by Jodi Compton
“That it’s not something dangerous?” I said, impatient. “Because A, I’m not a killer, and B, if I wanted you dead, I would’ve shot you as you walked right under me. I wouldn’t chain you to a piano and make you poison yourself.”
He sighed. “All right.”
“Good. You could probably dry-swallow these, but I’ll get you some water. Don’t let me hear you fooling around up here while I’m gone.”
I wasn’t really worried about that; there was nothing he could do to get loose in such a short period of time.
When I came back with the water glass, I knelt, put the tablets in the palm of my hand, and held it out as if I were feeding a horse. He lowered his face to my palm, and briefly I felt him use the tip of his tongue to get the pills out of my hand. Then I held the water glass to his mouth and he drank.
He didn’t seem like the devious type, but just in case, I said, “Open your mouth and lift up your tongue.”
He sighed again, irritated, but complied. There was nothing there. “Okay,” I said.
Then I reached around to the back of his neck, felt for the rubber band holding his ponytail, and pulled it out, then shook the loosened hair free with my fingers.
Joel gave me a curious look. “What was that for?” he said.
I shrugged. “I get uncomfortable when my hair’s pulled back for too long.”
“I never noticed,” he said. “Since I’ve had to wear mine long, I pull it back every chance I get. I can’t wait to cut it off.”
He wasn’t like CJ, then, who’d grown out his hair despite his mother’s frequent sighs and rarely so much as pulled it back.
I said, “Magnus made you grow it out? To work undercover?”
“ ‘Work undercover’ is putting it too strongly, but yes, to be a decoy in the park. He wanted me to look less like a cop.”
“It worked.”
“You have hard feelings about that? That I fooled you?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, being honest. “That was your job. It was a good trick, and you were good at it.”
“My father is blind. I grew up around it.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I think that’s how Magnus got the idea. He didn’t come up with it until after I mentioned my dad.”
“I’m kind of surprised you guys really expected to get anything out of you sitting in the park watching people.”
“I had my doubts, too, but we didn’t use a lot of hours on it. Magnus just wanted some boots on the ground in that neighborhood. He’s a patient guy, and his methods can be unusual.”
We were quiet a moment. A lot of people wouldn’t have understood it, I thought, the two of us having a civil conversation. But Joel wasn’t revealing anything that would hurt their investigation, and he knew I wouldn’t give him any information that he or Ford could use against me, either.
Then, apropos of nothing except for the fact that it’d just crossed my mind, I said, “How’d you get in here, anyway, if the SFPD didn’t let you in?”
“Pick gun,” he said. “Magnus gave it to me.”
That was something I’d only heard about, never seen for real, that greatly sped up and simplified the process of lock picking. Trust Ford to have all the cool toys.
Joel said, “My shoulders are starting to hurt a little.”
They shouldn’t have been, not this early. “First time in handcuffs?”
“No, we practiced on each other at the academy, to learn—”
“That doesn’t count,” I said dismissively.
He tilted his head, assessing me. “You’re saying you’ve been? I didn’t see any arrests in your history.”
I didn’t answer, looked away, remembering last December. What would this kid say if I told him the truth? Yes, I’ve been handcuffed. Last year I fellated a man while I was handcuffed and at gunpoint, and when he was finished, he dropped me on my face and I couldn’t break my own fall. That probably distracted me from a minor pain in my shoulders.
Don’t think about this, I warned myself, but already I was back there, hearing Quentin saying, The first thing I do, with a woman, is see what group she falls into. Hearing Joe Laska say, This is taking way too long. Get her back up on the table.
I heard a cracking noise and saw that I was still holding the water glass, but now it had a fine line running up its side from the pressure of my grip.
“Hailey? What’s wrong?”
“Shut up. Don’t talk to me.”
It had been months since the projection booth, and memories of it had caught me unexpectedly before, but I’d never felt a shaking red rage like this until now. Even the sound of Joel Kelleher’s voice threw fuel on it, as Quentin’s or Joe Laska’s might have. I closed my eyes.
No, don’t touch Joel—he didn’t do anything, he’s nothing like them. Think of walking with Tess afterward, think of North Beach on Christmas Eve, the lights in the window displays.
That was better. I took a deep breath, felt the events of last winter recede.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m all right.”
“Are you bleeding?”
“No,” I said shortly.
He tilted his head, watching my face. He said, “Something bad happened to you, didn’t it?”
I gave him a sharp glance. “Like what?”
“You tell me,” he said. Then, “I heard something about a traffic accident on Wilshire—”
“Don’t go there.”
He fell silent, chastened. Then, after a moment, he said, “You wouldn’t tell Magnus how you lost the finger, either.”
“Does it matter?” I said. “No, it wasn’t an accident; yeah, it hurt. Who cares? Thieves get rich, saints get shot, God don’t answer prayers a lot.”
He didn’t have anything to say in response to that. When I looked over at him again, I saw that the Ambien was taking effect. It was visible in his relaxed face, his heavy-lidded eyes. “You’re circling the airport,” I said.
He shook himself like a horse feeling a fly on its skin. “No,” he said.
“Don’t be stubborn about it. The sooner you fall asleep”—a safer-sounding term than go under—“the sooner we can both get on with our lives. Okay?”
“Mm-hmmm.” His head tipped forward, but he felt it and shook himself, like a student trying not to fall asleep during a lecture.
“Joel.”
“S’hard, I’m sitting up, I can’t just go to sleep this way.”
“What if,” I said slowly, “just to speed this along, I sit next to you, so you can lean on me?” I went to settle down at his side, carefully keeping the Browning on the far side of my body, just in case. “Here,” I said, “slide your hips forward a little, if you can, so you’re kind of leaning back, and then rest your head on my shoulder. That might help.”
Joel shifted in place, doing as I asked. “Your shoulder’s bony,” he complained quietly.
“Sorry.”
For a few long moments, he didn’t say anything, and I hoped he was finally dropping off. But then he spoke again. “Can I tell you something? On the job, I …” Then he stopped.
“You what?”
“No, I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Telling me what?”
He said, “The job … I think I do it pretty well, but I have to swallow a lot of fear. There’s no one I can tell. On the job nobody talks about being afraid. S’like I’m the only one.”
Whatever he’d been about to tell me, this wasn’t among the possibilities I’d considered.
“Uh, you’re not,” I managed finally. “I mean, everyone feels afraid sometimes.”
“No. Not like this.”
“I, uh …” How big a hypocrite was I, trying to address this? “Sure they do.” It sounded unconvincing even to my own ears.
Then I noticed that Joel’s respiration had become slow and steady. I carefully pulled away, letting his head drop to his chest.
I took the handcuff key, unlocked his wrists, and lowered him ge
ntly to the floor. Then I took his right arm in my hand, two fingers on the radial artery, checking the pulse against his watch. It was fifty-two. Low, but not dangerous. He was probably a runner. He could probably get down to the fifties every night in normal sleep.
Before I left, I went through his bag again and found the pick gun that Joel had been telling me about. It didn’t look like a gun, really—more like a price-tag applicator in a supermarket, except made of metal, with the slender pick protruding from the business end. I slipped it into my pack. Magnus was going to be pissed at his young assistant, but I was working with a lot more disadvantages than they were, and I needed all the help I could get.
14
Sometime in the night, the media had discovered what Ford and Joel Kelleher already knew. When I woke up, Serena was reading the story in the Chronicle: SLAYING SUSPECT WAS USMA CADET.
“You’re getting more famous by the day,” she said, wet black hair pinned up atop her head. She’d already taken a shower; scented humidity hung in the air.
“Looks that way.”
“And,” she said, “you ditched me last night. Pendeja.”
“You were sleeping.”
“I was supposed to be your backup.”
“You were sleeping,” I repeated. “You can’t actually be complaining that I left you in a warm bed at midnight instead of taking you across town to stand around in the dark.”
Actually, she was right. Leaving her had been a big mistake. If I’d had a lookout last night, I would have gotten out of the Eastman place before Joel was in. Now Ford’s right-hand man knew I was up here in San Francisco. Was I going to have to look over my shoulder for him everywhere I went?
“What?” Serena said. “You look kinda funny.”
“Thinking,” I said, dismissing that train of thought. “Let me see the paper.”
Details were pretty thin about my West Point career; the Army’s famous dislike of dealing with civilian reporters was working in my favor.
Of more interest, at least to me, was a related story on CNN: With banks once again open for business, details were coming out about Eastman’s accounts. As Tess had predicted, there had been “irregularities.” Apparently “Hailey” had written herself four checks on Eastman’s account on Thursday and Friday, cashing them at different bank branches. Each of the checks was for an amount just shy of five thousand dollars, the level that triggered bank oversight. In addition, there had been large purchases made with Eastman’s Visa and American Express cards those same days, at Neiman Marcus and Macy’s and a lower–Market Street jewelry store.
I kicked off covers and went to pour myself a cup of coffee from the little machine on the counter.
“So how did it go last night?” Serena said. “Was it interesting?”
“You can’t imagine,” I said dryly, tipping my face down into my cup.
“Yeah? What’d you learn?”
Shit. I didn’t really want to tell her about Joel; it’d freak her out. I sipped coffee and backtracked. “I was being ironic. It was a wash. Everything interesting has been cleaned out.”
“Mmm,” she said, and then, “So what’s the plan today?”
“Surveillance,” I said. “If Joe Laska is working out of Skouras’s old offices, we might be able to catch my good friend Quentin coming and going from there. This is going to be the boring part, surveillance.”
“That’s okay,” Serena said, “as long as I get to be there when things do get interesting. Like when you’re ready to throw down on this guy.”
“Sure thing.”
“I mean it, Insula. No ‘This part’s too dangerous, go wait at the hotel’ shit.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “You remember who these guys are. They’re heavy. If we don’t have to mix it up with them, we shouldn’t.” I drained the last of the coffee. “Let me take a shower, and we’ll head out.”
That’s how we spent the rest of the day: at a discreet distance from Laska’s office not far from the Port of San Francisco, watching people arrive and depart. I saw Babyface himself and pointed him out to Serena. Quentin did not appear. At one point I found some scratch paper and tried to draw him from memory, an exercise that reminded me I couldn’t draw at all. Serena smoked cigarettes and fielded occasional phone calls and slipped away to talk in private; Trece business, I knew.
By seven that evening, we were back at the hotel, eating Indian takeout and watching cable news. I’d been hoping that by the time the prime-time shows were on, I’d have been supplanted by a missing child or a homegrown-terror plot. That wasn’t the case. On CNN’s marquee crime-news show, generic footage of West Point cadets drilling was intercut with my military ID photo, footage of police activity outside the Eastman house on Friday night, and a brief snippet of Lucius “Luke” Marsellus getting out of a black Escalade and walking into the offices of his record label in L.A.
Marsellus? I set down my plastic fork and looked at the banner at the bottom of the screen. It read, BREAKING NEWS: MURDER SUSPECT HIT, KILLED CHILD IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.
“Oh, great,” I said.
The show’s host was saying, “This terrible story, these two murders up in San Francisco, the story just keeps getting more tangled, everything we hear just keeps getting worse.” She spoke not in sentences but in strings of clauses, with drawling emphasis on the key words. “The news late today out of Los Angeles about a traffic fatality in which—”
“Well, you knew that shit was gonna come out,” Serena said philosophically.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
On the screen the host was now talking to a remote guest, identified as a “psychologist and popular author.” Serena was about to speak again, but I held up a silencing hand.
“Now, Dr. Schiffman,” the host said, “what we’re hearing about this young woman, this suspect, more and more we’re seeing a picture of someone whose life has gone very wrong, who set herself this very high goal of going to the U.S. Military Academy and then failed at that; she later, for whatever reason, is responsible for the death of a small child.… Dr. Schiffman, what kind of effect would this string of, I guess you’d say missteps and failures, have on the psyche of a young person like Hailey Cain?”
The psychologist, a man with very short, curly hair and round glasses, cleared his throat. “Well, I think it’s important first to remind everyone that Cain is still a suspect, she hasn’t been tried or found guilty—”
“Of course, of course.”
“—and that the Wilshire Boulevard accident was found not to be her fault. But with those … uh, caveats, you’d have to say that the failure to complete West Point and then the death of this child, those kinds of life events at a fairly young age, could have a potentially devastating effect.”
“Certainly.”
“You could potentially be looking at someone who’s saying, ‘I’ve tried hard, I’ve failed, what’s the use?’ I mean, particularly someone being the agent of a child’s death, and completely by accident, that’s someone who could be saying, ‘Society’s going to look at me like I’m some kind of monster no matter what, so I give up, I’m just going to be as bad as I can be.’ I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but it could be.”
“So you’re saying that this could be someone who just snapped.”
“That’s entirely possible.”
West Point and Wilshire Boulevard—they were the two turning points of my adult life, the two points that allowed these people who’d never met me to triangulate, to plot out my psyche like they were laying out a map.
“For God’s sake,” I told Serena, “the Eastman thing was obviously a planned-out, long-term crime, moving into an old lady’s house and embezzling her money. That’s not ‘snapping.’ ”
“They gotta make it interesting,” Serena said.
Finally the news shifted to an update about a missing woman in South Carolina. Serena muted the TV and turned her full attention to her food. I tried to do the same, but I was
n’t very hungry.
I went to bed early that night, to make up for the sleep I’d missed the night before, in St. Francis Wood with Joel. But instead I fell into that dark, dreamless, not-quite-asleep state for I don’t know how long, coming fully to consciousness at the sound of Serena shaking an Ambien out of the bottle I’d left at bedside.
Eventually I succumbed, dreaming that I was far from California and my troubles. Instead I was on an African beach, alone with CJ.
15
The next day we sighted Quentin Corelli, driving a dark sedan that he parked outside the Laska offices. I’d almost forgotten the way he moved, light on his feet and cocky. And I hadn’t expected the extent to which I bristled on seeing that, an almost literal hackles-of-the-neck feeling. Bastard, I thought, you haven’t changed.
“Asshole,” Serena said next to me, as though she saw as much to hate in him.
Around midday he left Laska’s offices, and we followed him, Serena at the wheel. We tailed him to the south part of San Francisco, near Candlestick Park. It was a mixed-use neighborhood, residential and light-industrial, where there was so little traffic on the streets that Serena dropped back for fear he’d make us. Then Quentin’s dark sedan turned left down a narrow driveway that ran alongside a pale blue stucco house. Serena was forced to drive on or be conspicuous in stopping, but I turned in my seat to keep an eye on him. I only saw him getting out of his car, which was sheltered under a carport, before we’d rolled past.
“Go around the block,” I told Serena. “We’ll scope things out from one street over.”
“I can’t, it’s a dead end.”
I looked ahead and saw that she was right; before us was a low fence and some scrubby bushes. “Then go back,” I said.
“He’s gonna see us.”
“Dammit. Stay here a minute,” I said.
It was true, he might see us if we turned around right away. But if we stayed idling at the street’s dead end, I hoped, he’d go into the house, at which point we could safely backtrack.
I waited, watching the side mirror to see if Quentin or his car emerged from the driveway. Neither did.
