I left running, but I knew Maitland wasn’t going to follow me. He’d already caught me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
I COULDN’T NAIL DOWN precisely what woke me up: the pounding at the door, the pounding in my skull from last night’s gin and tonics in my room, or Dan Maitland’s phone call. I picked up the call as I walked over to the peephole. Jaya was outside, and she looked hot, dusty, and pissed. I opened the door and folded her into a half-body hug, then gestured with the phone. She wheeled her small suitcase over to the bed and flopped into the spot I’d just gotten out of.
“Did you spill booze on the sheets, or is this actually human sweat?” she said as I shushed her.
“There you are,” Maitland said when I got out a “What?” in my best been-up-for-hours-but-left-my-phone-on-silent voice. “Crissy’s back with us, Blanche. She’s at the county morgue—has been the whole time. Computer error, like I thought. And I am so sorry. You can come down and see her at 2:45.” Maitland did sound shaken, as though he’d just seen the dead body of his own mother. Probably near-true in his mangled, follower’s mind. Another Chuck Varner victim, this one with a pulse and a badge.
“Are you going to be there?” I said. Jaya was staring at me, and I pressed the phone closer to my hot ear to minimize any possibility of Maitland’s voice leaking out toward her.
“Of course, Blanche. We have more to talk about, whenever you’re ready. And I hope you know I wasn’t threatening you last night,” he said, hesitating a little before his last sentence. Wondering if I had him on speaker, if I was recording this chat into my laptop. If I had the necessary agility and brainpower to get that setup going, I would have.
“Blanche,” he went on, “I’m leaving the force, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be compromised heavily by what you know about me, just as you can from what I know about you. We share knowledge, right? That’s it. I can’t hurt you if you can hurt me, that’s how I see it.”
Jaya was staring at me expectantly now, but I held up a silencing finger. She threw an empty plastic motel cup at my head, but it fluttered to the carpet almost immediately.
“Okay,” I said. “Is there anything else right now?” From the silence at the other end of the line I could sense that there was a lot of anything-else coming.
“You can meet with Vernon Reilly today. He’s asked to see you before he’s processed out, and there’s not much I can do to stop you.”
“Processed out,” I repeated, slowly. I sat down on the edge of the mattress, facing away from Jaya.
“Yes. I’m sorry. All charges are being dropped. Alfred Kindt called in last night and made a deposition this morning to the tune of him being extremely unsure that it was Reilly who was on the grounds at that time of night, and that he’d seen him around the park that afternoon and only inferred the rest. Kindt is willing to face charges of obstructing justice if that’s what it’ll take to ensure that Reilly doesn’t go to jail on his word. I don’t—I’m not sure what’s happening, now. I don’t know who killed Crissy, but I’m going to find out. I promise you this is important to me. You know it is.”
“I can’t listen to this shit anymore,” I said, speaking to myself and to Jaya as much as to Maitland. I ended the call with some excuses and a reconfirmation of our 2:45 appointment, after seeing the time on the bedside clock radio. It was 11:20.
“Hello,” I said to Jaya. She pulled the covers over her face then immediately pushed them off.
“Every layer of this bed is grosser than the last,” she said. Then she looked at me and stopped kidding around. We did the hug again, this time a real one. My mind went slightly blank from the comfort of it, and I only broke it off when I couldn’t stop the thoughts from starting again.
“Everyone’s lying, Jaya. This wasn’t a stupid home invasion. It’s got everything to do with her disgusting Chuck cult, how she never let it go. Whoever she was teaching killed her, and there’s other creeps out there either covering for him or waiting to see what happens.”
I told her the rest, with deletions. The mystery box I’d wrested from Kindt in the parking lot had to be secret, and so did Maitland’s Chuck Varner club membership.
“Kindt rats out this local addict, just some kid, to get the cops cleared out of the trailer park. Now he’s taking the identification back, but I don’t know if they’re going to bother to investigate, at all. No one’s going to listen to me. Something really bad is going to happen if we don’t find out who killed Crissy, do you get it? I don’t care about her except to be fucking terrified of what she was planning with this.”
Jaya had me close to her before I could babble any longer. I leaned into her and started crying, then sobbing, then just quietly heaving for what seemed like at least fifteen minutes. It was Crissy that was making me cry, again. This time, because I knew I still wasn’t safe.
Crissy wouldn’t be dead until everyone who believed in her and Chuck was dead. There was no safety left in the filthy secrets Crissy had built for us in the ruin Chuck had made of our lives and all those others.
“We have to talk to Vernon Reilly. Find out what he knows about Crissy, about all of this. About what’s going to happen next,” I said, meaning it but also trying to shift the subject away from my tears.
Jaya wasn’t having it.
“Even if you hated her, it wouldn’t be normal if you weren’t upset. This is normal. Whatever you are feeling right now is normal. That’s your mom, still, on some level. Crissy was your mom,” she started whispering.
“Please shut up. Thanks, and god, I’ve ruined your sleeve, but no platitudes, I can’t take it.”
“That was the last one,” she said, leaning back from me a little and then getting off the bed. She looked thinner than she had in New Orleans, which with her tiny proportions was actually possible—Jaya looked different whenever she shaved off or gained as little as three pounds, because she was so small.
“You haven’t been eating,” I said.
“No. I’ve been worrying about you. I drove up as soon as I woke up this morning, which was pretty damn early, I’ll have you know. I want a shower.”
“Why didn’t you shower at Padma’s?”
“Because there is no getting out of my ma’s house for at least two hours after I set foot in there,” Jaya said. She pulled off one of her shoes and looked at her toes with clinical concentration and deeply felt disgust. “This place is like three miles from Mom, Blanche. She’s going to be really hurt unless you make up a really good reason why you didn’t just stay at home.”
“It was only my home for a couple of years,” I said, in what I knew was a whiny tone when I saw Jaya’s serrated side-eye.
“Two pretty important years, yeah?” Jaya said. There was a subtle shake to her voice, and she started to take her clothes off as she headed toward the shower. This was normal enough after our years as roommates. Jaya and I kept living together when we went to USC, before deciding that living together and working together was a good formula for starting to hate each other and never having sex with anyone again. What Jaya and Padma had done for me was remarkable simply in how unremarkable the life they gave me was: in the wake of Jaya’s dad’s death, they created two normal years of teenage living for me, an oasis of regular life that I pretended I understood and fit into until I actually did fit.
“I’ve been asking people about Emil Chadwick,” Jaya said. She’d let the guilt pantomime play out on my face until she knew I’d arrived at a place where I would see Padma without her having to add any extra pressure, and she looked pretty smug about it. “It was hard to get publishing people talking, even though they’re supposed to be worse gossips than us. But the poor little boy’s been trying to make headway in TV and film for years, and I had more luck there.”
“What do they say about him?”
“No one in the business likes him, his first three book pitches went nowhere, he has pretty solid narrative skills when it comes to feature pieces and scripting,
and he’s floating a Chuck Varner project with a surprise central character.” Jaya was in the bathroom now, poking her head out. “I need to wash the highway grime down the drain, like now. Sorry. To be continued.”
“No one knows it’s me he’s trying to sell?” I called out.
Just before the shower streamed on, she answered. “No one but you, me, and him. I think.”
I walked back to the bed and reached under it, pulling out the blue box. Lighter without the money, but still substantial. Before Crissy had taken it over, it had been my own Chuck Varner reliquary: in it I’d kept the turquoise bead bracelet he’d given me for my fifth birthday, telling me it was an ancient Mayan talisman, the old pair of sunglasses that I’d stolen from his truck because I liked them so much and then been too scared to give them back when he lost his temper in the extreme at Mom when he realized they were missing, and a handful of shells from the one and only time he’d taken me to the range. He only let me hold handguns and the AR, told me I could shoot something bigger than a .22 when I was a little older. But he was dead by then.
The roll of cash was in my bag. It felt like mine, after all that Crissy had put me through and was still putting me through. Whether I came up with that reason simply so I didn’t have to think too hard about where the money had come from, what Crissy had ultimately done for it, wasn’t something I was willing to ask at that moment.
The weight in the box came from copper-jacketed .38s, thirty of them in six little bundles held together with elastic bands. The rounds would fit the Ruger, and I put two of the bundles into my bag, burying them deep under receipts, tissue, and a silk scarf that I had bought in New Orleans and kept forgetting to take out. It was moderately filthy by now.
There were twenty Polaroids in the box. The first twelve were real ones from one of the old cameras, the last eight from a modern Instax. I looked at each one for a few seconds, refreshing my drunken memory of staring at each of them and crying last night, then put them in my purse.
The last items in the box hadn’t been left there by my mother. Crissy would never have taken off her wedding ring, for any purpose, and she’d kept Chuck’s on a necklace ever since getting it back from the morgue. Whoever had put these rings in the box had wrapped them together using an unfolded and then wound-over paper clip. It was almost touching and completely creepy.
I put the rings in the change pocket of the jeans I’d be wearing that day, once I cleaned myself up. They were loose enough for me to comfortably wear the holstered Ruger at my waist all day. I left the box, with its remaining .38 rounds, on the carpet, and nudged it back under my bed.
When the shower turned off I waited a second before knocking. Jaya, towel-wrapped, kicked the door open lightly. She was using a washcloth to get steam off the mirror so she could start on her makeup.
“Hey,” I said. “Something Emil Chadwick said kinda got to me. I’ve been sitting on it and I want to let it out.”
“What?”
“You’re going to be offended.”
“If I’m going to be, saying that won’t change anything, sweetie. Go on.”
“Have you been trying to edge me into making a documentary about my dad this whole time? Not this whole time, maybe, but for the past few years? Was making the Marigny doc sort of your lead-up to ultimately asking me to do a Chuck Varner movie?”
Jaya had turned away from the mirror before I hit the last question. Yes. She was pissed. She started gesturing at me with her lipstick as I backed slightly away.
“Are you asking me whether I’ve tried to manipulate you into doing something you didn’t want to? After we both went to USC to direct and you had me coproduce every single thing you ever did in and outside of that school? After you told me that we were better as a team than we ever could be alone, and just sort of hid between the lines that I’d never get to direct anything we ever made together, because you were the artist?”
“I never—I would never say that, Jaya, because I don’t think it. This is a partnership, you and me, we’ve always been—”
“And have I ever even asked you about Chuck Varner, once, after our conversations about him in like, our first two months knowing each other? Other than bringing him up before we shot Marigny to tell you that the movie was not about him, have I ever probed you for details? Have I ever asked you to share any of that shit with me? Have I ever given you a hard time for never asking about my dead dad, because I knew that it made you think about what a piece of shit yours was?”
“Maybe you should have asked,” I said. Blurted, really, speaking before I could think, saying something I knew would hurt, even if it held barely any truth. “Maybe you should have asked me about him because there’s no one else in this fucking world I can talk to about what I went through with Chuck and my mom, and I never felt like you cared to listen.”
Jaya took another step toward me and raised her left hand. I thought she was going to put it on my shoulder, or maybe slap my face, but she took hold of the door instead.
“We never spoke about those things because you never wanted to. You’ve always set the rules for us, Blanche, from the moment we met. You let me know how far every conversation was allowed to go. I don’t know if that’s something you learned from—them, but it’s part of you. Control. Now. I’m going to stay in here for five minutes so I don’t scream at you for an hour then drive home immediately, Blanche. I know your mom died and that you’re as bad at dealing with this as you are with the rest of your life, but you can bet that if I don’t hear an apology the second I open this again, we’re done.”
Jaya shut the door quietly. Crissy used to slam the bathroom door when we had arguments. These were rare, of course—that’s one thing about shared faith, even if it’s poisonous: if you both truly believe, it can lessen household friction. And we both truly believed in Chuck until I suddenly stopped.
I thought about knocking on the door but went back to the bed instead, sitting down and calling out to Jaya.
“You don’t have to answer but if you want you can nod or shake your head, I won’t be able to tell. I’m a mess, Jaya, and I know you know that. I’m sorry, too.
“I didn’t know—Jaya, I didn’t know you felt like I stopped you from doing things. That makes me sick. I want to fix that however you want, whatever you need to make you feel like—Jesus, it never even occurred to me that you didn’t think of yourself as a full creative partner. You practically created me. Everything good and functional and creative and worthwhile in me started in that house with you and Padma and—and I’m just nothing. I worshipped a fucking mass shooter in a trailer until I met you, Jaya. That’s what I was before you. Do you know how fucked up that is?” Something in the bathroom fell and clattered—a cheap, plastic echo and a crack.
Jaya opened the door, her makeup mostly done, a broken travel blow-dryer in her hand. “I guess pretty fucked up.”
“I need you,” I said. Before I was conscious of it, I had crossed the room, stooping and pressing my face into Jaya’s shoulder, getting it snotty and wetter than it had been before as she stroked my greasy hair and neck. At some point, I stopped.
“Okay,” Jaya said. “Okay, sweetie. We’re good. We’re good.” I guess I answered something back before making my own way into the bathroom to get ready, washing off the booze, sweat, and the crusted remains of my sobbing fit. Jaya opened the door at some point to nudge my suitcase into the steam-filled room, so I was able to come out dressed, my mental armor slowly starting to come together.
Jaya was on the bed with my purse, going through the Polaroids. She looked up at me.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “And sorry, kinda—was looking for change for the soda machine. I need a Coke Zero like I need oxygen right now.”
“It’s fine,” I said, but I took the purse back before Jaya could dig down to the bullets. I didn’t care about her going through my stuff, except maybe if she had the roll of bills, but I worried about this fib. She knew, absolutely knew, that I ke
pt all my change in the pocket of my jeans that currently held those two wedding rings, or on whatever table was nearest the entrance of whatever room I was sleeping in. Never in my purse.
“What are—Who took these? And why do they cover so much time?”
“Crissy took them, as far as I can tell.” I walked over to the motel door, letting in light, humidity, and a rotten cocktail of highway and dumpster odors, underlaid by a faint sting of the forest fires burning north and east of us. It was still, somehow, refreshing.
“Not just when, it’s the where. These two are LA, Los Feliz I think, this one is at USC—is this one, am I crazy, or is this from when we shot that day on Mrs. Bucknell’s porch? Like, week three of the Marigny shoot?”
“That’s what I think,” I said, taking the photo out of Jaya’s hand. Ada Bucknell’s porch was surrounded by lattice crawling with lush flowers and foliage, purple and green bracketing her face in an establishing shot that I’d needed six takes to capture, making sure never to direct her and ruin the natural fuck-offness of her face. The Polaroid showed me with my arms raised in a gesture somewhere between an air hug and a conductor pulling back on the way to a crescendo—I think that when Crissy had snapped this, I’d been in the process of silently warning my camera assist not to tell Mrs. Bucknell we had the cameras rolling while she stared down two teenagers who were drinking across the street. I’d never seen her face look so perfectly righteous, this old woman who’d accidentally slept with the worst monster her neighborhood was to see in her lifetime—and I had to slot in a visual of her get-off-my-lawn annoyance in place of genuine rage, to capture the truth of how she felt about the Marigny Killer on film.
“So your mother stalked you around the country, taking photos of you, and never tried to contact you once the whole time,” Jaya said. She wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t explain to her what Crissy had actually been doing, because I didn’t know myself. I hadn’t been crying out of sadness when I first flipped through that stack of Polaroids the night before, but out of fear for what part Crissy had for me in her plans.
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