“I can’t talk to you.”
“You’re talking to me right now, Ruben. Aren’t we talking?”
Ruben’s name sounded ugly coming from the stranger’s lips. Like the word Ruben was a slur.
A neighbor from three doors down, whose name was Chuck, Ruben thought, walked by talking into his phone, walking his russet border collie. Dennis waved to him in greeting, and he waved back distractedly. Help, thought Ruben. Help. Chuck cruised past, the collie straining at her leash.
“So I need your help,” the stranger said evenly. “You heard what we were telling your dad, right? The good and golden world, Ruben. It’s like this spirit, this beautiful merciful spirit, and it is trapped. It’s fucking trapped, man. Pardon my French. But we gotta let it out. Out of the vessel and into the world. Maybe your dad can’t understand that, but I think you can. I think you do.” He paused. He peered at Ruben. “Will you tell me where he is?”
“I don’t know.”
And he didn’t. He didn’t know. But with the night man looking at him, with his tangled blond hair, something lecherous in his gaze, Ruben felt like he had been caught. He felt like he was lying, even though he knew he wasn’t.
He took a breath and said it again, looked right at where the man’s eyes should be, behind the glasses. “I don’t know where he is.”
Dennis reached up to take off his sunglasses, and for one crazy second Ruben expected him to have no eyes at all. But when the glasses came off, there they were, dark and blazing, like two smoldering coals. The night man seized Ruben’s chin and tilted his head up, and his eyes looked just the way they had in the darkness of his life’s worst night, when this person had been there but not there, lurking in the room when Marilyn was disappearing, a shadow in the corner of death. Ruben dared himself to stare right back, but he couldn’t do it. He looked past him, at the house. His house. The off-white trim around the blue front door. The two little windows over the kitchen sink. The house would never be the same now, now that this man had been here. Now that the night man knew where it was.
“OK, I believe you,” he said finally, letting go of Ruben’s face, laughing as Ruben exhaled, relieved. “Can’t make you know something you don’t know, right? That’s crazy. Tell you what, though.” He took out a business card and slid it, a smooth and intimate gesture, into Ruben’s pocket. “If you find out, you’ll tell me, OK? How’s that?”
He flicked his cigarette butt into a stand of knobby succulents, bulbous prickly aliens that Marilyn had lovingly planted one summer when Ruben was still a baby.
“One more thing.” Dennis said it in the same easy voice, offhand and casual. “You’re not going to be a fucking wrestler, Ruben. Nobody gets to be happy. You know that, right? Not in this world.”
As he walked past, he swatted at the plastic bag full of gear so it bopped against Ruben’s leg.
“But there’s another world, Rubie-boobie.” A toddler’s ridiculous nickname. Marilyn’s name for him. Just between the two of them. “Just waiting. The future is waiting inside that boy, and you can help. We need your help, kiddo.”
And then Dennis left, one long step at a time, whistling a Beach Boys song, wandering aimlessly off the lawn and into the street. Ruben exhaled, shuddering, so relieved to be watching him go.
But then he called out after him, shouting, “Hey, hey,” until the night man turned, grinning, coy.
“If the—the spirit, the better world. If it’s inside him, then what are you going to do?”
“Oh, didn’t I say?” The night man turned back. He slipped the sunglasses back on. When he grinned, Ruben could see the gap between his bright white teeth.
“We’re going to crack him open, kid. Get it out.”
January 22, 2019
Cosmo’s was the second in a row of three squalid, low-slung motels, on a particularly unglamorous block, among the taco stands and car washes and doughnut shops that ran along Sepulveda just south of Venice Boulevard. The motel was a remnant of a period of LA history that had never existed but left its traces everywhere: a midcentury space-age of cheerful roadside glamour, when every scuzzy hot-sheet motel had a sign with big rounded letters, advertising COLOR TV and AIR-CONDITIONING and HEATED POOL. Cosmo’s was a semicircle of connected rooms, loosely gathered around a dirty and ill-kempt heated pool—as promised—that you could see in its entirety from the parking lot. No hot tub, no diving board, just a handful of stained vinyl chairs in scraggly clumps.
The on-ramp for the 405 was right across the road, and the parking lot was full of dust and fumes. Ruben found a parking space and sat for a second, looking at his own eyes in the rearview mirror and asking himself what he was doing.
If the working plan was to somehow prove that Richard Keener was sufficiently emotionally disturbed—was, as Ebbers had put it, out of his damn mind—he was hardly going to find evidence of that at the scene of the crime. His mandate was to find reasons to lessen the sentence, not to reinvestigate the case, which anyway seemed pretty clear: Richard shot at Pileggi, then he broke her head with a lamp, and then he called the police and told them he did it.
So what was Ruben doing?
The answer, such as it was, lay in Ebbers’s elusive half answer to what had been, after all, a pretty straightforward question: when Rich was under arrest, why did he call you?
Not everybody has a lot of experience with stuff like this. Cops and crime scenes and so on.
Ruben got off work on Tuesdays at 7:00, and he’d come right down here. Still in his neon-yellow shirt, KILLER GREENS across the front.
Cops and crime scenes and so on.
This was, Ruben was fairly sure, a waste of his time.
“Joke’s on you,” he told himself as he got out of the car. In the next space was a pink van advertising Topless Maids, featuring a voluptuous silhouette that leered at Ruben as he headed for the door. “My time’s not that valuable.”
“No, no, no, no. No, you fucker. No! Fuck you! No!”
The front-desk man at Cosmo’s this evening was deeply, angrily invested in a ball game playing on the laptop in his office. He was a husky older guy, with sharp eyes dancing under bushy eyebrows, with twin tufts of woolly white hair puffing out from under a Dodgers cap. “Come the fuck on!”
“Excuse me?” Ruben said it quietly, cleared his throat, and said it again. “Excuse me.”
The lobby was sparsely decorated and smelled of spilled milk or old garbage. A single goldfish, swimming in a clouded, lopsided bowl, looked like a prisoner, underfed and forlorn.
“How you doing?” said the clerk, eyes locked on the laptop screen. “You need a room?” And then, before Ruben could answer: “Oh, come on. Jesus fuck! Come on.”
Ruben peered at the man’s computer screen, at the ball game, which—based on the 1980s uniforms and the grainy film quality—was archival footage, an old game, which made sense. It wasn’t baseball season.
The clerk looked up, yawned with his gnarled fist up to his mouth. “Fucking Garvey, huh? All right—just you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir?” He snorted. “How about that?”
The old man’s desk was a disorienting jumble of paper: sections of the LA Times, yellowing receipts, stacks of unopened mail and catalogs. While he sifted through the chaos for a paper and pen, the fish twitched in his bowl, crying for help.
“How long you need?”
“Just, uh—just one. One night.”
“One night, all right. Single? Double? You name it. We’re pretty empty.”
“Single.” Ruben said it quietly, suddenly nervous. “I’d like room 109, please.”
The clerk had just found a pen. He flicked it back into the shambles of his desk. “All right,” he said, and made a thick noise at the roof of his mouth. “Get outta here.”
“What?”
“I said get outta here, dude.” He doffed his cap and aimed it at the door. “Get out.”
Ruben fumbled his thick wallet from the back of his pants.
“But I can pay. I have money.”
“Room 109 is not available,” the man sneered. “But you knew that, right?”
“No. Why? What?”
From the TV, the crack of a line drive, the tinny ancient roar of the crowd. Statistically, Ruben noted, a lot of the people in that crowd are dead by now. “You know why not. Because a lady got killed in there, couple weeks ago. That’s why. Right? Come on, asshole. You read it in the fucking paper, or on that, what, Reddit, huh? And here you are, no suitcase or nothin’, and oh by the way it’s one particular room you’d like. Ya fucking weirdo. You think I’m born yesterday?”
“No,” said Ruben, stunned by the profane rush. “No, actually, I’m…”
Nothing. I’m nothing.
Private. Defective.
“Look, sport, you wanna jack off at a murder scene, try the LaBianca house, OK? I’ll draw you a map.”
“You’re misunderstanding.”
“I am?”
“I’m not a pervert.”
The clerk scowled. “You think I care if you’re a pervert? Perverts are my bread and butter. But that room is closed. It’s in turnaround. OK?”
Ruben surprised himself by persisting. “If I could just glance in there—just for a moment.”
“It’s fucking closed, man. You deaf? Deaf pervert?”
“And when,” said Ruben politely, “do you think the room might become available again?”
“A while. OK? Someone gets their head bashed in, it takes a minute to clean.” He ticked off tasks on his fingers. “We gotta send out the rugs, get the mattress cleaned, rinse the brains outta the carpet. Plus, you know, bullet holes, too, a pair of ’em in my nice wall. And it ain’t like we’re getting reimbursed by anybody, by the way.” He snorted, indignant. “So I tell you what, come back in a few weeks, be happy to make you a reservation. But you might have to wait in line behind the rest of the ghostfuckers.”
If there was anything to find in this dump, in a few weeks it would be long gone. Steamed out of the carpets, washed off the walls. Not to mention, Ruben didn’t have a few weeks. He had—what?—he had thirteen days at this point. In a few weeks, Richard Keener would be sitting on death row.
But he pressed on.
“Can I just explain?” said Ruben. “I’m seriously not a—a ghostfucker.” He smiled awkwardly. “That’s not me.”
“So then what are you?”
Million-dollar question, thought Ruben. “I’m working the case,” he said, and that sounded idiotic, like he was on CSI or something. “I’ve been hired by the defense team. I’m an investigator.”
“Oh yeah?”
The guy scratched between his eyes and squinted at Ruben, clearly finding this information hard to credit. Ruben as he often did at such moments saw himself through the stranger’s eyes, this random Asian guy with his glasses and his one crumpled ear. Tall but trying to make himself small.
“So, you’re an investigator,” the clerk said finally. “Well, that changes everything.”
“It does?”
“No. It does not.”
He laughed without humor, and then unpaused his ball game.
Ruben almost left it there, and maybe he should have.
Maybe what he should have done was go back into the parking lot, climb into his Altima, and call it a night.
Instead he stood, thinking of Evie, putting her hand to his face. Backstage at the Echo, the singer and the detective, two strangers who had been friends their whole lives.
“It’s good to see you,” she had said. “You look really good.”
And when he closed his eyes he could still feel the heat of her palm on his cheek.
So what was he going to do now? Stop?
“Sir? Sorry.”
The man looked up again, astonished by this further incursion on his vintage baseball game. Ruben laid his hand down on the desk and lifted it again, and the man looked at the small pile of bills and then up at him.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said sharply. “You tryna bribe me with—” He counted quickly with his eyes. “Nine dollars?”
“Um—yes. Yes, sir.”
“OK.” The clerk shrugged. “I’ll take it.”
The door was old, but the handle was new. It had been switched out from the one Richard Keener had broken to get in.
The Rabbi at the threshold, taking stock. His eyes behind his thick glasses moved slowly from one end of the room to the other, from wall to wall.
“OK,” he said to himself. “It’s a room.”
A motel room, dim and ugly and cramped. One window looking out at the parking lot, where Ruben saw his car, parked next to the tawdry pink van. The colors of the room were shades of brown: beige, ecru, rust. Thin, fraying drapes. An ancient blocky television, a few ugly paintings of nothing: just shapes, colors, desultory gestures toward decoration.
The AC unit was unplugged, the cord curled into itself at the baseboard. A thin striped bedspread, laddered with thin beams of moonlight. The whole place smelled like paint and bleach and the dry, dusty odor of recent vacuuming. A room in a purgatorial state, on its way to being restored to its public function. The bathroom door was open; the toilet seat was up; no toilet paper on the roll; the shower curtain tucked up and hanging from the shower rail like a koala.
The room was dark and stale, but it was charged, too, with a shivering doomy energy. As Ruben stepped inside, he was conscious of a crouching sense of risk, which, as he began to move through the room, drew itself slowly up to full height. His dick, unpredictable bellwether of strong feeling, stiffened slightly in his pants. For God’s sake, he thought, but after all there are only so many strong feelings. Lust and darkness, murder and sex. Maybe they blur together in places like this. Murder places, with the power of high emotion still flickering in the corners, murmuring out from under the thin bedspread.
Or maybe he was a ghostfucker after all.
Ruben moved gingerly through the room, thinking what a nightmare it was to have a body. To be a body, tricked all the time into wanting whatever the body happened to want.
Most of the room was taken up by the bed. There was only one night table, jammed into a narrow space behind the wall, which separated the single room from the bathroom.
“OK,” he said, and shook his head, laughing at himself one last time, granting himself permission finally to do what he was doing. Casing a room. Chasing a phantom. Cops and crime scenes and so on.
If you’re going to fucking do it, you fucking do it.
“All right,” he said aloud, slipping off his glasses and sliding them into a pocket of his pants. “So, I’m Rich.”
He stood up tall and pulled his shoulders back and pushed out his chest. He exhaled, growling, feeling a skeptical gloominess rearrange the shape of his face. Then he backed up and came through the door again, coming in slow and heavy: walking Rich’s heavy bear’s walk, sniffing the air.
He looked down at the world from height, glowered around the room.
“I break into the room.” He glanced back at the door. “She’s not here.” He paused, remembered. “I knew she wouldn’t be here. My plan is, I wait. I sit on the bed.”
It creaked under his weight.
“I have this handgun. My old gun. I’ve had it for years.” Ruben recalled the details from the police report. A semiautomatic pistol, 8mm, with a sixteen-round clip. “I never use it, but now I’m gonna use it. I’m ready.”
He aimed his invisible weapon at the door. “I’m waiting,” said Ruben to the empty room, to the moonlight and the smell of cleaning supplies. “I wait.”
Then the door opened, he could fucking see it opening, and he aimed his invisible handgun and fired it—shouted bang—and watched the bullet’s path, an angle from the bed to the doorway.
Fuck. He’d missed. From so close, he’d missed—nervous, maybe, not a shooter, hadn’t practiced—
He shot again, screamed bang, missed again, and got up from the bed and hurled his massive body toward Th
eresa Pileggi. Ruben could see her clearly now, her intense expression, unblinking, unsmiling—he caught her by the door, slammed her against the wall.
And there it was, the lamp—right there on the table—Ruben snatched it and then paused, heaving breaths, bent over, the rounded midsection of the lamp clutched in his hand, the cord dangling like an entrail.
It had to be a different lamp. The murder weapon would be in evidence somewhere. Cosmo’s probably had a shelf lined with them, in a storage closet off the lobby, rows of cheap, ugly lamps, all the same: the cord wrapped around the brass base, the thin shade that clipped to the wire of the socket stand. Ruben lifted it. It felt like he was holding something substantial; a paperweight or a small bowling ball. Suddenly he took two steps from the bed back toward the door, back toward where Pileggi had come into the room. He swung the lamp in a slow arc over his head, reenacting the central moment, pausing three-quarters of the way through and shouting crack before watching Pileggi topple, broken, to the floor.
He did it again, quicker: grabbed the lamp, swung the lamp, grunting with the effort, feeling the small burn of muscle movement in his shoulder. Stopping abruptly where he imagined the lamp base would have connected with Pileggi’s head.
Crack.
Ugly sound, final sound, death at the moment of delivery.
He stood there frozen, the lamp in his hand. How strange it was that this physical action—the collision of the cheap metal of a lamp base against the bone of the head, the metal like an asteroid smashing into the skull, plowing deep and deeper into the putty of the brain—could have as its consequence the blipping out of this thing that never was physical in the first place: “Dr. Theresa Pileggi” had after all only been an idea, an abstraction, the name that the world gave to the collection of thoughts and emotions and physical actions and reactions that operated in the world as one complete functioning system. All the things that had been Theresa Pileggi—the bones and blood, the muscles and skin, the flesh and the molecules of the flesh—none of that disappeared in the moment of contact. All of it was in a box now, in the ground, and all that had died when the lamp hit the skull were the ideas; the thinking; the consciousness; what was gone had never literally physically existed to begin with. The person was the mind, and the mind was gone, but it had never been here, not like, say, the lamp.
The Quiet Boy Page 19
