The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  Aloa couldn’t help it. Her gaze went to his ungloved hand. It was so still, it looked almost like a movie prop.

  “The docs said it was a miracle I got that much. I told them the only miracle I needed was for a lightning bolt or some guy with a high-powered rifle to put me out of my misery.” He winked at her. “They didn’t like that. They wanted me to fall all over myself and thank them for saving me. But I asked them: saving me for what?”

  He looked over as Kyle came into the room and set a tray with a teapot and two ceramic cups on the desk. Kyle decanted the tea, set one cup on the desk near Aloa, and put the other on a tray attached to a metal stand. He lifted the tray and turned it so it was level with Davenport’s chin. He slipped a bamboo straw into the cup and put it near Davenport’s mouth.

  Davenport drew in a sip of tea. “A little too hot, but close enough,” he told Kyle. “Try yours,” he said to Aloa.

  The tea was earthy and smooth, with a faint hint of the sea, as Davenport had described.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “I thought you’d like it. And so for the second question: How do I live like this? The answer is: barely.” His glance went toward Kyle, who had moved to stand next to him. “You might think I feel nothing, but parts of my body buzz the way your foot does after it falls asleep. It’s like living with a hive of bees inside you. Plus my organs don’t work like they used to and there are muscles spasms and pressure sores, and the occasional nasty infection, and you also have to have somebody like Kyle here scratch your nose and shave your face and wipe your ass. I’ll tell you, you learn humility real fast.”

  “It must be hard,” Aloa said.

  “It is what it is, as they say.” Davenport took another sip of tea. “At first I was mad as hell, but after a while you stop wondering ‘what if’: What if I’d stopped to get a cup of coffee? What if the customs line had moved more slowly so the garbage truck had gone through the intersection thirty seconds before I got there?” His glance went out the door into the fog-cloaked garden. “As much as we want to control life, we can’t. Every small decision ripples outward and changes our path.”

  His gaze traveled back to Aloa. “Even the night Corrine died, when that prick came and stabbed her, it was one little thing. One little thing that was the difference between her living and dying.”

  She watched his jaw work.

  “I heard her scream,” Davenport said, “and I shouted for the phone to dial 9-1-1, but we’d decided to watch a movie and Corrine had muted the speaker on my virtual assistant because it kept interrupting when the TV was on.”

  Aloa had heard about that problem.

  “And, for whatever reason—whatever stupid reason—Corrine forgot to unmute the thing when she put me to bed. All I could do while she bled to death was lie there and yell for help.” Davenport’s lips went tight. “Like, I said, one little thing, man . . .”

  He looked away and Aloa could see his eyes shimmering with sudden emotion. “A goddamned baby would have been more help than me.”

  Kyle put a hand on Davenport’s shoulder. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. Corrine’s dead.” Davenport closed his eyes, causing a tear to zigzag down his cheek. “I should have been able to protect her. I should have stopped what happened.” He pressed his lips together. “Wipe my face, will you?”

  Kyle grabbed a tissue and blotted Davenport’s face. He turned to Aloa. “It’s not good for him to get upset. If his blood pressure gets too high, it’s hard to bring it back down.”

  “My blood pressure is just fine, Kyle,” Davenport said, although Aloa noticed his breathing had turned shallow and quick.

  “He needs his pills,” Kyle said.

  Davenport’s brow furrowed in what looked like a spasm of pain.

  “You should go,” Kyle said.

  Aloa stood. “May I come back?” she asked.

  “Probably not,” Kyle said, bending down to fish through a pouch on the back of Davenport’s wheelchair.

  “Here’s my card, just in case,” Aloa said and set it on the tray.

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Kyle said. He stood and picked up a water bottle. “Now go.”

  Aloa hesitated only a second, then left. On her way out she couldn’t help glancing into the other room, which was filled with shelves of medical supplies, a large-screen TV, some kind of complicated lift, and a wide hospital bed.

  From behind her came Kyle’s voice. “I said go.”

  She moved into the living room, glanced behind her, and crouched down at the spot where she calculated Corrine’s body had been found. Close up, she could see a small nick and a faint rust-red stain in the bamboo flooring. She pivoted on her heels and saw a baseboard covered in a layer of dust, a low scrape on the wall, and a black scuff mark on the doorframe that led into Davenport’s office-study. Small imperfections that stood out in what appeared to be a room worthy of a magazine shoot.

  She stood and let herself out.

  Back home, Aloa changed into her running clothes and headed out the front door into the cold miasma. Her feet took her down Sansome Street to Green, where a plaque marked the building where Philo Farnsworth and a lab crew that included his wife, Pem, had transmitted the first television image.

  The building was two-story and industrial looking, situated on a short, tree-lined street. Above it, expensive homes perched on a steep hillside.

  Aloa imagined the excitement that must have coursed through the young inventor when he saw his invention spring to life. The success, however, had been trailed by lawsuits and a descent into bankruptcy, followed by the inventor’s slide into a deep depression.

  Did he and his wife ever imagine what would flow from that one moment? Aloa wondered, her mind going to Christian Davenport and what he’d said about small decisions leading to consequences we couldn’t imagine. She picked up the pace.

  At the Embarcadero, she turned and headed for Rincon Point, doing quick sprints to build lung capacity, then jogging to recover. By the time she got home she was wet with sweat and starting to chill. She took a hot shower, running a washcloth over her small breasts, her rib cage, her belly with its hint of roundness. She shoved down the urge to count the calories she’d consumed so far today. That was the trouble with an eating disorder. A drunk could stay out of a bar. An anorexic couldn’t avoid the world of food around her.

  She toweled off, changed into sweats, and made herself a piece of avocado toast. Back at her desk—a scratched dining room table her grandmother had purchased on layaway sometime in the 1950s—she fired up her laptop and did a more thorough search for background on Christian Davenport.

  According to magazine stories she found, Davenport had grown up in Colorado Springs, the son of a mining company accountant and an elementary school teacher. He was something of a golden boy who won the state singles championship in tennis, was class valedictorian, and got a scholarship to Stanford where he majored in international relations and linguistics. He spoke Arabic, French, and Japanese. Despite job offers to work in Washington, DC, he’d surprised everyone by enlisting in the army, where he served as an interrogator at a detention center in Afghanistan. His best-known break was of a young Pakistani who gave away the location of a house where a Taliban operative lived with his two wives when he wasn’t out teaching recruits how to blow up innocent people.

  “Once you put a knife on the table, you can’t take it away,” Davenport said in answer to whether threats or violence had had a role in that interrogation. “The best intel comes from the details, the stuff they think doesn’t matter.”

  One tour of duty in Afghanistan had morphed into a job with the FBI and his most famous case: the kidnapping of a wealthy CEO’s four-year-old daughter from her parents’ sprawling house in Los Altos. According to the article, while questioning one of the family’s two housekeepers, Davenport had noticed that whenever he’d ask the maid details about the little girl, she’d reach for the small pearl hanging from a delicat
e gold chain around her neck. From the gardener he learned the jewelry had come from the housekeeper’s new boyfriend, and Davenport had followed the clue to the housekeeper’s cousin, who’d given up the boyfriend’s name. Davenport had then tracked the boyfriend to an auto shop where the guy worked until a week before the girl’s disappearance, then to a wife and two kids the housekeeper hadn’t known about.

  When the maid learned the truth about her boyfriend, she’d confessed, saying her beau had convinced her she was being exploited by the family because they didn’t pay her overtime when they took her to their weekend house in Lake Tahoe.

  “He said they owed me,” she insisted.

  Aloa leaned back in her chair. Davenport was good, she thought, and to have it all taken away? She knew a little of how that felt. But losing the ability to walk and move and turn a book page was way beyond losing a career.

  She was skimming Corrine Davenport’s LinkedIn profile when there was a pounding at the door followed by a shout: “Open up, will ya. It’s colder than a banker’s heart out here.”

  Aloa sighed and stood, opening the door to find three bundled figures on her porch.

  “What’s up?” she asked as the Brain Farm pushed past her.

  “We’re here to get the skinny, the scoop,” said P-Mac, blowing onto fingers that had once wielded a camera like a weapon and were now bent and swollen with arthritis. He had sharp blue eyes and a slightly hooked nose. An old ski cap hid his silver crew cut.

  “Yeah, when you didn’t show at Justus, we came here,” said Doc.

  “And we brought you something,” Tick said, shoving a box of cabernet into Aloa’s hands.

  “Yeah, we’re regular Martha Stewarts,” P-Mac said when Aloa rolled her eyes.

  Tick took off his porkpie hat and slapped it against his thigh. His thin gray ponytail was wet from the fog. “Christ, it’s like a meat locker in here,” he said.

  “I could make coffee,” offered Aloa.

  “We don’t have time. We’re old. Remember?” Tick said.

  All the men knew her elaborate ritual of making French press coffee: bean grinding, water heating, steeping, and pressing.

  “Just pour us the cab,” said Doc, lowering his six-foot-five frame onto the couch, while P-Mac settled himself with a groan into Aloa’s grandmother’s favorite chair, a fat overstuffed thing that had once been the color of burgundy but had faded now to a cheap rosé.

  Tick circled the desk and sat in front of her computer. “What do we have here?” he asked.

  “Research on the vic and her husband,” Aloa called over her shoulder as she headed into the kitchen.

  She came back and passed out three tumblers of the red wine.

  “You talk to my son?” Tick asked.

  “I did.”

  “And?” he asked, lifting his glass in a small salute to his comrades, then taking a long pull.

  “He threw me out,” Aloa said.

  “Sonofabuck,” Tick said.

  “But not before he admitted to sleeping with the wife,” Aloa said. “He told the cops they didn’t have sex.”

  “And now the idea that he killed her because she threatened to report him is going to be a lot harder to shake,” Doc finished.

  Tick’s lips went tight.

  Aloa gave the men a quick rundown of what she’d learned so far: the late-night caller, the texts, the male voice right before Corrine Davenport was murdered, Burns Hamlin’s denials.

  “Sounds like he just bought himself a ticket on the express bus to San Quentin,” said P-Mac of Tick’s son.

  “Is there any good news?” Tick said.

  “It’s still early,” Aloa said.

  Tick held out his glass. “How about a refill?”

  She fetched the box and topped off their glasses.

  “What was he like?” Tick asked.

  Aloa knew he meant his son. “Intelligent and a little full of himself, but with an undercurrent of insecurity, I think. Lives in an expensive house in the Mission.”

  “I’d bet my hat Mr. Moneybags, his stepfather, bought it for him,” Tick said.

  “‘Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.’ Willie Shakespeare,” Doc muttered.

  “What the hell does that mean?” P-Mac said.

  “Basically, that you can’t buy love,” Doc said.

  “Oh yeah?” Tick said. “Try telling that to my ex-wife.” He looked at Aloa. “Speaking of buying love, did the boy say anything about me?”

  Aloa hesitated. “He pretty much said you abandoned him.”

  Tick got up from her desk chair. “If you call getting arrested twice for violating a restraining order ‘abandoning him,’ then yeah, I guess I did.”

  “A restraining order?”

  “His mother got one after I had the nerve to show up at her and her new husband’s snooty New York apartment with a birthday present for the boy.” Tick shook his head. “What’s the matter with a seven-year-old having a full set of Dylan studio albums 1964 to 69?”

  “Nothing,” P-Mac said vigorously.

  “It wasn’t my fault I had to climb the fire escape. The doorman wouldn’t let me in. ‘Orders,’ he said. So maybe I broke one of their windows when I tried to open it. Maybe I got a little loud.” He flung out his arms. “What would you do if somebody wouldn’t let you see your own flesh and blood?”

  “Exactly,” Doc said.

  “Twice I tried to see him. Twice she called the cops. She returned my letters, hung up the phone when I called. She turned him against me, said I was a bad influence,” Tick finished.

  “A bad influence is a husband who makes his living off the backs of the proletariat,” Doc said and threw back the rest of his wine.

  “Yeah, and look how the boy turned out. Accused of murder,” P-Mac said.

  “You watch it,” Tick said. “That’s my kid you’re talking about.”

  “Sorry, man,” P-Mac said.

  Tick walked to Aloa’s front window and stared out into the fog. The sky was darkening. The mist had swallowed the city whole. “I know I wasn’t the best dad. I know I should have fought harder for him.” He swallowed the last of his wine and shoved his hand in the pocket of his faded jeans. “You know, you spend your whole life running toward something, but it’s only when you look back that you see what you missed.” His shoulders sagged. “I can’t make up for leaving him, but I’d like to try. I’d like him to know his old man loved him. Not the way I should have loved him, but the best somebody like me could.”

  He turned back toward Aloa. “You’ve got to help him, Ink,” he said.

  Aloa had just brushed her teeth and changed into her pajamas—thick socks, a pair of flannel boxers, and a Foo Fighters T-shirt from college—when a text alert chimed from her phone. She debated ignoring it, but years of late-night calls from editors and sources made it a hard habit to break. She picked up her phone.

  If you want to talk tomorrow, I’m available, the text read. C. Davenport.

  Aloa glanced at the time—11:10 p.m.—and called him back. Obviously, he was still awake.

  “It’s Aloa Snow. I got your text,” she said when Davenport answered.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “A night owl?”

  “Something like that.” She didn’t tell him of the insomnia that made semiregular appearances in her life.

  “I used to sleep eight hours; now I’m lucky if I get five,” he said. He paused. “I looked you up. That series you did for Novo on the runner was good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened before that? You know, at the Times? You got fired for making up a source?”

  She could hear the sound of slide guitar and violin playing softly in the background and mentally cataloged the fact Davenport liked country-western music.

  “I resigned,” she said, then, realizing that sounded petulant, added, “but only because they were going to fire me. My mom had cancer. The chemother
apy drugs she took were destroying her heart. I needed to get up to see her but first I had to file this story I’d been working on. About a bunch of nail salon workers who were being exploited. I swallowed a couple of bennies, pulled an all-nighter, and got on a plane. Long story short, I used interviews with three people to make up the nail salon worker I used in the piece. They were all immigrants, all making less than minimum wage, and working six days a week. I figured what I wrote was close to the truth. That’s not an excuse, just the reason. I knew better.”

  “And you paid the price.”

  “Still am.”

  “Tell me about it. The mistake that keeps on giving, right?”

  Aloa moved into the living room and got her Moleskine. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions while I’ve got you on the line?”

  “If you don’t mind me asking a couple first.”

  “Sure.” She settled onto the red leather couch she’d hauled up from LA—one of the few reminders of her life there—and pulled a throw over her shoulders.

  “Who’d you talk to first, me or the professor?” Davenport asked.

  “The professor. I wanted to get a feel for him.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  Aloa plucked at a thread in the throw. “Sorry. I don’t discuss one source with another.”

  “That’s right. First rule: keep ’em in the dark.”

  “Is that from interrogators’ school or something?”

  “It’s what they taught us. But so you know, we don’t call ourselves interrogators. We prefer collectors. Collectors of human intelligence. Just like you.”

  She waited.

  “We both look for inconsistencies, details, places where people are vulnerable. Anybody can get someone to talk, but not everybody can get somebody to tell the truth, right?”

  Aloa thought of Burns Hamlin saying Corrine Davenport was falling in love with him and had wanted a commitment, and compared it to the trail of blood in the photo that showed Corrine had tried to crawl to her husband as she was dying. Who did she really love?