by Jack Bunker
“At least not many who might have a reason to firebomb my house. Cogswell drinks the stuff, by the way.”
“That’s of passing interest but not what I’d call a conviction on a plate.”
“I suspect he wanted to make sure I knew who sent the message. I just wish I knew what the hell he’s afraid I’ll find.”
Strain pulls into a valet line at the Green Hotel. From the dress of the others in queue, it looks like he’s going to some sort of formal dinner. Maybe a charity event or an awards dinner. “I can only imagine two possibilities,” says Gloria. “Either he killed Lana or he embezzled from her estate.”
“I think Nathaniel Strain killed Lana.”
“If you’re right, and that’s a big if, that leaves embezzlement. But the statute’s already run out on that, so I think embezzlement is unlikely. Maybe we should get together, talk this thing out.”
When Gloria uses the phrase “get together,” it has only one meaning. The prospect of blowing off a little tension later tonight sounds pretty good, but a whisper of guilt keeps tickling my brain like I’m being untrue to Sophia. This bewilders me, considering that we’re not in a relationship, and I’m not even sure I trust her anymore. I tend to lose interest in women I don’t trust.
I watch Strain walk into the hotel as the valet drives his car away. Opportunity knocks.
“I can’t right now,” I say.
“Why not?”
I hang a U-turn and head back toward South Pas to do a little breaking and entering. “You don’t want to know.”
The ground is muddy, but at least there are no cacti or rosebushes beneath the window. I pull a pair of cheap, oversize galoshes over my amphibious shoes to prevent identifiable footprints, and I slip on some latex gloves before touching anything. Foresight. My mother would be proud.
Strain’s guest bathroom window is perhaps a foot higher than it needs to be for anyone short of a circus acrobat to pull himself through, so I have to roll the recycling bin over to climb on. I’m not surprised to find the window unlatched the way I left it; Strain probably doesn’t use his guest bath much. But the window doesn’t want to open. I ram the bottom of the frame with the heels of my palms. It barely budges. A neighbor’s dog starts to bark. Great. I ram it a few more times and rip the palm of one of my gloves, but I finally inch it open it far enough to slip through.
I contemplate the hole in my glove before going any farther. My fingertips are still covered, but the oils of my hand will be left behind through the tear, and I know they can tell a lot about the residue with something called desorption electrospray ionization, a process I once wrote about for Popular Science. But I’m not sure they can use it to ID me, and I figure no one’s going to waste that sort of resource on a modest little B and E anyway.
I slide through the window into the bathtub. Before getting out of the tub I feel around in the dark to drop the blinds and find the light switch by the door. I pull out of my shoes, leaving them in the galoshes in the tub before stepping out in my socks. No mud prints in the house.
I tread softly up the stairs to the master suite directly above. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but in the back of my mind is the unlikely hope of finding the gun that killed Lana.
The bedroom is an innocuous space painted beige with white trim and furnished with modest antiques that could have been handed down from Strain’s parents. The bed is immaculately made, implying a military past that I know he doesn’t have. I guess he’s just anal. A black cardigan sweater hangs from a wooden valet stand near the closet with some loose change, golf tees, and cufflinks in the tray. A thick putter leans against the wall by the bed. I wonder if he keeps it there for practice or protection.
I walk through into the bathroom. It’s got a black-and-white checkerboard floor with a big shower beside a separate tub. There’s a small tile-shaped bronze floor strainer about five feet from the window wall. But the floor is perfectly flat. There’s no point in having a drain if the floor isn’t angled to flow into it. I kneel down and peer through it, but all I see is darkness. Then I notice that the strainer is not grouted in. A hidey-hole? I keep my gun in one. Why shouldn’t he?
I pull my Leatherman from my pocket and loosen the two retaining screws. The strainer lifts out easily to reveal a square piece of cardboard beneath it, painted black. I lift it out to find that there’s no drain underneath. I’m looking right through the ceiling vent into Lana’s bathtub below. This is not what I expected but it makes perfect sense.
I’ve seen his eye glint through the wall,
Just where the vent holes show it all.
Love’s in his eye, it caught the light
Some asshole’s watching me tonight.
FIFTY-SEVEN
I check my watch for the tenth time. Holly is six minutes late. Minutes that seem like hours. I feel as nervous as a teenage virgin handing fifty bucks to a Tijuana pimp.
We’re supposed to meet at CBS Seafood, just around the corner from Phillipe’s, which claims to have invented the french dip sandwich. Holly chose CBS because the food is good and she can walk from her office, even though the dim sum is much better in the nearby San Gabriel Valley. That’s where we always went for Chinese when we were married. That’s where I taught her to use chopsticks.
CBS is packed at lunchtime, of course, so I got here early to grab a place in line. Now it’s almost my turn, and Holly’s not here yet. They won’t seat me without her. The place is loud and chaotic with dim sum carts cruising like bumper cars. I doubt they’ll be able to track my place in line if they call me and my party isn’t ready. These are the little moments in life that torture me most. Give me a firebombing any day.
They shout my name. I panic. Holly bursts through the door. I feel like the governor just called off my execution.
“Been waiting long?” No sorry. No hug. All business.
“You’re just in time.”
We follow the hostess to a table in the corner, and I hope we’re not so remote that the carts won’t come by. “Thanks for agreeing to have lunch.”
“I’m booked all day. Lunch was the only time I could do it,” she says to smother any thoughts I might have that she’s actually glad to see me.
Her hair is a mess from the wind on the way over. Her white silk blouse is disheveled, partly untucked from the hurried walk. A mist of sweat coats her brow, and her lipstick is splotchy. She still looks beautiful.
“Just to get it out of the way,” she says, “The whole thing with the house is on hold for a few weeks.” No how are yous. No good to see yous. No the worst mistake I ever made was divorcing yous.
“I’m trying to get the money together—”
She raises her hand like a traffic cop to stop me. “I don’t want to talk about it. I just thought you should know. Trudy called Jerry out of the blue, and he’s gone off to Tobago to see her.”
“Jerry went to see Trudy?”
I can’t believe she’d want to see him since he kicked her ass out of the house and sicced the IRS on her to drive her out of the country. And I can’t believe he’d want to see her since he thinks she’s a smack whore. If they can reconcile…I slam the brakes on that train of thought.
“She cleaned herself up. At least that’s what she says.”
“And he believes her?”
“He wants to believe her. He’s been miserable since they broke up.”
If I’m lucky, he won’t come back and Holly will find a more rational lawyer, maybe even one with compassion.
A dim sum cart pulls up, and I let her order the first round. She points to some har gow, some shui mai, and some golden-brown dumplings I can’t pronounce, much less spell. “I take it this has to do with Lana Strain’s daughters being abused by their shrink.”
“That’s just one piece of the puzzle. I want to ask you about another piece. Involving incest.”
According to her eyebrows, Ms. Get-down-to-business is suddenly Ms. Concerned.
“After Lana was killed,
the girls went into therapy,” I explain. “An alleged witness told me that soon after that, the younger girl, Ginger, accused her grandfather of molesting her. That’s what estranged the two sisters.”
She tries to pick up a shrimp dumpling with her chopsticks, but it slips away.
“How old were the girls?”
“Thirteen and fourteen.”
She tries and fails again to grab the slippery dumpling. I reach over with my chopsticks and pick it up for her, dipping it into her sauce and holding it up for her to eat. She looks wary for an instant, as if I’m trying to seduce her, but then takes it in her mouth. As she savors the shrimp, I savor the intimate moment.
“How reliable is your alleged witness?” she asks. I can tell she’s pressed for time because she talks while she’s still chewing, and she hates when people do that.
“Not very. But I found something last night that may substantiate the story. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“Go on.” She has less trouble grabbing the big crab dumpling and taking a bite out of it.
“I found a spyhole in the house Lana grew up in. It looked down on her bathroom from the floor above. Her father was spying on her in the bathtub.”
She chews on this as she chews on the dumpling.
“So I’m wondering,” I continue, “if this guy is a voyeur, does that increase the likelihood that he’s an incest abuser?”
“Well, it certainly doesn’t make it less likely. I’d think most incest aggressors would be drawn to voyeurism given the opportunity, especially with young victims, which is not to say that most voyeurs would necessarily be drawn to incest. But if an adult goes to the trouble of installing a spyhole into his young daughter’s bathroom, that implies several things: a propensity for acting out sexual taboos, an attraction to young girls, a problem with impulse control, and an antisocial personality disorder.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I eat my last shui mai and signal a passing cart. The dim sum lady pulls up, and I order some fried minced shrimp wrapped around sugar cane spears.
“There’s another thing,” I say. “He gave her a pendant when she turned thirteen. One of those hearts cut into two interlocking pieces to make matching pendants that complete each other. He also gave one to each of his granddaughters when they turned thirteen.”
“To seal the deal,” she says.
“I think so.”
As the dim sum lady serves us, I recall Boom-Boom reading the entry in Lana’s journal: “Hyde tried to slide his hand up my crotch. He’s so predictable.” She wasn’t talking about Cogswell, she was talking about Nathaniel! Jekyll and Hyde. The man who became the monster, the protector who became the Asshole. So many of her journal entries suddenly make sense.
“So if we assume Ginger was telling the truth and Nathaniel was an incest aggressor,” I say, appropriating her jargon, “what are the odds that he molested Lana as well?”
“I’d take that bet in a heartbeat. And I’d add the other sister to the list.”
“Her name is Sophia,” I say.
I feel a pain in my gut and doubt it’s the dim sum. I take a sip of water, less to quench my thirst than to take a moment to refocus my thoughts. If Lana and both of her daughters were molested by Strain, any or all of them could have threatened to expose him. That gives him motives for killing both Lana and Ginger. The two murders might be connected after all. And Strain is the only suspect with motives for both.
“If Lana was molested,” I ask, “how come she never told anyone about it?”
“Most children don’t. They’re sworn to secrecy by the aggressor. They believe it was their fault for acting too sexy, that they’ll be blamed for breaking up the family if they say anything. The aggressor makes it their special secret, an exclusive club that only they belong to, a secret bond that only they share. So the victim never says anything.”
“Not even to her mother?”
“Even if she did, there’s a good chance her mother wouldn’t believe her. These women often turn a blind eye or accuse their daughters of lying or even accuse them of being seductive, of bringing it on themselves.”
“What kind of mother could do that to her own daughter?”
“Denial is a powerful force in any family dynamic. Especially when the alternative is to lose your husband—maybe put him in jail—and perhaps end up out on the street.”
I take this in as I bite into a sugar cane shrimp. I offer a bite to Holly. She eyes me for a moment then reaches over and takes her own. I guess there’s an intimacy limit.
“So if you’re an incest victim,” I say, “and you’ve got this deep, dark secret, what happens when you have daughters of your own and grandpa comes to visit?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it? You said the girls were thirteen and fourteen when Lana was killed. They were just coming into puberty. Maybe that’s what turns Strain on. Lana might have seen signs that he was getting interested in the girls, or that she was already too late. He could have killed her to shut her up.”
“What would be the point of killing Lana when the girls could still testify against him? Ginger actually made a public accusation against him.”
“Nobody took incest accusations seriously in those days. And after the murder of her mother it would have been easy to write it off as a symptom of post-traumatic stress.”
“Okay. So then twenty years later she’s in therapy again, and it resurfaces. But this time she’s not an unstable teenager, and this time the psychological environment is more receptive. Maybe she even remembers something that implicates her grandfather in Lana’s murder. She confronts him, and he has to kill her, too.”
Holly shrugs to acknowledge the possibility as she licks some sugar cane juice off her fingertips. I am bitten by longing.
“The thing is,” she says, “incest victims often become part of a cycle of abuse. When someone they love betrays them like that, they learn to take the abuse in order to get the love. They come to associate the two. Love and abuse. Humiliation and pain become familiar territory, home turf. They confuse violence for passion. Healthy relationships feel unnatural to them. They can’t settle in. Abuse is all they know, what they understand. It’s what makes them feel comfortable. It’s a cruel irony, but that’s how it works. So they gravitate toward abusive men.”
This idea crystallizes for me. “Like Dr. Karl Lynch,” I say.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Runt has been barking his head off for a good two minutes before Gloria finally comes to the door. “Who is it?” I wonder why she doesn’t just look through the peephole. She sounds like I woke her out of a hangover in the middle of a REM cycle.
“It’s me,” I say, thinking my father would have corrected my grammar.
She opens the door stark naked, one hand holding up the edge of her sleep mask for a visual verification, as if she doesn’t believe me. Then she drops the mask back over her eye and, without a word, turns around and trudges blind back into her bedroom. I hear her flop onto the bed. At least Runt seems glad to see me. I close the door and follow her in.
“Long night?”
“Remember the floater in Echo Park Lake?” Her voice sounds like she’s talking through a comb and wax-paper kazoo. “I was up all night catching the guy who did it.”
“Allegedly did it,” I say.
She responds with her middle finger.
“If you want to fuck, I’m too tired to help but knock yourself out.” She pulls her mask down as she falls back on the bed. She’s shamelessly naked and blindfolded, looking absolutely delicious and oh so submissive for a change. Her breasts lie flattened and soft on her chest like two pancakes, each topped with a sweet dollop of strawberry jam. Another dotted babe.
My mouth waters in a Pavlovian reaction, but as tantalizing as she looks, I’m not tempted. Once again thoughts of Sophia intrude. I feel like my emotions are circling the nuthouse, looking for an entrance. Gloria starts to snore.
“I just want to talk,” I s
ay. “But I need you awake.”
She rouses herself to say, “Not gonna happen.”
“Nathaniel raped them, Gloria. All three of them. From age thirteen until they were old enough to refuse.”
It’s amazing how the right words can wake the living dead. Gloria rips off her sleep mask and stares into my eyes, to see whether I’m serious or just trying to get a rise out of her.
“Those broken-heart pendants were his initiation gifts,” I add.
She sits up, grabbing the sheet to pull across her as if her nakedness is suddenly inappropriate. Ugly news inspiring empathetic modesty.
“Why would he put one on Lana after he killed her?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe Lana discovered one of the other pendants and realized he was victimizing the girls. She confronted him, and he panicked and shot her. Then he put the pendant around her neck as a warning to the girls to keep their mouths shut about the incest.”
“But then the girls would know he killed Lana. Why incriminate himself like that?”
“He didn’t think the police could figure it out without the girls’ cooperation. No one else knew what the pendants meant.”
“That’s still taking an awfully big risk.”
“Unless the girls already knew he was guilty. Maybe one or both of them saw it happen.”
“Then twenty years later, out of the blue, Ginger decides to threaten to turn him in?”
“It wasn’t out of the blue. It was after I started asking questions. She tells Dr. Karl about our interview, he digs a little, and boom! She wakes the sleeping monster.”
“It doesn’t smell right,” says Gloria. “I need some coffee.”
She gets up, tying the sheet over her shoulder like a toga. As she leads me into the kitchen, the sheet drags behind her, mopping a faint trail through the dust on the hardwood floor.
“It stinks,” she says. “Ginger and Sophia were both interviewed ad nauseam by the investigating officers. They’ve been interviewed by dozens of reporters and writers over the years. No offence, Nob, but what makes you think you’re so special?”