“Excuse me,” he said, “are you allowed to keep that dog under the terms of your lease?”
“None of your business.” I wasn’t being hostile. I just didn’t want to mislead him.
“When that animal wakes me in the middle of the night with his barking, I’d say it is my business.”
“He doesn’t bark.”
“The hell he doesn’t.”
“He howls. There’s a crack in the floor, right above your bed. He puts his eye to that, watches you whacking off at night, and howls with laughter.”
“I’ll talk to the landlord. Obviously, there’s no use talking to you.”
I leapt up the stairs to the slamming of his front door. My new neighbor, worked at some ad agency. He’d moved in the month before, replacing the three aging hippie surfers arrested on charges of minor minding a string of West Side burglaries. I’d heard his rent was almost twice as high as mine.
I was stepping into the shower when the front bell sounded. The Rott jumped to his feet, excitement pitching his voice to sharp, warning barks, as though I was hard of hearing, needed him to tell me someone was at the door. I wrapped myself in a towel and put my eye to the peephole. The downstairs neighbor peered at me from the opposite side, his face distorted by the fish-eye lens. I went back to the shower. He gave the buzzer a few more blasts. The Rott continued to remind me someone was at the door. Eventually, either the neighbor gave up or the doorbell gave out. The Rott wound in circles, counterclockwise, then clockwise, and settled onto the bathroom floor. I got through the shower and into my street clothes before the buzzer went off again. I wasn’t going to allow myself to be harassed by a legalistic prig of a new neighbor and charged from the bathroom to snap open the door.
“We had an appointment to see a sketch artist, I thought,” the old cop said.
Angela Doubleday’s niece backed toward the stairs. “If it’s inconvenient, we can come back some other time.”
The Rott bulled me aside when he heard her voice. She stooped to scratch behind his ear.
“Sorry. I had an argument with a neighbor this morning, expected it was going to be him.”
Arlanda’s eyes sparkled and the corner of her lip hooked into a smile. “I didn’t think you knew us well enough to want to kill us.”
“My neighbor doesn’t like dogs.”
“Never trust anyone who doesn’t like dogs,” she said.
Ben’s sunglasses, dark as the back of a cave, hid his reaction, but he didn’t trust me, and the way I’d greeted them at the door confirmed his suspicions. I clipped the Rott’s new leash to his collar and led them down the boardwalk.
Hank occupied his usual spot across from the Sidewalk Cafe. Like most caricaturists, he hung a gallery of celebrity portraits on the sides of his drawing easel to attract the tourist trade. Hank had walked out of China a couple of years earlier, ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow, and followed the refugee trail south to Berlin, where he applied at the U.S. embassy for asylum on grounds of religious persecution. Nobody on the boardwalk could pronounce his Chinese name correctly, so everybody called him Hank. He was happy to go by an Americanized name.
His English wasn’t as fluent or precise as his pencil, so I spent more time describing the man I’d seen at Doubleday’s estate than he took to draw him. He couldn’t understand what I meant by prematurely gray, until I remembered a couple of movie stars who grayed early and were confident enough to wave off the hair dye. His pencil rapidly stroked across the sheet of sketch paper, and a portrait of the man emerged very much as I remembered him, even if he looked a little too much like George Clooney.
The gunman was an easier draw. His features weren’t so subtle and he wore his hair gelled back the way a lot of guys in L.A. did back when it was the style. Hank liked to put props in the portraits—surfboards and barbells for the boys, Rollerblades and heart-shaped sunglasses for the girls—but I resisted having the gunman’s portrait drawn with a 38-caliber automatic. I told him both portraits were not only accurate but beautifully drawn.
Ben paid for the sketches and promised he’d make copies for me. I asked what he planned to do with the originals.
“Look at some mug books,” he said. “See if I can match either suspect with any known firebugs. I still know a few guys. I’ll ask around.”
“You’ve been a tremendous help,” Arlanda said. “You didn’t have to volunteer your time like this.”
“What I was doing on the hill that day, it’s how I make my living. If your aunt had shown her face, I would have taken her photograph. She’s a public figure and it’s my job. But I don’t wish her harm.”
“I don’t suppose a mosquito means you any harm when it sucks your blood,” Ben said. “But that doesn’t make the itch go away, does it?”
Arlanda distanced herself by a step. “She’s trying to help. Why not be gracious and say thanks?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“I’m not trying out for sainthood,” I said. “But I’m not a blood-sucker either. We’re talking about public figures here, people who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of fame and acquired a considerable fortune trading on that fame. What gives them the right to control the media by decree? The public has a right to know, and that’s who I serve, the public, all those people standing in lines at the grocery store, looking for a little diversion, a little who’s-screwing-who while they wait their turn at the cashier, the same people who stand in lines at the movie theaters, who rent the videos and buy the records. The moment someone becomes a public figure, particularly when they’ve made a fortune from it, then the public has a right to information, which they aren’t going to get from the official starsanctioned photo ops and interviews set up by publicity flacks.”
“And what happens when they want out?” The old cop stabbed a forefinger at my chest, his hardware-store baseball cap shading the flush of anger in his cheeks. “According to you, they’re fair game until hounded to the grave.”
“Why should they be allowed to opt out? The choices I’ve made, they follow me everywhere I go. Everybody is bound by the choices they make. You want a public life, you’re going to get scrutinized. You can’t invent some pretty story about yourself, sell it to the public for ten million a year, and not have somebody like me prowling around, pulling up the corners of your carpet. And the interest in Doubleday was limited to the tenth anniversary of the death of the stalker who drove her into seclusion. I don’t think a couple of paparazzi trying to snap your picture once every couple of years qualifies as being hounded to your grave.” I glanced at Arlanda. “Sorry. That was an unfortunate choice of words.”
“Ben said it first. You’ve been nothing but helpful. You wouldn’t have talked to us if your heart wasn’t in the right place.”
“If the place isn’t in question, maybe the size is,” I said. “I’m still an ex-con snooping around celebrity backyards with a camera, not Mother Teresa.”
Ben smiled for the first time since I’d met him, a shake-of-the-head, rueful, cracked-lip kind of smile, but a smile nonetheless. “I think we have our differences but I appreciate your candor.”
Arlanda gave the Rott a good thump on the ribs, asked, “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“If you’re going to make an open offer like that, then yes, there is something you can do for me.”
Arlanda nodded lightly, her eyes wide open and trusting. Ben looked like I was going to steal his wallet.
“Take me where the fire was started, the exact spot. Tell me how you think it was done and what the arson guys are saying.”
Ben was tensed to say no and did. I asked why not.
“Just can’t do it.”
“The cops respect you. I understand you don’t want to abuse that respect by bringing me into the investigation. If you still suspect I had something to do with the fire then I advise you to thank me for my time and walk away. If you believe I’m innocent then I’d appreciate your help because I have better things to do wi
th my life than spend it in prison on a trumped-up arson-manslaughter charge.”
The old cop crossed his arms over his chest in the middle of my plea. I knew his answer before he spoke.
“I still don’t think I can do it.”
Arlanda nudged the Rott with her knee and stood at my side, the dog between us. “Yesterday you said you thought the investigation was going in the wrong direction.”
Ben’s arms tightened across his chest and he nodded, once.
“I’ve said nothing about that so far because you’re the one who knows best about these things, but it frustrates the hell out of me that everybody is wasting time while whoever set that fire is getting away with it. You act like you believe her story. You act like you think she didn’t do it. If we can prove that for sure, then the investigation will look elsewhere, and that can only help, right?”
Ben had a twelve-inch height advantage and outweighed Arlanda by over a hundred pounds but he was no match for her. “What, you girls trying out as a tag team for World Wrestling Entertainment?” He didn’t smile. He was serious.
“We’d kick ass, don’t you think?”
Arlanda’s language startled me, maybe because she was so small and, up to that point, ladylike. I hadn’t expected it.
“You’re kicking mine, that’s for sure,” Ben said.
I took that to mean yes, said, “Something you don’t feel comfortable telling me when we get up there, don’t tell me.”
“Then we might have a pretty short conversation,” he said.
We rode up to the estate in separate cars, the old cop leading the way in a battered Chevy Blazer. Arlanda had asked to ride with me, and though her request surprised me, I’d said yes. A few silent miles into the drive I understood that she’d wanted to ride with the Rott. She stared out the window and stroked his back as we rolled from light to light, his massive head in her lap. She mourned her aunt and missed her kids, I guessed, and petting the dog calmed her.
“You have dogs in Douglas?” I asked. It seemed a safe enough thing to talk about.
“Had one. Guapo. Died a couple months ago. He wasn’t much to look at but he was the sweetest dog in the world.”
“Going to get another one?”
“I should. For the kids if nothing else. But not right away. Kids should learn a little something about death, and I was afraid if I gave ’em another dog too soon they’d think everything was replaceable. I don’t care what dog we get, we’ll never have another Guapo. I want the kids to realize that. He was my husband’s dog originally.”
“You’re married?”
“Divorcing. He ran off to Houston with some girl about six months ago. Left the kids, the dog, eight years of marriage. Broke the poor dog’s heart, if nothing else. Didn’t even have the guts to say good-bye to me in person.”
I let a mile go by before I said, “Men. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t shoot ’em.”
“You did.”
“Got me into some trouble, too.”
“I wish I had the guts for a little trouble like that.” She pointed her finger out the windshield, said, “Bang!”
“Was that your ex?”
“It was.”
“Where’d you hit him?”
“Let’s just say he’s packing light.” Her voice was prim when she said that and we both laughed.
“You’ll be all right,” I said.
“Me? I’m just a divorcee waiting to happen, a mestiza from an Arizona border town with two years of junior college and a job with a real estate company in a county where the land ain’t worth spit. Your life seems a little more exciting than mine.”
I was afraid to tell her how boring my life really was. The work was good, but I didn’t really care about anybody and that deadened me inside like rotted wood. “You know what I used to do for a living?”
“Rob banks?”
“No, that was later.”
She looked at me like she thought I was serious.
“I took pictures of babies, worked in a place called Hansel & Gretel’s Baby Portrait Studio, wore a green jumper and little green hat, styled my hair in pigtails, painted big red dots on my cheeks.” I held my arm in the sunlight filtering between the seats. “Here, take a look at the hair on my arm.”
Though born a blonde, I’d been dying my hair black since my release from prison. Arlanda stared at my arm as though looking for one thing but seeing something else. I knew what she was looking at.
“The color,” I said, to redirect her attention.
“It’s blond, isn’t it?”
I put my hand back to the wheel. “That’s right. My name was Mary Alice Baker back then. I changed it. What I’m getting at is I changed my life. You can too, if you want. I’m not saying you should change, understand. And I know from personal experience not all change is for the better. But it is possible.”
Beyond Pacific Palisades the coast traffic thinned and the raw beauty of the hills and sea took prominence. I thought she was contemplating what I’d told her, about the possibility of change, but she had something else on her mind. “Those marks on your arm,” she said. “They look like cigarette burns.”
I didn’t want to look at her face, certain the burns repulsed her. The first one scars the inside of my wrist, to the right of the tendon. The second jumps the tendon to the left, higher up the forearm. Eight more crater the inside of my arm like a chain of extinct volcanoes, the tenth and final mark scarring the flesh at my shoulder. “I carry those scars as a reminder of why I was convicted of manslaughter and why I’ll never let myself ever be victimized again.”
“Who did it to you? The man you killed?”
I didn’t want to be mysterious, but I didn’t want to talk about it either. I said, “Different guy, but related times.”
Arlanda didn’t want to see the house—-what little remained of it—and stayed behind to watch the Rott chase gulls on the beach. Ben drove me up the mountain. A couple of twisting miles from the coast the road looped above the burn. A tangle of ironwood and sage clung to the mountain above us. Below, the burn cut a swath the shape of an oil spill to the beach. The afternoon Santa Anas had yet to pick up, and the offshore breeze blew cool and clean. To the north the Santa Monica Mountains crashed to sea in a perilous descent, and the informed eye could trace those same mountains breaking free of the ocean depths again in the rounded humps of Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel Islands before the continental shelf dropped away and plunged the range into the abyss. Out to sea, nothing blocked the line of sight except the earth’s curve. Even in devastation, the landscape rivaled any other I’d seen for sheer beauty.
We stepped off the road and down the embankment, where the earth had been scuffed by footprints into a rudimentary path. The investigators had climbed down the hill at the same spot, Ben said, to avoid contaminating the scene. The chaparral near the road was charred, as though the fire had been hot enough to singe but not to incinerate. About ten yards down, the intensity of the burn changed, and nothing but rock jutted from the blackened earth until fair below, at the base of the mountain, where a pillar of chimney rose above a cracked swimming pool—the only substantial remains of Angela Doubleday’s estate.
Ben stopped where the burn changed and crouched on his heels. He snapped a charred branch from a chaparral and held it up to the blue horizon. “Not burned all the way through, you notice. Why do you think that is?” He stood and sidestepped along the hillside, his gaze pinned to the ground. “I’m not an arson expert but I’ve lived these hills for thirty-five years and seen my share of fires. I always kept my ears and eyes open, too. Some of the deputies, they shut down after a while, but not me. I always wanted to learn something new. See this here?”
He pointed to a patch where the earth had been cut and peeled away like a square of carpet. To the uphill side the chaparral had not burned completely, but toward the sea only a few sticks poked above the ground. Another dozen yards down the hill the brush had been incinerated. His fin
ger traced the line, shaped like an arrowhead, that marked where the burn changed intensity. I remembered the direction of the wind that day and calculated that had I stood at the tip of the arrow and sighted straight downwind, my spit would have carried to Angela Doubleday’s roof.
“Whoever did this figured which way the wind was blowing and how hard and poured gasoline along this line you see. He climbed partway down the embankment so nobody could see him from the road.” Ben broke another twig on the high side of the hill. “See, the wind blew the fire downhill. Behind the line, the shrub is no more than singed.” He wiped the soot from his hand on his jeans and when he spoke again I heard the anger in his voice. “Maybe he just wanted to start a fire and this looked as good a place as any. That would make Angela’s death manslaughter. Maybe the son of a bitch knew exactly what he wanted to burn and put the match to this spot to kill her as sure as a bullet …” He pinched the bridge of his nose and every line in his face contracted with a sudden jolt of pain that closed his eyes. “Oh hell, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.” His voice tore like old cloth and he wept, trying to hide his face from me.
My first impulse when someone began to cry was to turn and run. I hadn’t cried in years. I still grieved when I lost people. I just didn’t cry. When grief came to me it was blank, impenetrable. I didn’t eat or talk for days, had hard thoughts, and sometimes, if I could justify it, I hurt the people who had hurt me. But I never cried.
“I don’t know what it is, why I get so broken up about this.”
“She was your goddaughter.”
“Yeah, but I hadn’t seen her in almost a decade. I knew her mother, back when. I guess it has something to do with that.”
I knew enough about people not to talk. Normal people need to let go every now and then. Sometimes a particular song will do it, or a couple of drinks, and sometimes it takes no more than a memory.
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