My Detective

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “Yes, they did. But I’ll admit they intrigued me.”

  “That’s a good word.”

  “It’s a very LA word. Everyone out here is intrigued.”

  “True,” says Jacob, sensing my peeve at the current state of Hollywood and wanting again to shift subjects. “What shall we do? Late dinner? Drink?”

  Jacob turns right on Wilshire. The night is cool; the hills glimmer. One could feel content, sitting in Jacob’s leather seat, watching his hands on the wheel, the hermetic quiet of the car, the faint music, safe from the world beyond the windshield. I don’t feel that way, but I’m sure people do. Jacob pats my knee. Says nothing. He’s just there, lit by oncoming headlights.

  We haven’t slept together since the night we first met, after a John Adams symphony at the Phil. Letting him into me was a mistake. I went to the bathroom afterward and cried while he slept. It was at his house. I had no room of my own. I stared at myself in the mirror, touched my face, my breasts, wondered whether they felt the same to Jacob, to any man. The bathroom lighting was soft, and I glowed—my tallness, tapered lines, flat belly, blue eyes, the way my black hair fell to my shoulders. A woman of my height can intimidate. You can see it in men’s eyes. They want, but inside their desire is a curl of doubt, like when Odysseus approached the Sirens. I leaned closer to the mirror. Was I beautiful? No. But not as far away as many. I stood there for a while. Running my fingers over myself. Into myself. Deciphering. The body absorbs what the mind cannot believe. It whispers to us; oh, yes, if you listen the body will speak. It is mostly honest, but like the mind, it can play tricks too. I left the bathroom and wiped my eyes and slid back into bed with Jacob, studying him in the dark, his profile (he’s an inch shorter than I) sharpening with the dawn. He awoke and kissed me and I pretended it was all okay and we lay in sheets imported from Argentina or was it India and I listened as Jacob smoked and talked about wanting to get Kenneth Branagh to direct a film that would star Annette Bening and Kristen Stewart; the script was in its third rewrite but almost ready and the financing was falling into place and Jacob could see the stars aligning in the strange, hopeful math that is a producer’s life.

  “You know,” Jacob says as we cross La Brea, “there’s a new place that opened in Koreatown. Jonathan Gold raves about it. It’s one of those out-of-the-way places he tends to find—you know, a kind of hole-in-the-wall. Want to try it?”

  “Not tonight. I’m a bit tired and have an early day tomorrow.”

  “Another time, maybe.”

  Jacob sighs and turns the music up. He looks over at me and winks. Harry Nilsson’s voice rises. The soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy, Jacob’s favorite, the movie that changed his life. He can’t help himself. He tells me again the story of his revelation. Jacob can be cute when he’s enthused. But I can’t indulge him, or we’ll drive around LA until the sun comes up, while he exhausts me with his cinematic catalogue. Besides, I want to get away from him, back to my Victorian in Angelino Heights, to the quiet wood and empty rooms. I have boxes that must be filled.

  “I had never seen anything like it before,” he says. “So raw and real. Hoffman and Voight. The cruelness of New York. The tenderness misfits can find in one another. That’s what life is, don’t you think? Giving and collecting grace. It came off the screen at me. That’s what I wanted to do. Isn’t that how you told me you felt about architecture? That little church you saw.”

  “You know the story.”

  “Remind me.”

  Oh, God. His cuteness has turned insufferable.

  “A summer road trip,” I say. “I was eight or nine. My father loved to drive with no destination in mind. My mother didn’t come. We stopped in a town in western New Mexico. I don’t remember the name. We parked at a whitewashed church designed in the mission style. It was small. Not remarkable, but to me it was perfect. That shape and those simple lines rising from the dirt. My father was a contractor. He used to take me to his work sites and teach me to draw. To imagine something out of nothing. We sat on the car hood that day. The sun went down behind the church. People came. A man opened the church and they went inside and lit candles. It was a holy day, I think. My father put his arm around me and I thought, I would like to design such a place.”

  “Why didn’t your mother go on that trip? You never say much about her.”

  “She floated in and out. My father called her ‘the butterfly.’ I loved that he gave her that name. He was such a protector. She was manic. Darkness and light. I’m sure you know the condition.”

  “Euphoria and despair.”

  “In extremes. She’d fill the house with music and sing and paint and dance with me around the living room. She could be magic. Very childlike. Every experience the first. Then she’d crash and close the door and lock herself away. For days. In her room. My father tending to her and wiping away my tears about Mommy. He was a strong, loving man. He checked her into a few institutions, and she would be better for a while and she’d come home. She never came back the same. Something gets taken, you know? A kind of vacancy. She was like that. Different. Medicated. ‘They’ve stolen the stars from my sky,’ she’d say. She’d wander through rooms. She left the stove on one day and burned our house down. I was ten or eleven. My father and I had gone to play tennis, and when we got home, she was standing in the front yard in her nightgown. The flames were wild behind her. She ran to us and we all held one another like it was normal, like you could burn down a house and it would be okay. She was like that. Beautiful like that. I feel those highs sometimes. The lows too. Not like hers. Hers hit the stratosphere and the abyss.”

  “Do you have a therapist? I know a few good ones. Yogis, too.”

  “I’m sure you do, Jacob. I was seeing someone. I’m better now. Much better. I run and exercise. I meditate. I shouldn’t have told you. You’ll think I’m nuts.”

  I want out of this conversation. But he pulls over and stops. He leans toward me and pats my cheeks with a handkerchief. He takes my tears, the ones I didn’t feel coming. If I were in love with him, this would be the moment that would make it last. The tender revelation of imperfection. We are drawn to flaws by a vanity that we alone can fix them. That is love, isn’t it? The delusion that we, as my father thought with my mother, can mend the broken parts. You cannot. I glance at Jacob so he knows this. So clever and smooth he thinks he is. He’s detected weakness, and there’s smug compassion in his eyes. That’s unfair. I am the false one. Deceitful. I would like him to know I wasn’t always so. I could tell him everything. No. It’s time to clip this, get back on the road and into the falling night. He leans closer, thinking he’s connected to a piece of me in a moment he’s captured. No, Jacob, no. I cannot give what you want.

  “What happened to your mother?” he whispers, looking, he thinks, dead into me.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore, Jacob,” I answer, my voice curt.

  The desired effect. He retracts his handkerchief. Shakes his head, puts a palm to my face as if he understood. But how can he? Slink back into your seat, Jacob. You don’t get my mother; you don’t get my life, my history. We sit in silence. The outside noises return. He eases into traffic. After a few blocks, we stop at a light. Our tender storm has passed. He turns up the volume on the radio. “A Famous Myth,” sung by the Groop, plays from the soundtrack, and Jacob, who seems quite pleased with himself, explains the music and mood that made Midnight Cowboy.

  “C’mon,” says Jacob, in full cheery mode. God. Was he not living in the same moment as I? “We’re almost at Koreatown. Let’s stop at that place.”

  “Not tonight. Please.”

  “Okay, but one night soon.”

  He is persistent. I guess that’s how movies get made. He wants to go back to our first night. He wants me and he thinks he’s found a way in. There’s so much he’ll never know. I look out the window. Jacob cuts north to Third Street, and we drift through Larchmont and dow
n toward Rampart, where Our Lady of Guadalupe is spray-painted on bodega walls, and Korean children play borrowed violins in open windows. I watch as we roll past. There’s a lot to be done. What’s started can’t be left unfinished. My game must begin again.

  Chapter 10

  The taxi drops me at a walk-up north of Houston Street in the Village. I hurry through the rain and inhale New York: asphalt, flowers, bread, coffee, sewage, salt, and the bite of winter. I haven’t been here in years. I buzz. “Detective Sam Carver.” A voice comes back: “Elevator, fourth floor.” I am delivered to a loft of wood floors, high beams, industrial windows, a stainless steel kitchen, a bed against a brick wall, and black-and-white photographs, all of New York, spread over the expanse. A Pollock-style painting, as if a rabid portal to another world, hangs between two windows.

  “It’s not him. It’s an original by a lesser-known. But I do like it. The photographs are mine. My new hobby.”

  Miranda Gallagher walks toward me, as slight as the “fairy” Jamieson told me she was. Ginger hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her face—you can tell she was a freckled child—is bone white and austere. The hand she offers is small but strong, and her green eyes stay on mine as if coming across an old friend and wondering where all the years went. Her smile is a flash. It softens her. She leads me across the apartment—must be two thousand square feet—to a corner of Afghan rugs, a couch, and scattered chairs that has the air of a Moroccan salon. She lights up a joint and extends the match to a candle. Not the Disney lawyer I had imagined.

  “It’s been raining for days,” she says. “How’s LA?”

  “Cloudless.”

  “As ever. You want some?”

  She offers me the joint. I decline.

  “I’m on duty.”

  “You’re three thousand miles away from the office. I don’t think anyone will know. Besides, this is just an informal talk, right?”

  The scent is sweet. She takes a hit, blows smoke. She looks at me and out to the rain.

  “I’ve been trying to mourn him, but I can’t,” she says. “Maybe it’s shock. The news went through me when Arthur called, but I’ve been away a long time and it seems like Michael is still just on the other coast. We hadn’t talked in more than two years. I suppose you’ve heard it ended badly or abruptly or however Arthur may have put it. Arthur’s a good man—a bit pompous, as I’m sure you’ve gathered—but he’s not always succinct, except of course in his architecture.”

  She takes another hit.

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” I say.

  “I didn’t hate him, and I didn’t kill him, so let’s get that settled. I’m a lawyer, as you know.”

  “Disney.”

  “Back there, yes. I’ve opened a small office here. Venture capital clients mostly. Michael and I made good investments over the years. I don’t worry about money. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious. It’s not meant to. I’m just letting you know.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “The day I left. We spoke once on the phone after that, mostly about financial things.”

  “He never came to New York?”

  “If he did, he didn’t call me.”

  “I thought you might be at the funeral.”

  “Why would you ever think that? Is that common in your work, for the ex to show up and weep over the coffin?”

  “It happens.”

  “How sad.”

  “Why did you and Michael split?”

  She walks to the kitchen. Things clatter and hiss, and she returns with a pot of tea, a French press of coffee, croissants, and jam. She puts the tray down, stands at the window, tracing squiggles of rain on the glass. She turns back toward me, tamps out her joint, and sits down. She holds the silence for a while, and I gather she’s a good trial lawyer, in control, every movement compact and purposeful. Juries like that.

  “I was in love with Michael, and for a long time, he loved me. We had a good life, Detective. We each had plenty of space. Our careers fulfilled us. Michael, as I’m sure you’ve been told, had quite an ego, but he was a man in search of perfect buildings. Elusive, impossible, I know. But I admired that. I loved that, actually.” She sipped tea and gestured for me to have something. “I don’t know how love dies, Detective, but it does. You don’t notice at first, and then one day, it’s not there.”

  I pull out my notebook and thumb through pages.

  “Arthur said there was a turning point. He said Michael told him there was a ‘quiet, intense explosion.’”

  She winced.

  “What does that mean?” she says, mouthing the words to herself: quiet … intense … explosion. “I don’t know what that means, Detective. It sounds quite self-contradictory. How can an explosion be quiet? Is it a riddle? Arthur loves riddles. Michael and I did have a few fights, but by then it was over anyway. Just noise, really. The spirit had even gone out of those fights at the end.”

  I sit back and look around. She sips.

  “Did he have an affair? Did you? Forgive me, but I’m just trying to figure it out.”

  “No one had an affair,” she says, looking at me, not blinking. “I really don’t have anything else to say. Michael and I fell out of love. Maybe it was ugly in the end. Failure makes people angry and ugly. Maybe pots were thrown. But that’s our business. That’s personal.”

  I sip my coffee. I reach for a croissant, spread apricot jam on it. She pours herself more tea.

  “Did you know Paul Jamieson well?”

  “He was Michael’s closest friend. He was at the house a lot. I liked him to a point. Everything about Paul was seduction. I even think he tried to seduce me. It was just his way. He and Michael go back to Cornell, you know. And Stephen Jensen. Stephen was much quieter. He filled the room less than Michael and Paul, if you know what I mean. Somewhere along the line, years before I left, Stephen went his own way too. I don’t know why. Michael and Paul could be suffocating presences. It was always about them, their ideas, their jokes, their very certain views of the world. Don’t even mention architecture. They’d go on for hours about the obscurest thing. Gargoyles and plinths. Postmodern and Wright’s organic designs. Los Angeles is a strange mingling of so much. ‘Like the Bible,’ Michael used to say.”

  “Paul mentioned Michael’s laptop had been hacked.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, I remember. He was frantic. In a rage. He knew it had been hacked, but he didn’t know what had been taken, if anything. It drove him crazy. At first, he thought it was someone trying to steal his designs. A great architectural conspiracy. The firms are intense in LA now. All the buildings and contracts. Billions. But Michael didn’t keep much company work on that laptop. It was his personal one. Maybe he was laying out a grand scheme for a new city, like Albert Speer. Do you know him?”

  “Hitler’s architect.”

  “Yes. There’s a passage in his diaries—Michael read them many times—of Speer being flown back to Berlin after the Nuremberg trials. He was going to prison at Spandau. He looked out of the plane and saw old women scavenging for wood in the Tiergarten. He saw miles of smoke and bombed streets. Rubble. His dream destroyed. The Olympus he was going to build for Hitler came to ash. Imagine that, Detective: all you could have had, gone. Vanished.”

  “He lived a long time in prison, as I recall.”

  “Writing memoirs, gardening, and feeding mice.”

  She stops and looks around the room and up to the rafters.

  “What must that be like, Detective, to be alone in a small cell with your failure?”

  “Some endure. Some go crazy.”

  “I’d go nuts.”

  She nods toward the tray. “Have another croissant, Detective. You must be hungry. I get them at a bakery around the corner, run by a French-Lebanese. They’re very good.”

  “They are,” I say, taking a bite. “What
did Michael do with the computer?”

  “Smashed it with a hammer and threw it in the ocean. That’s what he told me anyway.”

  “With everything on it?”

  “I don’t know what he did with the files. But as I said, it really unnerved him. I told him it could have been random. Some malware or troll. But he wouldn’t have it. He thought it personal.”

  “I guess, in a way, it is. What kind of things do you think he kept on it? Did he have a grand city? Something else?”

  “I wouldn’t begin to know. What’s in someone’s soul, you might as well ask.”

  “Did he have enemi—”

  “Of course he had enemies. Who doesn’t? But someone who would kill him? I don’t think so.”

  Tears shine in her eyes. She wipes them. She knows more than she’s saying. The ex always does. She masks it well, but there’s hurt in her sentences, as if she’s holding her breath, leaving an empty space at some betrayal, an unexpected transgression from a man she thought she knew. Enough to quit a job and move here, taking pictures and pulling joints from a small box of inlaid mother-of-pearl. The rain beats hard against the windows. We stand and look out. The street is slick, umbrellas bob, clouds roll in low from the south. A city in the rain feels ancient—the mist and the half-light, the sounds of voices hurrying.

  “This building used to be a machine shop,” she says. “Before that, way before, it was a factory where immigrants sewed. I have a picture of it somewhere. Rows of women and spindles. Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, Germans. It must have been quite a time back then in the city. Would you like more coffee, Detective?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It’s odd how we end up, isn’t it? The curves and crooked lines we take.”

  “There are few straight lines.”

  “In architecture but not in life. Michael taught me that.”

  “I think you’re not telling me something.”

  “I don’t know what that would be, Detective,” she says, with a deep, unwavering stare. She’s good. “But the laptop does seem intriguing, doesn’t it?”