by Scott Frost
Harrison rang the bell and we were buzzed in through the heavy wrought-iron security door and walked up the creaky wooden stairs. There were two other offices on the second floor: a Chinese medical practice from which a strange blend of smells drifted out, and a travel agency that, from the brochures taped to the glass on the door, looked as if it hadn’t booked a trip since the jet engine had replaced the propeller.
Inside Abraham’s, a wooden counter with a swinging gate separated the waiting area from the reception desk and three offices. On the walls were photographs of various apartment buildings and a large map of L.A. with red stars on it marking the locations of properties they managed. A woman who was probably sixty but working hard to look fifty got up from a desk in the reception area and walked to the counter. She had dyed red hair that made her look oddly like Lucille Ball. Her dress was bright green, and her glasses hung on a gold chain around her neck. I imagined she had once been an actress who got no further than holding an extra’s union card. A name placard on her desk read MS. WATERS.
She looked at us for a moment.
“You must be the policemen,” she said loudly, traces of New York still in her voice.
In one of the back offices a man with the long beard of an Orthodox Jew got up from his desk, walked over, and closed his office door.
I showed her my badge, clipped to the waistband of my slacks.
“Which apartment building was it?” Waters asked.
“The Iliad Apartments, three-oh-six.”
She walked back to a file cabinet, slid it open, then ran her fingers across the row of files until she found what she was after.
“One bedroom, carpeting, balcony, pool view, on-street parking, twelve hundred a month. Was rented sixteen months ago. Rent’s been on time, pays with money orders, no complaints, nothing needed to be fixed.”
“How many years back do you keep records?” I asked.
“Five years past the last month of rent paid,” Waters said.
“How long have you managed the building?” Harrison asked.
She looked at Harrison and smiled, still believing that somewhere inside was the cute twenty-year-old actress who moved out from Queens to be a movie star. “Since the beginning of time, sweetie,” she said.
“Have any of the tenants been there for eighteen years?” I asked.
She took a long, dramatic breath.
“I’ll have to look.”
“While you do that, I’d like to see the rental agreement,” I said.
“We like to consider that confidential.”
“I’d like to think that you’re cooperating with a Homicide investigation,” I said.
She looked at the file. “Homicide, in our building?”
“No.”
She thought for a moment, though it was clearly only for effect.
“I once auditioned for Dragnet,” she said. “They thought I looked too much like Maureen O’Hara.”
“I can see that,” Harrison said.
She flashed him a smile, then slipped the agreement out of the file and handed it to me. It was the standard form anyone trying to land an apartment would have filled out. I quickly ran through it for anything that would pinpoint the tenant as my father.
“Look at the name,” I said.
“Powell,” Harrison said.
An attached sheet held a bad Xerox copy of a New York driver’s license. At first glance the picture held no part of my memory. But as I looked, the past began to emerge like a photograph in a developing tray.
The sharp lines of his face had softened. The dark hair had receded and grayed. There were probably another thirty pounds on his frame. It had all changed except the eyes. They were the same eyes I remembered seeing on Bonanza and in the Cyclops movie, as dark and intense as pieces of coal. My hand began to shake. They were the same eyes I had seen on the day of the picnic as he twisted my mother’s arm.
I started to ask a question but lost the words. I handed the copy to Harrison, then stared at the red star on the map of Los Angeles that marked the place where I found the answer I hoped I wouldn’t.
Ms. Waters stepped back to the counter.
“The tenants in four-oh-two and the one in one-oh-eight have been there for eighteen years. I believe they’re both retired couples,” she said.
I tried to find my place again in the moment, but it eluded me.
“We’ll need copies of these,” Harrison said.
She nodded and took the files over to a Xerox machine on the far wall.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Harrison asked.
“Him,” I whispered to myself.
I realized my hand was still quivering so I folded it across my chest and tucked it under my other arm.
“Yes, it’s him,” I said.
A barrage of images and memories began rushing out of wherever I had kept them locked all these years. None of them was distinct, more like whispers from across a room, the words not quite understandable. But they were there, and they were of him.
I turned to Harrison and could see in his eyes the understanding of a fellow traveler to haunted memories. I looked at the rental agreement, trying to find a detail to pull me back.
“None of the personal history information is accurate. He was born in Maryland, not New York.”
I could feel the quivering in my hand pass.
“He pays with money orders so there’s no traceable bank account. I imagine the references and the past address are just as phony. If that license is genuine, then we can assume he’s been in New York for a period of time.”
I held on to the train of thought, afraid to let it go. The flood of memories began to slow to a trickle, but they were still there, just under the surface.
“He’s still hiding after eighteen years, but he came back here,” I said.
I turned and looked at Harrison.
“Why?” I asked.
“He rented it a year and a half ago,” Harrison said, letting me finish the rest of the thought.
“About the time Danny began to hear from the angel,” I said.
We looked at each other for a moment.
“There’re things about my father that I’ve hidden,” I said.
“You were a child, you didn’t have a choice but to do that.”
Ms. Waters stepped back to the counter with the copies.
“I nearly forgot, but you’re the second person to ask about this apartment in the last week,” she said.
I turned back to her. “Who else was asking?”
“She said she was an investigator.”
“Not a police officer?”
She shook her head. “She showed me identification. It was about missing child-support payments.”
“You showed her the rental agreement?” I asked.
Waters hesitated.
“Since a child was involved I thought it would be all right. But it wasn’t who she was looking for,” she said.
“Do you remember her name?”
“I don’t, sorry.”
“What did she look like?” I asked.
“She was pretty, pale skin. I think she had dark hair . . . maybe. James. I think her name was James. She left a card.”
She returned to her desk and went through a drawer until she came up with it.
“This says Sloan Investigations, but I’m almost sure her name was James.”
A gust of wind rattled the blinds on the window, sending hot air across the office. Waters stared at the window for a moment, then turned to us as we started for the door.
“Do you believe there’s such a thing as earthquake weather?” Waters asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“I believe it,” she said, turning back to the window. “Something bad always happens when it blows like this.”
I didn’t feel the wind on my face when we stepped outside, or sense the dry hot air wick away the moisture from my lips with each breath. I didn’t hear the traffic, or see the first streaks of smo
ke in the air from more fires. I stood staring at the martini glasses and cocktail napkins in the window of the store below Abraham’s Property Management as if I had just landed on a new planet and didn’t know what they were. The world as I knew it, or at least the one I inhabited, was based on the conviction that my father had disappeared and then died.
A single xeroxed picture and a photograph of me in a bright blue dress had changed all of it. And now even my memories no longer seemed to belong to me. They were in his hands, just as my mother’s arm had been that day.
A silent gust of wind sent a swirl of dust and dirt spinning past my feet before vanishing around the corner of the building. The sound of traffic on Santa Monica returned and I felt the dry air against my face. I stared at the papers in my hands for a moment.
Work it, I said silently to myself.
The wind rattled the glass on the display window in front of me.
“My guess is she’s hiding,” I said.
“I’m missing something,” Harrison said.
“If she’s who I think she is, she knows he’s looking for her.”
In the reflection in the window I could see Harrison play it out in his head.
“You think she’s the woman in your brother’s apartment?”
I nodded, then turned and walked over to the car. As I reached for the handle I saw the picture of myself in the blue dress sitting on the seat.
“What do you want to do?” Harrison asked.
“We need to find James.”
I stared at the picture for a moment. “And I want to know what happened to that little girl.”
27
There was only one Sloan licensed as a private investigator working in Los Angeles County. Sloan Investigations in San Pedro. We pulled onto the 110 freeway and headed south toward the harbor.
San Pedro doesn’t feel like it belongs in Los Angeles, at least not the Los Angeles that most people ever see. Its relationship is to the ocean, not the sprawl to the north of it.
The big commercial fishing fleets had long since vanished, replaced by the largest container harbor in the country. The tight-knit Japanese and Mexican fishing communities had drifted mostly inland, or traded in their heritage for nine-to-five jobs. There was gang violence now, and the possibility that someday a dirty bomb would slip through undetected in a sea container to spread terror.
We pulled off the 110 on Gaffey and drove six blocks. Sloan Investigations was in a small strip mall with a taco stand and a dry cleaner on either side. We parked and got out. The heat of the Santa Anas hadn’t reached the south coast yet. The air held the scent of the ocean along with grilled fish and dry-cleaning chemicals.
“Why would someone use an investigator way the hell down here for a job in town?” Harrison said.
“Because they are way the hell down here.”
A little bell rang as we stepped inside. The receptionist was a heavyset Hispanic woman named Fuentes. A woman with two small children playing on the floor at her feet sat in the waiting area. She had a black eye, and the sad look of someone in need of more help than she was likely to find in a place like this.
I showed the receptionist my badge and she buzzed one of the two offices with closed doors beyond the reception area and showed us in. The owner and president of Sloan Investigations was a man in his late forties named Lester Sloan. He had a thin mustache that looked as if it had been drawn on the top of his lip with a Sharpie. A plate of half-eaten tacos sat on the desk. He was dressed in the kind of one-piece jump-suit I remembered seeing Jack La Lanne wear as he preached physical fitness in the sixties.
“I’m looking for a woman investigator who may work for you,” I said.
He wiped the al pastor sauce off his chin. I noticed a photograph on the wall behind his desk of Sloan standing next to a former manager of the Dodgers.
“Was she involved in a crime?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“So you would say that this firm was also not involved in a crime,” Sloan said.
“Not unless I find a reason to think so,” I answered.
He breathed a visible sigh of relief, then spun around in his chair to the computer on his credenza and clicked the mouse and hit a few keys.
“I have only one female investigator working for me now. Andi James.”
“Has anyone else asked about her?”
He shook his head as he turned the flat-screen monitor around. A Polaroid photograph and her investigator’s license appeared. I stared at her face for a moment.
“Is that her?” Harrison asked.
I nodded.
“She works in town,” Sloan said. “I had to be down at the harbor for another job, so I used her.”
“I need her address and phone number,” I said.
Sloan began to shake his head.
“She’s a material witness in a homicide investigation, ” I said. “One of the victims was found tied to a chair where she had been strangled and stripped of her clothes.”
“I’ll get the address.”
“And I’ll need the name of the client,” I said.
Sloan shook his head. “The retainer was paid with cash. They hired us over the phone. I don’t know who it is.”
He wrote James’s address and phone number on a card, then handed it to me.
“Maybe she knows, if you can find her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I haven’t heard from her, and she hasn’t returned my calls, in three days.”
“Is that unusual?”
Sloan nodded. “It is if she’s alive.”
28
Dusk had fallen as we drove north from the harbor. As we approached the towers of downtown the winds were gusting to more than fifty miles an hour. In the distance bright flashes of green lit up the darkness where power lines arched and set off transformers. At Figueroa a semitrailer truck had blown over onto the concrete median, where it balanced precariously. A traffic sign folded over by the wind was shaking like a dog trying to escape its collar. I thought for a brief instant I was seeing the world as my father saw it.
We turned off at Sixth and started east toward Andi James’s address in the warehouse district. At Flower, a gust of wind had toppled a street vendor’s cart, sending blocks of ice and brightly colored juices into the street. Women walking on the sidewalk kept a tight grip on their skirts. Pieces of trash and newspaper swirled along at street level, then disappeared skyward in updrafts.
At Grand I pulled over and looked south toward Seventh.
“What is it?” Harrison asked.
A pink handbill advertising tango lessons caught the car antenna then vanished with the next gust.
“He would have run past here,” I said.
A block south, I could see the stone office building at the corner of Seventh.
“Gavin’s office,” Harrison said.
I nodded. I hadn’t thought of it before, but this was the most likely direction he would have run.
“The streets would have been empty at that time of night,” I said.
“Not entirely,” Harrison said.
I nodded. There had been a killer present.
Across Grand a sedan slammed to a stop with a screeching of brakes and a man in a dark business suit pounded on its hood and began yelling at the driver.
“Even if someone had been driving by they wouldn’t have stopped,” I said. “Not for a shoeless man running down a deserted street in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t have done any more than glance in his direction and look away.”
I sat for a moment trying as hard as I could to imagine the feel of the pavement on my brother’s shoeless feet, the sound of his breathing as he ran north, but I couldn’t.
I looked across the street. A homeless man stood in a doorway trying to escape the wind. His face, beard, and clothes were the same color as the dark stone of the building he stood next to.
“He would have been invisible,” I said.
&nb
sp; Harrison was silent for a moment, his eyes focused on something across Grand.
“Maybe not to everything,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He pointed across the street.
“The Standard Hotel,” I said.
“Look to the left of the building.”
The gate to the parking garage began to rise.
“The parking garage might have a security camera pointed out toward the street,” Harrison said.
I pulled across Grand and into the driveway of the garage below the hotel. On the ceiling of the sloping drive a camera pointed out toward the street. Harrison stared at it, calculating the angle and size of the lens.
“It might cover the nearest lane, maybe a little more,” he said.
“Enough to see the car that was following him?”
“It’s a chance,” Harrison said.
“If he came this way, and hotel security has a tape . . .” I said.
Harrison stared at the camera for a moment. “That’s a new camera. If the entire system is the same there wouldn’t be a tape, it would be digital.”
“I still get pictures developed at the drugstore; you lost me,” I said.
“Images would be on a hard disk, not a tape. They can store endless amounts of data without recycling.”
“Meaning they would still have it.”
Harrison nodded.
The night captain of hotel security met us at the first level of the garage and walked us to the control room just beyond the laundry and employee locker rooms.
Harrison was right about the system—it was digital. The control room had a dozen monitors connected to cameras located throughout the hotel. The night captain pointed to the monitor showing the entrance to the garage.
“What night you interested in?” he asked.
I stared at the small monitor for a moment. A pedestrian walked by on the sidewalk, then the fleeting image of a car passed in an instant.
“Four nights ago, one o’clock on,” Harrison said.
The captain spoke Spanish to the man sitting at the controls and he typed in the commands.
“It’ll come up on this monitor here,” the captain said, pointing to another screen.
