Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  The rafters echoed with the metallic sling and clack of the pump action bolting another load down the hole. A flash of movement turned my head. The window wall above me, tinted against the sun, reflected the room like a bleached-out movie screen. The butt of the shotgun had dropped Doubleday to her knees between Davies and the blown-out door. He laid his hand gently below the crown of her head, where the strands of her ponytail pulled together.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  A dark stain spread from the center of her face. Her nose, broken by the plastic surgeon, had been smashed by the blow. “No …” she whispered, her voice thick with blood, “… violence.”

  “Too late for that,” he said and stepped around her. “Too late for that at the start.”

  I don’t think he bothered to look for my reflection in the window. He knew where I hid. He could hear my feet bracing against the jamb where the window met the floor. When I leapt from behind the couch he’d shoot me like skeet. At that range, the question wasn’t whether he’d hit me but where. He closed the gap to the couch with the shotgun at his shoulder, his feet crossing toe to heel to improve the firing angle. My only chance was to take him head-on, low enough to duck the blast. I concentrated on the movement of his feet in the glass, timing my leap for the moment they crossed, the one moment he might be unbalanced enough to jerk his shot high.

  The brain does funny things to time in moments of physical stress. It works at furious speed, deconstructing each moment into separate facets of sound, movement, color, and shape, some fading into an irrelevant background, others pulled forward into sharp focus. The perception of time compresses and stretches, objects moving as though weighted in a hundred feet of water. My glance met the reflected eyes of Angela Doubleday, burning blue behind her gauze mask, and locked onto her steady gaze for what seemed like seconds but was probably less than the time it took Davies to shift his weight from one foot to the other. She stood up behind him, her limbs loose and graceful as a fairy rising from the lake, and when he raised on his toes to angle the shotgun over the top of the couch, she lifted her hand, the little black Beretta at the end of it, and shot him.

  He fell sideways and back, the tension in his limbs releasing with the sudden awkward splay of a dropped marionette. His head bounced off the hardwood floor, and when it landed the second time, eyes shocked open, the rest of him already lay still, arms thrown wide, the ankle of one leg pinned beneath the knee of the other., A bright gob of red stained the side of his blue shirt, just below the shoulder joint. The blood seeped from him slowly, and the stain never spread far from where it began. The bullet had lanced between his ribs and ripped his heart.

  The shock of seeing him die settled into an awareness that my own heart beat fast and strong. I pushed myself from behind the couch. Doubleday had not moved since shooting him, her face a mask of blood, the gun still pointing at where Davies had been the moment she shot him. I stepped over the barrel of the shotgun, past his blank eyes, and placed my hand on her wrist. She glanced at me as though startled from a trance, her fingers springing away from the gun. I caught the Beretta by the barrel before it fell, slid my opposite hand beneath the hem of my T-shirt and used it as a mitten to hold the gun. I said, “You have to answer one question, that’s all.”

  I waited for her head to turn to mine.

  “Do you want to go to prison?”

  “I am in prison,” she said. “I can’t escape.”

  “I spent four years in prison.” I looked at the stone fireplace, the cathedral ceiling, the wall of windows framing a million-dollar lake view. “This is not prison. You saved my life, and like I told you before, I know your niece, so I’m willing to take a risk. But I won’t help you unless you snap out of your self-pity.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I’ll call the police then, wait outside.”

  A slant of sunlight reflected off ceramic tiles in a room off the hallway to the right, below kitchen cabinets painted pale yellow. I moved toward it, the gun cradled in my T-shirt. Big houses usually have kitchen phones.

  “No, I don’t want to go to prison,” she said.

  Her voice shook but her eyes held mine steadily enough. I walked the gun to the body and stepped over the legs, watching the floor for drops of blood that; if stepped on, would betray what I was about to do. I knelt by his right hand and pressed the butt into the palm, again and again, to make overlapping impressions. Angela Doubleday had put in motion a scheme that, even though she insisted no one was to be hurt, had sent Ben to the hospital and Lupe to the grave. Even at her most benign imagining, she had been willing to torch twenty acres of Malibu hillside and bilk an insurance company out of two million dollars. But she also had saved my life, and that act had consequences as well, consequences that—for that moment, if not in retrospect—overruled the others. “I have some experience in breaking the law,” I said. “This is the way we’ll play it.”

  Twenty-four hours later I prepared to turn myself in to Terry Graves at the Region III parole office in Inglewood, leaving the Cadillac on a residential street with no parking restrictions and walking a half mile to wait on the sidewalk by the building entrance. I’d showered, carried enough change in my pocket to call my lawyer, and wore clean underwear. Someone could swing by and pick up the car later if needed. Experience counts for something in life, in knowing how to maintain the small comforts in difficult circumstances if nothing else.

  Graves strode around the corner a few minutes before 8:00 A.M., Pony Express bag slung across her shoulder, office keys in one hand and a cup of takeout coffee in the other. Her key hand slid toward a gap in her bag when she noticed someone waiting by the door, then fell back to her side when she saw it was me. Wariness, if not fear, was constant in her life. Paroled felons are not the most stable individuals, and many remain capable of great violence. Who knew which of them might decide she should no longer be allowed to live? Angela Doubleday had railed against paparazzi and obsessive fans, but my parole officer dealt daily with persons far more dangerous, and at $50k a year she didn’t ask people to treat her like a star.

  “Good morning, Ms. Graves,” I said.

  She looked at me, her mouth a sour curl beneath impenetrable sunglasses. “Put your hands down. I’m not going to cuff you.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Of course not. If I want you arrested, I’ll call LAPD. I won’t do it myself. You should know that by now.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  She opened the door, gestured me inside with a curt nod.

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For leaving the scene of a crime when I ordered you to stay.”

  I thought about it, but not long.

  “No,” I said.

  “How about for chasing Troy Davies up to Tahoe and putting not only yourself but Angela Doubleday in danger?”

  “No,” I said again.

  “Then cut the bullshit. What I don’t understand is why he didn’t shoot you on sight. You’re going to tell me all about it, aren’t you?”

  She sipped her coffee and tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the surface of her desk while she listened to my story. Her desk, like her office, was stripped of personal ornaments. It could have been anyone’s desk. No visible paperwork, no mementos, and above all no photographs. Not once during the six months I’d known her had she mentioned a family. I didn’t know whether or not she even had one. The story I told was identical to the one I’d related to the Placer County Sheriff Department and then, six hours later, to Detective Alvarez of the LASD. I’d followed Troy Davies to Tahoe in hopes of photographing Angela Doubleday, because I thought with good reason he’d kidnapped her. He’d ordered me at gunpoint into the house, where I found Doubleday in a state of mental confusion. She complained about being a prisoner, I said, and begged Davies not to hurt me. I tried not to make statements I knew not to be true, except the one about the littl
e black Beretta. He’d carried it tucked under his belt, I said. When he first raised the shotgun to shoot me, the motion pulled on his shirt, and the Beretta tumbled to the floor. Doubleday picked it up. Davies was too intent on chasing me to notice. She shot him as he came around the couch to kill me. I mentioned nothing about her confessed role in her own disappearance. I didn’t say that she seemed drugged and terrified by Davies, but I implied it. By omission, my statement to the police was a complete fiction.

  When I finished she said, “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  My parole officer was unforgiving of any lapse or inconsistency of truth, and even though I’d coasted through my interviews with the Placer County Sheriffs, and Detective Alvarez never seriously questioned my account, her mere glance made me sweat.

  “What,” I said.

  “What made him think he could get away with it?”

  “With shooting me, you mean.”

  The back of her hand arced across the desk, as though swatting away my misunderstanding. “Not that. He blows a hole in your chest, fills it with rocks, and sinks you in the lake. Killing you was the least of his problems.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I said.

  “And I understand why he hesitated. He wasn’t a stone-cold killer. He needed to work himself up to it, to justify killing you in his own mind. What I don’t understand is how he thought he’d get away with kidnapping Angela Doubleday. He didn’t seem completely delusional. He couldn’t have planned to keep her locked up in the Lake Tahoe place forever.”

  “The police know more about that than I do,” I lied.

  “But I’m asking you.”

  I repeated the story Doubleday had told me, the story we had both told the police, a story verifiable in fact if not truth, based on the ruins of their plan. “He planned to mnove her to a house in Wisconsin, outside Green Lake, is the way I understand it. He’d already taken her to a plastic surgeon in Tijuana, arranged a complete set of documents for her in the name of Angie Budd. He rented the house in Lake Tahoe because he needed someplace quiet to keep her while her face healed. He was going to pass her off as his wife.”

  “And he thought she’d just go along with him?”

  “He was obsessed with her. Maybe the plastic surgery, the false documents, were just a fantasy. Maybe he had another plan, if she resisted.”

  “Murder-suicide?”

  I didn’t want to seem too informed. If I knew too much, the story would smell cooked. I said, “Who knows? I’m a photographer, not a psychiatrist.”

  Her smile turned predatory, and I knew then I was in trouble. “He was gone from the Lake Tahoe place for days at a time, wasn’t he?”

  I nodded, wary of the question and all it implied.

  “And she was, what, tied up all that time?”

  “He kept her in a storage room when he was gone. I didn’t see it, but I understand the conditions were pretty primitive.”

  “A secured room, no windows, steel-reinforced door, triple locks?”

  “No windows. I think the door was braced on the other side by a chair or something.”

  “All that time, a chair between her and freedom, between life and death for all she knew, and she didn’t find a way to escape?”

  And that was the single obvious flaw in the story I’d devised, with Doubleday’s help, after she’d saved my life. Nobody knew about the diamonds except Harry Winston, Arlanda, and me. The Belgards had worked from plaster casts of Doubleday’s teeth; they thought she was a murder victim. Evidence that she had been complicit in her own disappearance existed, but it would take a combination of suspicion and determined detective work to root it out. The story of her kidnapping seemed incredible, but far more believable than the truth. All this clicked through my mind as I tried to figure out what Graves wanted to hear, and she read my calculation for what it was.

  “You’re hiding something,” she said.

  I tried to hold firm. I’ve lied enough in stressful situations to be good at it, particularly if the lie is made in self-defense to a stranger. But I respected my parole officer, and though her opinion of me wasn’t the same as my opinion of myself, I held myself accountable to her. She didn’t have to stare at me for long before I felt the ground shift beneath the careful facade I’d constructed.

  “Angela Doubleday wasn’t always an unwilling captive,” I said.

  “She bonded with Davies?”

  I nodded.

  “The Patty Hearst syndrome,” she said. “The kidnap victim grows so dependent on the kidnapper she begins to identify with his goals, to the point of becoming complicit in the crime. It’s not uncommon for a kidnap victim to want to sleep with her kidnapper. It’s a way of trying to survive. Do you think that’s what happened?”

  “I think they slept together, yes.”

  “It also makes his actions more understandable. If, like you said, he was obsessed with her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He already had what he wanted. He wanted her. Once she’d bonded with him, he’d achieved his goal. He would have been just as happy to die with her. People like this, they’re sick individuals. They’re losers who want to become celebrities the easy way. They know they’re losers, and the only way they can redeem themselves, in their twisted little minds, is by leeching onto a celebrity.”

  I shrugged, as though such complex questions of criminal psychology were beyond me, relieved that a partial truth held firm in place of the whole one. I knew then that Angela Doubleday would get away with the crime of attempting to murder her self, and not just because of her fame and the brilliance of her acting. She would claim under interrogation—gentle and respectful interrogation—that she had been kidnapped and drugged, that she had awakened with her face heavily bandaged from a trip to a plastic surgeon somewhere south of the border, that Davies had this mad idea of passing her off as his wife in the Midwest. Even those who suspected that she concealed something would not imagine the truth. They would sense a dark secret, perhaps, and logically suppose that she had turned during her captivity into Davies’ willing lover. Love breeds quickly in moments of dependency. My father beat my mother, brutally and regularly. She loved and feared him, believing her love would keep him from going too far, from finally killing her. Who could blame Angela Doubleday for bending to the needs of survival? They would never imagine that the secret was darker still.

  “Did you tell Detective Alvarez about this?”

  “He didn’t ask,” I said.

  Graves leaned far back in her chair and stared at something other than me for a while. “I always thought Patty Hearst got shafted,” she said. “Bonding with your kidnapper isn’t a crime, so your silence isn’t the same as withholding evidence. It would be conjecture on your part anyway. As you said, you’re a photographer, not a psychiatrist. Just don’t think you can hide things from me and get away with it.”

  I said, “No, ma’am.”

  “How’s the dog?”

  “He’s going to live, the vet says.”

  “Good to hear. Do you plan to keep him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What about your apartment?”

  I looked at her like, what about it?

  “You’ll be violating the terms of your lease if you keep the dog.”

  “The landlord is going to evict me anyway.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You already talked to him?”

  “Like I said, don’t think you can hide things from me.”

  “Nothing in the parole agreement says I can’t have a dog.”

  “Calm down, Nina.”

  Her voice was stern, and only on hearing it did I realize my own voice had lashed out with considerable anger. I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m not against you keeping the dog.”

  “You’re not?”

  A smile jarred the stern set of her jaw. “I think the dog is good for you. Gives you something to care about other than yourself. A lot of my charg
es straighten themselves out after they have a baby, so why not a dog?”

  The Rott lay on his side in a pen not much bigger than his body, one of a couple dozen stacked along the walls of the canine ward. The terrier in the neighboring pen yipped anxiously at my approach, quieting only when I crouched to let him sniff my hand. The Rott was twice the size of the next biggest animal. Bandages swathed his chest, slung around the forelegs, and wrapped his ribs. A conical collar of translucent plastic extended like the bell of a gramophone over his head. I knelt in front of his pen, reached through the door, and gently stroked his neck. His eyes fluttered once, as though my touch sparked a dream in the far-off land he roamed.

  “The collar is to prevent him from worrying the wound,” the vet said. She watched me from the door, the concern in her expression no less genuine for being professional. “Almost all animals lick their wounds in the wild, which is the best they can do to heal themselves. If he didn’t wear the collar, he might try to bite through the bandaging.”

  “Thanks for taking such good care of him,” I said.

  “He’s heavily sedated, so don’t expect him to wake. I’ll keep him tranquilized for the next several days to give him a chance to rest and heal.”

  I pulled a dirty T-shirt from my bag, the one I’d worn up to Lake Tahoe. “Is it okay to leave this with him? I figure when he wakes up, he might smell me on it, feel better knowing I’m still around.”

  She said she thought that was a good idea. I wadded up the shirt, left it at the edge of the pen. His breath came heavily but so evenly I could have set a watch by it. I laid my hand on his neck, said a wordless good-bye, and stood. The vet led me from the pens, and as she turned down the hall toward reception, she tossed a question over her shoulder. “I read about you in the morning paper, didn’t I? You’re the one who found Angela Doubleday.”

  I didn’t say yes or no. She cut behind the reception counter, leaned over a computer terminal, and gave the mouse a few clicks. By the satisfied nod of her head, what she saw on-screen confirmed something for her. “You’re Nina Zero, aren’t you?”