My Detective

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “I missed you.”

  Lenny smiles and pours a Johnnie Walker.

  “Caught a bad one last night, huh?”

  “Slice job. Dead architect.”

  “Don’t get many of those, I suppose.”

  Lenny’s a transplant from New York. Came out in the seventies to surf and stayed. Not a surprisingly original story, but Lenny got into dope trafficking, hiding white bags from Colombia in surfboards. He’d pick them up in Mexico and drive a few miles every day, surfing his way up the coast in no particular hurry to drop the stash off at an address in Toluca Lake. Ingenious, really. But a jilted girlfriend—a cokehead with a runny nose and a heart of vengeance—talked into a phone and Lenny was done. He did some time, got out, worked as a carpenter and a stagehand for a while, gave surf lessons. One of his students was the daughter of the guy who once owned the Little Easy. That’s how things happen.

  “What do you know about drones?” he says.

  “We kill people with them in Yemen and Pakistan. Amazon delivers packages with them.”

  “Cop surveillance too, right?”

  “Trade secret, Lenny.” I wink, and he nods.

  “Guy came in the other day,” he says, “sat right over there. Ordered a Dewar’s. Gentlemanly type. Said he landed at LAX a few hours earlier at dusk. In town for a convention. He told me he looked out the window of the plane and saw dozens of small drones buzzing like insects below in the pink-dark sky. Like Blade Runner or something. ‘A smooth chaos of crisscrossing things.’ That’s what he said. Direct quote. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What’s up there looking down. Who’s watching us? Who’s driving those things?”

  Lenny leans back, stands, crosses his arms, looks at me for an answer.

  “You can buy drones in Target, Lenny. They’re all over.”

  “It just makes you wonder. Drink up. I gotta close.”

  I set the glass down. Lenny leads me to the door.

  “Get some sleep, Sam.”

  He locks the door behind me. A street-sweeper passes; the sky flickers. Soon, it will be light. I’ll sleep for a couple of hours, shower, call Ortiz, check with the coroner, and head to Gallagher’s office of renowned architects. The bronze doors to my building swing open to a foyer of marble and mosaic that, early last century, led to the tracks of the subway, remnants of which lie beneath in scents of oil and dust. I went down there once and roamed with a flashlight between the girders and into the tunnels, thinking of the workers’ lights in the darkness, pounding away stone and earth beneath a city still young.

  The security guard at the front desk nods; the sound system jangles with an eighties loop. Dog walkers stir in the half-light. My key clicks in the door and echoes down the hall. I follow the sound to bed and dream of my father running through a mist in a sweatshirt and punching the air.

  Chapter 5

  His father was a boxer.

  A rough man with a broken hand and a quick temper.

  It’s all in my detective’s laptop, the one I hacked. When I can’t sleep, like now, I open the files and read about my detective. He’s a bit of a diarist, my man. A letter writer and keeper of emails. To me, it’s a map, words and folders leading here and there, and sometimes I don’t want to look. I feel as if I’m stealing things I shouldn’t. But I read on. I have to know him, what breaks and makes him strong, his fantasies and fears.

  I like the glow of a laptop in the dark. It’s cozy, blankets around me, dawn creeping up the streets to my home, a Victorian I bought after a streak of luck in the stock market and began renovating years ago. I live alone in this big place. I like it that way, wandering rooms, running fingers over banisters, contemplating tile and the arc of stained glass above the front door. The quiet. The way it enfolds. I’ve thought about having a child on my own. It takes so much to raise a life, intricacies I do not have but would like to. I could learn. I’d like to feel life come out of me. That’s how it is when I draw. Buildings come out of me. That’s different, I know. Miraculous yet different. My detective would make a good father. He knows what it is to have a scar and understand what put it there. What it leaves behind.

  I slide the laptop aside and go to the window. A few headlights, the moan of a bus, men speaking Spanish, hurrying down the hill. The city spreads before me. I feel like Princess Daenerys Targaryen with her dragons in Game of Thrones. I don’t usually like shows like that, but c’mon, fire and ice and treachery in a war for seven kingdoms? I’m in. I can almost touch the buildings in my own pop-up kingdom. Have you ever considered the precision of a line, how it thins and widens, cuts and curls, how it starts from a dot and lifts into porticoes and towers? Into cities that inspire and outlast us. They are what we leave to others, the semblances of ages that one day, when we are long gone, gather like ruins beneath the feet of those we never knew, and rise again.

  I cry when I draw.

  I pour fresh coffee and check the Los Angeles Times web page to read about Gallagher. Can you imagine, little ol’ me, the angel of death? I scroll. No story yet. So much other news, though. Ethan Hawke has a new movie. Bitcoin is trading high. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. The warming ocean is turning rainbow colors of coral to ash. Amazing how sensitive it is. How finely calibrated. Just a degree or two of change in temperature, and nature’s intricate architecture is in danger.

  Light fills the house. I stare at a vase to an iris on a long stem, cut from my neighbor’s garden a few nights ago, a delicate souvenir of illicit urge. No one knows what I do in my insomnia, flitting across dark yards and sidewalks. I am quite the petty thief. Flower, toy, hose, hubcap. My detective’s a bit of a heister too. He lifts things from crime scenes: bracelet, ripped cloth, dollar bill, license, bottle cap, eyeglasses, Bible, lock of hair, and, once, a tooth. Possessions of vics. I wonder what he took from Gallagher. He keeps them in an inlaid box under the leather chair in his living room, opening it from time to time, running fingers over his strange treasure. It reminds me of an archaeologist brushing away sand from a pharaoh’s image, or a lepidopterist pinning butterflies inside a glass case. Some are from crimes solved, others not. I think it odd, but we all have our rituals and relics. Things only the darkness knows. He doesn’t judge. Those of the innocent lie beside those of the guilty. Wife, skip-roper, gangbanger, priest, bride, barkeep, accountant, bus driver, and on and on. The dead. He writes a short paragraph about each: where they were found, what time, the position of the body, light and scent, and all else he sees on the small stage inside the yellow tape. “I don’t want them forgotten,” he wrote. “Each piece a part of someone who held a place in the world.”

  There is much sadness in his laptop.

  I love Sundays. The stillness and the way the day lingers at its start and later, sometime after three, races toward dusk. Jacob, my relentless producer, called and left three messages.

  “Dylan, pick up.”

  “Please, Dylan, let’s talk. I missed you last night.”

  “Hey, let’s go to a screening this week. You love screenings. New Tom Ford movie. Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams. Some kind of psycho-thriller. What do you think? Call me.”

  He’s hurt that I didn’t go out to dinner after the Mahler concert with him and his Belgium banker and Milan set designer. Three men, cigars, and wine, chattering about prostates and how the world has changed; twinges of nostalgia, a round of brandies. You can just hear them. I had to tend to Gallagher last night, and I’m not in the mood for Jacob today. Note to self: I don’t want any more Jacobs. Although, in his way he is sweet and considerate. In doses. But I don’t want that kind of life. I have money, not as much as Jacob, certainly not, but more than most women on their own, which gives me, as my accountant, Sven, would say, options. They don’t like us to have options, men. It bothers them—not like it did years ago, but you can see traces of betrayal on their faces when a woman pulls out her platinum card and opinions. Why is that? Are
we not an elevated species? Hillary found out, but really, she was not the right woman for this time. Maybe it was the pantsuit. That seems trite, I know, but it said something, didn’t it? It masculinized the feminine, made her, despite expert makeup and hair just right, a cross between us and them. You can’t do that with pussy-grabbers about. I should put Trump on my list. Wouldn’t that be something? Sssshhh. No, no, no. Homeland Security might swoop in like those monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie as a child. My mother and I watched it once a year before Easter. She’d put her arm around me and we’d sit in the dark in our pretend ruby slippers, singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and going quiet when the sky said, “Surrender Dorothy.” My mother was a great pretender. I would press against her warmth and close my eyes until the broom and the wicked witch flew away.

  “My baby, Dylan,” she’d say, “my sweet little girl. Don’t let them get you.”

  “Who, Mommy?”

  “The bad ones.”

  “Where are the bad ones?”

  “Everywhere.”

  I don’t want to think about that now.

  I’ll sit at the window and draw. I’ve been working on a sketch for a classical-and-glass design for a new library in Carmel. Light will fill the stacks, and old stones will conjure the Greeks. It’s in the early stages, but I see it in my mind. My partner, John Hillerman, likes the idea. John’s been good to me through so much. We have a way of seeing things so that each complements the other. He hired me after I got my master’s at Pratt, and for a while I thought we’d have a fling, but we agreed that it could spoil how we collaborate; our blueprints and ideas are sacred to us. Besides, John loves his wife, Isabella, a gallerist and a volunteer at the women’s shelter, someone you’d never want to hurt. Her Brazilian accent soothes, and she moves like an embracing force, a woman who knows that beauty is a collection of things. Maybe it’s her South American roots. The ease of slipping into one’s own skin. I like the light that comes off her.

  “Dylan, Dylan!” yelled Isabella, banging on my door years ago before dawn, just after I joined John’s firm.

  “What?” I said, wrapped in a robe, my hair a mess.

  “We’re going to the mountains. You must see the San Gabriels. I know a place.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “The day is coming. Hurry.”

  I barely knew her, but she was the boss’ wife. I dressed quickly, a bit miffed, and we packed into her car. She handed me a coffee, and we sped toward La Cañada and north into the mountains.

  “They come like whales out of the darkness,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The mountains. They swim around us.”

  She laughed and turned up an Astrud Gilberto CD. We parked and followed a trail along a stream. Light was beginning to break through the trees. We climbed a steep incline to a ridge trail. We walked the rim, cool rising from the Valley, blackbirds circling, tumbling, dancing above us. The sun was cresting, and Isabella grabbed my hand and led me through a bit of thicket to a rock overhang. We sat with our feet dangling. She waved an arm over the narrow valley.

  “This is my California,” she said. “Not the beach, though that is beautiful. But this. Isn’t it lovely? Don’t you think it’s lovely? John won’t get up this early. He can be a layabout on weekends, but I wanted you to see this. I think people need to know things about one another, right at the beginning. Sometimes, we wait too long to learn what we should know. Now you know about me. My favorite California place. What do you think?”

  I almost cried. She was unafraid and full of life. An offering in the dawn. A woman, not much older than me, inviting me in. That was rare. I didn’t know what to do. It was a few weeks before the bad things that would happen happened. But even back then, I was reticent—in the thrall of a new career, yes, but I kept to myself and my designs. Not with Isabella—at least, not on that morning. We sat for hours. She told me about her family’s village in Brazil, and her first trip to America. “You hear so much about it,” she said, “and then this thing in your head becomes real, and you think it’s yours.” I told her about my mother, how it felt growing up tall, awkward, and lanky, like a bird too big for its wings. She laughed at that and told me all girls felt funny about something. She said women understood perfection better than men and, because of that, realized how far we all were from it.

  “I never liked my nose,” she said, turning to profile. “Look.”

  “It’s a good nose.”

  “I don’t think it fits. I could have had it fixed when I was twelve. I’m Brazilian, after all. But it’s who I am.”

  “I like it.”

  “I like that you’re tall.”

  She touched my hand.

  “Dylan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be happy.”

  I don’t mean to canonize Isabella, but some people are more blessed than the rest of us. It’s hard knowing them; you can never be the thing you see they are, although perhaps, once, you weren’t so far from it. A few months after our trip to the mountains, Isabella held me on the night when I thought I no longer belonged in the world. She stroked my hair and sang softly in my ear; she wiped my eyes and let me sleep in her arms. How long ago that seems. But how close too.

  Yes, I’ll draw for a few hours and then off to the Grove to browse and look for a blazer for my detective. He wears the same one from Macy’s all the time. He doesn’t buy much with his credit cards, my detective. His laptop file marked “bills” is sparse. On that salary, okay, I get it (although the overtime adds up), but still, it’s important to have something in your closet that makes you feel rich. I should get him a Hugo Boss from Nordstrom’s. Send it anonymously in a box with a bow. Would I be that brazen? I like to think so. I need to go by that sports shop and pick up black running tights, black top, gloves, and black running shoes; fold them in my bag, bring them home, lay them out on the bed in the guest room, in the shape of another me. Or maybe something different: a tight dress and Salvatore Ferragamo heels. Waiting for that night when I kill again. Oh, yes. But not yet. My detective needs to get a little deeper into Gallagher before I deliver him another. This is my game. How smart is he? I have to be patient, which, I must say, is not a top-ten quality of mine.

  Chapter 6

  “You look like shit, Carver.”

  Coroner Lester Bryant is dressed in fresh whites, gloves snug. He stands beneath a light hanging over Gallagher’s pale-bluish flesh. The morgue is quiet. Lester nods and waves me toward him. He’s tall and thin, used to play basketball at La Salle before med school and a forensics career dicing stiffs and assigning causes of death—thousands over the years. He testifies at trials with the air of an unimpeachable uncle. Lester keeps a flute in the morgue and sometimes, mostly at night, sits on a stool and plays for the dead.

  “Long night,” I say.

  “Not for this guy.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think a lot of stuff, but with this particular stiff, it seems he died from that big, smooth, even gash in his neck. Nothing else on him. No bruises or cuts. Kept himself nicely manicured. Look at those nails. That’s a man who paid attention to detail. Lot of good it did him. Small guy too. Five-seven. Hundred and thirty-eight pounds. Scant muscle. Spindly. What’d you find at the scene?”

  “Not much. Doesn’t look like a robbery.”

  “Clean slice. Almost professional. Definitely a quality blade. He bled out in seconds,” says Lester, reaching for tweezers and bending toward the gash. “I hear the mayor’s office is paying attention. Big architect, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll be catching shit from all directions. Ortiz must be in a state. He’s agitated when it’s normal. Drinks way too much coffee.”

  “He’s called a few times.”

  “You’re calm, Carver. That’s what I like about you. You’ve alway
s been so calm, or are you just tired every time you roll in here?”

  “I get excited.”

  “When?”

  “Disneyland,” I say, winking.

  “Okay, sure, smart-ass. But when else?”

  “When I catch a doer. Swim in the ocean, eat a breakfast burrito on the beach.”

  “Riveting. You should put that on a Tinder profile. Isn’t that it, Tinder or Kinder or some shit like that?”

  “I don’t use them.”

  “Resistant to social media? You gotta embrace the now, man. You could be one swipe away from a goddess.”

  “Or a psycho.”

  Lester and I smile. He puts the tweezers down and sips coffee over Gallagher. A Chet Baker–like trumpet solo drifts up from a small Bose speaker. Other stiffs—a black guy, a Latina, an old white man with a missing arm, a young woman with a messed-up face—lie naked on slabs. Rows of cuts and traumas, bullet wounds and shattered bones. A few, like the black guy, lie there without a mark. But I have never seen one at peace here. The body is a land of sin and violation. It yields much. When I was starting as a detective, I’d come here and sit with them for hours. I thought they had something to tell me. A whisper between us. An understanding that I would close the final pages for them. Find who put them here and gather their silent shrieks for truth. You can hear them if you listen. My father taught me that. His was the first dead body I saw on a slab, in St. Catherine’s Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. He was beaten to death in an alley not far from the old wharf. His bruised and swollen face seemed too large and strangely colored for the rest of him. I was used to his damaged face; he boxed throughout New England, but the man lying on the slab was hurt more. It was him, though. Small demon tattoo; tight, compact muscles; bent fingers; big feet. So white he was under the light, as if scoured. Except his face. Most of his teeth had been knocked out, and I had imagined how he must have fought hard before he went down. My father was a battler, a man who inflicted and invited pain. I envied and despised him for that. He’d yank me out of bed at night and shadowbox around me like a phantom against moonlit walls. “Boom, boom, boom,” he’d say. “Boom, boom, boom.” Sometimes, he’d hit me. A glancing blow to the jaw, a jab to the gut—never enough to knock me down or make me cry, but just to let me know how cruelty was part of life. He said something like that once as we jogged along Cliff Walk with the ocean spread before us. My father came from old money, but he never fit into it. He started boxing when he was young, dropped out of Princeton and drifted back north. He married my mother, a schoolteacher. They lived in a small apartment off Malbone Road. When my grandfather, who called my father a “ruffian” and a “disappointment,” died, he left my father one million dollars. The other four children received twenty million each. The rest was spread to trusts and charities. The big family home was sold, the possessions auctioned. My mother said the whole affair was a “great dismantling of what had been.”