My Detective

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “Is she the killer, the girl in the mask?”

  “Don’t know yet, Maggie. Circumstantial so far. You still reading that Hammett book?”

  “No. I’m on to P. D. James. Devious little woman. What a plotter! Although it seems cleaner than what you do, real but not real. A romantic air to it. I’m sure it’s not like that in real life. You sound tired, Sam. You need to rest. Whatever happened with that girl you liked, the reporter? Susan. Did she end up moving?”

  “She’s in Washington.”

  “You don’t have the luck, do you, Sam?”

  “One day.”

  “I’m sure. Well, I better go. I need to check on your mom one last time. It’s after midnight here.”

  “Give her a kiss for me. I love you, Maggie.”

  “I love you too, Sam.”

  The bookstore is closing. No time for Winterson or a verse from Akhmatova, nothing to take into the dark. The late-nighters shuffle to the cashier with cheap books from the stacks upstairs. Blaze Foley is silent, lights are clicking off, the guy at the front who checks your bags yawns, and I wonder what this old bank building was like when the marquees shone over on Broadway and films were black-and-white and clever. I love classic movies. Not musicals so much, although I did have a thing for Cyd Charisse, who my father motioned to one night as we sat on our couch in Newport, both of us unable to sleep. My father, with a mischievous wink, looked to Cyd Charisse in the silver light as if to say, I love your mother, but there is a woman. Innocent in the way he did it, as if we’d both noticed the same splendid sunset.

  My father knew a lot about movies. They gave him a place to put his restlessness; that’s what my mother said. She’d start off watching with him but drift to bed around eleven, leaving him on the couch, whispers running through our house. I’d awaken many nights and think my father was conspiring with someone he dragged home from a tavern. But mostly it was Brando or Tracy or Frankenstein. I still remember the monster and the little girl and the flowers floating in the water, torches against castle walls. “You know, Sam,” my father said one night, “the monster didn’t ask to be brought into this world.” He’d make eggs and bring the skillet into the living room, with two forks, a beer for him, and juice for me. I’d usually fall asleep on the couch, and in the morning, I would awake in my bed, thinking how magical that was. My father would be gone, out running and punching the air. “Training,” my mother would say, and she and I would sit at the kitchen table and she’d ask what part of the movie I fell asleep at and then fill in the blanks. She would act out parts. She did a great Tippi Hedren in The Birds, a movie my father didn’t like but tolerated because he admired Hitchcock overall. We’d go to theaters and see new movies, but I liked the old ones best, sitting in my house, my mother sleeping, the silhouette of my father, the night quiet all the way to the ocean.

  I leave the Last Bookstore and walk across the street toward the winged-lion gargoyle standing stained and gritty above the Little Easy.

  “There he is.”

  “Lenny.”

  “You’ve got that look, Sam.”

  “What look?”

  “Your close-to-something look.”

  “What?”

  “Kind of an aura. I can always tell when you’re getting close.”

  “Scotch.” I nod toward four men in zoot suits at the end of the bar.

  “Who are they?”

  “Another movie. Period piece.” Lenny slides me the drink. “Seems like every night,” he says, “they’re filming a movie or series. Like Halloween, all these costumes. It’s Netflix and Hulu. Streaming stuff, you know. You need a lot of content. It’s a good moment for TV.”

  “Jesus, Lenny, you’ve been reading too much Variety.”

  “Fuck the trades. I’m just noticing things. You gotta be up on this stuff. Cultural shifts and all.”

  I sip. Lenny heads toward the zoot-suiters, wiping the bar along the way. I pull out my notebook and pencil. Images into words help me see. Her house, lawn, garden, hammock, windows. Stained glass and new paint on a quiet, tended street of wealth—not overbearing money, but the kind that allows indulgences and a bit of risk. It was fresh up there in the dusk: cool grass beneath my feet, the 101 hushed, the white stone of City Hall rising above Our Lady of Angels Cathedral and the federal buildings, which, when you slide down Temple Street toward Broadway, make you think of New York or Philadelphia. I write her name. Dylan Cross. Strong, a touch of the sacred, a boy’s name but not entirely. Perhaps a family name or a sound pulled from a poem. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I draw her mask. I stare into its blank, pale eyes. I’m not much of a sketcher. I don’t try to draw her tennis picture, which floats with the mask, like tarot cards in my mind. Lenny’s right. I’m close. She’s smart, though. May have disappeared already. Talked to John Hillerman and vanished. If it is her. It must be. But there’s no evidence linking her to either murder. No prints, no hair; only a filament of fiber, which, on the Gallagher kill, is not surprising. Gloves and a mask, most likely. Quick and done. Jamieson took time. The makeup, bow, wine—the whole scene. She was in there a while. But forensics and the crime lab lifted nothing. The underpants she left were never worn. A tease. The surveillance video does not betray her, either. A shadow through the foyer and into the street. She upped it a tick with Jensen’s kidnapping. I think she wanted him on her turf, a place she could control. Where? Would she have taken him into the high desert? I don’t believe so. She’s not working—at least, not on architecture. I close the notebook, set the pencil aside. I need a warrant to get into her house. I flag Lenny. Another pour.

  “Got it figured out?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Draining, huh? Fitting it all together.”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone’s gotta do it.”

  Lenny smiles. Dusty Springfield is playing low, and the zoot-suit guys are practicing lines and holding fake guns.

  “My mother’s not doing well,” I say. “Her mind’s going.”

  “It’s been a few years.”

  “It started slow, but not anymore.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “My aunt says she’s okay taking care of her. It’s getting to be too much, though. I can hear it in her voice. She never complains. Maggie’s a strong woman.”

  “She loves her sister.”

  I shake my head and sip.

  “Hey, Sam, you remember that guy who used to come in here with the trombone a while ago?”

  “The little black guy.”

  “Yeah, the crazy one. Always wore a turtleneck. Big glasses, Afro.”

  “Hard to forget.”

  “He just made a record.”

  “No shit.”

  “He came in the other night. I almost called you. Had his horn and a woman with him. They had a few drinks and we’re catching up, and he’s telling me that for a long time he couldn’t see himself in the world, where he belonged, why he mattered. Real existential shit. He’s saying all this, and the woman’s soft-kissing him on the ear, and he’s kinda like pushing her away but gentle because he’s really into what he’s telling me. He said he thought he was nuts and couldn’t figure it out and what to do with it. He lived on the streets for a while, then in a room at the Barclay. Shame what happened to that place. You ever see the tiles in there? Back in the day, that was the place to stay in LA. Now it’s all low-income. Anyway, that’s when he first started coming in here. One day, he said, he woke up and it was gone, like all the bad shit had cleared out. Hauled away in the night. He said he picked up his trombone and just started playing. Music was inside him. Just kept playing and writing thoughts down and somehow got it to a record company.”

  “He still have that Afro?”

  “Looks the same. Little heavier, maybe. Better teeth.”

  Lenny pours, takes a small one for hi
mself.

  “You believe people can change like that, Sam?”

  “Not often, but yes. When I was a kid, I thought my father might change. Wake up one day and be somebody else. The old self gone for a better self. You know? Sometimes, I thought I saw it, peeking through in the early mornings. There was peace in him then. He’d sit in the kitchen as the sun came through the window. He’d point himself toward it. Like a man thawing. It never lasted. My mother learned never to get too excited about those moments. They were tricks. She taught me to learn that too.”

  “Well, this trombone guy—Isaac Stapleton’s his name—found something.” Lenny wipes the bar. “He’s going to play here next week.”

  “Here?”

  “Nothing wrong with here,” says Lenny, all of a sudden proud of the place. “Maybe you could sit in on piano. Hey, what happened with the blond you danced to Frank with? The reporter one? I liked her.”

  “Moved to Washington.”

  “You ever notice, Sam, how your timing sucks with women? What was her name?”

  “Susan.” I think of her, the way her hair fell down, like a curtain.

  The zoot-suit guys are laughing and calling for Lenny to bring them another bottle.

  “I’d hate to be on set with them tonight,” Lenny says, walking toward them with a fifth of Jack.

  The door opens, and a man hurries in wearing khakis and a frayed button-down that doesn’t match his too-big muted-checkered blazer. His black hair is patted down and combed to the side. He slips his glasses into a pocket and tosses a folder on the counter. He’s restless, looking around, heading toward me. He waves. Tommy Yan hops on the seat next to me. He takes in the place.

  “There’s a homeless guy pissing outside on the wall,” he says. “Ortiz told me I’d find you here. Charming.”

  “Want a drink?”

  “I gotta drive back to the Valley. Ah, what the hell, yeah. What are you drinking?”

  “Scotch.”

  Lenny appears and pours.

  “I’ve never seen you out of the crime lab before,” I say. “I didn’t recognize you without the white coat and tweezers. What’s up, Tommy?”

  “This Jamieson case. We’ve got nothing. Zilch. How could she have been in that apartment so long and left no trace. They always leave a trace. I sent a team back to scour it again. I keep studying surveillance video from Jamieson’s building, and the rape tape. Nothing. I went through the Gallagher evidence too. Nothing. She’s like air, man. Mist. All we have are the images. Nothing to stick a fork in. She’s a ghost.”

  He takes off his blazer and drapes it over the chair. He sucks on a vape and says, “Ortiz says you may have something.”

  I look up and nod Lenny away. He walks slowly down the bar, hoping to catch a few words.

  “Didn’t figure you for a smoker,” I say.

  “Nerves,” says Tommy.

  I lean toward him.

  “I think she’s an architect. She’s got an office over by the Biltmore. She’s disappeared. Her boss says she’s in the desert. We—I—think she’s kidnapped the third man in the video. Stephen Jensen. He’s missing. Last seen in a car getting off the 101. She lives up in Angelino Heights. I went up there, but it was quiet. No one around.”

  “Warrant?”

  “Working on it.”

  Yan takes a long sip and catches himself in the mirror. He runs a hand through his hair.

  “You can’t blame her, can you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For taking some justice.”

  I feel the same way but don’t say it. A cop should never say it. It’s a line you don’t cross.

  “What’s in the folder?”

  “Stills I pulled from the video,” says Tommy. “I’m going to go home and take a shower and then I’m going to put them under a light and a magnifying glass. Study every inch of her skin. There’s got to be a mark, something, you know. We all have something. I didn’t know what way to go with her. Thought she might be dead. Killed the night of the video. Now you say she could be the doer. Damn. Makes sense, though.”

  He pulls a picture from the folder and slides it toward me. The mask looks out, her skin frozen—a different sensation than in the video, as if the image were permanent like a statue or an icon on a church wall. The Venetian mask, the lighting, makes a strange art. I don’t like thinking that, but there’s a terrible beauty in it. Yan leans in and traces a pencil on the outline of her body, then the mask and the dark slits for eyes.

  “The body,” he says, “is like a country. We travel across it, we’ll find something.” He finishes his drink and slips the picture back into the folder. “I won’t sleep tonight,” he says. “Won’t sleep until it’s done.” He puts on his blazer and stands to go. “What do men like us talk about, Carver? Away from work. I don’t get out much.”

  “Married?”

  “With three kids. It’s work and home. I love my job, you know, cases like this. I should get out more, though. Like now, having a drink in the night. Like this. Be somebody else. You ever want to do that? Be somebody else. Not forever. Just for a while. It’s what we do, you know; it grinds. The mysteries and the solving. The bodies. Amazing what our species can do to a body. Am I right? I like the how. It’s like a long equation. I was good in math. I’m empirically minded. My father was too.”

  “Some of the guys in the lab say you’re anal with a short attention span.”

  “I’ve heard that. Not true. I just think faster than they do.”

  He laughs. His eyes drift to the zoot-suiters.

  “Movie,” I say.

  “How’d you find this place?”

  “I live around the corner.”

  “Why?”

  “I like a city.”

  “LA’s not a city. It’s a collection of orphan neighborhoods.”

  “Downtown’s a city. You don’t think this is a city down here?”

  “Maybe. But it feels more like a borderland. Not one thing or another. A kind of in-between place, half apocalypse, half unsure what it wants to be. I love the old theaters on Broadway, though. Makes you think of another time. But they ruined it.”

  “Haven’t you heard about our Renaissance?”

  “I see a lot of cranes. Lot of holes.”

  “There you go. A new Rome rising.”

  “Cut this man off,” says Tommy, winking at Lenny.

  “You live in the Valley.”

  “True. I shouldn’t talk.”

  “It’s dry out there.”

  “Bone.”

  We both go quiet and look into our glasses.

  “If she’s the doer, I hope you don’t find her,” says Yan.

  “You’re Mr. Airtight. Never lose a case. Always the best evidence. You’d be okay with one getting away?”

  “Her, yes. Think I would.”

  He reaches into his pocket.

  “I’ll get this,” I say.

  “Thanks, Carver.”

  He’s out the door, letting in cool air.

  “Jumpy guy,” says Lenny.

  “Famous for it.”

  “Bet he’s good, though, huh? Like a bird dog. You want another?”

  “I better get home.”

  Chapter 25

  I wait in darkness for the click.

  How long have I been here?

  An hour, maybe more. My legs are tired; the gun hangs heavy. I dare not move. This is not the way I had imagined things going, but circumstance has forced improvisation. How much longer? I look down the hall and out the windows. No one on the sidewalks, lights aglow in the jewelry district. So quiet. The city. This time of night. I feel the carpet beneath my feet, the pictures on the walls I know but cannot see in the dark: the monk, the weaver, the orange man with the big hands playing guitar under a Van Gogh moon. I w
as here not long ago, when Sam was in Boston. I walked through his rooms, sniffed his shaving cream, touched his razor, lay on his half-made bed, flipped through his magazines, ate a cookie, ran my fingers over his piano. I’m back.

  I need to pee. But I dare not move. No. I wait. I wait for the click. I’m wearing my short black Herve and heels. I want him to know me in full. The length of me. A siren passes. Quiet. Note to self: my game is almost over. Gallagher, Jamieson, Jensen. All ended up as they should, and now it is only me, the final piece—and, of course, Sam. I am calling him Sam. He used to be “my detective,” then “you,” but now he’s Sam. We have an intimacy. Not in the way most lovers do—ours is stronger, deeper, and we’ve never met. Ah, but the things between us! Not like some bored couple going to dinner and a movie, talking about the news, and pretending to give a damn about the new show at LACMA. No. Sam and I are far more interesting. We have this thing. I can’t explain it, but it’s in me like a soul. Not a separate soul floating inside us, but something more suffused, woven throughout and animating every speck and bone. I wait. How much longer? I didn’t anticipate McKinley leading Sam to me. An unforeseen flaw in my plan, which makes me more alluring. A flaw offers entry. McKinley, I remember now, introduced me to Jamieson on that night way back when. I liked McKinley. He had a suave, disheveled charm. Old-school. He almost hired me. A lot of firms almost hired me then. A woman so close, so many times, but turned away. One has to wonder, how much longer? I don’t want to keep chasing stray thoughts. The coral reefs are dying, new stars have been discovered, driverless cars are here, a Brahms symphony has been found beneath floorboards in Vienna, Chuck Berry has died, and …