by Jack Bunker
I slip out from beneath Sophia’s arm and trudge to the bathroom to brush my teeth and empty my bladder. When I return, she lifts her face to me curiously, as if trying to read the morning-after mood.
“Morning, sweet lips,” I say.
She smiles. “Morning, Nob.”
I give her a little kiss. I’m minty fresh, but she still tastes like the morning after. It’s a raw, honest taste that says she’s not afraid to reveal the person behind the curtain. Not the taste of a deceitful woman.
She yawns and follows me into the kitchen, unselfconscious, breasts playing peekaboo with her half-buttoned blouse. I set up a pot of coffee then sit down to watch it drip through. She pokes her head in the fridge and, as she bends over, her hibiscus skirt drapes like falling water over her perfect ass and looks like something I can imagine staring at every day. Is that where I want to go with Sophia? If so, it’s not going to happen until we stop lying to each other.
“You have to tell me the truth.”
She gives me a quizzical look.
“About what happened that night,” I continue.
She lets out a sad sigh and comes around behind me to wrap her arms around me. She lays her head on mine. It’s a loving gesture, but I’d rather be able to see her eyes. “Can’t we just forget about all that for a little while?”
“That’s not an answer.”
She moves to sit in the chair beside me and puts her hand on my forearm, stroking it, looking sad.
“After last night, do you really think I’d lie to you?”
“I don’t know.”
Pain contorts her face.
“After last night, I’d hope you could trust me,” I say. “Your car was at Ginger’s that night.” I’m sure Gloria wouldn’t approve, but technically I haven’t mentioned the paint.
Sophia is shocked by the bald statement, as if I’d slapped her.
“I want to know why,” I say.
She searches my eyes for compassion but finds only accusation. Her protective facade finally crumbles. She doesn’t know how I found out, but it’s clear that I did. Denial is no longer an option.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly.
“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” It’s a Will Rogers quote, but she doesn’t look like she needs the citation.
“I was afraid to tell you,” she says. “I was afraid for Karl.”
“So he did go over there.”
She falls silent, weighing whether to tell me or how much to tell me or maybe whether to sink a knife in my chest instead.
Finally she says, “We both did.”
I’m floored. “Why in the world would he take you with him?”
“We were in the middle of a fight that night when Ginger called. That’s what started it all. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but it was obviously a patient who was in crisis. Karl said he’d be right over. I begged him not to go away angry, but he just grabbed his keys and left. I had this panic that he was never coming back, so I went after him.”
“You had no idea where he was going?”
“Not until he turned onto Weeping Glen. Then I realized he must be going to see Ginger. It made no sense. I thought he’d stopped treating her years ago. But the door opened, and there she was in her nightgown, throwing her arms around him, sobbing. I watched him hug my sister, then lead her inside and close the door like he was closing it on me.”
She leans over and lays her head on my shoulder.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I had to get out of there. I had this insane fear that he’d look out the window and see my car. That he’d realize I’d followed him and hate me for it. So I guess I drove home; I don’t remember much until I crawled into bed, and the fog just sort of lifted and I realized he was cheating on me.”
She gets up to pour some coffee for us both.
“When Karl finally pulled into the driveway I heard his car door open, but he didn’t slam it shut like he usually does. He was trying to be quiet.”
I nod to let her know I’m on the wavelength. She puts a cup of hot coffee in front of me and sits back down with her own.
“Then I heard his shoes crunch the gravel outside. The front door opened. The stairs creaked. The bedroom door brushed across the carpet. He was trying not to wake me.” She snorts at the irony. “As if I could sleep.”
She takes a sip of her java.
“I said, ‘I’m awake’ and turned on the light, you know, so he wouldn’t have to go into the bathroom to undress. He held out his hand for me to see that it was trembling and says, ‘The guy was ready to kill himself.’ Can you believe it? The ‘guy’? He had this elaborate story made up, and I just let him keep winding more coils around his own noose until I couldn’t take it anymore. I went into the bathroom and sat on the tub and felt sorry for myself.”
She looks into my eyes for a minute, maybe trying to gauge my reaction. I try to look empathetic but keep quiet. I don’t want to bump her off track.
“Karl asked me for a sleeping pill, so I opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out the pills, and poured out a handful. I looked in the mirror, and all I could see was pain. It would have been so easy to just swallow them right then and go lie down beside him. Let him find me dead in the morning and realize I’d found him out. Let him live with that guilt for the rest of his fucking life.”
“But you didn’t.”
She gives me one of those politely affirming smiles just in case I think I’m being insightful in stating the obvious.
“When I came back with his pill,” she says, “it was pretty obvious I was still upset. He told me he thought I was being unfair to him.” Her eyes flare at the memory. “It made my stomach cramp. Me being unfair to him? ‘This is what I do,’ he says. ‘I’m a psychiatrist. My patients have crises. Usually at night. Please have some compassion.’ Compassion?! That was the last straw. I started screaming about how I knew where he went and who he saw and what a complete shit he was for fucking my sister, if you’ll excuse my French.”
She takes another sip, and her soft lip curls around the edge of the coffee cup. I look away to keep my mind on her story.
“Then he started in on how he was just trying to protect me. How he knew I’d be upset, that I’d react ‘inappropriately.’ He’s fucking a client who also happens to be my sister, and he’s accusing me of being inappropriate!”
She takes a moment to let some of the rage evaporate. “The next morning, I went back over there to confront Ginger. That’s when I found her body.”
“Why didn’t you tell all this to the police?”
“Even after all he’s done, I still love him. I was afraid they’d blame Karl for her suicide.”
“It didn’t occur to you that if Karl and Ginger were sleeping together, he might bear some responsibility for her death?”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “I still love him.”
I know I shouldn’t, but I feel dejected. She takes my hand in both of hers and lays her face on it.
“Can you forgive me for lying to you?” she asks.
I have an urge to kiss the top of her head, but my feelings are so tangled I’m afraid of sending the wrong message. If only I knew what the right one was.
The words that come out of my mouth are the same ones Holly used when she left me. “Forgiving is easy; it’s trusting that’s hard.”
FIFTY-FIVE
Lana Strain was born in Langtry, Texas, hometown to Roy Bean, who gained prominence as the “hanging judge,” though he was probably just a notary public with an inflated ego. Nathaniel Strain drove his wife to drink then used that as his excuse to take custody of the girls when he divorced her. Lana was twelve when the family of three relocated to Southern California and moved into the home that Nathaniel still owns in what was then the overwhelmingly white, middle-class, Republican town of South Pasadena. Not much has changed in South Pas since then except for its political bent and the closing of the historic Rialto Theat
er where the hapless writer was murdered in Michael Tolkin’s The Player.
Gloria slows at the end of the Pasadena Freeway where it morphs into the treelined streets of South Pasadena.
“If Lana flushed it down the toilet,” says Gloria, “how did it wind up around Lana’s neck?”
“I think her killer put it there. It meant enough to Lana to make her hate it. And it meant enough to her killer to make him replace it.”
“So whoever gave her that necklace killed her?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Why would a killer place a clue on his victim that points to him? I think it’s more likely that Sophia made the whole thing up.”
“Why would she do that?”
Gloria glides to a stop in front of Strain’s Craftsman-style house on a parcel staked out to pay a poker debt in 1888, the year the city was incorporated. At least that’s what it said in one of the Lana Strain biographies I read.
“I don’t know. To cover up for somebody? To frame somebody? To send us on a wild goose chase?”
“She’d never do that.”
“You worry me, Nob. When your little head gets involved, your big head tends to suffer.”
She leads me up Strain’s gravel path and rings the front doorbell. The street is dead at eight on a Saturday morning. The door opens, and Strain’s bug eyes peer suspiciously through the steam from his Pearl Harbor souvenir coffee mug. He’s wearing a maroon flannel bathrobe and black leather slippers. Dapper. His bushy eyebrows rise at the sight of me.
“Nathaniel Strain?” asks Gloria, knowing full well that he is.
“Yes?”
“Detective Lieutenant Gloria Lopes. I believe you know Mr. Brown. May we come in?”
“What’s this about?”
“Just some routine questions, sir. About your granddaughter’s death.”
He rolls his bulbous eyes in my direction. “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s helping with the investigation. If that’s a problem, Mr. Brown can wait in the car.”
“I’m an Eli,” he says. “We don’t abide Princeton men.”
“How do you know where I went to school?” I ask.
“At Yale we learned to do our homework.”
“Is that how you learned where I live?”
His jaw twitches. He’s nervous. But I can’t tell whether it’s because he’s feeling guilty, or because he can sense that I’ve made an accusation but can’t figure out what it is.
“If you two are finished,” says Gloria, “I’d like to proceed.”
“I already talked to some other detective.”
“I’d like to hear for myself if you don’t mind.”
Strain doesn’t send me packing, but he gives me one last glower before leading us into a warm, airy den. There’s another photo of the vintage Morgan convertible on the wall, but none of his family. Below the windows on another wall, a built-in bookcase runs the length of the room, filled entirely with golf trophies and hundreds of old National Geographics. Is there some law against throwing those things away?
He points us to one of a matched set of flowered sofas and seats himself on the other to face us across a broad glass coffee table.
“Please make this quick,” he says.
“I’ll be as brief as possible,” replies Gloria. She does nothing to disguise the disdain in her voice. “When was the last time you saw Ginger?”
“I don’t remember precisely. It was probably four or five weeks before she died. She’d broken off relations between us, but we ran into each other at a family friend’s birthday party.
“Did you talk to her there?”
“I said hello. She just walked away.”
“Was Sophia there?” I ask. I wonder if she’d told me the truth about the last time she’d spoken to Ginger. Gloria strafes me with a glare for interrupting her line of questioning.
“If she was I didn’t see her.”
“This falling out with Ginger. What was it about?” asks Gloria.
“I don’t know. She’d go off on these delusional tangents, and there was no reasoning with her.”
“What sorts of delusional tangents?” Gloria is setting her trap.
“Every sort. Spacemen, weird diets, human rights for lab rats. I don’t remember anything specific.”
“Oh, come on, Mr. Strain. You can’t remember that your own granddaughter accused you of incest?” Snap!
There’s a lot of activity under Strain’s skin as he forces himself to maintain control. His pupils dilate, eclipsing the steel blue of his eyes, just like last time. He takes a deep breath before answering.
“No one took her seriously. She was always on the verge of a breakdown.”
“An emotional breakdown is hardly unusual for an incest victim,” says Gloria. “In fact, it can validate the accusations.”
“You have no right to come into my home and accuse me of such an abomination.”
“I haven’t heard you deny it.”
“Of course I deny it.”
They stare at each other for a beat. I take the opportunity to find an excuse to look around. “May I use your restroom?”
“First door on the right.” He seems irritated at the interruption.
I wander into the hallway and hear Gloria say, “Where were you Thursday night around eight o’clock?” She’s asking about the firebombing.
I notice there’s no alarm panel near the door. You’d think someone whose daughter was murdered would be a bit more security conscious. Unless he did it.
There’s nothing of much interest in the hallway. Some English foxhunting prints on the walls. Nothing personal. I pass the bathroom door and peek into the next room.
A guest bedroom disguised as a shrine to Lana leads into the bathroom I’d just passed. It’s obvious that this was once Lana’s bedroom. I can feel her presence in the ceiling light made of Indian glass beads and the window shade pull in the shape of a Fender Stratocaster. But the walls are filled with objects that postdate her life in this room. Nathaniel has covered the walls with Lana’s album and CD covers, music reviews, magazine covers and posters, including the swimming pool poster I had over my bed. It lacks only candles to be a full-fledged shrine.
I walk through into the bathroom. Small. Maybe eight by ten. Yellow tile floor with a black border. Claw foot tub. No shower. Frosted-glass, double-hung window behind the tub. Wooden Venetian blinds pulled up. Heating vent in the ceiling. Pedestal sink with a built-in bevel-mirrored medicine cabinet above it. Old Sloan-valve tank toilet. Not exactly low flow, but I flush it anyway for the sound effect.
I return to find Gloria dangling Ginger’s pendant.
“It started with Lana,” Nathaniel is saying. “I gave her one when she turned thirteen, to celebrate her coming of age.”
My veins ice up.
“When Sophia turned thirteen, I gave her one, too, sort of a family tradition. And then Ginger the next year. I always thought that was the one thing the Jews got right, that celebration of the coming of adulthood.”
“I guess the tradition took a turn for the worse,” says Gloria, “since somebody put one on Lana to celebrate the coming of death.”
“Maybe she just happened to be wearing it,” he says.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she replies.
They glare at each other like divorcees at a custody hearing. I’m not sure which one dislikes the other more, but there’s so much animosity in the room I half expect the windows to blow out. Strain’s patience is wearing thin. I furtively unstrap my watch and slip it into my pocket, thankful that, unlike everyone else I know, I don’t use my cell phone to tell time.
Nathaniel stands. “If you’re quite finished, Detective Lopes, I have constructive things to do.”
I feign embarrassment. “Oh! I left my watch on the sink. Sorry.”
I rush out of the room before anyone can respond and quickstep back into the bathroom. My gaze lands on a heating vent in the floor by the toilet. A
second heating vent. An odd redundancy in such a small room.
The sound of movement in the hall horsewhips my heartbeat. Turning to the task at hand, I unlatch the window then walk back into the hall strapping my watch onto my wrist.
FIFTY-SIX
I’m a half block from Nathaniel Strain’s house, watching his car for the second night in a row. Melody begged me to let her come, but it’s too dangerous. I told her she should go home and charge up some power tools. She gave me the finger.
Last night I followed Strain from work and sat around from about six to nine then gave up. Tonight, to save gas, I just showed up at his house and waited for him to get home, which he did about an hour ago, the same time as last night. He’s got to go out sometime, but I’m only giving him two hours to do it tonight. I’ve got my own life to live.
I know he’s at work during the day, but my chances of being seen by a neighbor are higher. At night there’s less risk, but I’ve got to find my opportunity.
My cell rings. It’s Gloria.
“They IDed your accelerant,” she says. “It was just gasoline. Could have come from anywhere.”
“Did I rate super, at least?”
“Just regular. The bottle is interesting, though.” She won’t just tell me, she has to bait me first.
“I’m listening.”
“What do I get?”
I see Strain come out of his house. He’s dressed in a dark suit.
“What do you want? A box of Crackerjacks?”
“A tongue-lashing would be nice. Maybe with Pop Rocks.”
He gets in his car and pulls onto the street.
“Just tell me what the hell you know.”
I start my engine and follow.
“It’s a Macallan bottle. Twenty-five years old.”
I can still see the Macallan sitting in front of Cogswell as I follow Strain up Fair Oaks into Old Town Pasadena.
“No prints, but at five benjies a bottle, there aren’t many people around who buy the stuff.”