“Routine questions,” said Milo.
“If you say so,” said Cutter.
As we walked away, he remained at the entrance to B, arms folded across his chest.
Staring, but not at us. More like gazing out into nothing.
Milo said, “We provoked some thought in him, poor guy. Funny about Pena, huh? We talk to him about Kramer and he gives up his job.”
“Or someone made the decision for him,” I said. “Like they did for Kramer.”
“Jesus. Don’t even theorize about that.”
A block later: “Let’s check out Pena’s house. You don’t really think he got offed.”
I shrugged.
“Don’t do that. Not that way.”
“What way is that?”
“Like I’m a patient and you’re trying to nudge me to insight.” He rubbed his face. Grunted. “Even though I basically am.”
* * *
—
Culver City, west of Overland and south of Culver Boulevard. Well-kept pink bungalow on a quiet block of similar structures all painted in pastels.
Empty driveway, drapes drawn. No mail on the ground but that didn’t mean much. The U.S. Postal Service had access to a lidded brass slot to the left of the door.
Milo lifted the lid and peered. “Too dark, can’t see. No bad smells, at least not from here.”
He checked out the property. On the right side of the house, a waist-high white wooden gate blocked access to the backyard. Locked but easy enough to get over.
He was contemplating his choices when the door to the baby-blue box next door opened and a woman stepped out holding a rolled-up newspaper.
White hair pinned high on her head, seventies, wearing a maroon sweater, mustard-colored slacks and brown boat shoes. Her free hand rested on her hip. Waiting for an explanation.
When none ensued, she said, “Can I help you?”
Milo walked toward her, flashing his badge.
She said, “The police? Bob and Marta? Something happened to them on the road?”
“I certainly hope not, Ms.—”
“Alicia Cervantes. Then why are you here?”
“Bob was involved in a case we’re working on.”
“Involved how?”
“As a source.”
“Of what?”
“Information, ma’am. We’re doing some follow-up.”
“What kind of case?”
Milo smiled. “Sorry, can’t say. So they went on a trip?”
Alicia Cervantes looked him up and down. “What kind of source could Bob be to the police?”
“I really can’t get into it, ma’am.”
“Huh.”
“He’s not in trouble if that’s what you’re asking.”
The newspaper slapped against her other hip. “Well, I know that. They’re good people. If you told me different I wouldn’t believe you.”
“When did they leave?”
“Yesterday evening. Packed up the van, I went out to say goodbye. They looked fine. Not like people involved with the police.”
“Any idea where they were headed?”
“Why?” said Alicia Cervantes. “You want to follow them on the freeway or something?”
“No, ma’am. We’re just trying to contact Bob.”
“Follow-up? Whatever that means.”
I said, “It was just the two of them traveling?”
My turn to be inspected. “Why all these questions, like they’re spies or something? No, it wasn’t just them. They took Paco and Luanne.”
Milo said, “Their kids?”
Alicia Cervantes broke into laugher. “Paco’s a black Lab, Luanne’s a tabby cat.”
I said, “Sounds like an extended trip.”
“Why?”
“Taking the pets.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Alicia Cervantes. “Whenever they travel, they take the animals. Would you leave yours? If you have any? Once they went to Desert Hot Springs and Luanne was sick so they asked me to watch her for a couple days and give her special food. Of course I said yes. Very nice cat, didn’t try to bother Fernando, that’s my lorikeet.”
Milo said, “So no idea where they’re headed.”
“Nope.”
“Okay, thanks, Ms. Cervantes.”
When we’d walked a step, she said, “Maybe Sequoia, maybe another state park. They like the parks, if they can bring the animals. So you’re not going to find them.”
* * *
—
Like Darius Cutter, she stood there as we returned to the unmarked. Unlike Cutter, she focused squarely on us.
Milo muttered, “Community relations.”
I said, “Maybe Pena looked scared and that’s why she’s protective.”
He pulled away from the curb. “First ol’ Bob takes sudden retirement, then he packs up the van and splits. Something to do with that building got to him.” Smiling at me. “At least your morbid possibility wasn’t borne out.”
“Lucky Bob,” I said. “Do you have that list of residents from the Wilshire tower here in the car?”
“It’s in the murder book.” He hooked a thumb toward the backseat.
I reached behind and retrieved the blue binder.
“I told you,” he said. “Already went over it a bunch of times.”
He’d asterisked the residents shielded by trusts and corporate entitities, making my life easy. I spotted what I’d hoped to find and showed it to him.
“High-Level, Inc.?” A nanosecond of confusion was replaced by clarity. His face turned chalky, highlighting acne pits and lumps; a lunar exploration module sweeping over the moon.
“The outfit that manages the place, shit.”
I said, “Subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subdivision et cetera.”
“Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
“It was just a guess.”
He groaned. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“The aw-shucks modesty thing.”
“I mean it—”
“Yeah, yeah.” He smiled sourly. “It’s like that old shampoo commercial, don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful? I will not despise you because you’re intellectually gifted.”
He punched the steering wheel with the heel of a big hand. “The Brain has met his match!”
“Aw shucks.”
Barking laughter, he swerved and parked, said, “Gimme that,” and inspected the list. “Twenty-fourth-floor penthouse. Trust-fund bastard!”
CHAPTER
43
Back at his office, he chewed on an unlit cigar and dove into Academo’s business records, sifting through layers of corporate camouflage.
High-Level, Inc., was a corporation duly registered in the state of Delaware.
Milo said, “Consider the wisecrack uttered.”
Click; save; print. Soon a four-inch paper stack sat next to his screen. He read each sheet and passed it along.
Proposals, prospectuses, other business filings.
The kind of small-print, preposition-clogged legalese that inevitably crosses my eyes and numbs my brain. Party of the first, party of the second; the Marx Brothers collaborating with a desk-jockey churning out municipal regulations.
The gist was that High-Level, Inc., functioned as the maintenance arm of Columb-Tech, Inc., the parent company of five other corporations, including Academo, Inc.
Goodsprings, Inc., owned and operated drug rehab centers in five states.
Vista-Ventures, Inc., owned and operated industrial parks and office complexes in seven states.
Holly-Havenhurst, Inc., owned and operated senior-care facilities in nine states.
Hemi-Spherical, Inc., owned and operated residential comple
xes in eleven states.
At the helm of each, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President Anthony Nobach and Chief Operating Officer Marden Nobach.
Below the brothers’ names, each company sported an impressive roster of legal counselors and board members. I’d barely unfogged my cerebral cortex when one name caught my eye.
Chief exploratory officer at High-Level, Inc.: Thurston Nobach, M.A.
A title I’d never heard of. Exploring what?
Then I realized if you compressed it to initials, you ended up with another version of CEO.
Exactly the kind of pretense I’d imagined for a psychopathic poseur.
I googled Thurston Nobach and scored on the first hit.
Full-color web page teeming with vertigo-inducing movement as holographic meshes furled, unfurled, and floated around the screen.
Then: utter blackness, followed by the oozing materialization of a red Enter button and an invitation to Traverse My World.
Accepting the offer brought me to a high-def, close-up photo of a good-looking fox-faced man in his thirties sporting wavy, black, shoulder-length hair, a flap of which obscured one eye.
The visible iris was gray and piercing. Below Thurston Nobach’s cleft chin, the silk collar of a peacock-blue shirt was visible, as was a silver chain around a bronze neck. A dyed-blond triangular soul patch shifted to the left by an off-kilter, thin-lipped smile and a left ear graced by a two-carat emerald stud filled out the picture.
Intense and not afraid to be noticed.
A Continue button led me to Ideations, Strivings, Journeys.
Thurston Anthony Nobach, M.A., ABD, thirty-seven years old, listed himself as an alumnus of Old Dominion Day School and The Pedagogic Preparatory Academy, both in Columbus, Ohio. Next came Brown University, where he’d earned a B.A., cum laude, in American studies, followed by Columbia University, where he’d earned a master’s degree in linguistics.
Next screen: bright-red italics on a gray, faux-granite background:
Following all that formal—and formalized—education, I found myself assiduously assessing the relative benefits of intense auto-didacticism versus classroom versus tutorial modes of transmission, e.g. the classic scholarly conundrum and, surprisingly, came to no facile conclusion. Here I must confess to a bit of timidity. Given no clear path, I opted to hazard a new journey, albeit one rife with tendrils that coiled around the conventionality of ancient avatars: e.g. pursuing doctoral studies at Columbia in the hopes of probing ephemerally-transitory and quasi-random patterns of post-cultural grammatology, metaphysical presupposition, and figurative semiology. In the end, I terminated my journey with an ABD that inspired laudatory serenity.
Those initials I recognized: “All But Dissertation.”
Cosmetic shorthand for Ph.D. students who’d either changed their minds or flunked their orals.
After almost-graduation, Thurston Nobach’s intellectual curiosity had “propelled me to seek distant harbors.” First was Maui, Hawaii, where “I autonomously researched the Multi-Ethnic Vox, e.g. the sometimes tenuous, sometimes tense, sometimes tensile kinship/autonomy/orthogonal flat-line between Collective Concept and Voice.”
Next: Auckland, New Zealand, “seeking an antipodal awakening as I continued to decompress after descending the depths of exploratory curiosity in the bathysphere of the crushingly rodent-like marathon masquerading as formal education.”
I.e., doing nothing.
For two years in Florence, “I honed my visual observational skills and eventually reached a place where I could rationally contemplate a carefree swan-dive into the reflecting pool of visual arts. My Da Vinci dream phase, if you will.”
That was memorialized by thumbnails of four pen-and-ink drawings. Broken lines, awkward composition, unclear subject matter.
“I traveled away from that world due to a near-Aortic constriction brought upon by a revelation regarding the ultimately futile process of rendering.”
I.e., I don’t know how to draw.
Nobach’s last recorded overseas trip had taken place eight years ago.
“After finding myself immersed in the Bob Cratchett / Uriah Heep tanning vat of the so-called business world, I discovered that my axons and dendrites were atrophying and returned to the world of ideas.”
I.e., an “endowed” year in Warsaw, Poland.
No university mentioned.
Financing courtesy a Holly-Havenhurst Liberal Arts Scholar’s Award.
I googled the fellowship. No mention of anyone else ever receiving it.
The subsidiary that ran old-age homes.
I.e., siphoning money from Daddy.
I pictured Thurston Nobach drifting the streets of Warsaw buttressed by a fat allowance. All that leisure time leading him to come upon the monster who’d given his life new focus.
Milo was ahead of me, breathing hard, frantically flipping pages of the murder book. He stopped, wide-eyed, slapped a page, reversed the binder, and showed it to me.
The Polish newspaper article Basia Lopatinski had given us.
Ignacy Skiwski pretending to play guitar. Surrounded by a small group of young people. Milo jabbed a face. He didn’t need to.
A figure sitting to Skiwski’s left. Long legs suggested height. Sitting low suggested a high waist.
Over eight years, the changes in Thurston Nobach weren’t radical. Back then his face had been a bit softer around the edges, the black hair even longer, bound by a leather headband. No yellow soul patch, diamond earring instead of an emerald, shabby-looking beige tunic in place of the bright-blue shirt.
John Lennon glasses perched atop a beak-like nose as he observed Ignacy Skiwski.
Just another Euro-hippie digging the street vibe.
Until you checked out the smile: razor-lipped, impatient. As if chafing for the opportunity to utter something clever.
And the eyes: hard, judgmental, challenging the camera. The only one of Skiwski’s acolytes to look away from the guitar and face the camera.
Jackal among the sheep.
I said so.
Milo grunted and returned to the documents, working faster, shoulders bunched. I moved on to the final page of Nobach’s website. My Manifesto.
KIND READER, PERMIT ME THE INDULGENCE OF SELECTIVE SELF-EXPRESSION. OR PERHAPS SHOULD WE SET UP A SYNOD, A CONCLAVE, A TED TALK—insert scoffing laughter—AND JOINTLY COME TO THE REASONABLE CONCLUSION THAT MY DARING TO OPINE IS NOTHING MORE THAN A BIT OF COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE FLOTSAM MY POOR BENIGHTED CONSCIOUSNESS NEEDS TO FLING AWAY????
I.e., See? I’m a modest guy.
The real subtext: I know how to rein in my arrogance and summon up a Humble Brag when it suits me.
I began reading, bracing myself for another shit-storm of jabberwocky. Found, instead, a surprisingly brief exposition.
The Nature of Consciousness
Submitted, hat-in-hand, by Thurston “Thirsty” Nobach, M.A., ABD, Eternal Searcher
Really, sir? sez I to myself.
You’re going to attempt to scale the alps of a meta-question? The answer: Yes, I will because meta is really mini. Because Nietzsche, Sartre, Caligula, et al., had no clue, histrionic egotists that they were, missing the final stop on the tram ride to oblivion.
There is no consciousness.
No self.
No personal boundaries, no rules impervious to exception, no individual existence that can be truncated from the cosmos, no greater meaning other than the transitory explanations with which we blanket ourselves during moments of weakness.
We are one with everything. We are everything.
More important: We are nothing.
Finis, no coda.
Au revoir.
Arrivederci.
Do widzenia.
I created a page link, emailed it to Milo’s computer.
It pinged arrival just as he put down the papers.
He rubbed his eyes and flexed his fingers. “How about you sum up?”
“Don’t want to intrude on your consciousness.”
“What?”
“Do yourself a favor and read.”
* * *
—
When he was through, the cigar had been chewed to brown pulp. He tossed it, printed.
“Guy’s nuts. Toss in his dad’s dough and here comes the insanity defense.”
“I promise to testify otherwise.”
He laughed. “Least you didn’t say cart before horse.”
I said, “Notice his nickname?”
“Thirsty.”
“Amanda had a sticker saying that on the back of her textbook. Bet you he prints them up and hands them out as goodies to the faithful.”
“He’s running a cult?”
“Or keeping it personal—mind-games one-on-one.”
“Hmmph. Well, let’s get into his personal space.”
He pulled out his list of generally agreeable judges. No answer at the first two. The third, Giselle Boudreaux, first in her class at Tulane Law and the youngest sib of three New Orleans cops, said, “Now we’re talking. See? All it took was some elbow grease.”
“Doing my best, Your Honor.”
“Everyone claims that. Lucky for you, in this case it’s enough. Write up the address as a comprehensive and email it. I’ll give you telephonic authorization soon as I receive it but you know the drill: Someone has to come by and retrieve actual paper.”
“You bet,” said Milo. “There are two addresses I need access to.”
“Ah, the guy’s rich,” said Boudreaux. “What, something at the beach?”
“If only.” Milo explained.
“A crib in a dorm? You know he’s there for a fact?”
“It’s likely.”
“Sorry, then. Likely isn’t actual. All I need is you’re wrong and I’ve warranted a nonexistent location.”
The Wedding Guest Page 30