by Jack Bunker
“Thanks for your time,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see you in court sometime.”
He responds to her double entendre by throwing me a malicious scowl, a clear reminder of the torture-death threat that ended our last tête-à-tête.
FIFTY-TWO
The cops have already canvassed Ginger’s neighborhood, but some people clam up when cops come around, so I decide to rerun the task, maybe find someone who saw Karl’s car that night. I take Melody with me in case we run into any women home alone. Mel’s presence makes them more likely to open the door. It’s also more effective to have two sets of eyes and ears to pick up signals from an interviewee, to make sure you don’t miss an important follow-up question, or to make sure no one blindsides the back of your head with a hammer.
Nobody’s home directly across the street from Ginger or at the house on its downhill side. Moving uphill, the first house has an old Honda Civic parked on the apron. The front door is sandblasted to look like something rescued from a New Mexican ghost town, and there’s a weathered cowbell hanging beside it with a heavy wrought-iron skeleton key for a clapper. I clang it twice.
A silver-haired woman in a black unitard opens the door. Her face is more wrinkled than not, like a dried apple, but her eyes sparkle with life, and her body is hard and lean. Behind her I see a wall of mirrors in the living room with a ballet barre mounted across it. No furniture. Two girls who look to be about five years old practice moves at the barre.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am. My name’s Nob Brown, and this is my associate, Melody Elvenstar.”
She brightens at this. “Like fairy stars?”
Melody blushes. “My parents were in a spiritual phase when they picked it.”
“Each of the seven points of an elven star represents a gateway to the higher self. Your parents gave you a great gift in that name.”
Terrific. A witness who believes in fairies.
“Ma’am, we’re sorry to bother you,” I interrupt, “but we’re looking into the tragic death of your neighbor, Ginger Strain. Would you mind answering a few questions?” I nod over her shoulder at the two girls. “We can come back later if it would be more convenient.”
“Are you with the police?”
“No, ma’am. I’m a writer. But I’m working with the police. We all want her killer brought to justice. Ginger was gracious enough to grant me an interview a few days before she died, and we were supposed to meet again the day her body was found.”
“So you were fated to become involved,” she says and, buried deeply beneath my empiricism, some part of me agrees. She turns and calls out, “Why don’t you girls have your snack now. I’ll be out front for a few minutes.” Then she steps out onto the porch and closes the door behind her. “My neighbor’s girls. I give lessons.”
She and Melody sit on an old wooden porch swing suspended by a rusted chain. I hook my butt on the porch railing opposite. She introduces herself as Rose Gold, former high school dance teacher now retired along with the high school dance program. I ask her how well she knew Ginger.
“Oh, I knew her since she was a little girl. I gave lessons to both the girls.” She smiles at the memory. “They were such sweet girls. At least they were until Lana was…” She lets her silence fill in the missing exposition as her wrinkles seem to slump in a moment of mourning.
“Then you knew Lana, too.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been here forty years. Lana was away a lot, and there’s not a lot of street life on a street without sidewalks, but we’d see each other now and again. Watering and so on. It was hard on the girls with their parents on the road so much.”
For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me before that with Lana and Billy in the same band, the girls would have been left parentless whenever they were on tour.
“Who looked after them?”
“Billy’s mother sometimes, until she died. Sometimes a lovely French girl. I think her name was Claudine. Billy’s brother once or twice. And they had a nanny when they were babies.”
“What about Lana’s father?”
Rose stares at Ginger’s house, trying to summon a vision. Finally she says, “Not that I remember.”
“Were you home the night Ginger was murdered?”
“Oh yes. I don’t get out much in the evenings. My night vision is gone, so I can’t drive after dark anymore.” She glances sadly at her beige Civic. It doesn’t look like she drives all that well before dark either. The driver’s side door sports multiple scrapes, a rear taillight is broken, the front fender on the passenger side is so banged up it seems corrugated, and the hood, an incongruous forest green, is a junkyard replacement. Rose and her car have clearly shared some adventures.
“Do you remember seeing or hearing anything unusual that night?”
“As I told the police, there was nothing that I can think of.”
“No one coming or going?”
“I don’t spend a lot of time looking out the window. I usually have dinner in front of Newshour, then I catch up with my Facebook friends for a while, and if I’m not too tired by then, I’ll settle in to read by the fire.”
“Your Facebook friends?”
“Oh my, yes. I’ve got my Pilates group, my dance group, my hiking group, my spiritual group, and my book group. It’s a chore to keep up with them all.”
“Do you remember anything at all about that night?”
“No. I really don’t. Sorry.”
“Well, thank you for your time,” I say.
As Melody and I head down the steps, Rose has an afterthought. “You might ask Will. He mentioned something about some car.”
We turn back in unison and Melody asks, “Will?”
She points down the street at the house two doors down from Ginger and Billy.
“He does gardening for most of the neighbors. Has done for thirty-odd years. Comes and goes through our yards as he pleases. I’ll see him out there in the middle of the night sometimes. He goes through everybody’s trash and probably peeks through windows, but he’s always there when you need him. There aren’t many secrets around here that Will doesn’t know.”
“Did he talk to the police?” I ask.
“Goodness, no. He hid up in the hills somewhere while they were around. But you just tell him I sent you over. He’ll let you in.”
Between the two of them, the squirrel appears cleaner. Will’s face is smudged with mud, and his hair comes down below his shoulders in wannabe dreadlocks that look like they’re coated with bacon grease. He’s probably close to sixty, but his hair is jet black and his thin arms roped with muscle. His nose looks like a pig’s snout that’s been sunburned and mottled from what looks like a half dozen liquid nitrogen scars, as if he’s been one-upping skin cancer for years. His nails are long and blackened from gardening and rummaging through trash cans for the salvageable junk that now litters his yard—broken chairs, lengths of scrap lumber, old lamps, a plastic birdbath, a Hoover upright with a plant sprouting through a hole in its bag, the dome from an old-fashioned streetlight.
The squirrel perches on Will’s shoulder, as calm as a frenetic creature can be. Will hands a Brazil nut to the squirrel, who sits absolutely still except for its feverish chewing that extrudes a fine mist of nut dust on Will’s ragged, stained black-and-green-plaid lumberjack jacket.
Will doesn’t look me in the eye when he speaks but he invites us in when I tell him that Rose sent us.
We walk into a great room that, like the yard, is filled with piles of junk that presumably can’t survive the elements outside. In the midst of the mess, like a child’s secret fort, is a cozy seating area around a cast-iron potbellied stove. Will’s got a fire going, using tightly rolled newspapers for logs, as if the summer heat needed help. He sits on an old sofa covered with a ragged serape and an army-surplus wool blanket. Melody and I sit on once-discarded lawn chairs that Will has repaired with a clear bias toward function over style.
“We understand you saw so
mething the night of the murder,” I begin.
“Nex’ mo’nin’,” he says, “budappenat nigh’,” by which he means he saw it the next morning but it happened that night.
He’s got what they call a “yat” accent, as in “Where y’at?” Not regional, just unintelligible. A lot of dropped syllables and slurred consonants. The way he runs his words together, he’s hard t’unnerstan’.
“Scrape mall, lef pain.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get that.”
“Scrape mall. C’mon showya.”
That last part I understand. We follow as he grabs a flashlight and leads us outside to the street. He points the light at the rock retaining wall that fronts his house to illuminate a six-inch paint scrape. Scraped my wall, he’d said, and left paint.
“Warntair nawt fo. Sort’n mawnin whena come dowfada pape.” It wasn’t there the night before. He saw it in the morning when he came down for the paper.
“You’re sure?”
“I spected fweeds jessfo sunoun.” Another few questions, and I manage to deduce that he inspected for weeds just before sundown on the night of the murder. His yard may look like a junkyard, but Will does not tolerate anything sprouting between the rocks of his precious wall. Neither was he pleased to see its natural beauty scarred with paint, especially in a color as conspicuous as turquoise.
FIFTY-THREE
We wind across Mulholland from Laurel Canyon to Woodcliff to avoid rush hour traffic while enjoying the view. But I don’t notice the view. My foot’s on the gas and my mind’s on fire. Sophia, of the turquoise Miata, has been lying to me.
“Could you slow down a little?” Melody’s got both feet up, bracing herself against the dash.
“She’s been lying the whole time.”
Will noticed the scrape hours before Sophia found the body. That meant she was there sometime during the night. So she lied. It should be as simple as that. But it’s not. I don’t simply feel like a fool, I feel emotionally betrayed.
“Get a grip,” says Melody. “You’re acting like a cuckold.”
“A cuckold?”
“What do you want to do? Barge in and confront her? Think with your big head for a change. You don’t want to tip your hand until we think this through.”
“What’s to think through? She lied to me.”
“You are such a crybaby. She lied to everybody, including the police.”
She’s right. I’m letting my emotions lead my actions, like I did on the force. When the fuck am I going to learn my lesson? I ease up on the gas and take a deep breath.
“Maybe we should grab a coffee before we head home,” I say.
She lets out a sigh of relief. “That’s the Nob we all know and sort of love.”
I head down Beverly Glen and manage to find enough cells to reach Gloria. She’s just leaving the Van Nuys courthouse, where she testified against a gangbanger who shot up a laundromat, killing three women but missing the guy he was gunning for by ten feet. The target shot back and didn’t even hit the drive-by car. If the city really wants to cut down on innocent bloodshed they ought to run an after-school program to teach gangbangers how to shoot straight.
After her day in court, Gloria is in no mood for coffee, so we meet up at Pineapple Hill—Gold Rush saloon décor, stiff drinks, big screens, and free popcorn. It’s early, so there are only a few guys in the bar watching a Dodgers game and a mid-fifties couple making out in the back of the lounge. I’m guessing Jdate.com, since he’s wearing a yarmulke.
We grab two red-velvet loveseats across a coffee table by the fireplace, and a good-looking waitress appears like magic. It’s a few minutes short of the cocktail hour. I order a Bombay. Gloria asks if the Cabernet comes out of a box and when the waitress says no, she orders a glass. Melody wants a club soda with lime.
The waitress leaves, and I fill Gloria in on our conversation with Will.
“What would Sophia have to cover up?” she asks.
“Maybe she’s still protecting Karl,” says Melody.
“He tried to kill her,” says Gloria. “What’s to protect?”
“It could be she just doesn’t want to admit she lied to us,” I say. “She originally lied to protect Karl. Now that motive is gone, but she’s afraid to change her story. She thinks it would complicate things.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” asks Gloria. “that maybe Karl went over there in her car to throw off potential witnesses?”
This thought makes me wonder why I had been so quick to accuse. I’ve spent plenty of time looking into Sophia’s eyes, and I’ve seen empathy, warmth, and honesty. On the other hand, I’m not always the most objective scholar when it comes to reading women.
We decide that our best shot at the truth is for me to talk to Sophia alone. Gloria agrees only if I promise not to mention the paint scrape. She wants to keep that as a surprise, if necessary, for official questioning on the record with Sophia’s lawyer present. Without the paint scrape to rattle Sophia I don’t have much leverage, but if I time it right, get her all cozy and trusty, lay on the charm and oil her jaw with a little wine, she might confide any secrets she’s keeping.
There’s no open space in front of my house, so I park a few houses down. As I walk back, I pass Sophia’s Miata and see the fresh scrape on the passenger-side fender. I might have seen it before and not even noticed. Without context it’s a minor blemish, a scratch, not even a dent. But now it practically screams at me.
I find Sophia lounging on the living room couch, staring out the picture window. She’s wearing a loose white button-down blouse and a retro aloha skirt, midnight blue with white hibiscuses. Her lips are backlit against the gray sky, and their silhouette in profile is crisp and inviting. But her brows spell trouble.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She turns her gaze to Senzimmer’s book on the coffee table. “What’s that?”
“Research for my piece on your mother.”
“I mean the drawing.”
She’s talking about a piece of scratch paper I’m using as my bookmark. The part that sticks out of the book reveals the little sketch I drew the morning after Gloria showed me Lana’s half-heart necklace.
“My mother had a pendant like that,” she adds.
“They come in pairs. Any idea who has the other half?”
She shakes her head then puts both hands behind her neck, drops her chin, and throws her long amber locks over her head to hang in front of her face. Then she throws her head back, sending her wavy hair flying behind her. Finally, she shakes her head like a terrier. Some sort of preening, I guess.
“She hated that necklace,” she says.
“She was wearing it when her body was found.”
“That’s impossible. I tried it on once when I was a kid, and she got so mad she flushed it down the toilet.”
“Whoever gave it to her must have broken her heart.”
“I doubt it. My mother was the one who always did the heartbreaking.”
“Maybe she was in love with a married man.”
“My mother wasn’t capable of love.” Her sadness drifts through the room like an acid- rain cloud, making me feel heartless for planning to trap her into revealing the truth about where she was on the night of the murder. My deception wells up like puke in my throat.
She’s lying on her side against the back of the couch. I sit on the edge before her, hip to hip.
“Okay,” I say. “The truth is, I feel something going on between us.”
“Me, too.”
“I don’t think it’s healthy. You’ve been through too much, too fast. You shouldn’t trust your emotions right now, and I shouldn’t react to them.”
A wisp of shame crosses her face. “I don’t believe in ignoring my feelings,” she says, barely audible. There’s a fear in her eyes. A fear of another loss. I feel the urge to hold her, to comfort her.
Her eyes are sucking me in again. She may have lied to you.
She puts her hand on my c
heek, a languid touch alive with promise. On the other hand, maybe not.
I’m afraid of losing my way if we kiss, but of losing her trust if we don’t. I’m still debating when she decides for me. Her kiss feels like a jolt from a stun gun. Deep, unbridled, charged with longing. She rouses feelings I haven’t known since my first date with Holly, but in their wake I’m awash with guilt. My motives are unclean, a mishmash of truth and lies. How far am I willing to let this go? Am I cad enough to sleep with her in order to lure her into telling me the truth?
I pull away. “I can’t do this,” I say. She grabs my head and pulls me back in.
FIFTY-FOUR
The morning sun wakes me from a dream about Sophia’s lips. They were the size of a small canoe, and I was cradled naked between them, feeling as if I were afloat in a soft, warm paradise. If I could repeat this dream in an endless loop for the rest of my life, I would die happy.
I open my eyes and feel disoriented. Where’s my clock radio? Then I realize I’m under an afghan on the living room rug. Sophia lies beside me, her hand across my groin as if owning it even in sleep. To my relief, we’re both clothed, at least partially. We’d kissed and begun exploring each other’s bodies. By the time we fell asleep it felt as intimate as sex, but we didn’t cross that line. I suspect it was because neither one of us was willing to test that emotional minefield for the time being.
Her lips look just as soft as they were in my dream. I remember losing myself in them last night and feel a pleasant stirring sensation under her hand. I watch her eyes twitch beneath her lids, and I question my doubts about her.
Sure, her car scraped Will’s wall that night, but why would she have gone over there? It makes more sense that Karl drove it there while she slept. The vanity plates on his mustard Porsche read “PHD KARL.” That’s the sort of detail that sticks in a witness’s mind. If he was worried about one of Ginger’s neighbors remembering his car, he’d be much better off taking the Miata with its generic, forgettable license number.