by Saul Black
* * *
According to parole officer Mario Difalco, Dwight Jenner had been playing it straight since his release. He’d shown up for every fortnightly face-to-face for the first twelve months and for every monthly since then. All the requisite community hours had been logged, and since the start of the year he’d been washing cars at a valet service on Guerrero. He was, not surprisingly, pissed at having spent six years inside, but in Difalco’s opinion not so pissed he’d be dumb enough to do anything that would send him back. They’d had their last meeting two weeks ago and Jenner had seemed perky. He’d been asking, in fact, about the procedures for changing addresses and getting his own room in state-approved accommodation. “I’m not saying he’s turning into a model citizen,” Difalco told Valerie. “But he’s holding down a job and keeping his nose clean, which in my experience is about as close to a miracle as you can get with cons who’ve done anything more than a two-year stretch, especially in San Q.”
Jenner was not at work. The manager at Gold Star Valet (“You Love Your Car—We Love Cleaning It!”) was Genevieve Welch, a bulky bottle-blond in her midforties who’d taken over the family business when her father retired. Her office had a no-frills orderliness to it and even at a glance Valerie’s impression of the all-male minimum-wage cleaning crew was of worker bees doing whatever the fuck it took not to get stung by the queen.
“He booked six days off,” Genevieve told them. “The only six days he’s entitled to, in fact, based on how long he’s been here. He’s due back in tomorrow.”
“Did he say what his plans were?” Valerie asked.
“Not to me. But word in the sewing circle is he’s got a girlfriend.”
“You have any qualms about hiring a con?”
Genevieve sat back in her swivel chair. She held a ballpoint between the fingertips of both plump hands. In so large a woman the gesture looked disproportionately delicate. Her smile was one of tired righteousness. “My old man got a second chance a long time back,” she said. “We pay it forward.”
The “sewing circle” confirmed that according to Jenner he was definitely seeing someone, but beyond the fact that she was, by report, blond and the hottest woman he’d ever been with, there was nothing more to know. No one had ever seen her and no one knew her name. Most of the car wash crew had been frankly skeptical of her existence.
Jenner’s home address was a small two-bedroom ground-floor apartment in the Mission. He wasn’t there. His younger half brother (same mother, different father) was. Thirty-two-year-old Kyle Cornell had light green eyes with showgirl lashes and a complexion that said his father wasn’t white. Collar-length dreds and a glossy musculature that made Valerie imagine him pumping iron with suppressed fury. Two small horizontal scars on his left cheek and visible gang tats on his bare forearms. So much for the ex-con’s rehabilitative environment, she thought.
But her expectations were confounded. Kyle didn’t like cops but he’d left gang life behind. The young-man rage had gone into agonizing self-improvement. Ten years back, to his astonishment, he’d inherited a dilapidated one-story in Viz Valley when his estranged father died. The timing was good. The new T Third Street Muni Metro line had just opened and the immigrant Chinese business influx that had been going on since the coke crackdown in the late nineties had started a little real estate price hike. Kyle had sold to a landlord and made enough for a down payment on the Mission apartment just when the district was trading its ID of high crime for one of gritty hip. He started tending bar. Thanks to an aspirational girlfriend, he contorted himself through a half-dozen community college courses, incrementally got his shit together. He was still tending bar, but the drinks were fancy and the white-collar clientele generous with their tips. The apartment, now that Valerie looked properly, was shabby, but tidy. There were books. A battered copy of Mailer’s An American Dream lay on the arm of the couch. Kyle Cornell had—everything about his demeanor said—a Life.
“That’s admirable,” Valerie said. “But why, given that you’ve got a life, would you want to put it in jeopardy by having a convicted felon living with you?”
Kyle smiled. In a way that made plain he regarded them as inferior souls. “It’s all black and white to you,” he said. Then to emphasize the happy fusion of literal and figurative: “Black”—he looked at Will—“and white”—then at Valerie. “For those of us who don’t have that advantage, the world’s got plenty of shades in between.”
“Bartender or philosopher?” Will asked.
“You don’t need to be a philosopher to know blood’s thicker than water. Me and Dwight spent half our childhood together.”
This was the guy, Valerie thought, who crossed the road in headphones at his own leisurely roll, daring you to run him over.
“What about this girl he’s been seeing?” she asked.
“I don’t know anything about her.”
“Not even her name? Where she lives?”
“Not even her name. Not even where she lives. Contrary to appearances I’m not my brother’s keeper.”
“And you have no idea where Dwight might be? You haven’t spoken to him on the phone?”
“I spoke to him a week ago. Said he was going to her place for a few days.”
“And naturally you don’t know where her place is?”
“Naturally. I try not to interrogate him. I’d make a lousy cop.”
“But a great lawyer,” Will said. “You should consider retraining.”
“Do you mind if we take a look at his room?”
“Yes, I mind.” Kyle grinned at her. “And yes, I know you’ll come back with a warrant.”
“Actually we don’t need a warrant,” Valerie said. “Dwight is still under correctional custody in the community. One of the conditions of parole in the state of California is that law enforcement officers have the right to search either the parolee or his or her home without a warrant. Without suspicion, in fact. So let me put it another way: Sit there and talk to my partner while I take a look in Dwight’s room.”
“She get you hard when she talks like that?” Kyle asked Will, elongating his pretty smile.
Valerie checked herself. A little impatience had crept in. Partly thanks to Kyle’s labored pose of nirvanic superiority and partly thanks to his being extraordinarily good-looking. She get you hard? Words were lawless, imprinted their images whether you liked it or not. She thought of getting Kyle Cornell hard, knew exactly how she’d do it, staring into his eyes while very lightly running her fingertips up his thigh, touching him everywhere except his cock. She loved Nick. Infidelity was out of the question. But her sexual self was still stubbornly alive. Some men, the basic female in you just fucking responded, whether you liked it or not. It was beyond reason. It was a pain in the ass. She wondered if she’d ever grow out of it.
Dwight Jenner’s room was shabby and not tidy. Orange curtains still drawn against the day’s hot light. Unmade bed, loaded ashtray, clothes that had never known the joys of a hanger. She pulled on gloves and went slowly through the available pants pockets and the contents of the dresser. She wasn’t expecting anything incriminating (ski mask, bloodstained joggers) and she didn’t find it, unless she counted a half-dozen gonzo porn DVDs, which proved absolutely nothing. Thirty-six hours had passed since the murder. Kyle could be lying, of course, but it was equally possible Jenner had come back here when his half brother wasn’t home. They’d have to interview the neighbors. In any case she didn’t have the requisite kit or skill to conduct a full sweep right now.
“We’re going to seal the room and send a team here later today,” she told Kyle when she returned to the living room. “You don’t have to be here, but I’m sure you’d rather be.”
“I can tell you really love your job,” Kyle said.
Will went out to get the tape from the car.
“Just for the record,” Kyle said, “so, you know, I can say I did actually ask: Who is it you think he’s killed?”
“Who says he’s killed anyone
?”
Kyle smiled again, looked Valerie in the eye. Contemptuous flirtation. “Well, last time I checked, homicide detectives don’t look for stolen bicycles.”
“It’s just a line of inquiry,” Valerie said. “I can’t discuss the details at this stage.”
“You don’t need to talk like a TV cop. We already get each other.”
While Will sealed the room, Valerie asked Kyle for a list of people Dwight Jenner knew, anyone who might have a clue to his whereabouts. It didn’t take long. Mother in Union City. Sister in Reno. One former San Quentin inmate, Salvador Jimenez, released the year before Jenner got out, currently living in the Tenderloin.
“Do you have a recent picture of Dwight?” Valerie asked.
She watched Kyle thinking about saying he didn’t. Then deciding it wasn’t worth it. “Only on my phone,” he said.
Valerie looked. A selfie taken by Kyle of him and his half brother, leaning against the hood of a red Ford in bright sunlight, both grinning. Jenner hadn’t changed much in six years, apart from dropping a few pounds. The stubble was gone, but the chopped dark hair was pretty much the same. Still greasy.
“That’s almost two years ago,” Kyle said, as Valerie texted it to her own phone. “The day he got out. I’ve got better ones of me if that’s what you’re really interested in.”
Valerie ignored him. Pointlessly, since their sexual selves had already established an understanding.
“Look,” Kyle said, softening his tone, “I don’t know what you think he’s done, but I’m telling you: He’s been straight since he got out. No bullshit. He’s kept his head down. You know what the first thing he said to me was when I picked him up?”
“What?”
“‘I’m never going back. Next time I go to hell it’ll be because I’m dead.’ Those were his exact words.”
“That’s what the other hundred thousand said.”
“What?”
“California parolees returned to prison after getting out. That’s the number, give or take.”
“I think you should let me buy you a drink,” Kyle said.
Valerie handed Kyle her card. Ropy forearm muscles when he reached to take it from her. His fingertips brushed hers, not accidentally.
“Just call if he shows up,” she said.
“Only if he shows up?”
“Just let us know if he gets in touch.”
In the car, Valerie called Laura Flynn and gave her the number for Dwight Jenner’s cell phone. “All the activity on this number. Incoming and outgoing, locations, the works. Meantime get an APB out. We’ll talk to the mother and Jimenez. Call Reno and get them to interview the sister.”
“Doesn’t sound like you think it’s worth it,” Laura said.
“If he killed Adam Grant,” Valerie said, “he’s flown a lot further than that.”
11
By the end of the afternoon, Dwight Jenner was officially unaccounted for. The sister hadn’t seen him since before he went inside. The mother hadn’t seen him since he’d got out. Whatever bond Jenner shared with his half brother, it didn’t extend to the rest of his family. Salvador Jimenez, former cellmate now bodyguarding the oiled and glittered talent at a Tenderloin lap dance club, had got drunk with him a couple of weeks back and recalled enough to confirm Dwight was getting, in his words, “royally laid,” but beyond that the details had dissolved in booze. He did, however, remember the beloved’s name. Sophia. Jimenez had grinned, revealing a gold upper incisor with a diamond stud. “Way Dwight said that name: So, Fee, “Ahh. Like when you taste something good and go uh-uh-nnnn.” He’d found his own analogy sinisterly hilarious. They were waiting now for access to Jenner’s bank records to check the most recent transactions. Kyle Cornell was under surveillance, but so far had done nothing more exciting than take out his trash and drive over to Flamingo Bar on Twenty-first and Castro to start his shift. In other news, the standard homicide toxicology report noted minute traces of zolpidem in Adam Grant’s system. Negligible, Ricky Santayana had told Valerie. Half the city’s on Ambien. He took a sleeping pill. Zero impact on cause of death. Sorry.
“I don’t like any of this,” Will said, when he and Valerie were back at their desk.
“Neither do I,” Valerie answered. “But there’s no arguing with the treasure trove at the scene. It proves he was there. It proves physical contact.”
“Still doesn’t sing to me.”
“What are you—a yogi? Maybe it wouldn’t sing to me if he hadn’t disappeared.”
“Look on the bright side,” Will said. “If he doesn’t show up, you’ll get to interview your new boyfriend again.”
“Oh, please.”
“It’s okay. I won’t tell Nick he needs to up his game.”
“You’re obsessed. I barely noticed that young man’s caramel muscles and elegant cheekbones.”
Will shook his head, in the manner of a despairing therapist.
“Well,” Valerie added, “no more than you noticed Officer Lopez’s cute little tits. Correction: ‘Maria’s’ cute little tits.”
“Just because you don’t bother with the names of your fellow officers, doesn’t mean the rest of us—”
“Hey,” Laura Flynn said, looking up from her desk. “I hate to interrupt vital sexual aesthetics with, you know, police work, but here’s something you might be interested in.” She got up and came to their desk, handed Valerie a transcript of calls to and from Dwight Jenner’s cell phone. One incoming number had been circled in red, repeatedly.
“Whose?” Valerie asked.
“Adam Grant’s,” Laura said. “One of them, anyway. He had two registered. More than a dozen exchanges in the last two months.”
* * *
Valerie drove out to California Pacific. She was in what she was beginning to recognize as her new state: alert contentment—fractured by perverse agitation. The contentment was a terrible fortune: She had Nick. She had love. She had the Work. There were random moments—Will making her laugh; starting the Taurus’s engine on a sunny morning; closing a case; discussing the night’s dreams with Nick over coffee in bed—when she couldn’t believe how lucky she was, when the wealth of her life suffused her with delicious guilt. But there was another guilt, not delicious. She was restless. And the conviction that she didn’t deserve any of her gifts endured. The dumb flare of lust for Kyle Cornell, for example. On the one hand, it was nothing. Love didn’t kill your ability to desire others, it just restrained you from acting on it. Her problem wasn’t that she had sexual temptation beyond her husband. It was that the sexual temptation was an apparatus for the bigger temptation: to Fuck Everything Up. To the truly perverse, happiness was suspicious, an elaborate joke in which unhappiness, sooner or later, would turn out to be the punch line. Her wiser self knew this was idiotic, mere juvenile existential paranoia, which insisted it made no sense to dare to be happy. But identifying paranoia didn’t cure it. Her younger, unwise self still tossed and turned and occasionally lashed out with the message that she was, deep down, rotten, and that the best thing she could do for the good people in her life was to leave them the fuck alone. Or, by some giant act of sacrilege, hurt them so badly that they’d leave her the fuck alone.
She knew why this was happening. She knew why this was happening now. Because as of four months ago she and Nick had dispensed with contraception. Along with quitting smoking, she was more or less off the booze. She’d rejoined the Department’s long-neglected physical training classes. She had begun to get her body’s house in order.
To be ready for a baby.
After which, her life would never be the same again.
That, both her wise and unwise selves agreed, was the real temptation: to avoid the transformation motherhood was guaranteed to bring. The voice that told her she was rotten was the most elaborate ruse of all. She didn’t hate herself. She liked herself—and that self, once there was a child to care for, would have to go.
She found a spot in the hospital parking lot, grabbe
d Jenner’s file from the passenger seat, and headed inside. Catching—naturally—the word “Maternity” on one of the signposts.
Officer Riordan was sitting outside Rachel Grant’s room, texting.
“Detective,” she said, pocketing the phone and getting to her feet.
“Hey,” Valerie said. “Sorry you pulled the babysitting gig.”
Riordan smiled. “Are you kidding? I forgot what it’s like to be able to, you know, sit down and think for five minutes. Like a regular person.”
“Who’ve we got in there?”
“Just the daughter and her aunt. Mr. Grant’s sister…” She checked the list on her clipboard. “Hester Fallon. Elspeth’s been staying with her. Mind if I ask what the latest is?”
Valerie flipped open Jenner’s file to reveal his mug shot and copies of the more recent picture, cropped to exclude his handsome half brother. “AWOL suspect,” she said. “DNA, prints, the works. APB’s out. Here, take one. Hand it off to your relief. I think Mrs. Grant was collateral damage, but you never know.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll be sending Elspeth and her aunt out in a few minutes. You want to take them to get coffee or a soda or whatever, that’s fine.”
“Will do.”
Valerie went into the room. Rachel Grant looked slightly better. Her bed was angled up to an almost sitting position. Her short coppery hair had been combed back. The first shock wave had passed but her face was still the traumatized version of itself. The threadbare sanity was there, even in the tan forearms and elegant hands, the fingernails of which Elspeth Grant was in the process of painting olive green. To give themselves something normal to do, Valerie knew.
Elspeth, on the other hand, looked worse. The puppet eyes were red around the rims, younger without the ghost of makeup. Her lips were chapped, making a pale smear of her mouth. She was still struggling with disbelief. For a while the nail-painting might have hypnotized her. Now, with Valerie’s appearance, reality was back. When she glanced at her, Elspeth’s face looked as if she were expecting the news that someone else was dead. Why not—since the world, in taking her father away, had obviously gone mad?