by Daniel Pyne
She discovered archived in the top wide flat drawer a collection of hundreds of square-format, black-and-white chemical-print photographs from the middle of the last century: a Los Angeles captured almost accidentally, as if by a blind man, not Finn—grainy, under- and overexposed, in and out of focus, a plurality featuring some part of a haunted-eyed, sad-lovely young woman apparently resigned that she was never going to be correctly centered in the frame.
In the next drawer down she found a spare loupe on top of a newer sheaf of freshly printed ink-jet eight-by-tens: crisp moonlit pictures Finn had taken of her on their one-night stand. The pictures were stunning, and she was so stunning in them that at first she didn’t recognize herself, thought it was some art model Finn had hired to pose and felt a stab of jealousy.
But they were of her, and seen through his very biased lens, well, Riley had never thought of herself as pretty, and certainly not at all vulnerable, and yet Finn’s eye had captured both.
Time stopped. For a moment she was frozen by a complicated flood of conflicting emotions. Like a thief, Riley drew the photos out of the drawer and went through them slowly, deliberately, studying each one, trying to reconcile this stranger with the one she saw in the mirror every morning, handling them cautiously, as if afraid she might break them, or break the spell they cast, just by touching them.
And after a while she gathered herself, put the pictures back the way she found them, took the loupe, and closed the drawer.
She rolled directly back to a single photograph, still hanging from the line, of Willa’s little girls in the bardo between Charlie’s body, Albert, and their mother. Riley tugged it free and placed the loupe over one of Jade’s grainy, underexposed little fists. And saw quite clearly that the four-year-old’s fingers were wrapped around a cell phone.
—
“MURDERS, DIRTY COPS, sleeping with their girlfriends.” Joaquin put all Charlie’s personal items back in the bin, securing the door, turning the key in the lock. Finn had already hung up and slipped his cell phone into his pocket. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Joaquin said.
In fact, Finn did not know what he was doing, and moreover didn’t even have a pithy reply, so he just started walking back up the aisle, and his friend followed him, rambling because Joaquin didn’t like the quiet:
“I met this chick once. Did you ever meet Gracie? She lived in that duplex I sublet on Fourth Street for a while with three JetBlue stewardesses who may or may not have been polyamorous, but definitely not with me—anyway, Gracie went out with this Signal Hill cop for a while, he was divorced. And his ex-wife, also a cop, in Bell Gardens, used to stalk them when they went out, like, not even trying to conceal the fact, and if Gracie brought it up her boyfriend, the Signal Hill cop, would tell her to ‘just ignore the bitch’—his words, not mine. And I mean seriously stalking. Late-night phone calls with just breathing on the other end, a dead opossum in a bag on the front porch, showing up at IHOP in her Bell Gardens black-and-white to stare at them through the parking lot window. She broke it off, finally. Gracie, I mean. And reads in the Times, six weeks later, that her former boyfriend cop had been found in his bathtub, drowned, and the ex-wife arrested on suspicion of offing him.”
Finn had stopped short, but not because of Joaquin’s parable—a small detail that Joaquin missed, continuing, oblivious, “I know, right? So I’m just saying—”
Joaquin nearly collided with Finn, but Finn deftly slipped aside of him, took a few strides back the way they’d come, and peered into another property bin, where a Nikon Df camera was prominent among a cache of stolen items.
He was sure of it. “That’s mine. That’s my Nikon.”
Joaquin checked the booking tag, annoyed. “Nah, dude, this is from a burglary happened six months ago.”
“I’m telling you, J, it’s my camera: There’s the fucking nick on the lens from the first week I had it, and—look, see?—some gaffer tape on the underside that I put there to help me grip it.”
After a pointedly doubtful eye roll, Joaquin unlocked the bin and checked the camera: nick, tape. “Shit. What’s your camera doing in a B-and-E bin?”
Finn could think of a couple reasons, but decided not to share them. “Who logged it in?”
Joaquin checked the tag again and this time frowned. “Lennox,” he said. “Detective T. L. Lennox.”
—
THE SKEIN OF MORNING MARINE LAYER seemed about to burn off, the sun an egg smear already leaking hard down on the concrete crawl of greater Long Beach, and Riley. She was waiting in her wheelchair on the curb outside his loft building when Finn drove past looking for parking. He was so surprised to see her that he failed to stop, and had to make a hard U-turn at the next intersection and come back. The elevator, she said, was working again.
Finn didn’t tell her about the camera he’d found in property lockup with her fiancé’s name on the booking slip, but Riley asked about the old-format photos she’d found in his flat drawers while looking for another loupe. The frangible timbre of her voice made him think she’d also seen the pictures he’d taken of her, and while she didn’t say anything about them, he worried that she’d think he was some kind of stalker.
“I got them at a yard sale,” he said, about the old photos.
“Why?”
“They were taken with a Rolleiflex. One of those cameras you look down through the top.” Riley was waiting for a punch line; there wasn’t one. “I know. They’re crazy, but. So many of the same woman. I don’t know. Something about them. Like somebody took them without looking, and yet they see.”
“They’re true,” Riley said.
“Yeah, I guess.” He was surprised she got it.
Assuming that they were going to the Huntington Beach address for Willa Ko’s father that Riley had acquired from DMV, Finn swung right onto Ocean View, intending to angle inland, but Riley said she needed to take a detour up into Palos Verdes, so they crossed under the 110 and curled out toward the ocean.
It was quiet in the car. The palisade drive was like a California coastal cliché: Kodachrome brown-and-green bluffs above pleated cliffs, the roiling slate ocean confettied with ivory sails. Finn rarely came up here. South of where the big estates began, where very rich people lived and where Finn was sure she couldn’t possibly have grown up, this cop who was nothing like any cop he’d ever met before had him leave the paved road and take a ragged dirt driveway deep into an area that backed into the Portuguese Bend Reserve, condemned and restricted because of the threat of massive landslides.
At the end of this drive, at the foot of a ruined manor house and a dead orchard, there was an ugly compound of manufactured structures to one side of which rose enormous, odd, geometric sculptures rusted red-brown by time and weather.
“Mason Mac,” Finn said, amazed.
Riley looked at him icily. “How do you know that?”
The Fiat, too light for the gravel apron, fishtailed to a halt in front of a piss-yellow prefab home tentatively resting on cinder-block risers. “I’ve seen some of these pieces in art books,” Finn said. “I’m a sucker for the guys who never got their due.”
“He got as much as he deserved,” Riley said, and then she fell quiet.
“What are we doing here?” And then it hit him: Riley McCluggage, Riley Mac, Mason Mac—
A gnarled fist rapped so hard on Riley’s window that she flinched. An old man’s face was behind hers, squinting in at them, and Finn saw in his piercing eyes the uncanny semblance.
“Hell’s bells, it’s the girl volcano,” Mason Mac mumbled. He had several Band-Aids casually covering tiny puncture wounds on one side of his head.
“I’m not getting out,” Riley told Finn, rolling down her window, and then, to her father, “Daddy, this is Finn, he’s going to get something from my room.”
“He the bone smoker?”
Finn said, “Wha
t?”
Riley shut her eyes, and Finn pushed his door open and climbed out from behind the wheel to look over the top of his car at her father. “I’m a fan of your work.”
“Fuck you,” Mason said.
Undaunted, Finn: “You were friends with Sam Francis.”
“Sure. Taught me the whole business of trading in wives when they get too much mileage on them.”
“And James Turrell.”
“Said he’d help me slip the draft,” Mason said, trending gloomy. “Instead, he went to jail, never served, and became rich and famous. I got drafted, shipped to Quang Tri, came back hooked on heroin and never made diddly-squat.”
“It’s the pink room,” Riley said to Finn, cutting the history course short because, as she would explain to him much later, it always ended with a bitter rant. “There’s a safe. You know the key code. You don’t like it, but you know it. Bring me everything inside.”
I know the combination? Finn didn’t want to ask; she had that look, and clearly did not want her father to know what the combination was.
“It’s not pink anymore,” Mason warned him, as Finn headed inside.
The tiny house had been gutted, and half rewrapped with panels of tin from an old roadside sign that, if Finn was right in how he quickly mentally rearranged the tiled confusion, had once been a billboard advertisement for Ojai Pixie tangerines. The furniture was handmade, sensuous shapes of bent maple and steel highly brushed. The floor was bamboo, but unfinished where it joined the walls. You could see right down to the crawl space, and smell the dry rot and musty soil.
Finn found Riley’s room, and it had indeed been repainted in a violent, unruly Abstract Expressionist sawtooth of black and white. Boxes and belongings were heaped in a corner, but the safe in the closet was exposed, bolted down, the flooring around it chipped and splintered where someone had recently tried to remove it.
Finn knelt down and stared at the keypad.
You know the code, she’d said. How was that even possible?
—
“I BUILT A RAMP to the front door.”
There wasn’t one.
“It looked like shit, so I tore it out.”
“Oh. Well. Thought that counts, right?”
“I can build another one. If you’re going to be coming out here more.” His voice was thin, he’d aged since her shooting, she thought, and mused how that must really piss him off.
The question her father wouldn’t ask lingered.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I doubt my chair will fit through the front door, anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s why I moved you out of your apartment.”
“You what?”
“I put everything in storage,” he said, and off her look of incredulity, “Second floor of a walk-up duplex, you weren’t ever going up there again.”
She groped for words. “You didn’t ask?” But of course he didn’t, the question was pointless. “Where did you think I was going to live?”
Her father shrugged. “I figured you’d either change your mind about the cop or bunk with your new fag”—meaning Finn— “until we found you a place you could roll into.”
“Jesus, Daddy.”
Mason nodded and looked out at his sculpture field, but Riley could see the moisture that was suddenly making his eyes shine. “I never wanted you to be a cop.”
“I know.”
“You could be anything you set your mind to.”
“And I am,” she said.
“Is it because I’m a failure?” he asked. He always said it almost like he was proud.
Riley didn’t care to answer this question anymore.
“Your fiancé called again,” Mason said, as if it just occurred to him, but she knew he’d been saving it. “He claims you’re in some kind of denial about what’s happened to you.”
“Meaning my legs? Or that I never actually agreed that I’d marry him?”
“I dunno. Either or, I guess.”
Riley said, “He’s wrong. About both.” Mason didn’t argue it. Or didn’t care. She said, “I know I’m changed. Same dreams, different stuff to deal with.”
“Shit to shovel.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“That new f-stop boy toy with this shiner, for instance,” Mason said, nodding at the open door of the house.
“Well, maybe, sure, okay.” Riley wondered what was taking Finn so long.
Her father turtled his head down and regarded her then through the open car window with a look that defied any words, an understanding and, weirdly, acceptance of her that, when it surfaced, she always found thrilling. But then, as it always would, the moment passed, it became about him. “I did the best I could.” He said this defensively, but there was some pride in it, too.
“I know.”
“An ex-junkie wifeless narcissist art dog knows fuck-all about a brainy little girl. Christ on a cracker, Riley. What the hell.” She hated him, she loved him. She couldn’t imagine it being otherwise. Mason peeled off one of the Band-Aids and tried to stick it on again, but his face, all sweaty, wouldn’t have it back. “Got too close to heaven again,” Mason said, about his wounds, grand. “Lah-dee-dah.”
Same as it ever was, Riley thought.
—
FINN STARED AT the safe’s keypad, blank, stumped, feeling the seconds tick past. How would he know what her code was? And why wouldn’t he like it?
He stood up, irritated, suddenly wearied of whatever artful lark this was for her, and the way they couldn’t, neither one of them, and wouldn’t, talk about the one thing they should have sorted out by now (life was all about finding the proper proportions, wasn’t it?), and needed desperately to address before proceeding (or was he being too provincial?), and he turned to go back out and just ask her for the goddamned combination when the riddle’s answer dawned on him, and he couldn’t help but smile.
He crouched back down and pressed six numbers: 1 6 1 8 0 3: the golden ratio of formal composition.
The safe door beeped, clicked, unlatched, and gaped open.
—
“STEPS,” SHE SAW, fought back tears.
Finn had found a parking space right in front of the post-and-beam Seal Beach cottage that dated back to the thirties, original lap siding thick with white paint and blue trim and a drought-ruined little brown lawn from which a wide wooden stairway rose up to a low, covered porch.
Seven steps to the front door. Finn was beside her, “I’ll carry you up.”
“No.”
Dusk was dropping, blue-gray and ambiguous, the line between sky and sea obscured, a soft mist rolling in off the channel, muting everything. They’d been tense and quiet again on the drive from Mason’s, Riley in her own thoughts and Finn trying to sort out what he’d discovered in the safe, and why she’d trusted him to see it. The fat envelopes of what Finn could feel was cash, and which looked suspiciously like bribes, were in a plastic grocery bag Finn had found in the kitchen. He brought the ledger book she asked for, and which Riley had glanced through and then dropped at her feet with the money and the empty Cartier bag, without reaction, despite what they implied.
If she was dirty, was it a slow bleed from her undercover role, the by-product of flying too close to the source? She wasn’t sharing anything with him, suddenly, and he wondered once more where he stood with her. Perhaps she was just using him because there was no one else, or because he was the easy option. Or maybe they were approximating the ugly, fitful, Gordian tangle of a real relationship, lovers becoming friends.
He had pulled Riley’s wheelchair from the hatchback, set it up on the sidewalk; she swung out of the car and into it smoothly and had started up the walk as Finn closed the door . . . and then . . . she’d stopped.
Steps.
“It’s not a big deal—”
Riley
snapped, “NO.” She angrily wiped at her eyes, pissed about the porch, and, Finn thought, her new penchant for tears, or maybe even her dependency on him, when the front door opened and a sturdy barefoot woman in leggings and a Lakers three-peat sweatshirt peered out at them.
Riley said her name and number and showed her badge. “Is Albert home?” Willa Ko’s littlest girl peered out from behind the barefoot woman’s hips.
The woman said, “Not home, no,” her accent thick with clicks and vowels Finn knew by heart from his childhood.
“Could we—”
“—no, not home, sorry.” She gestured the little girl back into the house, “Jade, go,” and was about to close the door when Finn launched into what must have sounded to Riley like beautiful French gibberish but was, in fact, his passable pidgin Basque—polite, warm, simple—and the woman responded, formal, suddenly shy. Finn understood enough of it. She was the housekeeper. She didn’t know where Mr. Albert was. Finn took his time, searching for words he hadn’t spoken in years, gesturing to Riley, gesturing to Jade. The housekeeper smiled at Riley, showing gold crowns and mismatched laminates, nodded to Finn, and went inside, leaving the door open, and Jade playing peek-a-boo around it.
Riley’s look expressed a certain amazement. “What did you tell her?”
“I said you were a hero policewoman who was trying to prove that Willa was innocent and they shot you in the back to try and shut you up.”
“Oh.” Then, “In what language?”
“Basque,” Finn said. “My grandfather was a portrait photographer who immigrated here after World War Two.”
Riley just stared at him. “Basque.”
Finn shrugged. “A lot of immigrants came to Long Beach on account of the port. And, lucky for you, the Basque love subversives.”
“Is that what I am?”
The housekeeper returned, trailing Jade’s older sister, blunt-cut hair, six going on twenty-one, super-serious. Reaching into the pocket of her sweatshirt, the Basque housekeeper showed Riley a phone.