by Josh Lanyon
He stopped in the doorway, hesitating. “Is — are you —”
“Five minutes,” I said desperately.
He turned and left. I heard the slap of his bare feet going down the hallway. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, pushed hard.
When my vision was clear, I stared up at the frosted-glass lamp fixtures overhead.
From in the pool yard, I heard the springy creak of the diving board and the splash of water.
Holy moly.
Chapter Fifteen
“Adrien?”
I looked up from the laptop screen, focused on Angus’s uneasy expression. He blinked nervously behind the specs. “Hmm?”
“She’s crying.”
I almost made the unforgivable mistake of asking who. I caught it in time.
“Okay.”
He ducked out of my office again, and I sighed. It was Sunday morning, the day after my date — my first and last — with Mel. We had managed to get through the rest of our swim date. I wasn’t faking it when I told him I was exhausted as we went inside to change back into our street clothes. He had said all the right things, but I knew he was as relieved as I was that the day was over. We’d talked film noir like our lives depended on it on the drive back to Pasadena, and when we’d arrived at long last at Cloak and Dagger, he’d promised to call — although the next few weeks were going to be pretty busy getting ready for the fall semester.
I said I’d look forward to it, and I’d gone upstairs and gone straight to bed.
All the same, things looked brighter today. There was no denying that I was getting stronger and feeling better all the time, and a scarred hide was a small price to pay for being alive.
Accordingly, I stuffed my squeamishness back in the box and went out to the book floor, where Natalie was crying soundlessly into the Dell Mapbacks.
I took a soggy copy of Armchair in Hell out of her hand. “Can I take you to lunch?”
She nodded miserably.
We went to Mijares Mexican Restaurant and settled on the back patio with a pitcher of El Presidente margaritas and a basket of homemade tortilla chips and salsa. Three baskets of chips, if we wanted to get technical. The Zone diet had apparently veered into the danger-zone diet.
“It’s over,” Natalie announced as she demolished the last of the tortilla chips.
“You and Warren?”
Her mouth quivered, though she kept crunching bravely as she nodded.
I wisely kept my opinions to myself. “What happened?”
It was a bit confused. The gist seemed to be that Warren — miracle of miracles — had the good sense to recognize that they wanted different things out of life and each other.
There seemed to be a lot of that going around these days.
“I’m sorry, Nat.”
“No, you’re not.” She glared at me.
“Let me rephrase. I’m sorry this hurts you.”
She picked up a chip. Her tears fell in the salsa as she dipped the chip. “He’s seeing someone else. He’s been cheating on me for weeks.”
“Who with?” It was hard enough to believe he’d ensnared Natalie — let alone that he could lure another doe into the tar pit.
“Right before the band broke up the last time, they hired a female drummer. Jet.”
“What kind of a name is Jet?”
“Her name. She has tattoos over her arms. Both her arms. Like she’s the illustrated woman. And she has a stud in her tongue.”
“Owth.”
She stared at me and started giggling. This was followed by more tears, then a recital of all Warren’s good qualities — both of them — then more tears. We ordered lunch, and I kept plying her with margaritas. When she had talked herself dry but was nicely lubricated, I paid the bill, steered her out to her car. It was still a few days too early for me to drive, but I figured we were safer with me behind the wheel than Natalie. I drove back to the bookstore and put her to bed upstairs.
“What?” I said grouchily when I caught Angus staring at me as I gathered up the invoices Natalie was supposed to have paid that morning.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“You just seem…different.”
“I am different. I’m an imposter. I killed Adrien two years ago and buried him under the floorboards. My real name is Avery Oxford.”
He seemed to think that was unreasonably funny. When he’d stopped guffawing, he said, “You seem the same but…older.”
“Uh-huh. I hope you’re not counting on a pay raise anytime soon.”
“Not old. Older. Or more…”
“Wiser? Mature? Worldly?”
He was grinning. “Yeah. All of the above.”
“That’s what I thought you meant.” I held up the invoices. “I’ll be in the office taking care of these. Yell if you need help.”
“I got it.”
To my relief, he did seem to have it. He was catching up quickly, and he was already proving an enormous help to Natalie while I was out of commission. Next week I’d probably be able to start working a few hours a day, and for the first time ever, we’d be adequately staffed.
I felt positively cheerful as I paid the week’s invoices.
Tomkins jumped up on the desk and nearly knocked over the can of Tab I was nursing. I saved the precious, lifesaving elixir. “You know, you’re well enough now to be reintroduced to the wild. If I let you stay any longer, you’re going to lose your survival skills.”
He stared at me with those huge green-gold eyes. Moon cat eyes.
“Come on.” I rose, scooped him up, and carried him over to the side door. I opened the door, set him outside. He slipped back inside, wound his sinewy self around my shins, and meowed.
“Don’t give me that. You’re supposed to be a feral cat.”
“What are you doing?” Angus looked up from reshelving the day’s strays.
“Reintroducing him to the wild.”
“I don’t think he wants to go.”
“If you want to go, now’s your chance. If I buy you a collar and a license, you’re here for the duration.”
“Are you talking to me?” Angus asked.
“Don’t tempt me.”
Tomkins rubbed his face against the blue denim of my Levi’s. After a few seconds more, I let the door to the alley swing shut.
Come to think of it, his survival skills had never been all that hot.
* * * * *
When we closed for the day, I cautiously woke Natalie and had Angus drive her home in my Forester. She went out, hand to her head like Ophelia considering the cool sanctuary of the river.
When at last they had departed and the building was quiet once more, I gave in, went upstairs, and called Jake.
I hadn’t heard from him since our Friday lunch with Harry Newman. Not that I’d expected to; I certainly didn’t imagine he was spending his weekend chasing this cold case when he’d already stated he thought it was a waste of time. And the parameters I’d set made it difficult for him to call me for any other reason.
“Riordan.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.” His voice warmed fractionally.
“Is this a bad time?”
“No. What did you need?”
“What are you working on?”
“My stalker case.”
“You mean the case where you’re working for the stalker?”
“That’s the one,” he said tersely.
No wonder he was ready to hang up the PI gig.
“It turns out Guilliam Truffaut has a daughter. Evelyn. She runs an art gallery in Beverly Hills. I’ve got an appointment to go see her Tuesday. Would you want to come along?”
“How did you manage that? I can’t even get her to answer my phone calls.”
“Lisa arranged it. So you did know about the daughter?”
“Believe it or not, once upon a time I did actually solve a number of police cases without your help.”
He sounded sardonic but amused.
I said, “I know. Sorry. It’s just that I’m bored.”
“You sound down. Everything okay?”
How did he do that? How did he know? Because there was nothing in my voice. I was pretty sure of that.
“Yeah. Pretty much. Just…tired of being tired. I’ve decided to keep the cat.”
“He seems like a nice little cat.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure he could make it on his own anymore.”
“Why should he? By the way, I did the checking you asked. Your boy Angus is in the clear. His Blade Sable playmates didn’t incriminate him.” He added, “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved.”
“I know. I think he’s learned his lesson, though. He’s not a bad kid. And I think these two years have been good for him in a way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thanks for checking.”
“Sure.”
“So about Tuesday…”
“What time?”
I told him, he agreed. I rang off reluctantly.
A second later the phone rang.
I picked up. “Listen, if you’re not doing anything this evening, why don’t you stop by on your way home?”
An unfamiliar male voice said, “I’ll stop by, all right, and I’ll bash your ugly face in if you don’t leave my mother alone.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me. Stay away from my mother.”
Admittedly not a threat I’d often heard.
“I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
“No, I’ve got the right number. And I’ve got your address too. Don’t forget it.” It was hard to slam down a cell-phone receiver, but he clicked off forcefully.
I stared at my own phone receiver and dialed the code for call return. I’d gotten a lot of mileage from that through the years — people have this innocent belief in their invisibility when it comes to phones, Internet, and license plates. That day was no exception. The phone rang, picked up, and the same male voice announced, “Chris Powers.”
“Hey there, Chris. Are you aware it’s a felony to make threats over the phone?”
To give Powers his fair due, he got over his shock within a split second. “Try it, asshole. I dare you. My lawyers will have you for lunch.” He clicked off again.
I did what any red-blooded American male would do. I called my big, ex-cop ex-boyfriend.
“What’s up?” Jake answered.
“Did you run Jinx Stevens’s license plate?”
“I did. I was going to talk to you about that.”
“Maybe you should talk to me about it now. I’ve got a guy by the name of Chris Powers threatening me with bodily harm if I didn’t leave his mom alone. I can’t think of anyone besides Jinx Stevens who would fall even remotely into the moms-I’ve-harassed-lately category.”
“That would be Chris Powers, the son of the late Bruce Powers.”
“Senator Bruce Powers?”
“That’s the one. Jinx a.k.a. Jane Powers married the senator back in 1967. She didn’t drop out of sight so much as reinvent herself.”
“No wonder she didn’t want to come forward and identify her brother’s remains. No way would she be able to fly beneath the radar.”
“No. Furthermore, the son is an uptight prick with his own political ambitions. He’s married to one of Terry Robinson’s daughters.”
“As in Terry Robinson, the right-wing, evangelical extremist?”
“Nice to know you do keep up on current events, even if you don’t watch much TV.”
“People like Terry Robinson are one reason I don’t watch much TV.” I mulled over these latest revelations. “Okay. So it turns out Jinx Stevens has a past someone might be willing to kill to protect.”
“Except that her brother was killed in fifty-nine. Eight years before she’d even met the senator.”
“That we know of.”
“You’ve been reading Raymond Chandler again, haven’t you?”
“This would be more like Ross Macdonald, but you’re right. It does sound like that kind of convoluted Byzantine plotting. Can we talk to Jinx again?”
“I’m going to try to interview her again, yes. I’m not having a lot of luck getting past her social secretary.”
I didn’t miss the emphasis on I’m. I said only, “It looks like Jinx — or Jane — confided in her son. He knows who I am and where I live.”
Jake said ominously, “Yeah? Don’t sweat it. He won’t be bothering you again.”
“I’m not worried. Don’t tangle with some rich right-winger on my account. I’ll see my mom against his mom any day of the week.”
He didn’t laugh, and I said, “Seriously, Jake. I’m not worried about this. I called you because it’s a development in the case. I’m wondering exactly how much Jinx told Powers. She could have spun it all kinds of ways and still avoided telling him anything concrete about her past.”
“True.”
I hesitated. Tried tentatively, “Did you want to —”
“Shit,” he exclaimed. “Gotta go. I’ll talk to you Tuesday.”
Dial tone.
I sighed.
* * * * *
Monday morning’s weigh-in indicated I had gained another half pound. If I kept it up, my jeans would stop falling off me and I’d no longer resemble a scholarly gangbanger. Temperature, blood pressure, heart rate: all normal. My morning routine was becoming so automatic, I no longer thought about it.
I popped my pills, shaved, and thought about getting a haircut.
The day’s e-mail brought a note at last from Todd Thomas saying he’d love to get together with the old gang. It seemed clear to me his reading comprehension left much to be desired. He did offer a couple of amusing reminiscences of life on the road with the Moonglows.
Otherwise it was an uneventful day. I finished the manuscript for A Deed of Dreadful Note and sent it off by e-mail to my publisher.
I missed Jake — which was funny because I’d managed to go two years barely thinking of him at all. It seemed like from the moment I’d decided we had no future, I’d been unable to get him out of my mind. What was that about?
After breakfast on Tuesday, I went for morning walk. It was hot and smoggy even that early in the morning. The city was noisy, busy, but I felt less threatened by it. More able to cope with whatever the day brought.
In fact, I was looking forward to the day — and to seeing Jake.
When I got back to the bookstore I could hear Natalie and Angus laughing, and my spirits rose. I settled down at the computer and tried a search for “Jane Powers.” I found a wealth of info on her. Granted, the bulk of it pertained to the last twenty years. Back in sixty-seven, when she had first popped up on the radar, the media wasn’t quite as intrusive or aggressive in its pursuit of political figures. And Jane had not been a political figure. She had been the lovely and self-effacing wife of a political figure. Smart girl that she was, she’d done her best to stay out of the limelight — the best that one could do if one had her heart set on marrying a US senator.
According to the official bio, she was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She had been orphaned at an early age. She had lived with relatives and moved around a lot. She had put herself through college — Scripps, a college for women in California — graduating with honors in ’66.
I admired the shrewdness of it. The bare facts were accurate and verifiable. The real story was in all that was left out. Putting the pieces together, I guessed that after her brother went missing, Jinx had left Dan Hale — I concurred with Jake that it looked on the surface like she had believed Hale had been, at the least, partially responsible for Jay’s disappearance — and dropped out of sight. During those missing years, she had attended Scripps College.
Senator Bruce Powers’s younger sister was also a student at Scripps and had provided the intro. After marrying Powers, Jinx had proved the perfect political wife: beautiful, intelligent, charming — and very much in the background. Literally. She was literally smiling in the background
of nearly every photo of Bruce Powers.
In ’69 she had delivered a set of photogenic twins: Christopher and Charlotte — and helped secure her husband’s reelection. The Powerses were the perfect political family, a California dynasty.
I was deeply engrossed in the tale of Charlotte’s messy divorce when Jake arrived — shortly before Lisa was due. Which was good, because I wanted time to warn him that she was accompanying us on this jaunt to Beverly Hills.
“Hi,” I said, coming out to meet him. Jake smiled, a white flash in his tanned face. He was wearing tailored slacks and a sports shirt in a deep forest color that brought out the green in his eyes. He looked relaxed and handsome and successful. I was happy to see him; it felt natural to move to kiss him hello.
I instantly realized my mistake. Kissing in public? Kissing in front of Angus and Natalie and for all the world to see? I was already pulling back, trying to make it look like I’d sort of lost my balance and weaved forward, when he stopped me — hand on my shoulder — and kissed me.
Just a casual graze of mouths. Just a taste of him. Just as though we had been kissing each other hello in public for years.
I had to reach back to steady myself on the sales desk.
“Hi,” Jake returned.
Instinctively I looked around, expecting… Natalie was smiling as she flipped through a stack of sales receipts, Angus had his back to us as he spoke to a customer, the customer wasn’t paying attention — no one was paying attention. No one thought anything of that kiss. That casual brush of lips that could never have happened five weeks earlier.
No one seemed to notice what felt like one of the most important moments of my life.
Even Jake was looking at me like he was about to ask if I was feeling all right.
The shop door bells jangled, and I looked over expecting to see Lisa. Instead I got a gander of Detective Alonzo’s smiling face headed our way.
“Well, well, well,” he greeted us jovially, his gaze zeroed on Jake. “It’s the Hardy Boys. Dick and Peter.”
“Ugh,” Natalie said. It could have been her hangover talking, though it did nothing to defuse the situation.
Alonzo’s broad face took on a dusky hue, and his shoulders bunched up with defensive aggression. “I got more questions for you, English.” To Jake, he said, “And you step one inch out of line, Riordan, and I’ll bust your ass. You’re not a cop, remember? You don’t get to hide behind your shield now, and you don’t get to use your authority to cover up for your little playmates anymore.”
