A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Hello, Sheila”

  We pressed cheeks. In a room dominated by sleek Asian women, long tall Sheila had the presence of a Clydesdale at a cat show. Big, flame-colored hair, clunky platform shoes, a dark green suit with deep cleavage and out-to-here shoulder pads, she would have fit in better at an old showgirls reunion. Making up for lost time, according to Sheila, the daughter of a Pentecostal minister.

  “I can’t believe it.” She hunched down to place her stage whisper closer to my ear. “You saw her. Was it awful?”

  “It wasn’t nice. Better that I saw her than a stranger.”

  “And she was coming to see you. It’s so weird, isn’t it?”

  “More scary than weird,” I said. “How did you hear about Khanh?”

  “Sam called Scotty, Scotty called Mortie. They were supposed to have lunch together today. And then, of course, we were all coming here tomorrow for the big dinner as usual. But that’s off.” Just about then she decided I must feel slighted about being left off the dinner list. She tried to fix things. “You’re better off. You know how boring those dinners are. All the men talking shop.” Then she blushed, realizing she had merely put her foot in it again and now she had insulted the deceased. She took my glass from my hand and downed its contents in a gulp. “Oh, hell.”

  “How are you, Sheila?”

  “Older, sweetie. Not wiser, just older.”

  I chuckled. “Where’s Mortie?”

  “He and Scotty have their heads together at Mortie’s office. Some crisis or another. They’ll be here later.”

  “How much later?”

  “Oh.” She checked her watch. “I don’t know, sweetie, but if you don’t want to run into a certain bastard, you might start saying your good-byes before too long. He has a dinner thing later, so I imagine he’ll be right along.”

  “Scotty doesn’t scare me.” I didn’t mention that I was the dinner thing.

  “Good for you, but why risk getting into something? We don’t want to turn the wake into a boxing match. Poor Sam already has more than he can handle.”

  “If there are people around, Scotty won’t start something.”

  “It’s your neck.” She caught the eye of the maid and snapped two glasses from the drinks tray, then handed one of them to me.

  “To Khanh,” I said, tipping my glass against hers. “May she rest in peace.”

  “To Khanh.”

  We talked about Sheila’s son, who was a college sophomore, and about Casey. She told me I seemed pale and I told her she looked fine. I was busy with my job, she with her charity work. After that there was an awkward lull. I knew her too well to bring up the weather, but no longer well enough to share anything very personal. I never mentioned Mike, though I’m sure the gossip circuit kept her informed without my adding anything. I felt that I was fair game as a lunchtime topic for the old gang. Mike was not.

  Sheila finished her third drink. “Nice turnout on such short notice, isn’t it?”

  The room was packed, people coming by twos and threes in a constant stream. I decided that it was time to say good-bye.

  “Walk me out,” I said, taking Sheila’s arm. I said goodbye to Sam and to his sons, and promised that I would come back after the weekend to sit vigil.

  Dread walked out of the house with me, a feeling as heavy and invasive as the scent of incense that filled my nostrils and billowed up from my clothes whenever I moved.

  “Want to talk about it?” Arlo asked as he held his car door for me.

  “I do. But I don’t know what to say.”

  Arlo is a considerate soul. He slipped Mozart into his tape player and waited for me.

  The green perfection of San Marino slipped by the car window as we drove down Huntington Drive to Monterey Avenue. Most of the houses were set back from the street on their acreage and were nearly hidden from view. Over the hedges: Rooflines as large as European country hotels, multiple gables, multiple chimneys, could be seen.

  I said, “How much do you think a place like Khanh’s would sell for?”

  “More than I’ll ever see in a lifetime.”

  “How much do you think it costs to open a big restaurant in a good neighborhood?”

  He chuckled. “Anything else you thinking of buying?”

  “A liquor store.”

  “The answer’s the same. It costs plenty.”

  “The first time I met Sam and Khanh was at their house-warming party. They had just moved into that beautiful house. They had been in this country for four years, and they already had their first restaurant and liquor store.”

  “Major bucks,” Arlo said. “Major.”

  Sam and Khanh were entitled. They paid their dues, probably enough dues for the next three generations. Born to a privileged class, they met in Paris where Sam studied at Escoffier, as Ho Chi Minh had a generation before, and where Khanh was an art student. They went home to Da Nang to chart their future together—in a war zone.

  Surrounded by a landscape created by wealth, I began to suffer feelings I can only explain as guilt. Survivor’s guilt that I was still breathing and Khanh was not, and that I might be in some yet unexplained way responsible. And something else, a sense that I had not paid my dues.

  As soon as Scotty and I found out I was pregnant with Casey, we moved from his bachelor cottage across the Bay in Sausalito to our house in the San Francisco Marina District. I loved the house for its ocean view and tall, skinny, eccentric design, the third-floor loft, and the wickedly steep street that ran in front. As soon as I saw it, I refused to look any further.

  How ironic, I thought, that Scotty should want the house now, because when we bought it, he argued, long and loudly, to buy an estate-sized property down the Peninsula in Hillsborough, a neighborhood similar to San Marino.

  Back then, I was still anchoring an evening news broadcast from a station South of Market in San Francisco. I hated the idea of commuting out of the suburbs every day, leaving my baby behind in the clutches of nannies. I also hated the idea of being isolated in the woods on the four nights out of seven Scotty was out of town or working late. The other thing was, I wanted a mortgage and upkeep that I could manage on my own if something happened to Scotty. To the end, we argued about moving, he pro, me con.

  Scotty built his second wife a glass palace in the foothills above Boulder, Colorado, when he moved his practice to Denver. I wondered how it was for Linda, on top of her hill with three acres of ponderosa and two babies for company.

  Arlo broke my reverie. “You want to go home, or you want me to take you somewhere?”

  I looked at my watch. “Home, please.”

  Cecil told me that Minh Tam wasn’t in his room, but his duffel bags were still in the closet and he had ordered, and eaten, room service breakfast. He was out when the maid made up his room at eleven, and the room remained as pristine as she had left it. There was a message at the desk for him to call Detective Mareno.

  The hotel staff agreed to keep an eye out, and to call Cecil when Tam returned.

  I took a long shower and then stared at my closet for a while trying to decide what to wear at dinner with Scotty. I didn’t want to look seductive, I didn’t want to look dowdy, and I didn’t want to look as if I cared in the least about how I looked for him.

  In the end, I chose a creamy white silk blouse, a straight, mid-calf-length black wool skirt, black tights and boots, and a black velvet jacket. Not dressy, not casual. Frankly, not much of anything. I added my grandmother’s long string of pearls, didn’t like the way they fell into my cleavage, took them off and wrapped them like a choker around my neck.

  I felt nervous. I felt as if I were betraying Mike. All afternoon, while I was in the company of Scotty’s friends and business associates, as I thought about what our life together had been, I remembered that it had not all been bad. In fact, there had been times when it was damned wonderful.

  CHAPTER

  20

  The Gabrieleno Restaurant was only a few miles west of the
house I shared with Mike, down where Monterey Road crosses the Arroyo Seco.

  The Pasadena Freeway runs through the Arroyo on stilt-like supports, carrying the moving lights and noise of traffic high above the canyon floor. Below the freeway, the terrain is uncivilized, a maze of dead-end streets and flood plain filled with tangled undergrowth. Snow melt pouring out of the San Bernardino Mountains has been redirected underground, but the Arroyo remains untamable in big storms. Most of the flood path is now the Ernest Debs County Regional Park; a notoriously difficult golf course makes use of the treacherous terrain.

  The Gabrieleno Restaurant overlooks the fifth green of the golf course. I had been there years ago with Scotty. What I remembered was how dark it was around the park at night. And how isolated.

  I left a message telling Detective Mareno where I would be, and then called Arlo and asked him to call the restaurant at eight and have me paged. I thought that an hour was long enough for Scotty to make his pitch and his rebuttal.

  Before I left, I accounted for everyone.

  The rehab center in Trona passed Mike’s muster. He said he would stay for a few hours and help Oscar get settled in before he headed home. Casey was at her grandparents’ in Berkeley, helping Lyle strip Jim Morrison from my childhood bedroom. Michael had taken Guido’s cats and gone to his mother’s house in the Valley for the weekend. Dad and Uncle Max were playing bridge with the neighbors. Guido, Lana, and the film crew were camped out in my Marina District house; they complained there wasn’t enough hot water.

  Minh Tam still had not returned to his room at the hotel.

  A light but steady rain was falling when I drove away from the house. At the first intersection, the van’s steering seemed stiff and the car felt slushy. For another block, I told myself that the problem was wet streets. When I turned onto Monterey, I heard the back tire flap and had to admit what I had known, or should have known, as soon as I backed the van out of the driveway. I swore, pulled over to the curb, and got out.

  The right rear tire was flat. I ran my hand over the treads but didn’t feel anything like a nail. Could be a slow leak, I thought. Or, most likely, someone messing with me. I don’t like to be manipulated.

  Soaked, hair flat against my head, I got back into the van, swore a little without much energy, and moved the van into the corner strip mall lot and parked it under the lights in front of a 7-Eleven.

  If the flat was a warning, it was duly noted. If the flat was meant to keep me from meeting Scotty, or meant to leave me stranded in the Arroyo, then I didn’t want to hand over a victory too easily. The restaurant wasn’t far away. Using the car phone, I called Information for the number of a local cab company. I dialed the number and waited on hold all the way through two golden oldies playing on the radio. I was still on hold when an RTD bus pulled up beside the lot and honked. I looked up, recognized the driver, rolled down my window.

  “Leon?” I said.

  “How you doin’, Maggie?” Leon got out of the bus, leaving his two passengers inside. “What you doin’ out here?”

  “Flat tire,” I said.

  “I can see that. You waitin’ for the triple A?”

  “I have an appointment, so I’m calling a cab. I’ll get the tire fixed later.”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “The Gabrieleno Restaurant.”

  “I know where that is.” He glanced back at his passengers, two men with their faces buried behind newspapers. “You might as well come with me. No tellin’ how long it’ll take a cab to come all the way over here.”

  “Is the restaurant one of your stops?”

  “Not usually.” He grinned. “But I have a feeling I’m going to get lost tonight and end up over by that way.”

  Before I hung up on the cab dispatcher’s hold music, I asked Leon, “Will you get in trouble?”

  “After what I went through today, anyone try to get in my face, I say call my lawyer cuz I’m ready to go off the deep end. Fool with Leon at your own risk.” He reached for my door lock through the open window. “But we gotta go. Can’t make my fares any later than they are right now.”

  We shared my umbrella and dashed to the bus. I took the seat right behind Leon.

  When we were back in traffic, I asked him, “Are you working double shifts? Is that legal?”

  “I volunteered. I thought if I drove this way enough times, something might come to me, you know, about what happened. And what else am I going to do? All this adrenaline running through me has got to get out somehow. And sitting at home thinking about that poor lady and how she got hit right there beside of me just ain’t the way I’m going to start feeling any calmer.”

  He laughed, a roll from deep in his abdomen. “I get time and a half. Besides, most of the other drivers called in sick when they heard what happened on my morning run.”

  “And has anything come to you?” I asked.

  “Only this: When the little lady got hit, I never saw a car goin’ by. I’ve been driving this bus long enough, I have like a sixth sense about where cars are and where they’re going to and where they’re coming from. If that lady was hit from a moving car, then it was some kind of ghost car.”

  Leon pulled up to his first stop and one of his passengers got off. “That Detective Mareno keeps asking, did I see a white car. I keep saying, I saw no car. Not at the very time I heard the noise and the lady fell.”

  I pulled one of the shots I had taken of Steinmetz out of my purse. “Ever seen these men?”

  Leon studied the picture before he shook his head. “Mareno showed this to me. I never saw them. But I’ll keep an eye out. Tell you this: I know the car before I know who’s driving it.” He slipped the picture into his ID frame so that everyone getting on the bus could see it.

  “Thanks, Leon,” I said.

  “Any time.” Looking at me in his rearview mirror, he winked and gave me a thumbs-up. “It’s nice to be with someone who knows what happened. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to be alone with it, either.”

  Two more stops, Leon let off his last passenger, and then doubled back to make the turn into the Arroyo.

  “Leon’s limo service,” I said. “Nothing like it in the city.”

  He cocked his head. “I’m not crazy, you know, goin’ off my route and drivin’ you out here like this. The thing is, it makes me so damn mad, them shooting at my bus the way they did. Anybody coulda been hurt. They can’t get away with that on my bus.”

  “I’m mad, too. But don’t go looking for trouble.”

  “I’m not looking, but if I find trouble, I’m not running away, either.” Leon turned up the park access road, a dark expanse lined with a high oleander hedge. Beyond the bus lights, the road disappeared into blackness. “You want to tell me how your tire happened to go flat?”

  “I’ve thought about it. And what I thought scares me.”

  The restaurant sign came up on the left, and Leon turned into the circular drive. “How you getting home?”

  “I can have the maître d’ call me a cab, or I can call a friend.”

  “The one-ten bus stops right by the driveway every half hour, at twenty after and ten to. The last run is just before midnight; picks up the busboys and kitchen help. I don’t know who’s driving the route tonight, but I’ll put out a call to be watching for you.”

  “Thank you, Leon.” He drove me right up to the door in his big city bus. Before I stood, I pulled one of my cards out of my bag and handed it to him. “Keep in touch. Let me know how things are going for you.”

  He looked at the card before he slipped it into his shirt pocket. He pushed the door release. “You have a nice dinner, Maggie.”

  “Good night.” I kissed him on the cheek before I got off the bus. He didn’t drive away until I opened the restaurant’s massive front door and walked inside.

  Gabrieleno exuded a quiet, comfortable gentility. In the lounge, sofas were arranged around a huge tile fireplace. The motif was meant to be Early California: adobe wall
s, Mexican clay pavers on the floor, rough-hewn beams in the high ceiling. This wasn’t a trendy restaurant, but a place that catered to a regular, well-heeled local crowd. It was Friday night, and the house was full, neighbors and old friends sharing a rainy evening out. Scotty and I had eaten here a number of times with Khanh and Sam, and Mortie and Sheila Rayburn, whenever business brought us to L.A.

  It was awkward to be in a place that belonged to my former life, to see people who had once called me by name now look right through me. I wondered if this was the way the prodigal felt when he dropped in for dinner after a long absence, a living ghost from the past.

  Because Khanh had brought it up, I imagined how damned awkward it must have been for Linda, Scott’s newer wife, to walk in my footsteps. How many times, standing at Scotty’s side, had she heard some knucklehead say to Scotty, “And how is Maggie?” I felt sorry for her, knowing that a ripple of gossip followed her every time she turned her back, just as it followed me.

  I looked at my watch—I was five minutes early—and hoped I had time to order a drink from the bar before Scotty arrived. A Kir Royale, I thought. A little champagne to take the edge off my jitters.

  Scotty was already in the bar, waiting. He rose from a seat near the door. As he walked over to meet me, he carried a small, elegant leather attaché case, his offer to buy the house, I supposed.

  “You look beautiful, Maggie.” He held me by the shoulders and bussed me on the temple, the way a fond uncle might. Familiar, but not forward. Not sexual. “Is it still raining?”

  “Sprinkling.” I was nervous. It had been years since I had been in a room with Scotty unchaperoned. There were good reasons why I avoided situations exactly like the one I had just walked myself into. As those reasons occurred to me, I knew that if my car were out front in the lot, at that point I would have turned tail and driven myself away. Far away.

  I looked at Scotty, trying to decide how devious he could be, and how perceptive. If I were Scotty and I didn’t want someone to run away from me, how far would I go to clip that person’s wings? Would he mess with a tire? I realized that I had never known him well enough to be able to answer the question. Maybe that was the problem between us: We didn’t bother to find out what we needed to know about each other.