“We’re looking into everything,” I say.
McKinley leans against a drafting table. I think he might faint.
“I’m sorry,” he says, loosening his tie. “How does one make sense of this?”
“How long have you worked together?”
“Paul became a partner five years ago, but he’s worked here since shortly after he graduated from Cornell.”
McKinley offers a few other details. Jamieson had no wife. He worked out a lot and boxed at Larry Clabon’s gym, where Denzel and other movie stars hit speed bags and skip rope. He loved the opera. He partied on weekends and had a collection of girlfriends, including an actress with a small part in a Hulu series about transgenders, and a cellist from Spain who played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “And, of course,” said McKinley, “he was thick as thieves with Gallagher. A shame what happened to him too. But he was a sneaky sort. Always plotting. Ferrety eyes. I never liked him. He had math but no art in him, if you know what I mean, Detective. His designs had some fine lines; some were even unique, but they didn’t touch the eye or move the soul. A building must do that. Paul had that. I worried he was too close to Gallagher and might lose it.”
“Do you know if Paul used an escort service?”
“Paul? Nooooo. Why would Paul need that? I just told you, women adored him.”
McKinley’s eyes fill with tears.
“This is so terrible. How are these related, Detective? Two friends, two architects.”
“We don’t know yet. There’s a lot of competition for contracts in this city.”
“I don’t think we have an architect hit man running around erasing the competition. This is not the sanitation business in New Jersey.”
“Like I said, we’re looking at every angle.”
“Yes, I understand. I’m sorry. That just seems far-fetched to me.”
“Do you know Stephen Jensen?”
“Jensen. Jensen. Ahhh, yes, he’s an architect in Santa Monica. Does homes mostly. Beautiful homes along the coast. You know, that’s the thing about LA, Detective. Some of its best architecture is hidden behind bushes and hedgerows. In homes. Organic, as if the air conspired with the land. I always tell people that. To know LA, you have to know its homes.” McKinley is drifting, wiping his eyes, speaking in tangents. “I’m sorry. But yes, Jensen’s carved out quite a niche for himself over the years. You suspect him. A slender fellow. A quiet, unassuming sort, as I recall. A man you would not notice coming to or leaving a party.”
“Was he close with Paul and Gallagher?”
“At one time, yes. But I have not seen Jensen around or heard Paul mention him in ages. What are you thinking, Detective, if I may ask?”
“Just looking at everything.”
“You think Jensen did it … or could be next?”
McKinley is starting to annoy me. He’s gone from demure and broken to pointed and quizzical. They do that sometimes, feel they’re characters in a mystery, a breath away from a killer. He doesn’t have much else to offer, but I tell him I’ll be back and that we’ll need to look through Jamieson’s Macs.
“Have your office computers ever been hacked?”
“Certainly not.”
“What about Paul’s personal laptop? He ever mention something like that happening?”
“Not to me.”
“If you can think of anything,” I say, handing him my card.
I take a few more notes and thank McKinley and head over to the coroner’s office. The city feels fresh, clean almost—last bits of morning shade, unfinished buildings draped in meshings like ghosts. I hear workers’ voices above me, their clatter and laughs, but I can’t see them. My Porsche jerks—the clutch slave cylinder acting up—and I join the traffic, drifting beneath palms and murals: a five-story Anthony Quinn dancing on brick at the old Victor Clothing Company across from the Bradbury and, farther down Broadway, a skeleton in a sombrero, sipping from a beer bottle. I park in front of a big-windowed café and run in for a quick espresso, but espressos, despite the name, are seldom quick in America. Mine slides toward me half-warm and bitter, no foam. I mention this to the barista. She looks at me with a sneer and takes my four bucks.
“Morning, Lester,” I say, stepping into the morgue. “Not too many bodies today.”
“Violent crime is down, haven’t you heard?”
“How about my guy?”
“The architect. Two in a week. That’s trending, or something like that. A Twitter thing.” Lester nods and points to a few bodies down. He’s listening to a Gerry Mulligan–Stan Getz CD and burning mint-orange incense. He clicks on the light over Jamieson’s naked corpse. Powdered skin, faint webs of veins, but the eyes still open, the face calm, lips smeared purple, the pale blue bow around his neck.
“You thinking kinky?” says Lester.
“You’re quite perceptive.”
“Ah, wise guy today, huh? I’ll indulge. Mascara, lipstick, ribbon.”
“There’s a pinprick on the neck.”
“A needle,” says Lester. “But the stab to the heart killed him. You find the knife?”
“No.”
“Clean plunge. That Gallagher guy, that other architect—he had a clean slice to the neck. Care, skill, you know.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I haven’t had my scalpel on him yet.”
“Looks like it could have been a woman,” I say. “Saw her on the building’s video surveillance.”
“Mmmmm. Well, then, here’s my wild-ass guess until I do the science. This guy’s strong, powerful. Look at his arms and shoulders. No woman took him down without a little help. She may have needled him with a paralyzing drug. Tranquilizer of some sort. You can get all kinds of stuff on the web. You ever notice that? How much crap you can buy just sitting around at home? Or maybe she knew a vet or a doctor. She zaps him with the needle. She probably slipped something into his drink so he’d be woozy by the time she injected him. Anyway, he can’t move. The knife comes out. Clean cut on the finger too. You find it?”
“No.”
“Who takes a finger?”
“A collector,” I say, half smiling.
“Two dead architects but no pattern—that’s what you’re looking at. Somebody’s messing with you.”
We stand over the body.
“We come and go in mystery, don’t we, Carver?”
“Womb to grave.”
“And all the stuff between. Speaking of which, my wife and I went dancing the other night. She said we were in sync, the way we moved. It did feel like that. For a minute. We seemed to float. I have to branch out more. Try new things. A lot of stuff to do before the grave.”
“Glad you’re working it out,” I say.
“Whatever. Dancing one night. The next, who knows?”
“I might start working out. Get back to running and lifting.”
“That’d be good for you,” says Lester. “You look like you could be a jock. Meet someone?”
“Can’t a guy just work out?”
Lester looks at me, raises his eyebrows. He unties the blue ribbon. He slides it into a clear plastic bag and bends over and studies Jamieson’s face. He snips an eyelash with scissors, puts it in a bag; swabs the eyeliner, puts it in a bag; swabs the lipstick, puts it in a bag; swabs the powder, puts it in a bag. Step by step, it accumulates, the tiny, intricate things that will fill a box marked “evidence.”
“All right,” says Lester, “let me get on with it. Call me or stop by later. I’ll try to have something solid.”
I nod goodbye and head to the door.
“Hey,” he says, “turn that music up on the way out. It’s lonely down here today.”
Back in the car. Buzz. Ortiz.
“Crime scene guys got his lap at the house. Nice place in the hills off Sunset. You better get u
p there. Guys say a lot of paintings on the walls. Not abstract splatter, but real paintings, like the old guys from Europe. Anyway, get there. Chief’s in a meeting with the commissioners. Turns out Paul Jamieson—and I quote from some douche bag in the mayor’s office—was ‘an important architect but not a big political donor like our Mr. Gallagher.’ Which is good and bad, but it takes a little heat off. Not much, but a little.”
“We still have two dead architects.”
“This is what I’m saying, asshole. But one’s not politically connected, so …”
“What about the Renaissance?”
“Yeah, I know, we don’t want to spoil that. The heat is on, don’t get me wrong.”
“You seem confused.”
“I’m full of clarity.”
“You get my text about the video surveillance?”
“A woman, huh? Makes sense with Jamieson, the way you say he was all posed and made-up. But Gallagher took strength. Cut like that coming from behind. Not that women aren’t strong—Jesus, you know, I gotta watch what I say or I’ll get written up for being sexist or some shit. Sure, a woman could have done it, but it’d have to be a strong one. The one in the video look strong?”
“Couldn’t tell. She looked lovely, though.”
“What …?”
“Breezy coat and a fedora. Like from an old movie.”
“You sleeping enough? We don’t want wet dreams over murderers, Carver. Keep that shit to yourself and arrest somebody, lovely or not.” I hear him breathing, know he’s fingering the mustache. “That broad from the Times has been calling again. Important message to give you. What’s that about?”
“‘Broad.’ What is this, the thirties? Have you been watching LA Confidential again?”
“I love that. Only one to get it right. But no. I’m just saying.”
“She’s been calling. I don’t answer.”
“Best way to handle a reporter.”
“I’m driving to Santa Monica to see Stephen Jensen.”
“The third Musketeer.”
“He and Gallagher and Jamieson were close once, but then they split. Don’t know why. Gallagher and Jamieson stayed tight, but Jensen went his own way.”
“Okay, go there and swing by Jamieson’s house on the way back.”
“Yeah. One more thing. You know a uniform named Lily Hernandez? She was at the Jamieson scene. Smart cop. Strong too. She does Iron Woman competitions. Swims miles in the ocean. I don’t need a partner. Don’t want one, but if one day you forced one on me, maybe she …”
“Don’t know her. Let me check. It’d take a while to bump a uniform up.”
“Just mentioning it. That’s all. For later. Not now. I’m on my own on this case.”
The 10 is clogged. I get off at Culver City and take Washington to Lincoln. Salt and breeze. I park and stand and watch the ocean. Every wave a sound and roll from another time, white, green, glittering. A few surfers. Tourists. Russians. Iranians. A busload of Koreans. That dog with sunglasses and his wino owner, yoga classes, volleyballers, homeless, shopping carts, jugglers, a snake charmer, and a doom prophet, his long black hair down and wet, his tie-dye shirt drying on the sand like a banner in the sun. I point my face to the sky. Noises at the edges. I am warm and I could sleep. I could sleep for ages.
Jensen’s office is at the top of an eight-story art deco between the Santa Monica Pier and the Palisades. Scattered papers and blueprints. A tall, slender black woman appears and draws back a curtain. Light fills the room. Half-finished drawings of houses hang on the walls; photographs of monks and skylines and deserts and savannas and rain forests; rocks in a glass case, hammered copper pots, a tin can from Kenya, a postcard from Amsterdam. The woman—she is black and swanlike—steps into an adjoining room and opens another curtain. More light. Two cracked Oxford blood-leather chairs, two Macs, a drafting table, a cuckoo clock, a small TV, muted and tuned to CNN, and a large photograph of a sunset on a tea plantation in a place I do not know.
“What house is yours?” says the woman.
“I don’t have a house.”
“Oh, I thought you were checking on a design. We’ve been busy. Chinese. Europeans. Everybody wants a house on the coast. There’s only so much coast. People don’t realize that. It is finite. I’m Wanita.”
“Is Stephen here?”
“No. He’s gone,” she says. Her accent is African, curled vowels, floating consonants. “I think Montana. Fishing or hiking or climbing. I can’t keep up with Stephen.”
“Can you reach him?”
“He goes off the grid when he goes. Shuts his phone off and returns when he returns. Usually no more than two weeks.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Four or five days. He is, as my father would say, a spirit man. Can I give him a message?”
“I’m Detective Sam Carver. I need to ask him a few questions about Michael Gallagher.”
Her face tightens. I reach for my notebook.
“It is a shame. I read about it in the Times. Stephen was quite shaken. He’s a delicate person. His feelings, I mean.”
“Was he close to him?”
“Once, yes, but not for years.”
“How long have you been with Stephen?”
She nods, pours two coffees, and leads me to leather chairs by the window. We sit and look out to the blue, beyond the waves to the calmer water where freighters and sailboats move on the horizon. Her black skin shines in the light. Stephen, she says, was friends with Gallagher and Jamieson before she and Stephen met. He talked about them sometimes, pointed out their work when he would take her on “his meticulous architectural tours of Los Angeles. Hours and hours we would drive and each time was like seeing the city for the first time.”
Jensen, Gallagher, and Jamieson were students together at Cornell, and one by one, Stephen said quite by chance, they arrived here. They stayed close, but there was a falling-out. When she asked why he didn’t see them anymore, Jensen would shake his head and change the subject. “What happened, I don’t know,” she says, “but it hurt him. We saw them once at a conference in San Diego. Stephen nodded to them from across the room, and we quickly left. They lifted their glasses. They seemed like two brash schoolboys to me. Self-satisfied. Do you know the kind? Smug. Stephen is not like that.” She and Jensen met in Ethiopia. He had traveled to Addis Ababa to meet her father, an architect and archaeologist, who took him to ruins and medieval churches in Aksum and Lalibela. Wanita was her father’s assistant, and she accompanied them. She and Jensen fell in love, and he extended his visa and kept a journal and a sketchbook. After traveling back and forth for a year, they married. “All of this,” she says, “happened after what happened with Michael and Paul.”
“But you have no inkling of what broke up three friends? You must have sensed something.”
“I didn’t sense anything,” she says, tightening her jaw and looking at me hard. “As I told you, Stephen never spoke of it.”
“Paul Jamieson is dead,” I say.
The news moves through her. A tear rises at the edge of her eye. She stands with her coffee and looks at the ocean.
“What has happened, Detective?”
“We don’t know.”
“When did Paul die? Was he killed?”
“Yes. We found him this morning. Most likely, he was killed last night.”
“Stephen has been away. As I said, he left three, four days ago, after Michael was killed. I had never seen him so upset. The news came on the TV while he was working. He said he had to get away. He is a traveler, Detective. His comfort is the road.”
She sips. “Oh, God.” She sips again. “It’s cold.” She turns from the window, takes my cup, and pours fresh coffee.
“Should I be worried, Detective? He hasn’t seen them in so long. Why this? What connection could he possibly have?”
“We don’t know. We need to find out.”
“I’ll call him now,” she says. She hits a button. I hear it ring. No answer. “Please give me your number, Detective. I’ll leave it with Stephen. He will not answer. He never does on a trip. I will leave it on his voice mail, and maybe by chance he’ll check it.” She writes and hands me a number on paper. “This is Stephen’s phone.” I give her my card. She walks around the room, unrolls a blueprint on the drafting table. “He designs homes, Detective. Wonderful homes.” She wipes her eyes. “I don’t know how to feel. How should I feel? How do people feel in situations like this? Stephen may be in danger.” She lifts her coffee, puts it down before drinking it. She picks up her phone and walks back to the window and stands for a while. She calls Jensen again and leaves a message. Urgent, stern. She turns and walks back toward me, smooths her husband’s blueprint. “My father was a smart man, a man of history and a bit of a philosopher. I missed him for such a long time when I moved here with Stephen. He visited several times and died a few years ago. He loved wandering the ruins of my country and the traces left by Europeans. ‘Listen,’ he would say, ‘they are here in the air all around you. Listen.’ I remember that so clearly. The voices he said we could hear.” She shakes her head. “I am sorry, Detective. I’m rambling. Why would you want to know about my father? I don’t know what thought to have, how to feel. My father and his spirits came into my head. We are silly people, aren’t we, Detective? Silly people with ghosts.”
I close my notebook, slide my pencil away.
“How do you fit so much on such small pages?” she says.
The sun sets in my rearview. I exit the 10 at Robertson and head north of Sunset. I drive into the hills, thinking about Wanita and how her accent made me think of maps and books. Jensen’s a suspect. Has to be. A falling-out with two dead men years ago and now off to Montana, or so Wanita says. If he’s the doer, who’s the woman in the video? Wanita was rattled. More scared that Jensen could be the next victim than of his being the killer. Gallagher’s wife, Miranda, did not have that look on her face when she spoke of her dead husband. Hers was the stare of the betrayed. Wanita’s was different; it came from love. A rare thing. What is the connection between Gallagher, Jamieson, and Jensen? What split them apart? What was on Gallagher’s computer? I park, slip beneath yellow tape, past two uniforms and into Jamieson’s house.
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