by Tyler Dilts
The front door opened as Jen pulled the cruiser up to the porch, and Celeste Gordon stepped outside to greet us. We introduced ourselves and she led us inside.
She looked younger than I’d expected. At fifty-one, she was less than two years younger than Bill had been, but she could have easily passed for forty. She looked like she was dressed for a tennis match, in a short skirt and a sleeveless top that showed off her trim and athletic figure. If she’d had plastic surgery, it was good enough not to show.
The house was even more impressive on the inside. It had been fully remodeled into what looked a photo spread for Architectural Digest, artfully mixing rustic and contemporary styles. She led us to a large dining table that I had no doubt had been hand-built from reclaimed wood.
“Can I get you something?” she asked. “Coffee? I have some fresh iced tea?”
“A glass of tea would be nice,” I said, returning her friendly smile. Usually, I turn down beverage offers. But I wanted to get a better sense of her before we started talking.
She looked at Jen. “Detective Tanaka?”
“Nothing for me,” Jen said. “Thank you.”
She went into the kitchen, opened a glass-paneled cupboard over the counter, and took a moment to select a proper glass, then took a pitcher out of the enormous stainless-steel refrigerator. As she poured, she said, “Sugar?”
“Do you happen to have any Splenda?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. She came back to the table with the glass, two yellow packets of sweetener, and a tiny spoon to stir it with.
I poured one packet into the drink. The glass was thick, intentionally indelicate, with an uneven wave to the outside surface, carefully crafted to simulate a rough-hewn artisanal effect. It went well with the table. It made me think of that line from Springsteen’s song “Better Days,” about a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.
“Thank you,” I said, clinking the ice cubes around with the little spoon.
“No problem.” Celeste smiled pleasantly.
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Jen said.
“We hadn’t been close, Bill and I, for a long time,” Celeste said. “But still, it’s much more difficult than I would have imagined.”
“I understand,” Jen said. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“That would have been Lucy’s anniversary party. In April.”
Four months, I noted.
“Where was that?” Jen asked.
“Here,” Celeste said. “They were having a rough time with the restaurant, so Larry and I wanted to do something nice for them.”
“Was that before or after it closed?”
“Just after.”
“How were they doing?”
“Oh, Joe was practically distraught.” Celeste looked down at her hands. They were clasped together on the table. “I’d never seen him so down about anything.”
Jen said, “How about Lucinda?”
“Lucy was taking it better than he was. She’d had her doubts about it all along. We all did, really. Larry had even tried to talk him out of it.”
“What about Bill?” Jen asked.
“He didn’t think it was a good idea, either.”
I thought about speaking, but decided to let Jen keep at it. Celeste seemed to be warming to her.
“Did you know about the loan Bill made to Joe?”
“Yes.”
“Why would he do that if he didn’t think it was a good investment?”
“Because he could never say no to Lucy.” Celeste sighed. “I asked him if he really thought it was a good idea to give Joe that much money. He said he didn’t know, but he wanted to do it anyway.”
Jen thought for a moment. “Did he say why?”
“No, but I think I understand. Bill always had a soft spot for Joe. I think he saw a bit of himself in him.”
“In what way?”
“Bill wanted to be a history professor. He loved teaching. But all he could ever find were part-time jobs. He applied for hundreds of openings, literally hundreds, but he could just never land a full-time appointment. ‘If someone would just give me a chance,’ he’d say. Then he inherited the properties from his folks, and he just gave up. I think he wanted to give Joe a chance. It didn’t really matter to him that Joe wasn’t ready. There was an opportunity with some other investors and Lucy asked him to help, and he just couldn’t say no.”
I wanted to ask what she knew about the other investors she mentioned, but I didn’t want to derail Jen’s line of questioning, so I made a note and let her move on.
“Was Bill close to Joe?” Jen asked.
“I think so.” There was a distant sadness in Celeste’s eyes as she spoke. “He always wanted more kids, but it never really worked out for him.”
Jen studied her and I could see her thinking, evaluating how far she could push without alienating Celeste. When she spoke, there was softness in her voice. “What happened with you and Bill? Why did you split up?”
Celeste looked out the French doors to the dark-bottomed swimming pool and the lush greenery surrounding it. “Bill was a very kind man, a sweet man. And he loved me very much.”
Jen let her sit in silence and stare at the sunlight glinting off the surface of the pool.
“As much as I wanted to,” Celeste said, “I could never love him the way he loved me. He saw a future for us that I never did. Lucy wasn’t planned. I knew he’d be such a good father and he wanted it so badly that I thought I had to try.”
Someone, I thought, had given him a chance.
“It took a long time, but he learned to live with our split. We were a good team when it came to Lucy. Larry and I were granted full custody and he just had visitation rights initially, but that didn’t last long. He was so good with her that we changed it to joint custody before she started school.”
“How is Lucy doing now?” Jen asked.
“She’s having a very hard time with it. They were still very close.”
We talked to her for a while longer. Celeste didn’t know much about Bill’s financial situation and seemed to be convinced that he was not nearly as well off as he actually was. I looked down at the melting ice cubes in the bottom of my glass, and at the expansive kitchen, and the leather sectional, and the warm white walls, and I thought I understood something about Celeste. Even with her genuine love for her daughter and her wistful affection for her ex-husband and her perceptive awareness of her family’s shared history, she was still a person who couldn’t seem to understand that someone might have money and not spend it.
“Patrick still hasn’t texted me back,” I said as Jen’s cell phone chirped with a new text message. “That’s not him, is it?”
We were passing USC. Waze had taken us back the way we came. The Long Beach Freeway was still jammed.
“No. It’s my mom. She wants to be sure you’re coming to the anniversary party.”
“Of course I am,” I said. “Tell her I said hi.”
After a moment, she said, “What did you text Patrick about?”
“I asked him for an update. Wanted to see if he came up with anything new.”
“Danny,” she said.
The tone in her voice made me turn toward her to be sure my partner hadn’t been replaced by a middle-school teacher. She didn’t need to say anything else. I knew I was pressing Patrick too hard. But I couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, I did. And I fully understood why I needed to be kept as far from his investigation as possible. My involvement could potentially taint the case if it came to trial. Ruiz was already bending the rules as far as he could. The fact that he hadn’t removed me from the squad and assigned me to a desk someplace until the whole case played out was all the evidence I needed of that. But, like most people, I sincerely believed that the rules should be different for me.
“You never answered my text,” I said to Patrick back in the squad room.
“Sorry about that,” he said, without looking up from
his computer. “Nothing new to report. We’re still working the same leads. I’ll let you know when there’s something to tell you.”
I went back to my desk. What I was hoping to get from him, I didn’t really know. It made me think about all the times I’d blown off conversations with the family members of victims, and worse, with the victims themselves, before I transferred to Homicide. I wanted to believe that I’d never made them feel excluded, that I’d always made time for them, that I’d listened. But had I? How often had I hurried off the phone or hustled them out of the office because I had something else to do?
When I was five, my father, an LA County sheriff’s deputy, was killed on a routine domestic-disturbance call. I was far too young to understand what was going on, but in those hazy and distant memories of the time following his death, I seem to remember lots of cops at our house for weeks and months afterward. It seemed that there was always a deputy or two there, checking on us, trying to help, offering comfort. Often I have difficulty sorting out real memories of my father from the stories his friends and colleagues told after his death. Did I actually remember him singing “Danny Boy” at the barbecue in the backyard, or had I just heard the story so many times that it had rooted itself deeply enough in my imagination that I could no longer distinguish it from reality?
It wasn’t until years later, when I was in the academy myself, that my mother told me to be careful, that she was worried I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I reminded her of that period after Dad’s death, when I’d felt so protected and cared for by all the deputies who were looking after us. “Oh, no, Danny,” she had said. “Don’t you know most of them were just trying to fuck me?”
I’ve always felt like being a homicide detective was a kind of calling for me. During my marriage, I’d put the job first and it had damaged our relationship, perhaps irreparably. Megan’s death might have been the only thing that spared us from divorce.
But I wasn’t the only good cop on the homicide squad. Patrick’s drive and commitment were respectable. The cop part of my brain knew that and understood it. But the civilian part, the human part, the friend part, was having trouble. Of course I wanted to be a part of the investigation of the attempt on my life, but I understood the reality of the situation. It was that I was learning a lesson I should have learned long ago—what it feels like to be a victim.
CHAPTER NINE
SO LONG
Jen found me moping at my desk at the end of the workday. She asked me what I wanted to do that night and when I told her I didn’t really care, she said she had an idea. When we got back to her house, Julia was waiting with pizza from Domenico’s. Jen told us to have a good night and that she’d be back late. So we settled in with some ground pepperoni and Amazon Prime Video.
A few hours later, we were still sitting on Jen’s couch. We’d just finished watching the first season of Downton Abbey and I was digging through the popcorn dregs in the bottom of the big bowl in her lap looking for a few more edible bits.
“What did you think?” Julia asked me.
“Could have used more car chases and explosions.”
Her phone rang on the coffee table in front of us. She picked it up and I could see that the display read “Unknown.” She silenced it and put the phone down and picked up the conversation where we’d left off. “Well, World War One is coming up.”
“I guess that’s something. How about you? What did you think?”
“I liked it,” she said.
“You don’t think it whitewashed the aristocracy a little too much?”
She made a sour face at me. “That what you think?”
“Maybe.”
“You know that’s kind of what the whole thing is about, right? The fall of the British upper classes.”
“How do you know? You said you weren’t watching it without me.”
“I didn’t. But I read that somewhere and thought it sounded good.”
I smiled. “What do you like about it?”
“The grandeur. The romance. The tragedy I know is coming.”
Surprisingly, I agreed with her, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of telling her that. Not when I was having so much fun teasing her about it.
“And I like Bates,” she said.
“The stoically noble valet? Why?”
“He reminds me of you.”
“What?” I said, surprised. “Why? Just because he was injured and I was, too? It’s not like I limp or anything.”
“It’s not the injury so much as it is how you’ve dealt with pain. How you still deal with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Sometimes that’s true.”
“Not always.”
“No, not always. But sometimes.”
I put my arm around her and as she leaned her head on my shoulder, the tea-tree scent of her shampoo made me feel far away from home. But for years, home had been a dark and lonely place for me. I wanted so much to believe her, to see in myself the things she was seeing in me. That’s what I should have told her. “Funny,” I said instead, “I didn’t figure you for a Conan fan.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s the quote at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian, the Schwarzenegger movie.”
She looked at me with a playful warmth in her eyes.
“What?”
“You’re really cute when you pretend to be stupid.”
She kissed me then, so I shut up.
Julia didn’t stay the night, but I still managed to get some sleep. In the morning I showered and found Jen in the kitchen, oatmeal and coffee waiting for me.
“Thanks for last night,” I said.
“You guys have a good time?”
“Yeah, actually, we did.”
I sat down at the kitchen table and checked my e-mail. There was a short note from Patrick. Sorry about yesterday. Maybe we should have let someone else take the case. He included a link to a podcast I hadn’t heard before. I clicked on it.
I Was There Too with Matt Gourley. It was a series of interviews with people who’d played small parts in famous movies, like the lady with the baby carriage from The Untouchables, one of the colonial marines from Aliens, and the insurance guy Bill Murray runs into over and over again in Groundhog Day.
The e-mail seemed like an honest apology, but the podcast just seemed like an insult that reminded me I was sidelined on the bombing. A bit player in the investigation of my own attempted murder.
Jen said, “What did you just read?”
I looked at her.
“A minute ago you were all smiling and happy,” Jen said. “Now you might as well have cartoon steam shooting out of your ears. What is it?”
“Nothing. Just got a reminder of where I really stand.”
The next morning, I was at my desk in the squad room when Dave Zepeda called and told me they found a body in a Dumpster in the alley behind a donut shop on Atlantic. Three small-caliber bullet wounds in the back of his head. A man had been hoping the shop had thrown away some old pastries like they did sometimes and flipped up the lid and saw him. The man called it in to 911 but didn’t wait for the responders.
“Anyway,” Dave said, “Nathan says you probably want to come out here.”
“Who’s Nathan?”
“The Forensics kid. Said he helped you search the apartment of that Asian guy you’re looking for.”
“You mean Ethan?”
“Is that his name? I thought it was Nathan.”
“What did Ethan say?”
“He had somebody take over the scene so he could rush the prints on our John Doe here. He says they match your guy.”
“Did the ME take the body yet?”
“Nope,” he said. “They’re waiting on you.”
I found Jen coming out of the women’s restroom.
“You busy?” I asked.
“No. What’s up?”
“Dave caugh
t a new case. Kobe’s dead.”
By the time we got there, the ME was getting impatient. There really wasn’t a good reason to hold up the scene to wait for me. It wasn’t my case, it was Dave’s. But he knew I’d want to see it. In Homicide, we get a little bit of indulgence if we’ve proved we can close cases, and he had closed a lot of cases. Also, he’d run out of fucks to give years ago.
“How long is this going to take?” the ME said. He was a tall, twitchy guy, whose name, if I was remembering correctly, was Jerry.
Dave looked up into his face and spoke in a friendly chirp. “You got someplace else to be? If you’d like, I can call your boss and have him send someone else out. Want me to do that?”
Maybe-Jerry shook his head.
“I’ll let you walk it,” Dave said to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
The donut shop shared a small parking lot with the neighborhood grocery store. The lot and the alley that ran behind it had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. There were a dozen or so evidence markers scattered around on the cracked asphalt. I didn’t look closely at any of them. The Dumpster was actually behind the market rather than the donut shop, and that put it farther away from the street. Still, it wasn’t a very private place to dump a body. The donut shop was on the corner of Atlantic and Pacific Coast Highway, and PCH had a steady flow of traffic all night long. Why use the Dumpster when they could follow the alley halfway up the block and have complete privacy?
The lid was propped open. I leaned over and was hit by the familiar smell that longtime cops still sometimes call “eau de Dumpster.” Inside, I saw the body prone on top of mounds of garbage. The head was turned slightly so I could see the edge of his face and the outside corner of one open eye. I moved around to the end of the Dumpster to get a better look at the back of his head. His short black hair was matted with dried blood. He wore shorts and a hoodie and looked even younger than I had expected. There was what appeared to be an unopened loaf of bread next to his right hip. I wondered if the guy who discovered the body had seen it.
