Gone to Dust

by Matt Goldman

  She looked over and smiled. “I made a reservation at Bar La Grassa. Good?”

  “It’s kind of dark in there.”

  She laughed her throaty, hoarse little laugh and said, “Most people like that.”

  “Not me. I do most of my communicating with facial expressions. You know that. Otherwise I tend to chatter away like a schoolgirl.”

  “I’ll talk to the manager. See if they can goose the dimmer a bit.”

  “That’s not fair to all the unattractive people who go there because it’s so dark.”

  The hoarse little laugh again. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”

  “No, no,” I said. “We’ll go to Bar La Grassa. But if you can’t read my facial expressions, you’ll just have to come straight out and ask what I’m feeling.”

  Micaela turned right on Excelsior Boulevard. I stole another glimpse of her in the dash light and worshiped the faint smile on her face. She was on the precipice of adventure, a leader of and, simultaneously, coconspirator in misbehavior.

  I said, “Fuck Bar La Grassa.”

  As if she were ten and I’d just asked if she wanted a pony, she said, “Okay.”

  “We’ll cook.”

  “We can do that.”

  At the bottom of the hill, she turned left into the Calhoun Commons parking lot. We shopped Whole Foods and MGM and, half an hour later, stepped out of an elevator and directly into her penthouse condominium overlooking Lake Harriet with two bags of groceries, a bottle of wine, and a bottle of Bushmills 1608. We dumped our coats on a bench in the foyer. She wore a cashmere V-neck in soft green and old blue jeans and toe socks with all ten toes a different color. We carried the groceries into her open living space and set them on the kitchen counter.

  Her kitchen was white—the cabinets, marble countertops, and subway-tile backsplash. Micaela lit half a dozen candles and dimmed the lights—the white surfaces glowed and danced as if they, too, were on fire. We started with whiskey, neat in lowballs and Johnny Cash American III on her invisible sound system. I said, “I’ll take the prison job.” Johnny sang “I Won’t Back Down” while I peeled carrots, parsnips, turnips, and beets. Micaela trimmed and halved the brussels sprouts, cut the potatoes, and chopped the parsley, green onion, and dill. I tossed the vegetables in a roasting pan with olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper, then threw them in the oven. Micaela opened a plastic clamshell of arugula and dumped it into a bowl. She seasoned the greens, pan roasted slivered almonds, and diced a red onion while I unwrapped the salmon, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, then drizzled it with olive oil and lemon. Johnny sang “Field of Diamonds,” and we poured our second lowballs of whiskey.

  Micaela rinsed the cutting board in the sink. I stepped behind her and put my hands on her hips. She turned off the faucet and put her hands over mine. I buried my face in her hair. She took her left hand off mine and swept her hair in front of her shoulder, and I found the back of her neck with a whisper. Then she grabbed my left hand and brought it up to her breast and I felt her excitement through her sweater. She looked at the timer on the oven and said, “Come on.”

  We walked to her bedroom as if we were late to catch a bus. When we entered, she flopped back onto the bed and put her arms over her head. I kissed her stomach and pushed up her sweater, which she lifted over her head and threw to the floor. I reached behind her bra, and she said, “It’s in front.”

  “You know I can’t do those.”

  “I do.” She laughed her hoarse laugh and somehow removed her bra and jeans and underwear at the same time, and I made a note to put that skill in the pro column the next time I made a pro and con list headed “Micaela.” She unbuttoned my jeans and slipped them off. I pulled off my sweater and T-shirt while she removed my boxers.

  Then she lay back again. “Hold on,” I said. “I have to remove my socks or I’ll look like a tourist.” She laughed and thirty seconds later I was inside her, and, like every time before, I felt a tidal wave of something—gratitude, happiness, sadness, I couldn’t tell what—but I had to knock it down before it prevented me from continuing. I recovered and moved slowly. Then she pushed me off of her and climbed on top of me, took me into her, and ground herself down onto my hips in perfect time. I had to close my eyes because she was too beautiful and seeing her made me want to come, but I held it off by thinking of us in a cold room with two cold lawyers who handed us pens then slid us copies of documents to sign. Then I opened my eyes, and she said, “I’m going to come. Nils, I’m coming.” Then I breathed in all of Micaela’s beauty and came with her.

  We dressed and returned to the kitchen without saying a word. I covered the salmon in the chopped herbs and put it in the oven, then uncorked something yellow and oaky. Twenty minutes later we sat in the living space at a table for two, eating salmon and roasted vegetables and arugula while overlooking Lake Harriet.

  I said, “I got fired off the Edina case today.”

  She thought a moment, then said, “I’m sorry.” She looked out the window. I noticed the leather chair in the living room hobnobbing with fine furniture. I thought of its twin in the shitbox, now slashed open, it’s down and foam spilled all over the floor. Life, even for chairs, is not fair.

  “We found crucial evidence pointing to a suspect,” I said, “but the person in question is cooperating with an FBI investigation, so the FBI told me to back off. I didn’t handle it as well as I might have.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you had to back off your suspect, kind of doesn’t matter if you got fired. You would’ve had to stop the investigation anyway.”

  “Maybe if I’d been more politic, I could have seen it through.”

  “So see it through. What can they do to you now?” She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “More wine?”

  “I got it.” I went to the kitchen. She was right. She was always right. Micaela gave me a freedom I wouldn’t give myself. Problem was, I didn’t always know how to handle it. She knew how to handle freedom. That’s why she had her own elevator and a view of the lake. I got the wine bottle and brought it back to the table.

  As I poured, she said, “You’re sleeping here tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your house will be put back together in the morning.”

  “I’m paying you for that.”

  “Fairies don’t take currency.”

  “I’m pretty sure you don’t have wings. I’ve looked. Everywhere.”

  “I’m not the fairy. The fairies are cleaning.”

  For dessert we ate squares of dark chocolate we broke off the world’s most expensive candy bar. We cleaned the kitchen and returned to the bedroom for another round, but took our time. And though I’d never been right before, I had a feeling it’d be our last naked assault on that bed or any other bed.

  At 3:30 I woke to pee and checked my phone.

  Ansley—8:36 P.M.  So sorry. Yes. Still on for tonight.

  Ansley—8:52 P.M.  Are you there?

  Ansley—9:25 P.M.  I screwed up. Sorry. Much to tell you. Pick me up for the funeral at 11:00?

  I went back to sleep and woke just before 7:00. Micaela had already gone to work.

  22

  I took an Uber from Micaela’s to the Lowry to meet Ellegaard for breakfast. From the backseat, I answered Ansley’s text. No worries about last night. Pick you up at 11:00. At least one of those sentences was true. Ansley Bell, if nothing else, was my ticket to Maggie Somerville’s funeral. Staying on the case wouldn’t pay my rent. It wouldn’t pay my health insurance. But it would get me through the day.

  “We’re really supposed to get it tonight,” said the Uber driver. She had tattoos on her neck, piercings in both eyebrows, and gauges in her ears big enough to fit a dime through.

  “I haven’t heard.”

  “Another foot at least. Maybe more.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Saw it on the news last night. And after the snow, it’s going to get warm.”

  “Wel
l, no one is going to complain about warm.”

  “That’s for sure,” she said, pulling into the Lowry parking lot.

  I got out of the car and entered the Lowry, where Ellegaard waited for me. He wore jeans and duck boots and a Minnesota Wild baseball hat. He hadn’t shaved and didn’t appear to have showered.

  “You get fired, too?” I said.

  “I took some vacation.”

  The hostess sat us in a booth looking out on Hennepin Avenue. The same blonde from the day before swooped by with greetings and menus and coffee. When she left, Ellegaard said, “We’ve got to flush out Fine.”

  “We?”

  “I need your help, Shap. I’ll figure out a way to pay you.”

  “You’re not paying me, Ellie. What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing’s going on with me. I’m on vacation. I can do whatever I want. And I want to flush out Andrew Fine.”

  “And if we flush him out,” I said, “who’s going to arrest him?”

  “I don’t know. But I bet Fine doesn’t realize to what extent the FBI is protecting him, so maybe he’ll do something so stupid they’ll have to let us arrest him.”

  “All right. So how do we flush him?”

  “You’re going to his party tonight, right?”

  “I can, yeah.”

  “Pull him aside and tell him your buddy at Edina PD told you that the carpet fibers in Maggie Somerville’s dust match the carpet fibers from his office park. See if that lights a fire under him.”

  I looked out the window at the cars driving down Hennepin Avenue, their sides coated white with road salt because it was too cold to wash them. “And if Fine runs? How are we going to track him with the FBI on our backs?”

  Ellegaard’s jacket was crumpled next to him in the booth. He reached into one of its pockets then held his hand, palm up, in front of me. In it I saw what looked like a computer chip in a matchbook-size plastic bag. The chip was no bigger than a Cheerio. “Plant this in something he’ll take with him. His keys. His wallet. Whatever you think he can’t live without.”

  “Is that property of Edina PD?”

  “The sales rep gave me one for personal use when I bought a dozen for the department. There’s a piece of paper on the back. If you peel it off, it’ll expose an adhesive that’ll stick to almost anything. Don’t stick it to yourself. That would be an embarrassing trip to the doctor. For both of us.”

  I took the micro tracking device and put it in my pocket. “I’m going to the funeral with Ansley Bell. If I see Fine there, I’ll tell him I need to talk to him tonight. I’ll say it in my most ominous voice.”

  “You don’t have an ominous voice.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s a real problem.”

  23

  I pulled in front of Ansley’s duplex at 11:00. A few minutes later, she came down and got in the Volvo wearing a navy wool overcoat with semi-opaque black tights.

  “You clean up well,” she said. She leaned over and kissed me. She’d replaced the orange blossoms with something spicy. “Do you want to talk about yesterday?”

  “We’re on our way to your mother’s funeral. It can wait.”

  “I’d prefer we do it now if that’s okay.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you about me. Because we’ve basically just met and, to me, it’s not that big of a deal, but I guess it is kind of a big deal to most people. And now I’m embarrassed about it so I’ll just say it—I’m married.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept my eyes on the road and drove.

  “It turns out that private detective wasn’t working for my parents. He was working for my husband. His name is Hunter Priem. He’s a couple years older than me and lives in Rancho Palos Verdes in a house that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. You can see whales migrating up and down the coast while you’re eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. It’s quite beautiful. Hunter’s a trust-fund kid. And despite having had everything handed to him, he’s a kind and decent human being.

  “My parents weren’t great parents. Having a child was something on a checklist for them—they didn’t know what they were getting into and, when it got hard, they both retreated to their comfort zone, which was work. They aren’t bad people. I just wasn’t their priority. And when you’re a kid, you know that. If your parents aren’t your people, you start looking for your people.

  “I was at a party in the Hollywood Hills when I was seventeen and met Hunter, who went to USC. He fell in love with me on the spot.”

  “Imagine that,” I said. I smiled and put a hand on Ansley’s hand, which was gloved in soft leather. Probably a gift from Maggie Somerville. Or maybe from Hunter Priem—sounded like he could afford them, too.

  “In a weird way, Hunter was in the same boat I was in. He’d been isolated. Me by my parents and him by his family and wealth. Hunter is sensitive and introverted. There’s something poetic about him. But his parents and siblings are Tea Party billionaires, friends with the Koch brothers and those types of people. Hunter wants nothing to do with them.

  “Then he met me and swept me off my feet. When I turned eighteen, we flew to Hawaii and got married. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was our way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the world. If the world wasn’t going to give us a place to belong, we’d create our own. I had a semester of high school left. I’d seen pregnant girls in high school and thought, Boy, that is weird for them and everyone else. Then, I was the girl in physics with a huge rock on my finger and I was creating the weirdness. Hunter would drive me every day from Rancho Palos Verdes to Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks. It took almost two hours. Then he’d go to classes at USC and then pick me up after school and we’d drive all the way back. But it was just us, an eighteen- and twenty-year-old against the world.”

  I turned onto the 35W entrance ramp off of University Avenue and wondered why I hadn’t taken 94. An old habit of forgoing the easy way, I supposed. “So what happened?”

  “It’s more like what didn’t happen,” said Ansley. “Hunter was and still is genuinely a good person. He’s tall and handsome and rich. And he was deeply in love with me. But what happened was that I never fell in love with him. I fell in love with my life with him, but not him.”

  “I’d think that might not matter, considering you weren’t happy at home.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Everything was so much better with Hunter. But the dishonesty of not being in love with him took its toll on me. I started to have fantasies that something bad would happen to Hunter and then I’d be living that life all by myself, independent of my parents, independent of Hunter. I’d be free to do what I wanted and meet my true love. And the guilt of having those fantasies started eating away at me. That’s when I decided to contact my birth mother.”

  The freeway was wide-open. Gray clouds had gathered in the west. The Volvo’s dash registered a balmy twenty-one degrees.

  “Hunter was studying archeology at USC. He went to Mexico for a dig and was gone a couple of weeks. So without telling him, I flew to Minneapolis and met Maggie. Within a few days she became my mother and my best friend. I knew I couldn’t go back. So I wrote Hunter a letter and told him the truth. I wasn’t in love with him and the guilt was killing me and I had to go away and not to bother looking for me. I knew he would look for me, of course, so I used his credit card to buy an airline ticket from Los Angeles to Paris. A friend of Maggie’s was also going to Paris, and she mailed the letter back to Hunter. I legally changed my name and started my new life. Every year or so, one of Maggie’s friends would travel to Japan or Moscow or Vietnam, and I’d give them a letter to mail telling Hunter I was okay and had found a new life overseas and he should move on.”

  “And Hunter’s been searching for you ever since?”

  “On and off. Eventually, he moved on with his life. He has a girlfriend now and wants a divorce. He was about to get the divorce in absentia, but then received a tip that I’m here.” />
  “From who?”

  “He doesn’t know. It was anonymous.”

  “When did he get the tip?”

  “Last week sometime.”

  Ansley’s husband being tipped-off to her whereabouts the week before Maggie Somerville’s murder was too big of a coincidence to be a coincidence. I said, “Who mailed those letters from around the world for you?”

  “Once it was her friend Peggy. Once it was her friend Natalie. Once it was her friend Beth. I can’t remember them all.”

  “Beth Lindquist?”

  “Yes. She and Maggie were close. Beth and her husband mailed the letter from Vietnam.”

  “Did Beth know about you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I asked Maggie who knew about me. She said no one. She didn’t want her and Robert’s kids to find out. She thought they might feel displaced. Like I told you before, she planned to tell them after my residency.”

  “Is it possible Beth could have opened the letter and resealed it before she sent it?”

  “Sure. I guess anything’s possible.”

  The freeway bent south with a ninety-degree turn that had no business being in a freeway, the concrete barrier riddled with collision scars to prove it.

  “Are you in contact with Hunter now? Can you ask him if the seal was ever broken?”

  I kept my eyes on the road but could feel Ansley’s cold glare.

  “Did you really just ask me that?”

  “What?”

  “You know I saw Hunter yesterday.”

  “You didn’t say that. You said the PI was working for Hunter.”

  “Oh, Nils, you’re so full of shit. I know you came to the hospital. Twice. You were looking for me. You found me once before—I’m sure you found me yesterday.”

  I looked at her. She smiled. “I kind of rigged your phone to make you easier to find.”

  “Of course you did. So I’m sure you saw me with Hunter yesterday. And the reason I didn’t respond to your texts or calls is I wanted my time with Hunter to be about him. If I interrupted it to respond to you, it would have muddied the conversation. Do you know what I’m saying?”