“I suppose, yes, in a way.”
“‘I suppose, yes, in a way.’ What kind of answer is that? It’s noncommittal. So weak. Jamieson and Gallagher were right about you. Have you always been this weak? I don’t like men who give up,” I say, gritting my teeth, snarling in a voice I have never heard before. “I don’t like weak men. They’re pathetic. Excruciatingly pathetic. What good are weak men? They should die, don’t you think?”
Fear flashes across his face. It is only terror looking at the mask now. I say nothing more on this point. Let him wonder. Then I say—to myself, of course—let’s ramp things up a bit. I go to the cabinet above the washing machine and pull a knife from a shelf. The same one I used for Jamieson: six inches, sturdy, balanced weight, silver gleam. I turn. Jensen tries to make himself smaller. He says nothing. He closes his eyes. No fight, no pleading, no tugging at the chain. I sit and lay the knife by the lamp. It becomes the center of his universe. I cross my legs and sigh. I am suddenly amused. “But,” I say, “you must still see something in your head. Designs and the way you wanted buildings to be.”
He looks at the knife. Then at the mask. I can see him calculating. How to stay alive? Must be thinking he’s doomed, like a goat tied to a post during Ramadan, which I saw once in Cairo, knives flashing and blood filling alleys in praise to God. There’s something about Jensen, though. It’s as if he’d wanted this: to sit across from the mask, like a penitent slipping into a confessional and waiting for the priest’s shadow. Does he want forgiveness? Does he want to die? Maybe both. He just sits, chained, almost intrigued, like a man whose sin is too heavy to bear. Look at the way he stares at the mask. Not blinking. Amazed, like a child playing make-believe in a closet. Frightened but inviting it. Oh, yes. Am I to be confessor and executioner? I hadn’t anticipated this. Fascinating. Let’s see how it plays out.
“When I was a child, my father took me to New York,” he says, wiping away tears (Or is it sweat?), shaking a little, calming again. Spasms run through him. Maybe he doesn’t know what he wants. I wait. I want to hear this story. I lean toward him, my mask hovering not like a priest but like a vengeful spirit. “We walked from Grand Central Station. It was just after dusk and drizzling. The sky was full of mist and going black. We passed the New York Library. Those big lions. Do you know them? We kept walking along Bryant Park. Everyone was rushing with umbrellas. Then I saw it: the American Radiator building. Do you know it?”
I nod that I do.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Black stone dipped in gold. Like a castle. It seemed to float in the fog and rain. I had never seen anything like it. I stood and stared. My eyes climbed from floor to floor. The top was half hidden in the mist. I’d never experienced anything like it before or since. My father put his arm around me. We didn’t budge.”
“You wanted to build something like that?”
“Yes,” he says, looking at the mask. “It’s foolish. A boy’s fantasy. Do you know architecture? You mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright.”
I rise, smack him in the face. Again he accepts it. Rage burns, and my mind is back to that night. Yes, I am an architect. I have my own dreams and cities. You did not take them from me. You raped me and broke my body with the others, but you did not take my designs and imagination. They’re alive inside me, not so easily surrendered. An architect? Yes, I am. I understand him, that feeling he had. Seeing that building. A magical building in a boy’s life. It changed him. Just as that little mission church in New Mexico changed me when I was a girl. The things that come into us. Sharp and fast as arrows. Those realizations; nothing afterward is the same. We become newborn. I understand this about Jensen. Why, then, did he do what he did? Why did he dirty that little boy’s dream?
“What did your father do?” says the mask.
“My parents were teachers. History and science.”
“Did you love them?”
“Yes.”
“Was either of them crazy in any way? Mental illness?” An odd question, but I have my reasons.
“No.”
“A happy, normal family.”
“My father drank. Never abusive. But often distant, away from us.”
“Ah, the flaw. No family is immune.”
“He smelled of bourbon and pipe tobacco. That’s what I remember most. He died in a car accident. Hit a pole after a night at a bar.”
“How cliché.”
“It was. Yes. It didn’t feel so then. It felt unique and sad.” He pauses, swallows. “Your parents?”
“No, no, no. We don’t talk about me. This is your trial. The trial of a weak little man.”
Nice touch, that phrase. Trial has an ominous ring. He quiets, a slight scrape of chain.
“May I stand?”
The mask nods. He rises against the wall.
“How many days have I been here?”
“Does time matter?” I laugh like a ghoul, not intending to, but it just happens.
“I’m hungry. Can I use the bathroom?”
I nod to the bucket, which needs to be emptied.
“Please. A toilet.”
Men. Fucking men. I walk upstairs, pull the 9mm out of the kitchen drawer, return to the basement, point the gun at him, hand him the key to unlock the clasp around his wrist, follow him upstairs, gun to his back, let him use the hallway powder room. I hear him washing his face, the pat of a towel. He steps out. We are so close. Face-to-mask. He looks into my eyes. I poke the gun into his side. I almost pull the trigger. I nod. He turns, and we go back to the basement. He chains himself to the wall, throws me the key. He looks at me and sits, rests his head on his knees. I return to the kitchen and make him a sandwich—What am I doing? Why is he still alive?—and bring it down with a bottle of water. I place the gun on the table by the knife. I sit and watch him eat, like at a zoo.
“Thank you. This is good. This is a Victorian house, isn’t it? You’re restoring it. There used to be so many of them in this city, up in Angelino Heights and over on Bunker Hill. The Bunker Hill ones are gone.”
Ooh, a clever little shit. But still, it’s not as if he were leaving.
“We don’t talk about me. Or my house,” I say. “Why did you go that night to Jamieson’s place? Tell me everything. Every detail. I want to know every piece of what happened.”
He swallows the last bit of sandwich, sips water.
“I was supposed to meet them earlier, at a bar. We had all just started new jobs and wanted to celebrate. We’d gone to college together. I had to work late and couldn’t make it. They called later and told me to come to Jamieson’s. They were drunk and acting strange when I got there. Like they were hiding something. They brought me in the back door and we sat in the kitchen. They kept sliding shots of tequila at me. Opera was playing. Jamieson loved opera. He blasted it all the time. I was getting tipsy.” (Thought to self: strong men don’t say “tipsy.”) “It was fun. I felt like one of them,” he says. “I was the less secure one, always worrying. I’ve been that way ever since I can remember. I don’t know why. I always felt like the one trying harder than everybody else. I didn’t feel that way that night, though. I liked not feeling that way. I wanted it to last. We kept drinking and talking. Gallagher said one day the three of us would start our own firm and redesign the city.”
“Like gods.”
“Gallagher’s ego was that big. We were young and drunk. We talked about great architects. Wright, Piano, Foster, Nouvel. Of favorite buildings and styles. Art and public space.” (Again, note to self: they were talking about this, my passion, while I was drugged and naked in another room.) “It was dreamer talk from men who had yet to do anything. Do you know what I mean? We were showing off in front of one another.” He sips his water, fingers his chain. “The conversation turned, though. It got mean.” He takes a breath. “Gallagher and Jamieson started railing about women. How they shouldn’t be architects. They lacked a
esthetics, precision, and discipline. They saw the world differently than men and could not blend poetics and pragmatism. Jamieson used those exact words. Even drunk, he was a blowhard. At first, I thought they were kidding. I mentioned Zaha Hadid. I don’t know if you know her, but she was revolutionary. Her buildings curve and seem to stretch as if she’d invented a new geometry. I brought up a few others too. I didn’t know that many, to be honest. Architecture is a men’s club. Jamieson waved me off. He was quite intense about it. Gallagher nodded in agreement. They kept going on and on. I’d never seen that in them before. Vanity and ego, yes, but not blatant misogyny. They let it pass and we moved on to other things. The opera got louder. Jamieson sang tenor and Gallagher pretended to be conducting an orchestra with a fork.”
“Why didn’t you defend women more? Why didn’t you leave? Bringing up Hadid. Big whoop, she’s the poster child. You should have done more. People who do nothing are as guilty as those who act. That’s the first lesson of history, or religion. It sounded like a party of little Nazis with opera and architecture thrown in.”
“I thought what they were saying was nonsense. But I didn’t stop it.”
The eyes in the mask glare. They water and glare.
“You’re weak. Why should you live?”
I reach for the gun, retract my hand before I touch it. I prefer the knife. When the time comes. But let him wonder. Let him sit there and wonder whether that is the last sandwich he’s going to eat. I didn’t know that about Jamieson and Gallagher. I was selected and targeted. To be culled from the herd. It was hate and contempt, not your drunken frat-boy-variety rape. They wanted to damage me and prove their superiority, keep me as their little private joke. They had never seen my designs, didn’t know my concept of math and beauty, of calculus and form, of the history and artifacts we pull from to shape the present and contemplate the future. They knew none of that about me. They never asked, weren’t interested. I was a woman. Young and pretty and not scared of her opinion. I wonder what I sounded like before they drugged me. Was I eloquent? Did I speak of Gothic or Spanish Revival? Did they plan it, or did it just happen after martinis at a bar? I can’t remember now whether it was arranged. The way I recall it—and my memory is blurred—was that new architects in the city went out for drinks to get to know one another. Other architects were there. Were they all men? I don’t remember. Statistically, probably. Was I a real-life Architect Barbie, some toy Mattel put out to “inspire” little girls, like President Barbie and Veterinarian Barbie? Did we need a doll to make us matter? Was it a setup? Was I that naive? No. Yes. But I was a disruption, a flaw in their grand design. The how of my flaw doesn’t really matter, though, does it? Not now. We know the price—oh, yes, the price. Naked and splayed, a tumble thing in a mask. Shamed. Never knowing exactly what happened, but left wondering, trying to piece together broken parts of a night. I never could until the video. That was their mistake. A record of their vanity and hate, like the ledgers kept at concentration camps, the pictures of Serbs raping Muslim girls. The list of crimes is endless, some of them well known, shocking the world. But most, like mine, remain deep, hidden slivers.
“What next?” I say.
“They told me they had a surprise,” he says. His voice cracks. He’s tired. Remembering is draining him. He’s more humiliated than scared—a strange repentant, this Stephen Jensen. “We went to the living room, and a woman in a mask was slumped naked on a couch.”
“This mask?”
“Yes.”
He looks right at me. Doesn’t turn away.
“You saw the video,” he says. Ah! “You” means admission. We are in this together now. The woman in the mask has become a “you.” How touching.
“Yes, I have seen it. Many times.”
“You came after us,” he whispers.
“One by one. Down to you. Rapist number three.”
Pain covers his face, but it is a pain with repose in it, a pain of unburdening. Like a man justly at the gallows.
“The video tells everything,” he says. “I don’t want to say any more.”
“Not everything. It doesn’t tell me why you did it. Jamieson and Gallagher, I understand. I didn’t before, but I do now. They wanted me gone. Get rid of the lady architect. She’s beneath us. Jamieson attacked me with such rage. Why did you wince when I said that? That’s what he did. That’s what Gallagher did. That’s what you did. But Jamieson and Gallagher did it with hate. Glee. It was obvious. I can see that now. Their expressions, the way they laughed. It was their own sick opera.”
I stop. Play the video in my mind. The minutes pass. Faces from that night come back to me. Then I see them dead, pale, eyes closed. It’s hot in this mask; it presses against my skin. I turn toward my prisoner.
“But you, the scared one at the edge. You finally appear, pulling off your clothes, standing behind me. Did you like how they draped me over the couch? I am not a man, but I wouldn’t think that would be a turn-on. A passed-out girl folded over a sofa, with two other naked men standing around as if waiting for a bus. Is that erotic? Tell me, I want to know. Do men really like things like that? Did you really want to be third in line? Yes, you’re right, the video tells much about you, Stephen Jensen. But it doesn’t tell me why.”
I scrape the knife blade against the table.
“I’ve thought about that every day,” he says. “On my wedding day, when I sit to draw. That mask is there. In my mind. It follows me. Sometimes, when I haven’t seen it in a few days, I think it’s gone. But it comes back. It hovers just out of reach, like a light you can’t blow out. I apologize to it. Isn’t that strange? I apologize to an image in my head.”
“It’s before you now. Real. Want to touch?”
I rise, take a step toward him, bend closer. He doesn’t move. I step back and sit down.
“It’s in me. Inseparable as my breath,” he says. “I did it because I was a young, misguided, screwed-up, drunk man. That’s all the excuse I have. I’ve been through it every day. It is all I have. I was repulsed and attracted. Your vulnerability, helplessness.”
“You’re reducing it to the drunken primal? Can’t you do better than that?”
He pauses, swallows.
“It gave me power, a power I’d never had,” he says. “It’s sick, I know. How could you understand? I’m being honest. That’s what it was. That and wanting to please them. Sometimes, I hate myself as much for that as for what I did to you.” He looks at the mask. It does not react. “The man I thought I was to become was gone. My better self, if I ever had one, disappeared. That’s no justice for you, I know that. But it destroyed me. It got quieter and quieter through the years, but it was always there. Look at me. Not much of a prize. Not like Gallagher or Jamieson. I am sorry. That’s all I have to give you. It is who I am. Is that selfish? I’m sure it is. What I—we—did to you …” He trails off, looks at the knife. He weeps but doesn’t make a sound. I sit still. Tears pool at the bottom of my mask. I am crying over his words and the many years it took to hear them. My rapist is as ruined as I—two fools sacrificed long ago. Is that true? Can the two be one? No. I’m not giving him a pass. He is not a victim. That is sacrilege. He’s trying to wheedle. But his end is near. Oh, yes. I like seeing the pieces of him before me. They’re the toll. He didn’t get away with it. The chain scrapes. He pushes back against the wall.
“I think I know who you are,” he says. “I was walking on the beach about two years after that night. I saw you in a bathing suit. You were ahead of me. It was the way your shoulders moved, your legs. I followed but not too closely. You stopped and sat in the sand. You were alone. I knew I had seen you before. I remembered. I’d seen you at an architects’ gathering. It all made sense then. That moment on the beach, I knew.” He took a deep breath and again looked right at the mask. “But until you saw the video, you never knew who I was. Gallagher and Jamieson brought you to the house, through the ba
ck door. I came hours after you arrived with them. You were drugged and passed out by then. I was a mystery to you, just as you were to me until that day on the beach. I kept saying to myself after I saw you that it couldn’t have been you. You seemed so free. I thought, No, this is not a damaged girl. But it was you. I wouldn’t admit it. I let it pass. I let time pass.”
He takes another breath.
“You’re Dylan Cross,” he says. “You did that beautiful, lonely church out near Joshua Tree.”
I fly toward him with the knife.
Chapter 22
“How could that have been missed?”
“Typical stupid shit.”
“Jesus, Ortiz.”
“I know. I’m pissed.”
“A nine-one-one call. A woman says she sees someone holding a gun to the head of a driver in a Range Rover ahead of her. She gives the license plate.”
“Yeah, then she drives away. Scared. Who wouldn’t be? Dark, just before dawn.”
“Jensen’s car?”
“Yup. Got off the 101 around Echo Park near Angelino Heights. A car responded right away. But after the caller stopped following, we never knew where the Rover went. Only a few minutes passed, but it’s a big goddamn city.”
“Any street cam video?”
“That’s the thing too. The camera over by the freeway was broken. Nothing but black fuzz, really.”
“Christ. So a doer and a vic vanish right before us. The mayor’s going to love that.”
“The mayor won’t know about it. Understand me, Carver. The mayor won’t know.”
“Why did it take days before we found out it was Jensen’s car?”
“You really asking that question? How long you been on the force? How much crap falls through the cracks? Get over it. We have something to go on. Jensen’s not in Montana or Wyoming or wherever. He’s here. Dead or a hostage, I’m thinking.”
“No shit. Or maybe he escaped and is sitting in a Starbucks.”
My Detective Page 18