for a while. In my mind, I worked through the worst scenario—Maggie looked so …—and decided I didn’t care what they had to say. I pushed the bell.
Khanh herself opened the door.
“Maggie.” Khanh held a cell phone similar to the one the gate guard carried. She bowed slightly rather than reaching for my hand. “You are so good to come.”
“If I’d known you had company, I would have come another time.”
“It is not company.” She touched my arm then, as if sharing a confidence. “Sam is having a meeting.”
Khanh, wearing house sandals, waited while I took off my sneakers and lined them up at the end of the rank of polished black leather shoes next to the door. A quick count said maybe a dozen pairs, about two pairs for each car in the drive. And all of them men’s shoes.
Khanh smiled while she waited for me to pull up my socks, graciousness personified.
Khanh was probably in her early fifties, though there wasn’t a line on her face to give away her age. She was exquisite, her perfect features—dark almond eyes, high cheekbones, a surgically westernized little nose, a curtain of black, sculpted hair as smooth and shiny as polished obsidian—and her graceful carriage, conspired to give her the illusion of being delicate when, indeed, she was anything but.
I walked with Khanh across her wide marble foyer to a small, dark-paneled sitting room: teak desk, deep chairs, big-screen television. She closed the door behind us, shutting out the male voices coming from the another part of the house.
“May I get you a drink? Something to eat?”
“No, thank you. I need to get home.” I handed her the copy I had made of Minh’s interview. “You may keep the tape.”
“Thank you.” She set the tape on the arm of a green leather club chair. “I will watch this later, when Sam has finished his business.”
I was puzzled: If she had been in such a hurry to have the tape, why was she waiting to see it? When she raised her hand to sweep back the silky curtain of hair that fell across her face, I saw bruises and abrasions like ugly bracelets around her wrists where, I guessed, Bao had bound her, and a yellow-green doughnut-shaped circle where he had apparently pressed the barrel of his gun into the center of her forehead.
I asked, “Do the police have any news of Bao?”
“Nothing.” She picked up a television remote control and pushed a button. “The police took the tapes from our security cameras, but they gave me this to show our friends. Here is Bao.”
The television came on, a flash of snow across the screen, and then a pale face below dark hair.
The camera was placed too high so it shot downward on the person standing outside the front door, foreshortening the man and distorting his features, making it impossible to judge his height or see his clothing clearly, or to see his features at all unless he looked straight up, which he did not do.
The image on the screen rolled, bobbled, and then changed to another camera, a different angle, this one shooting outward from, I guessed, somewhere beside the front porch.
Against the dark of night, a white, ghostlike blob approached up Khanh’s driveway. The figure triggered a motion-sensitive spotlight mounted on a tree, and bright light washed the man in color. It was still impossible to see his features: He had turned up the collar of his windbreaker and kept his chin low as he jogged toward the house.
There were two other figures, just shapes against the hedge, loitering near the front gate. A hand loomed large in the lens, and the screen went dark.
I said, “There were three men?”
“I saw only two.” She held up two manicured fingers: long, perfect tapered nails. “Bao was alone when I opened the door. I cannot tell you how surprised and how happy I was to see an old friend I thought all these years was dead. Of course, I invited him inside. I did not see where the other man came from. He was suddenly upon me and my hands were being bound. It happened so fast.”
“The other man tied you?” I said. “Who was he?”
“I never saw his face. All I can say is he was tall and his voice sounded like a white man.”
“Is it possible that Bao was a hostage, too? Could he have been forced to go along with the raid?”
“Forced?” She shook her head. “Oh, no. Bao gave the orders. He told the other one what to take and where to look. It was Bao who held the gun to my head when I would not give him the combination to the safe.”
“Were you in the house alone?”
“Yes. Bao seemed to know I would be alone. He knew that it was the housekeeper’s night off and he knew that it was the night I stayed home from the restaurant. Bao kept telling the other man to stay calm because there was plenty of time. He would say, ‘Sam is just closing the restaurant now,’ and ‘Sam is counting the register now,’ and ‘Sam will get into his car now. Time to go.’”
A Hard Light Page 5
