Skies of Ash

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  Colin wandered back to the squad room and found me at my desk. “So he came all this way to bring you coffee and sign a form?”

  “Scalawags and insurance attorneys kiss the ground I walk on.”

  The red voice-mail light on my phone was blinking. Gus Lebo’s deep voice—southern minister meets numbers runner—boomed over my speaker. A lot of “honey,” “pleased,” and “crazy-ass broads” in his “thanks for givin’ me a head’s up” message.

  I kept the phone to my ear and dialed Greg’s cell.

  He picked up on the third ring. “Didn’t think I’d hear from you today,” he shouted over the clatter of kitchen sounds.

  “Phones work both ways,” I said. “It’s loud in your world. Where are you?”

  “Grabbing food for everybody,” he said. “Long day.”

  A female giggled in the background.

  The hair on my body bristled. “So I have to fly to Vegas.”

  Silence. Then: “When?”

  “This afternoon, but we will—”

  “We?”

  “We will be back after we finish the interview.”

  Silence. Then: “Hunh.”

  “What does ‘hunh’ mean?”

  “Friday night in Vegas,” he said. “Convenient.”

  I closed my eyes. “It’s a Friday afternoon in North Las Vegas. Big difference.”

  “Whatever, Lou. So you’ll be back tonight—unless Taggert has another bright idea to interview this person tomorrow morning?”

  “Of course,” I snapped. “Lena’s recital is tonight, and I can’t miss it. So good-bye, and tell whoever the hell is with you to stop laughing so much. She sounds like a hyena.”

  Back to work.

  I grabbed the manila envelope that had been left beneath my Christmas tree and emptied it onto my desk. Copies of checks… more copies of checks… a crumpled wire-transfer receipt with the print almost faded.

  The first check copy came from the account of Vandervelde, Lansing & Gray. Dated April 9, the check had been made payable to Peggy Tanner for $10,103.96. It had been endorsed by Ms. Tanner and then deposited into Pacific Western Bank in Thousand Oaks.

  Peggy Tanner…

  I rolled my chair over to the filing cabinet and pulled off the top of a box marked CC HOME OFFICE. After a few seconds of browsing through the contents, I found that prospectus prepared by Christopher Chatman for Peggy Tanner.

  Dot connected.

  The warmth of satisfaction rolled over me, but I didn’t linger in it.

  Back to the Christmas-gift envelope.

  The next check copy, dated July 12, had also come from Vandervelde, Lansing & Gray. Payable to Sol Y. Hirsch for $7,997.41. Endorsed by Sol Hirsch in big loopy letters and deposited into Pacific Western Bank.

  Pacific Western… Christopher Chatman had an account at Pacific Western.

  Another dot.

  I picked up a wire-transfer receipt and peered at ghost print. Banco… Central de… Venezuela. A transfer of $107,500 from L.O.K.I. Consulting Services on September 20.

  “Hey,” I said, calling out to Colin, “these docs you pulled. Where’d you find all of this? In the boxes we grabbed from the storage unit?”

  Colin blinked at me. “Guh?”

  I leaned back in my chair and stretched. “Where did you find this? I didn’t see check copies from his clients last night.”

  “I didn’t find any copies of checks,” Colin said.

  My turn to say, “Guh?”

  Colin shook his head. “Nuh.”

  I squinted at him. “You left an envelope on my desk, remember? It was right under my Christmas tree when I got in this…”

  “I didn’t leave anything under your tree,” he said, staring at the pile.

  “Luke!”

  Luke stood at the whiteboard with Rocky, a night-shift dick who had caught a fatal stabbing at a strip club. Conversational key words: “Hennessy,” “glitter,” “serrated blade,” “bad tipper,” “crotch,” “bled out.”

  I held up the empty manila envelope. “You leave this for me?”

  Luke said, “Nope,” then turned back to Rocky and his killer-stripper story.

  “So I did some surfing on Christopher Chatman,” Colin said. “He doesn’t have a Facebook page. Juliet did, but she hadn’t posted on it since Easter. A lot of ‘Rest in Peace’ messages on there now. Cody has a page. In his photo albums, there’s not one shot of his dad.”

  “Is that a teenage-boy thing?”

  Colin shrugged. “You’re askin’ a guy with a tattoo of his dad’s favorite snack.”

  “Yours is the first Cracker Jack tat I’ve ever seen.”

  “I did find this.” Colin rolled over to my desk and handed me several pieces of paper. “Printouts from Internet forums Cody visited. A site called Sk8B8. Originally created by skaters. Now a domain for angry little bastards with too much time and technology and not enough homework.”

  One of Cody’s posts, dated December 8, had been titled, “Going away now.”

  …tired of this. Tired of them. They’ll get what they been asking 4. Me gone.

  Another post two days before Thanksgiving: “Don’t understand.”

  How can 2 ppl stay 2gether & hate other. THEY WANT THE WORLD 2 THINK THEY R PERFECT. How am I like this? Why I have bad thought? Don’t love them. They keep hurting me w there lies. Blame me 4 everything. I cant chill out anymore. Cant act like it all ok anymore. They need 2 WAKEUP. I will make them wakeup.

  And another, posted on October 30:

  basterdbumbumbumallofyou. Hahahaha.

  I sighed. “This kid was…”

  “Fucked up in the head?” Colin asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think…?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But…?”

  “Not really. You?”

  Colin shrugged.

  I turned back to the pile of paper on my desk. Why had someone put this envelope beneath my Christmas tree? Who had left this envelope beneath my Christmas tree? What connections was I supposed to make?

  The check copies had been sent to clients of Vandervelde, Lansing & Gray. The clients were all Christopher Chatman’s. He had made them a lot of money.

  So…?

  I shoved the check copies back into the envelope. “How about a side quest before we fly to Vegas?”

  Colin stood from his chair and pulled on his blazer. “To Oz?”

  “To Oz.”

  38

  THE MID-AFTERNOON DRIVE OVER THE HILL AND INTO THE VALLEY WAS ONE FENDER bender and two stalled cars long. Even in sixty-degree weather, brown haze hung over the basin. As Colin drove, I read Juliet’s diary. A mile before our exit, Pepe texted me that Adeline St. Lawrence had arrived at the station to complete a witness statement. I had also reached the last entry in the diary with hollowness in my chest.

  Thursday, December 6: I made the mistake of looking in the mirror this morning. My skin is pea green. There are hollow circles beneath my eyes. I have lots of zits. Cody told me that I looked like warmed-over zombie shit. I have no energy to tell him to stop cursing, especially since he’s right. I do look like zombie shit.

  No wonder CC’s now ashamed of me. No wonder he won’t respond to me or even look me in the eyes. I was gorgeous once upon a time. He says he’s overwhelmed. That being sick has slowed him down.

  I wish our marriage would’ve… not worked (?) since technically it is working, but then how can it be working if I now have a fucking gun in my trunk? Is marriage, is life supposed to hurt like this?? Maybe if I had been brave, maybe if I had listened to Addy, this BULLSHIT would’ve ended a long time ago.

  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Christopher’s mother would say that all the time, usually talking about me. I write it now, yes, in reference to me but also to this life he and I have led together. He doesn’t trust me, I don’t trust him, after all these years married. So what was the point? Why keep going? I know it’s taken twenty years but someone now has
to make a decision. Guess that someone is me.

  And so my decision is this: I WILL NOT DIE HERE.

  The office building at 10113 Thousand Oaks Boulevard was a smoked glass, fourteen-story high-rise, the tallest in an uninteresting office park that had planned gardens and walking paths and boringness.

  The Stepford wifeness of it all ended at the sixth floor. Colin and I marched out of the elevator and into the fancy-pants lobby of Vandervelde, Lansing & Gray. This was not the lobby of your grandpa’s commodities firm. It had sharp lines and angles, crimson-cream-brown furniture, and splashes and blocks of art trapped in modern frames. Flat-screen monitors hung on the walls showing videos of handsome young people as diverse as a bag of Skittles smiling and opening glass doors for one another. An impressive glass and bronze staircase spiraled from the sixth floor up to the seventh.

  “Ooh la la, Sassoon,” I said to Colin, eyebrows lifted.

  “Shoulda wore my Louis Vuitton handcuffs,” he said.

  “The ones with the mink lining?”

  He winked at me. “Your favorites.”

  During the drive over, I had clicked onto the firm’s Web site and learned that they traded everything—from grains and rendering products to silver and oil futures. With more than two hundred brokers in five offices across the country, including Thousand Oaks, it would be easy for a receptionist to lose track of names.

  And we found that receptionist seated at the circular front desk, its gold nameplate reading TIFFANI LANE.

  “She’s kinda cute,” Colin said, straightening his tie, fire burning in his eyes.

  “If you like young, blond, and bosomy.”

  As a detective, I knew things. And I knew that the woman seated here no way, no how resembled the desktop framed pictures of the chunky brunette hugging the fattest cat in the world. I also knew that the chick seated here, the one synthesized by Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Victoria’s Secret, had not collected the six hundred troll dolls lining the desk’s edge.

  “May I help you?” she asked, her baby-blue eyes big and bright.

  “I know your voice,” I said with a worried smile. “You’re Stacy.” The one who couldn’t connect me to Christopher Chatman’s office, I wanted to add but didn’t.

  Stacy grinned. “Awww. You remember me.”

  Colin badged her first and then told her that, oh yeah, I was his partner. “We’re wondering if you could help us out,” he said.

  She leaned forward, her bountiful bosoms boosted for his benefit. “Anything to help, Detective Friendly.”

  “We need to talk to the head guy,” he said. “The one who recruits all your brokers.”

  “That would be Mr. Meiselman,” she said. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “We do not have an appointment,” he said, his eyes lingering on her magnificence. “But I promise not to take too much of his time.”

  “Cross your heart?” Stacy asked.

  “Only if you cross yours,” Colin said, doing his blue-steel-squinty-eyed thing.

  Stacy crossed the heart spot on her lilac-colored sweater.

  Colin crossed the heart spot on his tan corduroy blazer.

  Stacy giggled.

  Colin winked.

  I threw up a little in my mouth.

  Three minutes later, Colin and I were seated in an office that smelled of sweet tobacco and peppermint. The lightness of the bamboo, teak, and aluminum furniture spoke more of an architectural firm than a place of math and bankers. Framed maps of Los Angeles hung from the walls, and acrylic trophies from every nonprofit in Southern California sat on a credenza.

  At six foot five and more than 250 pounds, the managing partner seated behind the desk did not match his furniture. He had a meaty, pockmarked nose and olive skin that belonged more to a wise guy named Tony Giamatti than a banker named Myron Meiselman.

  After offering Pellegrino and Diet Coke, Colin and I declining each, Meiselman leaned back in his big leather chair. “So how can I help you?”

  I offered him a business card and told him, very la-la-la, that we were investigating a case, that I needed information about one of his brokers, nothing special, la-la-la.

  “Certainly,” he said. “There are fifteen brokers in this branch, and I hired each of them. I can assure you that we only bring on the best and the brightest. Now, I didn’t catch the name. Who were you asking about?”

  “Christopher Chatman,” I said.

  An almost-imperceptible shock wave raced from his forehead down to his chin. “Oh. Yes. Chatman.” He chewed on the stem of his silver-framed spectacles. “Very smart. Very talented. Incredibly perceptive.”

  “Incredibly trustworthy?” I asked, my head cocked.

  An icy smile formed on his lips.

  “Can you confirm that Mr. Chatman still works as a broker with your firm?”

  Meiselman tapped the stem against his teeth, then slipped the glasses on the desk. “Yes. He is still an employee.”

  “Has he ever been involved in—?”

  “I won’t be able to answer that question, Detective Norton.”

  “I haven’t finished asking it, sir.”

  Meiselman’s smile widened. “I apologize,” he said. “Go ahead, please.”

  “Has Mr. Chatman ever been disciplined for inappropriate dealings or whatnot?”

  Meiselman shook his head. “Like I said, I won’t be able to answer that question.”

  Colin reached into the case file for the copy of Peggy Tanner’s check. “Is she one of the firm’s clients?”

  Meiselman studied the document with cold, hard eyes. “It is a check from our account. And Mrs. Tanner is a client.”

  “And is Mr. Chatman in charge of Ms. Tanner’s account?” Colin asked.

  Meiselman rubbed his jaw. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss this account or any other accounts with you.” His nostrils flared as he handed the copy back to Colin.

  “At least not without a subpoena,” I said.

  Meiselman nodded, then slowly exhaled.

  “Can you tell me the last time Mr. Chatman was in the office?” I asked.

  “Hours are very fluid here,” Meiselman explained. “So no, I can’t.”

  “According to Mr. Chatman,” Colin said, “he was here Monday night around eleven to Tuesday morning until about three thirty.”

  The big man squinted at me. “Really?”

  I nodded. “That’s what he told me. Are those hours unusual?”

  “Our clients are worldwide,” he said. “While you’re sleeping and dreaming about winning the lottery, China is going full steam, which means my brokers are going full steam.”

  “Homicide detectives never sleep, nor do we dream,” I said with a tight smile. “As William Burroughs said, ‘Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.’ And last time I checked, sir, there are a lot of frying pans in this city.”

  Meiselman nodded. “Of course. I apologize.”

  “Are you aware,” I said, “that Mr. Chatman’s family died in a house fire early Tuesday morning? That we are investigating that fire as suspicious? That my partner and I are homicide detectives?”

  Meiselman’s eyes darkened, and he whispered, “Yes, I am aware of those things.”

  “Do you think—?”

  His desk phone chirped, and relief washed over his face. “I’m sorry, but I need to take this, Detectives. It’s my colleague in Chicago—I’ve been waiting all day for him to call.”

  Colin and I stood from our chairs.

  Meiselman stayed seated but offered his hand. “Sorry I couldn’t be of much help.”

  “Thank you for taking time to talk with us,” I said, taking his hand.

  “No problem. Be careful.” Then, he grabbed the receiver and said, “Meiselman here.”

  Be careful.

  What a weird thing to say. Not “good-bye” or “have a nice day.”

  But “be careful.”

  Of what?

  39

  TO COLIN’S I
MMENSE PLEASURE, STACY HAD NOT FLITTED AWAY TO THE COPIER OR to the mail room. She still sat at the reception desk, holding down the fort for the chubby, cat-lovin’, troll-collectin’ Tiffani Lane. “Detective Friendly is back,” she twittered.

  Colin winked at her. “Wouldn’t leave without sayin’ good-bye, darlin’.”

  “Also, there’s only one exit.” I pointed to the elevator lobby. “That one over there.”

  “Ha-ha, Detective Friendly’s partner.” She opened a tube of lip gloss.

  The sticky aroma of strawberries and vanilla made my stomach queasy, and I pitied the schmo required to kiss her. But then I wasn’t in the demographic, so maybe that scent was akin to queen-bee pheromones and dog whistles.

  Colin examined a pink-haired troll doll, then sat it back in its space. “Question for you, pretty lady. What’s up with this dude Christopher Chatman?”

  She bit her shiny bottom lip. “Between me and you?”

  “Between me, you, and my partner here. I share everything with her.”

  She flicked a look at me, then slid her eyes back to Colin. “Everything?”

  “Everything,” Colin said, unblinking.

  My whole body went cold because what the hell? But I didn’t move. I clenched my jaw and ignored the tingling in my left arm. Any verbing, even an ill-timed heart attack, would startle the blond bunny rabbit into her hidey-hole, along with the answers to our many questions.

  “Does he still work here?” Colin asked.

  Stacy stroked her throat. “Yeah, but not for long.”

  “He’s on his way out?”

  She motioned for him to come closer. “You didn’t hear this from me, but the only reason he’s still working here is because he’s sick and they can’t fire him because he threatened to sue.”

  “Sick?” Colin asked. “With what?”

  “Don’t know. But last time he was in he gave me these crazy-looking flowers. They were probably expensive, but they looked totally gross.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s so not my type.”

  “But he’s rich,” Colin pointed out.