“Or would you prefer I call you, what’s your alias, the one your photographs run under?”
I glanced back over my shoulder, said, “Nina Zero”
“I’d like to talk to you, if you could spare a few minutes.”
The man was a mid-forties Chicano, his skin pebbled by old acne scars. A silver horseshoe belt buckle supported a paunch just big enough to make his Levi’s fit awkwardly. The bulge was beneath the right side of his beige windbreaker, making him a left-handed shooter.
“Detective?” I asked.
He slapped his forehead, as though embarrassed to have forgotten to introduce himself, and produced his badge wallet from the left side pocket of the windbreaker. “Alvarez. I called and left a bunch of messages on your answering machine.”
I nodded. “You got the name of the motel from my parole officer.”
He pocketed his badge wallet, said, “I wouldn’t mind getting a little something to eat, if you want to get yourself cleaned up and join me.”
“Long way to drive to interview a witness,” I said.
He pointed to a white Chevy Caprice in the far corner of the motel parking lot. “I’ll wait for you in my car. I’d appreciate it if you’d make the shower a fast one. Like you said, it’s a long drive.”
The restaurant he chose for breakfast was a flapjack-and-bacon place a block from the motel. My parole officer had said a number of cops wanted me behind bars again, and as I hastily showered and pulled on my clothes, I wondered if Alvarez was one of them. We sat at a window booth. I’d tied the Rott to the end of a row of newspaper vending machines, where I could keep an eye on him. He was a big, friendly dog but still, most people bought their news from the opposite end of the row.
“I hear you’ve had a few problems with the law,” Alvarez said. He’d reached the age where he needed glasses to read the fine print on the menu, and he jabbed a glance above the top rims to test my reaction.
“A few,” I said.
He nodded, flipped the page. “When I got up this morning, I thought, this is a great opportunity to get out of the city, take a little drive up the coast on the county’s tab, breathe in some sea air, make a good half day of it while acquiring some information from a key witness.” He snapped the menu shut and signaled the waitress. “But I didn’t drive all the way up here to listen to one-or two-word replies to my questions, particularly not when I’m buying.”
The waitress kept her distance from the table when she came to take the order, sensing rightly that Detective Alvarez and I had been thrust into the same booth by some unpleasant circumstance, or maybe she was just wary of those who weren’t local. She warmed a little when I asked for a plate of steak tartar for the dog, said she had a dog herself, a Lab, and turned on the rubber heels of her orthopedic shoes to place our order.
“I’m not stonewalling you. You need to make your question a little more specific,” I said. “For example, are you talking about my past problems with the law, which I’ve fully bought and paid for, or are you talking about the fact that I’m neck deep in law-enforcement officials because I was unlucky enough to be on the hill above Angela Doubleday’s place the day it burned? I hope you’re talking about the latter because every time somebody tries to use my so-called criminal record as a club I just turn stubborn.”
We stared each other down over the ketchup and syrup bottles.
“You’re a real pistola, aren’t you?”
“Only in self-defense.”
He slowly reached for his coffee cup and took a sip. “Relax, I came for a friendly interview.”
I smiled, trying to look friendly.
“You may have heard that Detective Claymore has been placed on administrative leave.”
“I heard.”
He waited for me to amplify my remark. I didn’t.
“When the charges against you fell apart, the department decided to step back, take another look at the evidence …”
“With someone new in charge, thank God,” I said.
“I don’t know if you have God to thank, unless you consider the chief to be divine. I do know he’s pretty damn close to considering himself divine, so maybe you got a point after all. It’s pretty obvious, when you look at things, that you’re in the center of what’s going on. Now, the previous investigator took that to mean you were guilty of lighting the match that killed Angela Doubleday. If you’re not guilty of that …”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Good to hear it. No disrespect intended, but if we relied solely on confessions of innocence, we’d never get anywhere with ninety-five percent of our cases. But with you specifically, I see no reason to doubt your word. Just to keep things official, tell me where you were Sunday night, between, say, eight P.M. and two A.M.”
Sunday night, the night Lupe Potrero had been murdered.
“The slow lane on Interstate 10, between Phoenix and Indio. After midnight I pulled off the road to sleep out the sunrise.”
“Anybody with you?”
“The dog,” I said, pointing out the window with my chin.
“I don’t think his word counts. Anybody see you on the road?”
“A couple of gas jockeys.”
“Would they remember you?”
I shrugged.
He didn’t look happy. He needed a firm alibi to clear me as a suspect, and that I didn’t have one meant one more loose end to tie.
I said, “Arlanda Cortes will verify that I was in Douglas at one-thirty in the afternoon. The fastest anyone can drive the stretch of road between Douglas and Malibu is twelve hours.”
“Why Malibu?” His tone was as sharply suspicious as his glance.
“What, you think that’s a detail only Potrero’s killer knows, like the coroner found saltwater in his lungs? Potrero’s body was found in the ocean off Malibu, and I saw his truck parked by the side of the road, that’s why Malibu. You want to know if I could have been in Malibu during those hours to kill him, right? If I drove like a maniac, sure, I could have leapt out of my car and hit him over the head with a sack of takeout burgers bought on the way and still had a good five seconds to spare. Unfortunately I don’t have a motive, unless you believe I have a cop fetish and did the whole thing just so one would finally ask me out to breakfast.”
He took another sip of coffee. “When you get wound up you really let go, don’t you?”
“You’re the one said he didn’t want any one-word answers.”
He set the coffee cup down, watched me with worn but patient eyes. “As I was saying, when you look at this, it’s pretty obvious that you’re at the center of things. Claymore thought it was because you’d set the fire. But let’s try another angle. Maybe you’re at the center because you told the truth, because you saw the people who set the fire. Follow me so far?”
I nodded.
“So what I need from you is a complete statement. I want you to walk me through everything you can remember that might be important, starting from that day on the hill above Angela Doubleday’s place, and ending”—he glanced at his watch—“about a half hour ago.”
“You want me to talk about both Doubleday and Potrero?”
Alvarez slipped a pad and pencil from the inside breast pocket of his windbreaker and started to jot down a few details of the conversation we’d already had. “As much as you can remember.”
“That means you see their deaths as linked.”
“That’s one of the possibilities we’re checking.”
“Are you heading both investigations?”
“Me personally? No. We work in teams at LASD.”
“But you’re one of the lead investigators.”
He shrugged as though it didn’t matter, meaning yes.
I told him everything, talking through a breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, and bottomless cups of coffee. He took detailed notes in a slashing hand, left elbow angled sharply out and his writing hand curved above the line in the backward style of most lefties. He asked pointed,
intelligent questions that switched rapidly back and forth along the time line of incidents, making sure I told the story straight and that he understood it. When finished we walked out to the row of newspaper vending machines, where I untied the Rott, asked, “You didn’t by any chance get into town last night, did you?”
“This morning,” he said.
“I had a strange feeling last night, somebody was behind me, hoped maybe it was you.”
“I didn’t leave L.A. until six this morning.”
“I’m sure I’m just being paranoid.”
“Considering the story you just told me, I’d say a little paranoia is justified.” Alvarez knelt to get up close and personal with the Rott, dropping his voice an octave and calling the dog a good boy. “You take this dog with you everywhere?” He scratched behind the dog’s ear and adjusted his collar.
“I’m not sure if I take him or he takes me.”
“He’s big enough, that’s for sure.”
Alvarez stood and offered his hand. I took it. He told me to be careful and to call if I thought of anything else. I promised I would. When he drove away I gave the Rott a pat, thought Alvarez was a pretty decent guy, for a homicide detective.
The Rott and I took a long walk that day around the wetlands to the north, the Rott tightly leashed because of the herons, sandpipers, and other coastal birds. For the first time in what seemed like years, I felt vaguely hopeful that things might turn out well for me. Most of the prisoners who greet the outside world with certainty on parole plan to return to the same ways and habits that imprisoned them. They fall back into the life of drugs and thievery because that’s what they know, and there is great comfort in the familiar. I’d never been a criminal. I’m allergic to drugs and I can’t steal things. I wasn’t afraid of returning to the criminal life because I’d never lived it. The life I’d lived before had vaporized. I had nothing to go back to. No friends, no job, no family. A deep and abiding rage took their place, combined with an interest in photography and a little hope. I wasn’t angry at everyone, and I wasn’t angry all the time, but my rage was never distant, and it was the closest thing I had to a best friend. When I needed my rage, it was there, and it saved me from harm on more than one occasion. It also came to me when I hadn’t called it, and when it did, I always regretted the wake it left behind.
My rage nearly burned itself out after my husband died, like a star that goes supernova and all at once collapses. For a while, I felt nothing—not grief, not pain, not regret. My emotions spun down to a hard, black core from which no light escaped. Only my love of photography remained, and for a while, that sustained me. I have suffered through emotional changes often enough to know that I was passing through another one, that this too would end, but I didn’t know whether it would end someplace better or far worse. An odd thing happened then. A toothless dog walked out of a brushfire and into my life. The Rott had suffered too, but he was a happy animal. His happiness was infectious. I couldn’t fairly say I’d caught it completely, but the dark and oppressive pull of my heart lightened. I began to feel again. Those feelings were awkward, sometimes stumbling things and maybe not always appropriate, but I was beginning to think that I might make it, that my life wouldn’t turn out as badly as I’d feared.
Arlanda’s call came while I was eating dinner at an outdoor fish-and-chips place on the waterfront. The Rott was a good companion, though having him by my side limited the choice of restaurants, and our dinner conversation was a little short of stimulating. I welcomed a call from Arlanda, even if she didn’t sound particularly happy.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Normally, it’s rude to talk on the phone in front of your dinner companion, but I don’t think Baby will mind.” I was trying to be funny, cheer her up a bit.
“I don’t want to talk about this over the phone.”
“Why don’t you come up tomorrow, relax a bit?”
“I’m not free to just pick up and leave,” she said, a stab at me and forgetting that she had done just that in flying to California. “When do you think you’ll come back to L.A.?”
“How’s Ben? I didn’t call him today.”
She didn’t answer.
“You didn’t talk to him either,” I said.
“I don’t need you to guilt-trip me about Ben.”
“Fine,” I said, meaning the opposite. “I was thinking about going to see him anyway. Should get there about noon tomorrow, if you want to meet me there.”
My anger didn’t last more than a few minutes after I hung up the phone. All friendships have their awkward moments, particularly at the start, when one doesn’t know the other’s blind spots and insecurities. Every now and then I resented something about her—her easy command of the Rott’s affection, her tendency to cling to me one moment and cast me aside the next—but the resentment passed the moment I saw her again or heard the crack in her voice when she laughed. I went to bed that night looking forward to seeing her again.
Ben was sitting in a cranked-up bed when I got to the hospital, carefully spooning rice pudding while he read a copy of Sports Illustrated propped against his water container. “Hey, I thought you were up north somewhere,” he said, setting the spoon aside.
“Still am,” I said, taking his hand between both of mine. “Just came down for the day.”
“Not on my account, I hope.”
His grip was stronger than the last time I’d seen him, but his skin looked like parchment, thin and dry, and I felt the bones in his hand click together when we shook. “Thought I’d check how long it’s going to take you to recuperate,” I said. “I don’t have anybody to drink with anymore. The darn dog quits after one beer.”
He laughed, waved me to sit down. “Your Rottweilers don’t strike me as a drinking breed. You want a dog that drinks, try a poodle. I had a girlfriend once, her dog was a toy poodle, little thing not much bigger than a cat, but he could really pack it away. We’d have these backyard barbecues, set up a keg with a bowl beneath the spigot to catch the spill, and he’d keep that bowl dry as a bone.”
“You had a girlfriend?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I haven’t been celibate my whole life. Just for the past—” He glanced at the ceiling and made a show of counting. “Twenty years.”
Arlanda poked her head around the door, her face framed by a bouquet of flowers from the hospital florist. “You want to keep it down in here? This isn’t a bar, it’s a hospital. I could hear you halfway down the hall.” Her smile contradicted the attempt to admonish us. She kissed Ben on both cheeks, gave me a nod, and arranged the flowers on the bedside table.
“Ben was just telling me about his ex-girlfriend,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking about her at all,” he protested. “I was talking about her dog.”
“Who was she?” Arlanda stood at the end of the bed, shifting her weight from one foot to another.
“Name was Barbara. Worked as a dispatcher.”
I asked, “You ever marry?”
“Her?” He grunted. “No.”
“I meant anybody.”
He looked at me like, back off.
“Just curious,” I said.
“Only time I wanted to, didn’t work out.”
“You didn’t miss much, if my experience is any guide,” Arlanda said and took a step toward the door. “Nina? You have a moment? We need to talk.” She nodded to Ben. “You’ll excuse us?”
I stood, irritated and confused in equal measure, and followed her down the hall. She walked quickly, veering toward the elevators past the nursing station. “You leave Baby in the car?” she said.
The elevator doors slid open. I followed her inside.
“You leave him in the car a lot, don’t you?”
“Is that what you want to talk about?”
She waited, watching the floor numbers light as we descended toward the ground floor. “No. I talked to Dr. Scarpers yesterday. The coroner is sticking with his identification of my aunt’
s remains.”
She bolted from the elevator the moment the doors opened. I chased her heels through the lobby. “Did you expect him to admit he was wrong?”
She glanced once over her shoulder, eyes like bullets, and pushed through the doors into the central courtyard. “Dr. Scarpers examined the file herself. She agrees with the coroner. Nothing contradicts the original identification.”
“And nothing disproves the switch either, I bet.”
When she finally stopped, at the corner of the terrarium, she crossed her arms over her chest and stood with the toe of her right pump kicked out. “You just have to be right, don’t you? Well, here’s another one. Remember the missing person poster you tore off the telephone pole? I called the number listed on it, spoke to the man who put them up. His wife called him last week, from Seattle. She’d left him for another man, her high-school sweetheart, it turns out. He thought he’d taken all the posters down, but I guess he missed one.”
“Just because a few of the details are off doesn’t mean the whole theory is wrong. They could have used a cadaver. In fact, it makes more sense that—”
“Let it go!”
It had been a while since someone had shouted at me and the shock of it snapped my head back.
“I’ve felt so crappy the past couple of days, ever since I got here, really, and it’s taken me a little while to figure out it’s because of you.”
“Me?”
“What is it with you? My aunt’s death is none of your damn business, but suddenly, you seem to think you’re the only one who knows the truth. Ever since I asked you to call a few art dealers for me, you’ve been treating me like I’m a money-grubbing bitch interested only in my aunt’s money, and I don’t need the guilt, particularly not when it’s false guilt. My aunt is dead, do you understand? The coroner has declared her dead, the state has declared her dead, the entire town of Douglas turned out for her memorial service and the church buried her. I don’t need to feel guilty that I’m not mourning her properly just because you’re the only one who thinks she’s alive.”
“I’m not telling you to feel anything.”
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