Dark Debts

by Karen Hall

  She drove aimlessly for about an hour, then paid a guy in a red vest three dollars for the privilege of parking at the Santa Monica pier, where she could stare out at the ocean. She did that until she was bored, then leaned her head back on the headrest, closed her eyes, and made a conscious decision to let herself remember.

  Cam had come into her life eight years ago. More precisely, she had come into his. She had happened upon a book he’d written during one of her book-buying sprees. She had seen it on the “Staff Picks” shelf at Book Soup and had been intrigued by his name. Cameron Landry seemed far too poetic for a mystery writer. When she read on the jacket flap that he was also from Georgia, she decided to give it a shot. The book had startled her with its complexity and insight. She was also drawn to its darkness—its bleak themes and haunted characters. Randa had been attracted to darkness from an early age. Maybe it was just from having grown up in the South, where people clung to morbid fascinations and superstitions as if they were consolation prizes from the Civil War. (A just God would never have tolerated Sherman’s rampage, so there had to be powerful dark forces at work that protected Yankees and other agents of evil.) Or maybe it was growing up in her family, where everyone practically worshiped at the altars of depression and morbidity. (The only song Randa could ever remember her mother singing to her was “Put My Little Shoes Away”—a song about a child who knew he was dying.) Whatever the reason, something about the darkness soothed her like a lullaby, and she sought refuge in it by whatever safe means she could find.

  The darkness in Randa’s soul had been quick to respond to the darkness in Cameron Landry’s prose. She immediately bought his other three books and read them, then pestered everyone at the paper until they let her write an article about him. She scheduled an interview through his literary agent, then ferreted out every article ever written about him and every interview he’d ever done. The reviews of his books were consistently effusive. People who cared about such things compared him to Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. A reviewer in one of the magazines for mystery buffs swore that Landry would leave them all in the dust before it was over.

  Very little had been written about the man himself. He’d grown up in several small towns in rural Georgia, the youngest of four brothers in a working-class family. He’d read a lot, he was good in English, a teacher had encouraged him, he’d decided to become a writer, and so on. No indication of where that dark vision had been born.

  As she continued to search the computer indexes for anything more enlightening, she came across another Landry, one whose name had an even more poetic lilt: Tallen Landry. She didn’t know if the name belonged to a man or a woman, but she loved the sound of it. When she saw it the second time, she decided to detour and find out. She typed the name into the computer and brought up the first citation. It was an article from Texas Monthly entitled “The Impact of Capital Punishment on the Families of Death Row Inmates.” It had been written by an SMU sociology professor, a Dr. Karl Wiedergott, who had interviewed fifty families of condemned men and women and compiled a study about their emotional and physiological reactions. Near the end of the article, Tallen Landry was identified as a convicted murderer who had been executed in Alabama. (What an irony, she thought, for a murderer to have such a lovely name.) The professor had interviewed some family friends, but said that members of the immediate family had refused to talk with anyone. Randa was about to exit the article when something in the next paragraph caught her eye. Tallen Landry was more specifically identified as the second of four sons from a working-class family in rural Georgia. Randa stared at the paper, amazed. Surely it was a coincidence? Landry wasn’t a particularly unusual name, and Georgia was not a small state. Still, if there was any connection at all, it would certainly shed some light on the workings of Cameron Landry’s mind.

  A week later, at the appointed time, she sat at a table at Musso & Frank Grill, poring over her notes and nervously chewing the ice from her water glass. She was surprised to see the maître d’ showing a tall guy in a brown leather jacket and black Ray-Bans over to her table. She had certainly not expected him to be on time. He smiled warmly and offered his hand (“Hi, I’m Cam Landry. I’m not late, am I?” ), then slid into the booth across from her. He didn’t look anything like she’d expected, although she didn’t know what she had expected. His hair was very dark brown, almost black, just long enough to look artistically unkempt. It had a lot of gray in it for a man his age (which, from the articles she’d read, she knew to be thirty-one). His face was perfectly shaped, with sharp features, and his skin looked as if it had never seen the light of day. And then he took off his sunglasses and she saw those eyes, and all other physical attributes were rendered unimportant.

  When they started to talk, she was amazed at how they found an instant rhythm, and it seemed to have nothing to do with their common heritage. By the time the food came, they were finishing each other’s sentences.

  The one thing he didn’t want to talk about was the content of his work. Whenever Randa tried to get into the material in any depth, Cam would quickly and adroitly change the subject. No wonder the articles she’d found had not gone beneath the surface.

  After dinner they ordered margaritas and swapped war stories from their careers. When it started to get late and he still hadn’t mentioned his family, she finally asked about them. He shrugged. “They’re all dead.”

  “Well, who were they when they were alive?”

  He shook his head. “A sorry bunch of people. Don’t waste your time.”

  “A lot of great writers have come from sorry bunches of people.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” He looked away. “Actually, my mother was okay.” He seemed to be saying it to himself. “She just . . .”

  “What?”

  “She thought she was very selfless, and maybe she was . . . but she put all her effort into maintaining her dignity in a horrible situation instead of trying to get out of the horrible situation, you know?” He looked away again. The energy had definitely shifted. Randa decided to go for it.

  “By any chance, are you related to Tallen Landry?”

  He didn’t move, but she could see the muscles in his jaw go tense. Finally, without turning back to her, he said, “How did you know that?”

  “I came across an article. I saw that you were both from Georgia and both had three brothers, so I thought there might be a chance . . .”

  After a long moment he turned and looked at her again. He didn’t appear angry. Maybe a little defeated. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask you not to mention it.”

  Randa didn’t answer. God, this stroke of luck, this great angle, and he wanted her to just ignore it. She didn’t know him. She didn’t owe him anything. So why did she feel she couldn’t betray an unspoken loyalty?

  He picked up his sunglasses. “I know, it’s a ridiculous thing for me to ask. You’re obviously very good at your job.” Before she could figure out what to say, he was gone. She watched him go, knowing it would do no good to call him back.

  For days after that she’d found herself missing him. How she could miss someone she didn’t know was a mystery to her, but she did. She’d almost managed to clear it from her mind when, about a month after their dinner, she was surprised to get a phone call from him at her office.

  “What happened to the article?” he asked, without any preamble.

  “I scrapped it.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t think I could write it honestly if I didn’t go into your background, and I didn’t think I could sleep well if I did.” He didn’t say anything, so she added, “I’m sure you’ve been through enough.”

  “You don’t even know me.” He sounded incredulous, and impressed.

  She thought about it and decided to risk him thinking she was nuts. “I know, but I feel like I do. I know it sounds crazy, but the minute you sat in that booth, I thought, ‘Oh yeah, there’s Cam.’ I can’t explain it, it was weird.” />
  “I know. I felt the same way. It wasn’t like we just met, it was like we were . . . reunited. I almost said something about it, but I was afraid you’d think I was coming on to you.”

  She might as well go for broke. “Maybe I wouldn’t have minded that.”

  “Yeah, but my wife probably would have.”

  Damn. Of course he was married. She felt like a fool. But then, he hadn’t exactly mentioned it at dinner.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, let’s get together again. I’ll give you the real interview.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I trust you not to turn it into a three-ring circus. And it’s probably time for me to stop hiding from it. Maybe that’s why you came along.”

  They had met for dinner a few days later, and he’d told her the story. (“In broad strokes, okay? I can’t go through it in detail, I just can’t.” ) It was fascinating, if relentlessly disturbing. Cam told it without much emotion; she guessed it was a self-preservation instinct. He told her about his father, Will Landry, a violent drunk who had brutalized the family. His mother, Lucy, a classic martyr/enabler who was more terrified of Will than of what he was doing to the rest of them. His brothers, marauding delinquents who had terrorized the neighborhoods in which they had lived. Each of them, however, had been artistically gifted in one way or another. He told her about Ethan, who was almost as talented a poet as he was a cat burglar. Tallen, who had grown up in reform schools and graduated to prisons; painted mesmerizing, melancholy landscapes that screamed of loneliness. He had been the most sensitive, and therefore the most troubled. (The rest of Tallen’s story, Cam had said, she could read in the papers.) And then there was Jack, his oldest brother, who had always been a complete mystery to Cam. It was partly because of the age difference, but mostly because Jack had hated Cam too much to reveal anything to him. Jack was the only one who hadn’t done anything artistic, although he’d been a voracious reader. Jack had never done much of anything, but he seemed to have turned observing into an art form of its own.

  Ethan and Will had both died the same year. Ethan had drowned (Cam supplied no details) and Will had committed suicide a few months later. Lucy had also killed herself, on the anniversary of Tallen’s execution. Jack still lived in Georgia, as far as Cam knew. Cam hadn’t seen him since Lucy’s funeral. They had gotten into a bitter argument just as Cam was leaving, and he’d said some things he now regretted. Later he had written Jack a long, apologetic letter. It had come back marked MOVED NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. He had tried to find Jack a couple of times, with no luck. He knew Jack didn’t want to be found and figured he’d never see his brother again. It didn’t bother him, or so he claimed.

  Cam wouldn’t offer much about how he had managed to escape unscathed. He attributed it to the age difference (five years) between him and the next oldest, Ethan, or the fact that Will had been kinder to Cam than he had to the others, probably because Will knew it was his last chance to have a decent relationship with a son. Cam said he remembered realizing at a very early age that his family was crazy and declaring, “I’ll be in my room until I’m eighteen, then I’m out of here.” He had kept that promise and had not done a lot of looking back.

  The article about Cam had turned out to be one of the best things Randa had ever written. It caused a bit of a stir for a while, but Cam kept reassuring her he was not sorry he’d given her the interview. He said it had been very “freeing.” It had also bought him a lot of free publicity, but he didn’t seem to think like that, as far as she could tell.

  Not long after her article appeared, Cam’s marriage had broken up. She never knew if there was any connection because he never wanted to talk about it. He just kept saying that it had been coming for a long time. Randa never even met Cam’s wife. All she knew was that her name was Terri and she was or wanted to be an artist. Through a couple of cryptic comments he’d made, she also suspected that Terri had never been very faithful (although, by his own admission, neither had Cam) and that she had some kind of chemical dependency. All in all, it sounded like Cam was better off without her.

  When Cam and Terri broke up, Randa was living with Evan, a screenwriter who made a fortune writing movies that were never made. The first time Randa had asked Evan if he loved her, he’d said he didn’t know what love meant. When he was still saying it two years later, she moved out. The irony was that she wasn’t sure she loved him, either, but she wanted the option.

  Next she’d taken up with David, a studio musician who’d fascinated her because he was brooding and mysterious. When it had finally become apparent to her that he was merely brooding, she decided to chalk up another waste of time and move on. David hadn’t minded much. It gave him something new to brood about.

  While Randa was with David, Cam went through a country singer, a publicist, a freelance photographer, and, for the sake of cliché, a flight attendant. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily one at a time.

  Through all this, Randa and Cam remained fast friends. They got together at least once a week to share their successes and bemoan their losses, or to critique movies they’d seen or books they’d read, or to vent about the state of the world in general. They also took each other to any events their mates didn’t want to go to, since they both always seemed to hook up with people with whom they had little in common. Their mates were always required to live with this arrangement, and only the most insecure of them had ever felt threatened by it.

  Randa wasn’t sure when she had realized she was in love with Cam. There wasn’t any specific moment, just a sort of growing awareness; she’d admitted it to herself so gradually that at some point it simply became a given that she was in love with Cam, that she had been in love with Cam since the night she’d met him. It didn’t really matter when she’d known it, because there was nothing to be done about it. Cam had never shown even the slightest glimmer of being romantically interested in her, and there was no way in hell she was going to make a fool of herself by saying or doing anything to call his attention to the fact. As long as they were friends, he’d be in her life. She wasn’t about to give him a chance to reject her.

  When Randa and David broke up, three days before her thirty-third birthday, Cam took her out to dinner, to “mourn or celebrate, whichever you want.” They’d gone to an Italian restaurant on Melrose whose only distinction was that it was possibly the darkest restaurant in the greater Los Angeles area. Randa always complained that every restaurant in LA was lit like a Kmart, and Cam wanted to prove to her that she hadn’t been going to the right places. They’d sat on the same side of a large red-leather booth and picked at whitefish while Randa complained about her lousy luck with men.

  “You don’t have bad luck,” Cam informed her. “You have bad taste.”

  “Gee, that cuts deep, coming from someone whose entire romantic history combined couldn’t produce the IQ of an Irish setter.”

  “We’re not talking about me.” He was swirling the ice cubes around in his margarita; he seemed oddly serious. “Do you think you ever really loved this jerk?”

  Randa didn’t have to think. “No. I loved the idea of being in love with a tortured artiste. I figured that out months ago.”

  “Then why didn’t you break up with him months ago?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t feel like going through all the drama. Not to mention having to find another apartment.”

  Randa was still living in the apartment she shared with David, sleeping on the couch. Not a comfortable arrangement on any level.

  “Why don’t you buy a condo in my building? There’s one for sale right below me.”

  “Right. All I need is to move into your lovely, crime-infested neighborhood.”

  “We could see each other more often.”

  “Translated: I could feed your cat when you go out of town.”

  He smiled. “You’re such a cynic.” He put his fork down and
stared at her for a moment, suddenly quite serious. “You know, you really look pretty tonight.”

  She smiled back. He was just trying to make her feel better, but she appreciated it. “Thanks. I guess self-pity becomes me. Enough of my stupid life. How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. My usual cheery self.”

  “How’s Patty?” Patty was Cam’s latest girlfriend. She was a waitress at a health-food restaurant (which didn’t explain where Cam had met her) who fervently believed there wasn’t a problem on the planet that couldn’t be cured by the right combination of herbs. Randa and David had gone out with them a couple of times. Randa was still trying to be open-minded.

  “I don’t know,” Cam answered. “I guess you’d have to ask Richard.”

  “Who’s Richard?”

  “The New Age weight trainer she dumped me for.”

  “Oh no.” Randa could not possibly bring herself to say she was sorry. “Are you serious?”

  Cam nodded. “She doesn’t know if she loves him, but she thinks they have karmic debts to settle. And he’s going to teach her how to have an out-of-body experience.”

  “Cam, Patty has never had an in-body experience.”

  Cam smiled. “Yeah, she is a little bit out there.”