by Tim Weaver
Again he eyed me, but more suspiciously this time.
‘It’s the truth,’ I said.
‘Where did you find the Post-it note?’
‘At Lynda Korin’s house.’
Again he spent a long moment studying me, and then his eyes switched back to the scrap of paper in his hand.
‘Craw,’ he said.
‘She has nothing to do with this case.’
‘So why have you written her name down?’
‘She’s just a cop I know.’
He studied me for a moment more, the knife inching even closer to my left eye, as if he thought its proximity to my face might force me to admit that I’d lied. But eventually he shoved the paper back into his pocket.
‘Do you know what I do for a living?’
His voice was quiet, but it bristled with menace. The knife was so close to my face now that all I could see was a blur: his arm, the blade, merging into one.
I shook my head.
‘Well, I’m not an architect,’ he said. For the first time I could see one of his front teeth had discoloured to a grey-blue, dying below the arc of the gum. ‘I sort things out. I know people. I suppose I’m what you might call a “fixer”.’
I felt the tip of the blade nick the skin next to my Adam’s apple, and when I looked up at him, I had a horrible feeling he might be waiting for me to reply; that he was going to cut me off by jabbing the blade through my throat. Instead, he leaned in closer, so I could smell the sweat on him, feel his breath on my face, and said, ‘You know, when I found out that you were working Lynda Korin’s case, I looked you up on the Internet and saw all the headlines about you. And I said to the boss – and I remember this, clear as day – I said, “He’s good. He’ll be dangerous.” And the boss says to me, “Dangerous? How can he be dangerous?” And I said, “Look at these cases he’s solved. He probably will find out where Lynda Korin is – but it’ll come at a cost.” ’
I felt a trickle of blood inch towards my shirt.
‘And here’s the cost,’ he continued. ‘That brain of yours, whirring and clicking, dancing around the edges of what’s going on. You shouldn’t have gone into that cellar, David.’ He leaned closer to me. ‘Not that it matters any more. In a couple of hours, you’ll be nothing but worm food –’
‘All right, that’s enough.’
Egan backed away from me, surprised by the sound of another voice behind him. As he shifted out of the way, I saw the door – saw it was open, and that a woman was standing there, backed by shafts of bright sunlight.
It was Alex Cavarno.
40
My heart sank as she moved further into the room, almost reluctant to cross it, as if she were wading into a swamp she knew there was no escape from. Her eyes shifted from me to Egan and then back to me, and she said, ‘That’s enough.’
Egan made an incredulous noise.
She turned to him again. ‘I mean it.’
I just gazed at her, unable to understand why she was here, why she was involved with Egan, with Zeller, with whatever this was. She seemed to pick up on what I was thinking, like she was seeing right into my head, and she perched herself on the empty desk, about six feet from where I was, and just sat at its edge and stared into a space between us. Finally, when she looked up, she had an apologetic slant to her face, a tightening of the lips that said sorry clearer than any words ever could. Egan was behind her, unable to see her expression, and probably thought the two of us were just staring at each other, sizing each other up. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he knew everything – how she’d played me from the first moment we’d met. I thought I was better than that – too strong to fall for those tricks, too wise. But in the end she’d reeled me in. I’d been as weak as the next man.
Just bait on the end of a line.
She was wearing a dark blue skirt-suit, tailored to follow the curves of her body, and as she sat there, legs crossed, she removed her jacket and placed it beside her. She looked from my wrists, my arms still bound behind me, aching, numb, to the handcuff at my ankle – and then she started checking her pockets.
‘I never wanted any of this, David,’ she said quietly, and produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘Once the police investigation hit a dead end, I hoped that would be the end of it. I hoped that no one else would get involved in the search for Lynda Korin. No one would get hurt.’ She stopped, shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happened. We’ve been monitoring Wendy Fisher’s calls, just in case she ever decided to get someone else involved, but somehow we must have missed her call to you, because the first time I ever heard so much as a mention of your name was when I was at the Comet, talking to Louis, and he told me that you were meeting him, and that you wanted to talk about …’ She stopped, swallowed, the words seeming to stick in her throat. ‘Robert Hosterlitz,’ she said finally, quickly, wanting her lips to be rid of his name. ‘I felt deflated. I felt even worse when we met.’
‘I’m sorry to have upset you,’ I said, my words shot through with such a sense of betrayal, it was like they were wrapped in barbed wire.
‘I understand why you’re upset.’
‘Do you?’
She nodded. ‘I do, believe me. You told me you were going to find out who Billy Egan was, that you had his address, and so I called him and told him you were coming.’ She gestured to Egan, and I remembered what he’d said to me earlier: I found out about the phone fifteen minutes after I left the house. ‘It was how he was able to turn the tables on you. So, yeah, I understand, I really do. Thirty-six hours ago, I asked you out for a drink. This morning, you’re chained to a radiator.’
Thirty-six hours ago. That made today Monday. I’d been here two days, not one. They’d kept me chained up since Saturday night.
I looked up at her. ‘Have you ever been in Egan’s cellar?’
The air seemed to cool. Alex glanced over her shoulder at Egan, he looked back at her, and though he hardly moved, I could see a flicker of anger in his eyes at the fact that I would even think to bring it up.
‘He’s been following you around for months,’ I said. ‘He’s got your picture all over his walls. He’s targeting you. Do you even know who this guy really is?’
‘I didn’t know he was told to check up on me,’ she said. ‘But unfortunately, yes, I do know who this guy really is.’
‘And you’re still working with him?’
She removed a cigarette from its packet and propped it between her lips. ‘They don’t give you a receipt for family, David.’
That stopped me.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s my brother.’
‘Half-brother,’ Egan muttered from behind her.
As I tried to process that, and what it meant, she ignored Egan and took a long drag on her cigarette, blowing out a flute of smoke. She was harder to read now, her face more ambiguous. After watching the smoke dissolve, she picked a sliver of tobacco from her tongue, gesturing with her cigarette to the handcuff, and said, ‘I don’t like this stuff. Chaining a person up like a dog – I don’t believe in it. That’s why my brother doesn’t trust me, it’s why he keeps me under surveillance, even though we’re both tied to the same man. He thinks I’m a weak link.’
‘Tied to the same man? You mean Saul Zeller?’
She didn’t respond, but I knew I was right. I watched more ash fall away from the end of the cigarette like flakes of snow. ‘That story I told you, about how I grew up next to the Santa Ana Freeway. That was a lie. I’m sorry. I grew up in a seven-bedroom house on Mulholland Drive, with my half-brother and my father and whatever woman Dad brought home that week.’
I studied her. With my half-brother and my father.
She could see that I’d put it together.
‘Zeller’s your father?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Cavarno’s my mother’s name, but she died when I was young. I never knew her. We don’t really talk about our family history, which is why most people aren’t even aware that Saul and I are rela
ted. In fact, we don’t really talk about anything.’ She opened out her hands. ‘Now you understand why my life’s so screwed up. I’ve got him as a brother and Saul as a father. I don’t trust them and they don’t trust me, but somehow we make it work.’
I glanced at Egan. He just stared back.
Alex took another drag on her cigarette. ‘Anyway, when this started, I thought we’d find Lynda Korin within days and then it would all be over. I mean’ – she jabbed a thumb in Egan’s direction – ‘he’s not one for great dinner conversation, but, in his own way, he’s quite talented. Hollywood’s an ocean full of sharks, and if you stay in the same place, trying to tread water, you drown. So sometimes you need someone who can get things done, because you need problems to disappear. You use what leverage you can, to get you to where you want to be. We’re not living in some black and white sitcom where everyone’s tipping their hats to one another on the edges of their manicured lawns. LA’s a cesspit. You sink or you swim.’ She stopped again, realizing that she’d strayed off course. ‘Point is, someone like Lynda Korin, with no particular skills? Finding her should have been a walk in the park.’
Her gaze idled on me for a moment and then she shuffled along the desk and reached for an empty mug at the sink. She set it down beside her and tapped some ash into it. I wanted to ask her about Korin, about why they were so desperate to find her, about whether it had anything to do with ‘Ring of Roses’. I wanted to ask her about the true-crime book I’d found in the cellar, about why the angel mattered, about a million other things. But it wasn’t the right moment. Not yet.
She spent a long time studying me, her dark eyes fixed on mine, as if she could see me working things through, and then very quietly, very evenly, said, ‘My brother told me he went through your car and found CCTV footage from the day Lynda vanished. Wow. You’ve got to admire her. I always wondered how she did it. Though the question I’m trying to figure out for myself is, did she hide those discs, and that business card, and the key for the cabin at Stoke Point, in that box for you specifically to find? Or did she just do it in the hope that someone would find it and figure out what’s going on? The distinction is important. See, if she did it for you, then that suggests she’s buzzing around somewhere close by and knows that you’ve picked up the case; if she hid it way back when she first disappeared last year, then that’s different. It means ten months have passed without her ever coming up for air – which, in turn, raises the question of why she’s been so quiet.’
‘Maybe she’s dead.’
Egan snorted, a smile worming its way across his face. ‘Listen to Columbo over there,’ he said, looking at his sister. ‘I think we’d probably know if she was dead or not, don’t you? We’re the ones trying to put her in the fucking ground.’
I felt a coolness travel the length of my spine. Alex closed her eyes, as if she hated hearing him talk like that, as if she were trying to push the words back.
We’re the ones trying to put her in the ground. I’d seen the evidence of Lynda Korin’s deceit in the CCTV footage, in the way she’d used the men she’d befriended to cover her tracks. I’d seen the stage on which she’d built her disappearance, and been impressed by its sophistication and disquieted by its cunning. But in everything I’d read about her, in all the testimony I’d heard on audio and listened to in person, the thing I’d always found difficult to accept was the idea she would do any of this malevolently. She hadn’t struck me as that type of person. Her inability to open up to people completely, the vagaries of her relationship with Hosterlitz, neither of those things made her malicious, they just made her good at keeping secrets – and she had a secret Alex Cavarno, Billy Egan and Saul Zeller needed to get at. Even if she’d run because she was scared of them, they were just as scared of her – or, at least, scared of what she knew. So what was it she’d found out? The truth about what ‘Ring of Roses’ was? The truth about those repeated scenes in the horror films? The wooden angel? The case in the true-crime book? All of them?
‘I saw the true-crime book,’ I said.
Alex shook her head, her eyes full of pity, as if I were a child who had disappointed her. ‘You don’t know anything, David. Don’t embarrass yourself.’
‘Is that why you want Korin dead?’
‘Because of some book?’
‘Because she knows the truth about the case you tore out of it. She knows how it connects to you and your brother, to Zeller. She knows what that angel means.’ I paused, watching her for a sign that I’d hit upon something. When she gave me nothing, I threw her the only thing left. ‘She knows about “Ring of Roses”.’
Egan moved against the sink. It was a flicker, a moment of discomfort that he’d just as quickly tried to disguise. When I looked at Alex, her expression hadn’t shifted an inch.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ I said. ‘It’s about “Ring of Roses”. This is about whatever Hosterlitz was working on at the end of his life – about the script he was writing.’
Instantly, something changed in their faces, but this time I’d missed the mark somehow. Egan started smiling. They both seemed to relax.
‘What do you know about “Ring of Roses”, David?’
I looked at Alex, her question hanging there between us, and then turned to Egan. The relief was so clear in his face.
‘You think all of this is about a film?’ she said, and glanced at Egan. ‘He doesn’t actually realize yet. I thought you said he’d figured it out.’
‘I thought he had,’ Egan replied.
I glanced between them. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘ “Ring of Roses”,’ Alex said.
‘What about it?’
‘Hosterlitz’s great, unfinished masterpiece – is that what you think this is about?’
‘Are you saying it’s not?’
‘I’m saying it’s bullshit.’
I felt my chest close. ‘What?’
‘He wasn’t working on a film, David. He wasn’t working on a script. There never was a script. “Ring of Roses” isn’t a movie – and it never was.’ She leaned into me, her perfume coming with her, its odour catching in my throat. ‘It’s something much more dangerous than that.’
41
‘You genuinely believed that Hosterlitz started writing again in retirement – is that it?’ Alex looked at me, sympathy in her face. ‘I mean, who knows? Maybe he did. But he didn’t finish any script. Way I heard it, after he got diagnosed with cancer, he went back to hitting the booze, and hitting it hard. Painkillers too. By all accounts, he was completely fucking loaded most of the time. The pretty picture of married life that Korin painted in Cine – it was rose-tinted bullshit. Most nights, he was down the local pub cleaning out their whisky supply. Ask my brother …’ She gestured to Egan. ‘He spoke to some of the people in the village when we started trying to find Korin back in November, and do you know how they remembered the great Robert Hosterlitz, Oscar winner and cinematic visionary?’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘As a sad old drunk.’
‘Why would I believe anything you say?’
She shrugged. ‘Believe what you want to believe, but – deep down – you know it’s true. I mean, let’s pretend for a moment that Hosterlitz was working on a film in the last, miserable, sickness-affected years of his life. Where the hell is it? It’s twenty-seven years since the old man died. Where’s the script? Where are the sketches, and the notes, and the ideas? Where are the actors he spoke to, or the producers he pitched it to? Where’s the evidence that it ever existed, in any form? Do you think Lynda has just been sitting on it for over a quarter of a century?’
I didn’t reply – didn’t know what to say.
‘There is no movie,’ Alex said. ‘There never was a movie. We should know. My father’s been watching Hosterlitz from before Korin ever came on the scene.’
I frowned at her. ‘What do you mean?’
She shrugged again.
‘Zeller had been watching Hosterlitz since the seventies?’
‘Since way before that.’
‘Why?’
But Egan stepped in. ‘That’s enough.’
Alex didn’t look at him, wisps of smoke curling past her face. ‘Point is, no script was written at that house. Nothing was made there. All Hosterlitz was doing in retirement was drinking and dying.’
‘But why was Zeller watching him?’
‘Dad likes to know his enemy.’
‘Hosterlitz was his enemy?’
‘Robert Hosterlitz isn’t the man you think he is.’
‘Meaning what?’
She didn’t reply this time. I looked at her, my mind spooling back to what Hosterlitz had written to Korin on the back of the photo of the angel (I hope you can forgive me), and then to what Veronica Mae had said about Hosterlitz, about the way he always behaved as if something was weighing on him.
‘Is “Ring of Roses” related to that case in the true-crime book?’
The two of them just looked at me.
I thought of the pages that had been torn out of it. Had Hosterlitz known what they related to? Had he told Korin before he died? Somehow I doubted it, because if he had been telling her everything, he wouldn’t have lied to her about his trip out to LA in 1984, and he wouldn’t have asked for her forgiveness on the back of a photograph. But why keep something important from her? Because he hadn’t thought she needed to know? Or because he had been trying to keep her safe?
Alex tapped some more ash into the coffee cup. ‘The truth is, David, the best you can hope for – I mean, where any film is concerned – are some scrawled notes Korin may have kept, that Hosterlitz had maybe written on the back of a napkin while loaded up on bourbon and tramadol – and you really think my father’s losing sleep over that? Hosterlitz was finished. No one took him seriously. No one was interested in any script he was writing, even if he had completed it. This isn’t about a film, it’s about what Lynda found out about her husband.’
‘Found out about him?’
‘Bobby was keeping secrets from her.’
Something curdled in my guts.