We had about a half-hour to kill until the 4:30 meeting, so I took us along the waterfront, pointing out a few Chuck Varner–relevant sites.
“That’s the bookstore Chuck used to leave me at when he went drinking at Morley’s. There’s where Morley’s used to be. An A&W now, but trust me, it was very visual.”
The bookstore used to be run by ex-hippies who were getting broker by the day. Chuck would leave them ten bucks as a sort of mass-rental fee and put me in the kids’ section for two, four, five hours. Days when he had an appointment with a woman that would take too long to leave me with an ice cream at the beach. The woman owner of the bookstore, named Kimberly something and smelling pleasantly of sandalwood and sweat, sometimes took me to the apartment above the store for soup and a nap. I never went back after Harlow Mall.
“How long would he leave you for?” Jaya asked. She understood what I was doing: offering up some intimate information that I didn’t usually talk about in place of answering her other questions.
“Long,” I told Jaya. “That’s the hotel he took women to.” I pointed up at the sign, Cabana Hotel, with a palm tree and a well-built hut on a pale blue background that had gone two shades paler since I’d last been in Stilford, and would look white on a less than perfectly set up and color-corrected shot.
“When you were—did he make you wait for him?” Jaya asked. “God.”
“I didn’t think of it as waiting for him. He trained me to see it as a fun, secret excursion for both of us, a secret from Crissy.” I laughed. Jaya didn’t.
We pulled over for gas before starting the last push out to the jail. I turned off the AC, letting the dry wind cool us through the open windows. Jaya pushed her loose silver watch up her arm and rubbed at the sweaty constriction mark it had left, but then kept her hands locked on her knees. Years in LA hadn’t made her any more relaxed about highway driving than she used to be when we were in high school. Especially when someone other than her was driving.
“What do we know about Vernon Reilly?” she said. “Anything? Everything?”
“Barely any of his convictions are violent. The assaults look like barfight crap. And no sex crimes. So said Maitland, anyway.”
“Great. What else did he say?”
“I can show you,” I said, thinking of another way I could give Jaya something, if not exactly what she wanted to know. I pulled my phone out of my purse when we hit a stoplight, and started fumbling with the hookup in Jaya’s stereo. The light changed and she took the phone from me, patching it into the stereo herself.
We listened to the first conversation I’d had with Maitland, back at the station. Jaya was a patient driver, but an impatient listener. She did laugh at Maitland’s plaintive “hope you’re not recording this” line, but after a couple more minutes, Jaya switched over to a throwback ’90s R&B station.
“I can’t listen to him creepily fish for facts about your dad, Blanche.”
“I know.”
“It’s gross. It really is. But he’s doing worse and I don’t understand why we’re not stopping him, okay? You have to explain that to me. He’s leaking information to Emil Chadwick, Blanche? This is—it’s got to be illegal, doesn’t it?”
“Who said leak? He’s speaking to press, presumably not spilling anything that he could get in trouble for, because Maitland doesn’t strike me as dumb, and Chadwick wouldn’t strike anyone as discreet.”
“Chadwick has some hold on Maitland. I can see it. Some leverage.”
It wasn’t a hold, no. It was a bond that I almost shared with them—a connection through Chuck and Crissy. Even if Chadwick wasn’t a member of the cult, he was a breed of worshipper. Awed by the past shooting, eager for the next one. Wanting a role in it, even if it was just coverage, absorption, inside information, a seat at the feast of mass death that I worried was days or hours away.
“I don’t think either of them shot my mother, Jaya. And I guess that’s what should actually matter to me right now, even if all this other shit is wonderfully distracting.” I ground my teeth together, almost loud enough to be heard over the radio, thinking about how much longer I could lie to her. I knew, at least, that I wasn’t setting the pace, the schedule. Whoever had shot Crissy, whoever had followed me and hung that scope in the trees, was the timekeeper.
Jaya knew that some of my bitchy non sequiturs were a poorly phrased request for silence, and that was the case here. We didn’t talk until we were about two minutes away from our exit.
“I’m rethinking the Reilly thing,” Jaya said. “We should be doing this more officially, don’t you think? Literally everything we know about him is about violence and erratic behavior.” Jaya fiddled with the sun visor, blocking my view of the side-view mirror, and I had to gently push her arm down so I could change lanes safely.
“Look,” I said, taking a calculated risk. My left hand on the wheel, I pulled my shirt up a few inches, showing Jaya that I had the Ruger holstered on. “I know you hate these things and you should know I do, too, but right now, it’s making me feel a lot safer.”
Jaya recoiled against the passenger door. “Take it away. Take it away right fucking now,” she said.
“It’s not loaded.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yes, but only because you’re so afraid. Jaya, I know guns. I wish I didn’t but I do, and when I have one, it’s not a murder weapon,” I insisted, glancing at her as I talked to reassure her. “I’m using it to keep us safe, and that means that I probably won’t even touch it. We need to talk to him, and we can’t go through the cops. Maitland can’t be trusted and he’s sure to have told everyone else in the department to ignore the crazy bitch who comes in raving about her dead mom and her spree-shooter father.”
“You sound like a fucking NRA commercial, talking about that thing,” Jaya said, her voice shaking.
I braked to follow the curve of the exit road and put both hands up on the wheel. Jaya reached for the gun and I slapped her hand away with a cracking impact that bounced her palm off the parking brake.
“Don’t touch it,” I screamed. “You have no idea what you’re doing and you have no idea what we’re inside of right now, do you get that? These are people who kill people. They killed my mother. Chuck blew apart the spines and guts of nine people in that mall. I know what a gun can do and I know what a piece of shit who has one can do, and I know what I’m not going to let happen to you, do you hear me?”
Jaya sat still. For a moment I thought she was going to yank up on the parking brake, pull the car into a screeching swerve.
“Your dad shot people? Great. My dad got shot, for no reason, by someone who probably was just as confident that they knew what they were doing with a gun as you suddenly seem to be. All I’m saying to you is that if I see that thing in your hand, I’m going home to say goodbye to my mother, right after I tell her why I’m leaving, and then you and I are never going to talk again. Clear?”
Jaya had been angry at me before, of course. Countless times. We’d been as close as friends could possibly be, closer than family, because we chose each other and made the choice to marry our careers together. But, even this morning at the motel, she’d never talked to me with this breed of deal-closing coldness, the tone of someone who was willing to walk out the door and consider the consequences afterward.
“Jaya, I’m sorry. I can’t—don’t say that to me. There’s nothing left of me if you go. That’s pathetic but it’s fucking true.”
“Shut up. Just listen to me and shut up. Don’t let me see the gun again.” She touched the back of my hand, which was clamped in a bloodless squeeze around the wheel, and spoke softly. “I understand, kind of. We need to get through this, but you need to know that there are places I can’t go. I can take anything the world puts in our way, but I can’t take you being a different person, Blanche. I can’t take you being a person who casually flashes a gun. Don’t tell me where you got it and don’t let me see it again.”
I heard forgiveness in
what she said, but also some latitude. She didn’t want to see the gun again, but that didn’t mean I had to get rid of it.
We got to County just as Vernon Reilly was being put through the last of his processing-out. After Jaya got out, I took the holster and Ruger off and slid them under my seat, in case we had to go inside for Vernon. We ended up waiting in a parking space that the guard pointed us to very specifically, sitting on the hood of the car until a bruised, younger version of the elderly Charles Manson who wasn’t vigorous or charismatic enough to look like the young Charles Manson came through. I called him over first, at Jaya’s prodding.
“He might not be the most unracist guy,” she said. It took about a minute of talking and the word “Denny’s” to get Vernon Reilly into the back seat of our car. Jaya and I stood outside for a second after he’d gotten in, taking a breath, staring confidence that neither of us quite felt into each other’s eyes. Reilly was a petty criminal. If Crissy had turned Reilly, had brought him into Your Life Is Mine the way I thought she had, it told me something: that I could handle him, too.
While Jaya checked her phone, I got into the car, immediately reaching down and pulling the Ruger out from below my seat, wrapping it in the light sweater I’d been using as a back pillow and stuffing the package into the driver’s side door storage panel. I didn’t want to risk sliding a gun into Reilly’s hands the first time I hit the brakes too hard.
I switched the station to outlaw country as soon as the engine was on and Jaya was inside. She kept taking looks backward that she probably thought were subtle, but were as telegraphed as silent film mugging to an experienced prison body language expert like Reilly. He chuckled, but only once, and Jaya probably thought he was laughing at something in his head. About five minutes into our drive back to Stilford, Reilly politely asked for us to look for some rap on the dial.
“No trap shit, though,” he said. His voice was picking up an increasingly cringey hood inflection the farther we got from the jail. “And sorry about your moms, having nothing to do with it even as I do.”
“Thanks.”
“You know who killed her?” Reilly asked.
“No, do you?” I asked.
Jaya shot me a look, wanting us to save this for the restaurant, where I knew she was thinking she could at least ask Reilly if he minded us setting up a little camera, perhaps signing a release.
“Nah,” he said. “I really thought you’d a said something interesting on that, though.”
“Why?”
“Because your mom said you killed her.”
“You knew her!” Jaya said, and I gave her a shut-the-fuck-up glance.
“Yeah. Shit yeah I did. Was her em-plo-yee. Just not the kind of information I was willing to offer up to any pigs.”
Maitland probably hadn’t even asked him any questions, probably just intuited that, like Kindt, this man in the wrong place at the wrong time was following orders of a sort in staying quietly in jail until it was time for him to be let go. Crissy’s orders to soldiers who weren’t allowed to know or speak to each other. A risky but perfect organization in at least one respect: you can’t betray someone you’ve never met.
“But yeah, before Crissy even got shot she was calling you out as the one that did it. She said you was gonna kill her. But kinda nice, like, like she was sweet on you and the idea of you killing her. Crazy. She called you Chuck Varner’s true daughter.”
“Oh?” I said. I couldn’t look at Jaya, and I knew if I looked back at Reilly, my fist would land on his face a second after my eyes did.
“Yeah. Proud, you know? Loved you. Paid me like a grand, gave me a plane ticket to come take photos of you all in NoLa. Said I was the kind who could blend in good in a shitty neighborhood.” Reilly laughed. He was skinny and short but somehow managed to take up the entire back seat as he started clawing his hair back into a ponytail. Crissy had had him out there with her when she was stalking me. It was odd to reorient my idea of her taking the Polaroids to Reilly doing it, but it made sense. She always liked having partners or proxies on field missions.
“So you knew her for long enough that you were—following her.”
“Not following-following, if that’s what you mean, haha,” Reilly said, pronouncing the “ha’s” and drumming his hands on the back seat. “I wasn’t ‘ally’ material, she always said. And fuck no I did not tell the cops about any of this.”
I looked at Reilly in the rearview: past the scrappy beard, there were ropy Egon Schiele tendons around his mouth, a jaw that drooped to show the stumps of teeth burnt out by a decade of various kinds of pipe-sucking, frozen green eyes with unmoving, tiny pupils. His smile looked like he was trying to wink and couldn’t do it without moving the rest of his face. Chuck never would have picked him out for anything more than a sacrifice errand, and Crissy would do the same. I could see how Crissy and Chuck would look at a particular kind of loser like him: the kind of fake-tough zero whose middle-class background hung around him no matter how much street talk he picked up, how many teeth he lost, and how many scabs he acquired. Someone who always pretends and never follows through. I couldn’t remember whether it was Chuck or Crissy who had said that in a lesson. It didn’t matter.
“I’ve seen you,” Jaya said. “Around where we were shooting over there.”
“You got it. I love NoLa. Was a trip I’d a taken myself without mommy’s paycheck but that just made it sweeter. But where you were making your home movies, that was a part of town that knew how to party, you know? You gots to get distance from those tourists if you really want to get deep.”
Another of the Polaroids I’d found in the blue box came into my mind: me, crouched in front of Mrs. Bucknell’s house, waving to my sweating B-camera op to get into a crouch, too, so he could get the right angle of the old woman walking into her home with the portrait of her dead sister just visible through the open doorway. About an hour before Crissy had approached me. Had Reilly even known she was there in NoLa, following him as he was following me? I touched Jaya’s knee, warning her off talking more.
Sitting in the packed Denny’s on Charter Way, Reilly opened up further. For food, first, shoveling in a double order of hash browns that he’d crushed two fried eggs and half a bottle of ketchup into.
“She was with you on that trip, right?” I asked.
“How you know that?” Reilly asked, speaking to the potato-yolk slurry on his fork that he was communing with.
“We can get through this faster if the questions go one way,” I said.
Jaya snorted assent. Reilly kept talking.
“Just I thought you never talked to her, and I knew I thought it was fucked, her paying for me to fly out then coming herself next day. But yeah, I got to the motel, did fuck-all but drink, she got there the second night.
“Crissy was pissed I hadn’t been working. Shooting you, I mean. Knew where to find the motel ’cause she’d booked it.” Reilly took awhile to get all this out, because he’d gotten the entire meal off his plate and into his esophagus in between words.
“How did she look to you the last time you saw her?” I asked Reilly, even though I hadn’t intended to at all. It was dinnertime, but I stuck with Reilly’s breakfast theme, getting bacon and toast. The server saw my look when she set down the quarter-cooked rashers of fat in front of me—she took them back to get them grilled up to crispy and brought my plate back.
“She looked good, man, I guess,” Reilly said, licking yolk from his mustache and ketchup from his beard. Jaya was still looking away but couldn’t avoid the sounds—this kind of slobbishness stirred violent thoughts in her. She’d once reached into my mouth to pull out a piece of gum that I was apparently chewing “like a fake ’70s New Jersey movie prostitute.”
“Good how? Healthy? Normal?”
“What are you getting at?” Jaya asked, interrupting.
I ignored her and picked a piece of bacon off my plate, crunching it. Emulate their movements, Chuck used to say. They’ll listen to you if
they think you’re like them but on a higher level.
“Healthy, all that. Little sloppy in the clothes but that was regular for her,” Reilly said. “Crissy was only ever real put together after work. That’s when we met most—right off the highway when she got back from her job, up until she quit last year. After that we met at bars. Only let me come to her place once.”
“You think that was odd?” Jaya asked. She was recording video from her phone, which was propped up against her little clasp purse. She was savvy enough not to ask for Reilly’s permission yet, something that always derailed an interview. We’d ask afterward.
“Nah. Lotta people don’t want me in their houses. I used to steal shit, I get it.” Reilly did look shy about this, smiling in a school-picture wince that was probably cute when he had his teenage teeth. “Probably what made it so easy for Kindt to send me up to County. That and a shit public defender who wouldn’t even make a couple phone calls to alibi me once I’d waited long enough. Fucker. Kindt, I’m going to be having a real personal talk with, right soon.”
“I don’t think you mean that,” I said. “And if you do, can you wait? I want to talk to him, too. Actually talk, not beat.”
“What do you mean ‘waited long enough?’ ” Jaya said. “You were waiting for something before you made an effort to get out of jail? What?”
“Shit,” Reilly said, then went right into answering my question about Kindt as though Jaya hadn’t said anything. “No promises on the old man’s health and safety.” He scraped at his molars with his fork and checked the tines for plaque. There was a lot.
“Promise, so we don’t have to tell Officer Maitland,” Jaya said. It was odd for her to make a miscalculation like this—she was nervous, more nervous than I’d ever been, and that made me feel calmer. In control for the both of us.
“Maitland.” Reilly laughed, and not for effect—out of authentic amusement. “You want to rat on me—and yeah, I was joking, I was joking—tell a real cop, not the kid who begged for this case so he could handle it front to back and get what he needed.”
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