Until Violet, Max had never gotten it. How you could like yourself better just because someone else did. With her, for a brief time, he’d seen his own promise and potential. Even his own deep-buried flaws and vulnerabilities had been teased to the surface and warmed by the light of her gaze until he understood that maybe they weren’t so unique, so shameful. They were just other pieces of himself that he had a shot at accepting because, after all, she had.
He hoped he’d done all that for her, too.
Before.
Max crouched to pick up the fallen cigarette, and as he handed it back, he saw that his father’s eyes were rimmed red. They stayed that way after he cried, all the next day. Max remembered from his childhood—mornings after his mom’s birthday, their wedding anniversary. He wondered what Grant’s death had loosed in Terry. Another life cut short, another truncated family member. It had to have set the tectonic plates shifting inside him, rupturing along old fault lines. It struck Max that he’d been too goddamned scared these past days to notice that it had done the same to him.
“Thanks, son.” Terry gave him an awkward pat on his shoulder, and Max smelled beer on his breath. “Why—” He halted.
Max finished the thought for him: “Why am I here?”
“Goddamn it, can’t I say anything without…” Terry tucked the cigarette back into his pocket. “Do we really have to do this again? Here?”
“I’m not doing anything, Dad. Except standing here.”
A sudden flare of anger. “I did my best, okay? I did what your mother would’ve wanted me to. And maybe if you had a kid of your own, you’d understand how hard it is, that you can’t be perfect no matter how much you try.”
The words echoed between them. Maybe if you had a kid of your own.
Terry shoved the heel of his hand to his forehead, eyes wrinkled shut with dismay. “Oh, God. I didn’t mean it like that. I swear I didn’t. Christ, I’m sorry. I can’t say anything without feeling like an asshole. Look, I didn’t mean you shouldn’t be here. I just meant you’re not dressed for it. That’s all.”
“I didn’t know the reception was today. I was coming to…” Max paused. He’d sensed why he was coming but hadn’t considered it head-on. It sounded so foolish now.
Through the open gate, he could see clutches of people around the infinity pool. Tealights floated in the aqua water on origami rafts, and paper lanterns had been strung along the pergola. Elegantly dressed women sipped chardonnay from voluminous wineglasses probably suited to the varietal. A string quartet fronted a bank of roses by the greenhouse, trickling notes across the yard with muted reverence.
It was all so ridiculous. Not the reception, but Max’s being here beholding it.
And then he spotted Michelle. She was sitting on the back end of the diving board, her dress shoes off, rubbing her feet. They got sore when you were pregnant—he remembered that from Violet. It took a toll, making a human.
Seeing his niece sitting quietly amid all the movement, Max felt a stab of pride in knowing that he had kept her safe. He had kept them all safe, and there was a private kind of honor in that.
He looked back at his father, the answer suddenly clear. “I came to tell them.”
Terry’s eyebrows hoisted. They were fuller than Max remembered, a few rebellious strands twisting out. His father’s rugged, handsome face was just starting to transform into that of an old man. Max felt the awareness like a fresh cut. The years were pouring through his fingers, and he couldn’t do anything but watch.
“Tell who?” Terry said.
“I don’t know. Jill, the cousins, Nona.” You.
“Tell them what?”
“That what happened to Grant wasn’t my fault,” Max said. “That he pulled me into the mess, not vice versa, and I kept it away from the family to protect you. All of you. And I did. I protected them.”
“How?”
Max looked through the gate again, saw his grandmother sitting on a cushioned deck chair in a dour funeral dress, various grandkids playing at her elbow. The purse in her lap looked like a bowling bag. Life in ordinary motion.
Max shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Grant’s business?” Terry said. “The stuff he uncovered that got him killed? You cleaned it up?”
“With a lotta help. But yeah.”
Terry looked into the backyard. “And you were gonna tell the family. But?”
“I don’t want to now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Max started to walk back to the taxi, his dirty shoes crunching on the designer wood chips.
“Son?”
Max turned.
Terry tugged at his mouth. “I’m proud of you.”
Max swallowed and then swallowed again, something simmering inside him, rising to the brink, threatening to spill. “I don’t need you to be proud of me now.”
Quickening his pace, he weaved through the juniper cones, stepping onto the front walk.
And coming face-to-face with Violet.
She wore a black dress with long sleeves—always long sleeves—and she looked a bit wobbly in wedge heels. Her mouth was ajar, her eyes flared with surprise, and Max thought if she came at him hard after his run-in with his dad that he might just come apart altogether.
“Max.” She stepped back, away. “I … I guess you have more of a right to be here than I do.”
“I suppose that’s one perspective.”
“Oh. You weren’t…” She couldn’t quite get out the word “invited.”
“You know how it is, Vi.”
“Are you out of danger? Or whatever?”
He nodded.
“So you’re good?”
She’d always been able to read him at a glance, and right now especially he felt like he had no control over what his face might show. He didn’t know where to look. Had her eyes always held that much yellow? A tendril of hair twisted down her cheek, touching the edge of her mouth. Her perfume—orange blossom and vanilla—brought him right back to that casino floor, sitting next to her for the first time.
Can I sit here?
I’m having an unlucky run. If you’re smart, you’ll get as far away from me as possible.
Don’t worry. I’m not that smart.
He forced his gaze downward. “I’m good,” he said. “You doing okay?”
She laughed. “I live in South Pasadena. I’m working for my parents. My parents. Overseeing housing units. And I’m doing my best making sure the tenants have what they need, you know? Making sure we’re good landlords to them, at least better than my dad would be, but it’s still … I’m in this job I hate in a life I hate and I swore I’d never be here again and it’s all my fault and all my own choices and here I am wondering how the hell it happened.” She wiped at her eyes. “So no. If we’re being honest, I’m not very good.”
“I’m sorry.” The same two stupid words, but he said them with everything he had, and she must have sensed it in his voice, because for the first time it seemed she actually heard them.
For a few moments, they stood in the breeze, not knowing what to do. It was no longer dusk; night had happened all at once, the gathering inside vivid behind plate-glass windows and the two of them out here, invisible.
“It got so awful,” she said. “Between us. And we said awful shit. But I would’ve gone through it with you. I would’ve been awful with you. Until we weren’t.”
She was crying freely now, and there was no anger, only pain laid bare, and whether that was from the rawness of Grant’s death or the moment, he didn’t know.
“I understand,” she said. “Believe me, I understand. Maybe that’s why I’m so angry.”
“Understand?” Max said. “Understand what?”
“That I was…”—she had to fight out the word—“damaged.” Her voice was constricted, squeezed tight with grief. “You didn’t want to be with me because I couldn’t have kids anymore.”
The words cut through him like a scythe.
“What?” He fought to catch his breath. “No. No, no, never. Violet—never.”
“Why, then?” she said. “Why?”
He opened his mouth. It clutched, but nothing came out.
He couldn’t tell her.
He could never tell her.
She studied him an instant through glassy eyes and then turned and hurried away, arms crossed around her stomach to hold herself together.
He stayed rooted to the walkway, the faint melody of conversation and string instruments reaching him on the wind.
At some point he told his legs to carry him back to the taxi, and they obeyed. And then somehow he was in the backseat, bathed in the scent of the pine Little Tree freshener spinning from the rearview.
The cabdriver tilted the mirror and for once didn’t offer a smirky crack. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.
Max considered the question in a larger context and realized he had no fucking idea. He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak.
“Hollywood police station, please.”
33
Reduced
By the time Evan went to his safe house, traded out the Chevy Malibu for his Ford F-150, fought through clotted traffic on the 405, and reached Castle Heights, he was fit only for sleep and vodka.
He turned in to the porte cochere more briskly than usual and waved off the valet, who feigned annoyance as usual. It occurred to Evan that this was the closest thing to a domestic ritual he had.
The run-flat self-sealing tires screeched on the ramp as he veered down, powerful headlights raking the subterranean parking lot before landing on Mia Hall standing directly between the concrete pillars that defined his spot. Her glare was unrelenting, her arms crossed.
He was bent into the wheel from hitting the brakes abruptly, the grille steaming five feet from her, but she hadn’t budged an inch. She hadn’t even flinched. Leaving the truck running, he climbed out. Walked around. Stood in front of her. The dank space smelled acrid from the brake pads. Her mouth was set, her full lips compressed into a thin line of displeasure.
“Something on your mind?” he asked.
“His head was split open,” Mia said.
“Who?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Evan.” She jutted her jaw forward, stared over his shoulder at nothing, took a deep breath. “The guy who robbed Ida. He was terrified, confessed to everything. His forehead, split like a melon. He had bruises all down one cheek.”
“As I recall, so did Ida.”
“Eye for an eye? The law doesn’t work that way.”
“No,” Evan said. “The law shouldn’t. It can’t.”
She was radiating more than anger, something like thundering moral authority, and he understood how defendants must feel in the face of her righteousness—undressed, despite their courthouse suits. “I told you I was handling this,” she said. “I told you to stay away from it. And you lied to me.”
Her expression loosened for only a split second, but he saw what was beneath, how badly he’d hurt her. The betrayal she felt.
He wanted to tell her that he hadn’t lied, not precisely, but he couldn’t assemble the words. He didn’t have the faintest notion how to navigate a situation like this, but he did know that a semantic argument right now would be a colossal misfire.
And besides, he’d missed his opening.
“What is it you do, exactly?” What Mia’s voice lost in volume, it gained in sharpness.
“I help people,” Evan said. Or at least I used to.
“What does that mean?”
“I protect them.”
“Without limitation?” She grew frustrated at his silence. “You’ll go anywhere? Do anything?”
The garage whirled a little, and he rocked to regain his balance but recovered before she noticed. “Yes.”
“When you split Jerry Zabala’s head open, how were you protecting Ida Rosenbaum?”
“Allegedly.”
In the headlights her eyes had turned impenetrable, wishing-fountain dimes throwing back a midday glare. “Excuse me?”
“When I allegedly split Jerry Zabala’s head open.”
“Answer the fucking question, Evan.”
He took note of his core temperature, a faint rise in heat through his torso. A steady exhale brought it down to normal. He observed her as if she were someone he was seeing for the first time. Nostrils flaring with each inhalation. Faint flush through her cheeks. Leaning forward onto the balls of her feet. An aggressive bearing all around.
To de-escalate, Evan answered in a dead-calm voice, hoping Mia would subconsciously match it. “For five hundred dollars, Jerry Zabala put Ida Rosenbaum in the hospital. But the damage was worse than that. She was reduced. Treated as if she were invisible. No feelings of her own. No power over her own body. No dignity. That’s how she feels right now.” He pictured Ida’s frail frame, bones beneath the bedsheets, bolstered by pillows. That age-curled hand rising to cover her bruises, hiding her eyes behind a washcloth. I’m an eighty-seven-year-old widow. That’s about as unspecial as you can be. Evan met Mia’s glare. “She deserves to be shown that she matters.”
“A lot of people deserve a lot of things,” Mia said. “That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to just go out there and get it for them.”
“Maybe if you were in her situation, you’d feel differently.”
“Right. Because when my husband died of pancreatic cancer and I had to pick up the pieces for myself and my three-year-old, I felt empowered as hell.”
“We’re not talking about cancer,” Evan said. “We’re talking about willful, considered choices that people make to tear others down. And what should be done about it.”
“You mean what you should do about it?”
He shrugged. “Not anymore.”
“What’s that mean?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
They considered each other in the headlight’s glare, the engine growling behind them like something feral.
“How could you? Hold those views? Do those things?”
“You’re a district attorney,” Evan said. “You don’t know what it feels like. To have no recourse. No power. Nothing.”
“And you do?”
He pictured himself at twelve years old, the scrawniest of the boys at Pride House Group Home. How he’d slept crammed on the floor between bunk beds, every day starting with kids sliding out of the sheets, pounding him into the floor. Charles Van Sciver, two years older and one head taller, used to flick mac and cheese across the table onto Evan’s shirt, his face, daring him to respond. Even now in the garage, Evan could feel the heat of the asphalt against his palms and knees that day behind the handball courts. Drooling blood onto the cracked black tar, his head still ringing from a backhand. Squeezing his eyes against the bright-lit pain, blinking himself into a reality that was hardly any better.
He locked down his face, his body. Total control, no nonverbal cues, the perfect stillness of an Orphan. The truck grumbled at his back. He gave Mia no answer.
“You interfered with a criminal case,” she said. “My case. And you committed criminal actions of your own.” She stepped forward, tilted her head, studied him. The flush on her cheeks remained, her anger on a low boil. “I’ve never seen you before,” she said. “I’ve never seen who you really are.”
He said, “I hope you never have to.”
He’d spoken softly, his words sincere. He had already saved her and Peter once before, but she had no idea how far he would go if he had to. She took his words entirely the wrong way. As a threat.
He saw something in her eyes that horrified him.
Fear.
She drew back her head. The high beams bleached the fringe of her lush, wavy hair. She squinted, collected herself. “You’re a thug,” she said. “If you mess with one of my cases again, I will take you down.”
After her footsteps faded away, he stood for a time there between the pillars. The headlights spilled over his shoulders, si
lhouetting his shadow on the concrete wall. He stared at it.
It stared back.
34
Nightmare Scenario
As the taxi pulled away, Max lumbered toward the police station at the corner of De Longpre and Wilcox. The low-slung building, concrete and brick, suffered from a paucity of windows. Like so much else within the cash-strapped L.A. city borders, it was losing a war of attrition, too many weeks grinding by with not enough funds. Chewing gum spackled the Hollywood stars embedded in the pavement. Sun-baked plants crumbled in the dirt beds lining the entrance. The bricks, faded and chipped.
A bail-bonds shop across the street perkily advertised 2 percent down, the glitzy yellow sign a lighthouse beacon shining through the night, drawing the fallen like moths. This was real Hollywood, the tattered velvet underbelly, a spiderweb stretched wide and hungry to catch overreaching souls in free fall.
Max’s hand, shoved into his pocket, made a fist around the zip drive loaded with Grant’s files. His palm was sweaty.
Taking a deep breath, he walked up the ramp, yanked open the weighty glass door, and stepped into a trickle of air from a failing fan. Unhappy folks filled the molded plastic seats. The desk officer didn’t look up from her iPhone. She was frowning down at it, tapping away with one finger. “Your complaint?” Her voice emerged tinny from a speak-through grille punched through the bullet-resistant glass screen.
“My cousin, Grant Merriweather, was a forensic accountant working on a case for someone at your station. I have information about the investigation.” Max’s mouth felt dry, the words rough and raspy on the way out. “He was murdered last week.”
At this she looked up.
She dropped her phone on the blotter and pushed back in her rolling chair, coasting to the left side of the horseshoe desk. Plucking up a landline, she poked at buttons with the end of a pencil and had a brief conversation. Then she called over to him. “Max Merriweather?”
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