It was around midnight when I got off in Encinitas. The wind whipped hot on my sweaty neck like dog’s breath, if the dog and I were in a microwave set to ten. The 7-Eleven wasn’t more than a block out of my way, and I stopped there. Because of the time of night and its proximity to a dive bar, which I’d frequented in earlier days, there were fake ID–bearing brosephs fucking around out front. Best I could tell they were taking turns punching one another in the dick. I tried to ignore them, plugged some money in the phone, and got through to the Ramona Substation. When I asked the dispatcher if she could put me through to either Tuitele or Lawrence, she told me it was my lucky night.
“Why?”
“Street racer caused a three-car accident on the 67. Two fatalities. Tuitele’s here.”
“That doesn’t make me feel lucky,” I said.
“Tell that to the baby in the back seat of one of the vehicles. Not a scratch. Hold, I’ll put you through.”
My cup of grief was full, and I tried to put the thought of this fresh tragedy out of my mind. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for Tuitele to pick up.
“Can I help you?” he said in a tone that clearly meant he’d rather do anything else.
“This is Mark Haines,” I said.
“Oh, really,” he said. The tone had changed. He was listening in a different way, like he’d been expecting to hear from me. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. “That’s interesting. You know what else is interesting? Finding out that you’re running around town pretending to be one of us. I told you to let us do our job. That doesn’t mean do our job. If you need to know, my job right now involves making some unpleasant next-of-kin calls and treating a toasted white kid who had a little too much fun in his dropped Chevy Cavalier with more dignity than I’d like. So finding out some drunk old-timer seems to have forgotten impersonating a cop is a crime, that’s not something I really want to deal with.”
I didn’t need to check any guilt or anger or resentment. That should have been a bad sign—the lack of fear or sense of consequences, the missing typical self-protection and self-hatred. “Beside the point,” I said. “There’s something you need to know.”
“Wrong,” he said. “There’s something you need to know. You’re looking pretty suspicious from where we sit. So why don’t you tell me how you were involved in Michael Padilla’s death. Why don’t you tell me how long you’ve been in business with Sam Gans. Because those are the only things I want to hear.”
He hadn’t included assaulting a pastor in his own home. That was good, at least for now. It would take only so long, though, for a line to reach that dot, too. “That’s not what I have to say, but I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed.”
Tuitele didn’t say anything for a moment. At first I thought he was debating taking the bait and changing topic, but no. They were tracing the call, probably. He just needed to stall for time. Time was what I didn’t have, so I spoke up unrequested: “You need to go back to Sammy’s house, to his garage. Start digging around. He’s got a secret room under the floor, and that’s where he runs the drug operation from.”
“Oh, yeah?” Tuitele sounded happy to mock the lead I’d given them. “And you know this because you’ve got a key to it, too? Were you behind the camera on that video of the chick in the bikini smashing a dog’s head with a brick? You manage the archive of kiddie porn?”
“No. I didn’t have anything to do with the drugs or that laptop. And I didn’t have anything to do with Mike. But promise me you’ll have someone look at the garage. I don’t know exactly where the entrance is, but it’s hidden in that garage.”
“Only if you promise to stay right where you are until one of our guys comes to pick you up. We need to talk to you some more.”
“Sorry, now’s no good,” I said, and hung up. The change hidden in the pay phone jingled. They’d probably finished tracing the call anyway, so I left. Behind me, four young men held their injured dicks in front of the 7-Eleven, laughing like it was a good thing. People needed something better to do with themselves. People probably included me.
29.
WHEN I LET MYSELF INSIDE MY PARENTS’ HOUSE, THE LILAC AND LAVENDER scent wrecked me, completely, for a split second. Then I walked my body like a pet zombie to the bed and fell onto the blankets. The smell left me worse than wrecked there, but I was too tired to care. Unfortunately, I was too starved for calories to sleep, and my brain did some diabetic laps thinking about Emily and about Sammy. How I’d come into each of their lives. How we had churches between us.
That was one way Emily could end up with someone like Sammy. His little crew of miscreants at my old soul-stomping grounds were church kids. A lot of those kids were tourists, attending different services around the county like they were putting together a religious Zagat guide. It wasn’t hard to imagine Emily, a little younger, angry and blasphemous, ending up with them, ending up with Sammy. Their way of speaking and thinking would have been familiar, even if the words and deeds had different ends.
My head was thrumming, all thin atmosphere where I’d expected something breathable. My skin grew cold and fishlike with chilled, anxious sweat. Outside it was still dark. The clock showed a little after two in the morning, so I got up and tried to drink some tap water. Nothing came out.
On my way back to the bedroom, I stopped in front of Ellen’s door. What would she make of all this? I didn’t know—and if I didn’t know, I didn’t want to guess. Most of my childhood I’d spent trying to guess what she was thinking, mimic and hem my way into her thoughts and world. There’s a strip of film somewhere, of a diving contest at the lake my parents would take us to each summer: Ellen makes up dive—a wounded swan, the Thinker, the false belly flop—then I, creatively, do the same one, and do it worse. Even in play, at tennis courts and shopping malls, in the music she sent home from college—she was the shadow I felt safe in. Then I stepped out at a certain point, made my own shadow, didn’t run from it. I wondered less and less about what she would think, and then, before I even realized it, she was gone, never to darken my door again. Then I tried that same vanishing act, and again I couldn’t live up to her example.
Her life had taken a couple rough turns, those last years. A fiancé had broken things off. Then she switched churches, then again. Said she was looking for the right fit. She was looking for an ideal impossible to find on earth. But every time I talked to her, it was the same unshakable Ellen, so I didn’t worry—didn’t think I had the need to, and I was too busy anyway. The last time I saw her, we got coffee and talked about my money problems. Then we saw a forgettable action movie—my choice—and said see you later with a quick wave. I didn’t know. So many things I didn’t know. The drinking started then, the anger at my family. It only took a year to disassemble my life, brick by brick.
I paced the hallway awhile to clear my head. That didn’t work. I fitfully read one of my father’s old business books, which was better. The principles in them were so clear, the steps to success so linear, almost unavoidable, that they had a narcotic effect. That the steps were unsuitable for most and impossible for the rest, I knew. These books were more like comics, or any Harrison Ford film: in them even the most outlandish was claimed as an attainable possibility. Who wouldn’t want that? After an hour or so, I sure as hell didn’t. But it had killed a bit more time at least.
And it got me thinking about Gustafsson. These books were bibles to a man like that, but he seemed to have his nose in the capital B one, too. I didn’t know if his name was on the deed to Canaan Hills, filled with its spirit of consumption and comfort, but his name was high up on their donor wall, and his heavy hand was in their books. He probably owned my house, somehow, without me knowing it. I didn’t like how he connected Emily to me, too—indirectly, sure, but his presence drew a circle from the place where Emily lost her faith to the fabrication shop where Mike lost his life.
But Gustafsson wasn’t the problem, I tried to remind myself. Or at least he was the problem in a larger
, more universal sense only. I was on the run from Sammy. I was trying to protect Emily from Sammy. I hoped that what Daniella had told me was true. If the police didn’t find a basement full of drugs, if Sammy didn’t get locked up, I didn’t like imagining what that would mean. The room had to be well camouflaged if the cops hadn’t seen it the first time.
Then I remembered going into the machine shop, the night Mike was killed. There were people there, shuffling around in the dark. They were moving heavy machinery. The sound of it was earsplitting, but the detective who questioned me said nothing had been stolen. Whatever they’d moved had been put back. Maybe it was just a new iteration of paranoia, but I couldn’t explain it away as hunger or exhaustion: maybe there was a similar kind of hidden bunker or compartment in the shop, one that those supposed burglars used for a very different kind of job. Maybe something had been taken, just not anything the shop owner would have missed. I couldn’t shake the thought. If anything, it became only more insistent, more committed.
The hunger and exhaustion had me thinking strangely. I had to admit that as a possibility, as is my way, but I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t sleep, but I could resolve the other problem. I walked the few blocks to the corner market. The offshore wind of the Santa Ana was increasing in speed, obliterating any drop of humidity, whipping up a helium head rush in my brain. The streetlamps were on, and the sodium light caught all the dirt in the air. Palm fronds crackled like sails. I threaded through parked cars, windows glinting dimly orange with the grime of baked-on salt air.
At the store I bought eggs, butter, bread, and coffee. Back at the house, I dug out the old camping gear from the garage. I set up the propane stove on the kitchen table, boiled a pot of water, and made three quarts of cowboy coffee. Then I set a pan on the stove and melted butter on it. Sweet cream overwhelmed the floral, motherly smells of the house. I fried two eggs. With no toaster, I used a couple forks to dangle two slices of bread over the burner and then buttered them.
I ate the food and drank two cups of coffee while standing at the kitchen window. Everything out there was unknowable, black shapes on black, except for how I could draw on my memories to make a map of the space, a ghost image: the love seat on the patio, the detached garage at the back of the property, the gravel pathways in the miniature rose garden, gone to seed now but not as I saw it, trimmed and lush and brilliant with color. I wasn’t hungry anymore, and the idea of checking out the machine shop hadn’t lost any of its pull. It was connected to everything else. I’d need to make another call, not to the cops this time. Esme knew the situation with Mike and how I was a little off the rails, and she was the night dispatch for the security firm. I called her instead.
I opened the garage door by hand. There was a little light coming from the alley, not much, and I heard the rats scurrying. Inside was my mother’s 1965 Chevy Nova, dull and dusty. But the keys were still on a hook by the door, and I reattached the battery terminals. Of course, there wasn’t any juice to turn over the engine. But the alley had a good slope, so I put the car in neutral, got it rolling out of the garage, and was able to push-start it before I hit the city street. The Nova ran rough, on some old and no doubt sedimentary gas, I’m sure. But it would get me around for a while, and that’s all I cared about.
In the middle of the night, the red marble accents on North County Security’s exterior looked like massive, geometric scabs. The building was in a quiet corner of industrial zoning, and the closest streetlamp was out, so I could wait in the shadows. An unmarked back door opened. Esme paused, hair pulled back again, silhouetted against the bright interior. I could see her where she stood in the light, but by standing in the light, she couldn’t see me here in the shadows. There was some kind of metaphor in that, but I wasn’t thinking in metaphors—these thoughts were becoming purer than metaphors.
“Mark?” she called in a whisper.
“Over here.”
She walked quickly, her sneakers sucking up mud in some overwatered grass. But she slowed down when she got near me and kept some objective distance between us. She held the ring of keys in one hand, but she was making a point of not passing them over.
“I want you to tell me again,” she said firmly, “while I can look at you.”
“Esme,” I said, sighing. Even as far apart as we were, the vanilla scent of whatever was in her hair made me ache. But everything ached, and aches didn’t matter, and Esme’s worry didn’t matter, her concern about what I was doing with myself, doing to myself. None of that mattered. “I already told you—”
“Seeing you now,” she interrupted, “I’m not sure you’re alright. I don’t want to be a part of you doing something stupid. Something stupider than what you normally do anyway.”
“It’s what I said before.” The story I’d come up with rolled off the tongue easily enough. “I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of Mike, keep seeing what happened to him. I was right there but I didn’t see it, and I keep trying to picture it. To picture what I would have done.”
Here’s where I turned on the showmanship. A little less breath, bringing my voice down into more of a chest tone, inserting the right pauses—in the key of overwhelming but barely repressed emotion. Then I could secure myself from her doubt through a jab of guilt-inducing accusation: “You weren’t there. You don’t know. You have no idea how . . . what this . . . what this did, or what this has done. To me.” Now it was time to hang my head, turn, look away, take a few breaths.
“I don’t expect it to make a whole hell of a lot of sense,” I continued, steadier now but still threatening to give out, “but I just need to see the place. The place where he died. Only having memories to go back to is driving me crazy. And you know Watt wouldn’t let me anywhere near the complex.”
Esme pursed her lips and appraised me. “This is a mistake,” she said. For a moment I thought I’d misread her. “Your doing this. I don’t think it’ll give you what you want. But it’s important to you, I see, so let’s give it a chance.” She passed me the key ring. The warmth of her fingertips brushing against my palm was brief and then gone. The weight of the keys was cold and familiar and lasting.
She took a step toward me, and I started away from her, just slightly. She was going to hug me, I saw, but she’d read my quick retreat and let that go. “I’ve already notified the on-duty guys that the owner has someone doing some early a.m. work. You should be good, but don’t tell them who you are. On second thought, don’t talk to them at all. If Watt finds out—”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t want to make your life harder.” Even that tasted as thin and flavorless as communion bread on my tongue, as empty of any human or spiritual content beyond a few bland carbohydrates.
She rubbed the back of her neck and sighed, looking at me so kindly I almost felt it. “A little harder isn’t a bad thing, if it helps you. I’m not expecting life to go so easy on me. But I’d like to avoid going on unemployment. So don’t get caught.”
“It will help,” I said. “More than you could know.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Even if I’m not counting on it.”
30.
AT CARLSBAD PALMS NORTH, I STEPPED OUT OF THE CAR AND THE WIND HIT me hard. I’d been sweating, I discovered—sweating obscenely. My shirt clung to my back and, despite the heat of the air, was as cold as cast iron.
I was in the same lot where the ambulance had been parked, where that detective told me Mike had been killed. Maybe even the same spot. I couldn’t remember for sure. I remembered the glaring morning sun and how basically my injuries were tended to. I heard the detective’s voice: This whole shit show doesn’t get up and running for a piddly B&E. But seeing where everything was, where everyone had been, that was harder for some reason. The sweat and the wind got a rattle working in my jawbone.
I wasn’t sweating because I was afraid of getting caught. In all likelihood, this was the safest place for me outside of a padded cell. It was because of Mike. Returning here meant seeing the place where hi
s life ended—not “his life,” as if he still existed and his life were one of a number of things he could possess and misplace, but where he ended. He hadn’t been on my mind while I drove, but the idea of him must have been in it: worrying the synaptic gaps, drifting among the clefts’ chemical dark matter—an invisible, ineradicable presence in the dead air. Something in my lie to Esme must have been like most lies: ashamed truth peeking out from under the bedsheet.
I’d parked close to the machine shop. No guards appeared while I walked across the lot. Some memory lingered right below the surface, of walking around similar lots and abandoned streets, at similarly ungodly hours, only run through with the sour tang of inebriation and a kind of dark wish for some evil or accident to reach out from the shadows and claim me—claim me so I wouldn’t have to. I couldn’t fully perceive the memories, but they cast a piss-yellow wash over how I felt everything.
My hand was shaking when I got the right key into the lock. Maybe it was the sweat and the wind. Then I went inside, shut the door, and found the light switch. The reception desk was as spartan as I remembered it, a simple plywood and paint barrier between the public and the guys doing the work. Behind that was the office where I’d spent the night against my will. There was a new door to replace the one they’d busted up getting me free. The carpet had a few new stains on it, ones I didn’t remember sleeping on. A fresh calendar—this month featuring a pinup housewife with grocery bags in her hands and panties around her ankles—hung above a computer so old that it might as well have been a typewriter duct-taped to an oscilloscope. I was wading in a strange kind of nostalgia.
I went through a heavier door into the shop itself. A moment of fumbling in the half-light coming through the window in the door and I found the light switch. The space was arrayed just as I’d remembered it. A couple bays with lifts to hoist up Harleys to a more reasonable working height. The tool chests, workbenches, and heavy machinery all looked flat and dull and lifeless in the cold blue fluorescents that dangled by chains from the ceiling. They were swinging slightly, shifting the shadows back and forth, making me feel shipbound and unsteady.
The Churchgoer Page 23