by Tyler Dilts
“Okay then,” Marty said.
“This means I am free to go?”
Now it was Marty’s turn to grin. “Oh no. It means we’ll only be charging you with assault of an officer and attempted murder.”
Tropov kept smiling.
“Maybe,” Jen said, passing him on her way out of the room, “you’ll want that lawyer after all.”
When they closed the door, Tropov looked directly at the mirror and pointed his finger at us through the glass. He dropped his thumb and fired an imaginary bullet. I wanted to yank his spleen out through his nose.
Less than thirty minutes after the interview, Tropov had called his lawyer, and Ruiz had phoned in from home and told Marty we wouldn’t be pressing charges against Tropov anytime soon.
Jen and I watched as Marty hung up the phone, took a deep breath through his nose, and told us the news. Dave was busy sulking and pretended to be deeply engrossed in the latest Long Beach public safety newsletter.
“Did he say why?” I asked.
“Only that he got the word from Baxter,” Marty said, biting his lip and bouncing his huge fist lightly up and down on his desk. “Something about Tropov being knee-deep in some Organized Crime Detail shit.”
“What?” Jen said. “He’s a snitch?”
“Must be something like that,” Marty said. “Why else would they kick him loose?”
“But what snitch has enough juice that someone would reach out to a deputy chief at home on Sunday night?” I asked.
Marty shook his head. “Somebody’s yanking Baxter’s chain too. That little dweeb would shit biscuits before he’d violate procedure.”
“Tropov’s got to be hooked into something big,” Jen said. “Who, though?”
Marty was thinking out loud. “Mayor…DA…Chief? Who else has that kind of pull? City council, maybe?”
He looked at Jen and me as if we might be able to answer the question. I let it hang in the air unanswered for a moment before I spoke. “Doesn’t matter, though,” I said.
“Why?” Marty asked.
“Because,” I said, “his alibi’s gonna hold. Did you hear him?”
“So what?” Jen asked.
“So if his alibi holds,” I said, “it means he didn’t kill Beth, and he’s not our problem.”
“Danny,” Marty said, “you just beat the shit out of a guy who has enough juice to wake up a deputy chief.”
Jen finished his thought. “So like it or not, you made him our problem.”
“Oh,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.” At least she said our problem and not your problem.
“Well, it’s about time you did,” Jen said. She got up and left the room. As she walked away, she shook her head, and I thought I heard her mutter, “Jesus.”
I looked at Marty and said, “Maybe next time she’s tied to the railroad tracks I ought to just look the other way.”
“You know what my old man used to say?” he asked, his eyes narrow.
“What?”
“When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” He got up and followed Jen out of the room. Dave just smiled into his newsletter.
TWELVE
Driving home, I listened to Fresh Air on KPCC. Terry Gross was interviewing an author about his new book, which traced the history of the first English translation of the Bible. A guy named Tyndale spent years and years cranking out great stuff like, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Then Henry VIII, because his pissing match with the pope hadn’t yet reached full force, stuck with the Catholic hard-liners, who stood fast against letting the masses read the word of God in their own language, and let Tyndale be executed for heresy. Less than a decade later, Henry commissioned someone else to finish the work.
I stopped at Ralph’s to do a bit of late-night grocery shopping, but found myself just pushing an empty cart up and down the aisles, unable to focus my attention on anything other than the memory of Tropov’s shit-eating grin. In the magazine section, I tried to distract myself by reading a long-term test report on a Honda Odyssey in Motor Trend and then an article in Outside about the top-ten backpacking regions in the United States. Briefly, I thought about packing up a shiny new minivan with tents, sleeping bags, and backpacks and getting reacquainted with the glory of nature. Then I remembered the last time I’d been camping with Megan and how I had come home bug-bitten and exhausted, and I thought better of it.
I spent another fifteen minutes wheeling the cart back and forth indecisively and then eventually made it to the checkout with a box of Wild Berry Pop-Tarts, two packages of Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza, a half gallon of orange juice, and two bottles of Grey Goose.
As I slid the bags into the passenger footwell of my Camry, my hand brushed the top of one of the vodka bottles, and I imagined myself cracking the cap and taking a long pull from the bottle. I turned the key in the ignition instead.
At home, though, I didn’t think twice. I dropped my shoulder rig and leather briefcase on the table and carried the paper bags into the kitchen. I put the groceries, such as they were, on the counter and turned on the light, squinting at the bright Caribbean yellows and reds.
On my way to the fridge, I punched the button on the answering machine. As I opened the freezer, Geoffrey Hatcher’s voice assaulted me with its unabashed politeness. “Daniel, give me a call if you would. I’ll soon need to go with tomorrow’s story, either with or without your input. I’d hate to put my foot in my mouth. I’ll be up late, so call anytime. Thanks very much.”
I put the two new bottles of Grey Goose in the freezer and took out the old one. I took a swallow straight from the bottle before pouring what was left into a glass and cutting it with No Pulp Tropicana. I drank as I dialed the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Geoff.”
“Daniel.” He sounded bright and sunny, like he’d just set out on a fine morning’s constitutional. “How are you?”
“I’m hanging in there.”
“Funny, you don’t sound much like it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “How do I sound?”
“Exhausted.”
“And how do I usually sound?”
“Exhausted.” He chuckled a bit on the other end of the line.
“Well then.”
His voice softened and quieted. “I don’t suppose you have anything new to share on the Williams murder, do you?”
“I wish I did. We’re not any closer.”
“I heard something about a ViCAP match?”
“No luck,” I said, “not our guy. And he was the only thing resembling a lead we’ve come up with so far.”
“Anything you’d rather not read in the paper tomorrow?”
“Well, it would be nice if this wasn’t connected to the whole school-violence thing.”
“But it is school violence, isn’t it?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Geoff. This wasn’t some alienated teenager tired of getting his ass kicked. We’re looking at something else.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Just what is it that you are looking at?”
“Off the record?”
“Of course.”
“At this point, nobody wants to admit it, but there might not be any connection at all between the victim and the killer.”
“And no apparent motive?”
“No.” He paused, and I imagined I could hear him thinking. It was actually just the refrigerator humming on the other side of the room.
“Does that mean what I think it means?”
“I hope not,” I said.
The graphic designer who’d lived in the duplex before me hadn’t given up on the bold painting after the kitchen was finished. He and his wife had a daughter, and he’d decorated the second bedroom for her. The left wall, which faces east, had been painted a dark indigo, almost black, with pinpricks of yellow to simulate stars. In the center of the wall was a smiling crescent moon, over which jumped a cartoon cow. On the ceiling, the dark colors b
lended slowly into the lightening blue of a morning sky. Directly opposite the moon was a grinning, orange, noon sun, decked out with Ray-Bans and a zinc-oxide nose. Megan would have loved it—all those smiles. I was thinking of her when I signed the lease.
I use the room as an office. Actually, it’s more just a place to keep the computer that I use once or twice a week to play Minesweeper or solitaire or stare at the walls. Sometimes, though, when I bring work home, I’ll slide the keyboard out of the way and use the desk. Earlier that day, I’d put in a request with the Property Detail for copies of the student papers that Beth had been grading when she was murdered. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but I thought they might help me get a bit closer to her state of mind at the time of her death. I took the copies out of my bag and spread them across the desk. Out of the original batch of thirty-two, four had been too damaged to copy, and of the twenty-eight remaining, Beth had commented on just more than half. I divided the fifteen marked papers into piles based on the grade. The A pile had four papers in it. I started my reading there.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the students were writing essays about Hamlet, and I remembered the last time I attempted to read the play as a student at Long Beach State. I recalled the professor droning on about Freud and Oedipus and unresolved paternal issues. I remember spending a good amount of time with the Cliffs Notes version, but I’m not sure I ever actually finished reading the play.
The four students with A grades obviously had finished, though. The first paper was written by a girl named Elisa Santos who examined in detail the vast amounts of shit that Ophelia had to put up with and the reasons why it wasn’t so surprising that she went nuts and drowned herself. The second, by the mono-named Lakeesha, wondered why everybody thought it was such a bad thing that Gertrude married Claudius so soon—a woman has to take care of herself, and it was lot harder to do so in those days. Susan Butler broke with the budding feminists and argued that Hamlet wasn’t really crazy at all—just smart as hell for “getting everybody all wrapped around his fingers like that.”
It was the fourth paper, though, that really got me. Someone named Jorge Hernandez had concluded his essay with this paragraph:
So I could totally sympathize with Hamlet and how he had that heavy-duty kind of angst because I know what that’s like because of when my brother Hector got shot and died all I wanted to do was bust somebody’s head just like Hamlet. It’s like when he’s talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstein and he says that thing about he could feel like some kind of a king if it wasn’t for his bad dreams. I still dream about Hector, too.
I looked away from the paper and turned to face the wall. The jumping cow had a silly-ass grin on her face that stretched from one side of her black-and-white-spotted bovine head to the other. She didn’t look like the kind of cow who’d experienced much angst at all in her life. No last-minute reprieves from the slaughterhouse for her—no, just a happy-go-lucky free-range picnic all the way. She didn’t fit in too well with the likes of Jorge and Hamlet. They knew angst.
In the closet was a box of books that had belonged to Megan. They were some of her favorites, which she’d kept in the small bookcase in our bedroom in the old house. I’d meant to go through them before I moved, but I always managed to put it off. Finally, I just gave up and lugged them and the dozen or so other boxes of her things to the new place with me. The books ranged from one of the first Oprah books to some that went all the way back to her days as a sociology major. I dug through them and found what I was looking for, a thick volume near the bottom of the box—The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I opened the book, first to the table of contents and then to page 784 to find The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, turning the pages, I scanned the lines looking for the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. (The listing of dramatis personae had corrected Jorge’s spelling mistake and enlightened me as to why Beth had underlined the name on his paper.) Half an hour later, I discovered the line to which he’d been referring in act two, scene two: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
After I’d gone over the line a dozen or so times, I thumbed back to the beginning and read the play from beginning to end.
Repacking Megan’s things, I came across her black leather-bound address book. The embossed cover had been smoothed by years of use. Seeing her handwriting inside filled me with a bone-deep melancholy. The way she dotted her i’s with tiny circles, the way she made her e’s like the front half of an eight, all curves and no sharp angles, the way she slanted her letters off to the right—all seemed to me then somehow evocative of her enduring warmth. I wanted to know that sensation again, to let it wash over me like a healing balm, but all I could feel was the fading ache of memory. Megan had alphabetized all the entries by first name because, she once told me, that was how she liked to think of the people she knew. Last names, she’d said, were too formal. She didn’t want to impose that distance between herself and her friends. So it was under B that I discovered, in my wife’s softly flowing hand, the phone number, address, and birthday of Beth Williams.
I didn’t sleep that night. Instead, I spent three hours lying awake, my eyes itching, staring at the ceiling above the bed, trying to imagine myself in Beth’s classroom at the time of her murder, trying to piece together the story. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t there yet. But I would be. I had to be. For Beth. For Megan.
THIRTEEN
The next morning, I stood in a shower that was as hot as I could stand and let the water wash down my head and back. I’m not sure how long I stayed in, but the water had gone from scalding to tepid by the time I twisted the clear plastic knobs to the off position. My skin was a bright pink, and my fingertips had begun to pucker. I wiped the condensation off the mirror and rubbed artificial-lemon-scented shaving gel on my cheeks. As the gel transformed itself into a thick, rich foam, I remembered I’d forgotten to buy fresh blade cartridges for my razor the night before. Fuck it, I told myself as I began to scrape my face clean, let’s live on the edge.
I shut off the faucets and wrapped a towel around my waist. A sound like silverware scraping a plate came from the kitchen, and I froze, listening. The bathroom door was half-open, and I wondered if I could slip through it and make my way to the nightstand next to my bed, where my pistol sat in its holster. To do that, though, I’d have to pass the kitchen—unlikely, I thought, unless whoever made the noise was facing away from the door. I looked around for something I might use as a weapon. Nothing.
Another clink. Had someone broken in to wash my dishes? I slipped into the hallway and peeked around the door frame. Jen was looking out the window over the sink, the Mr. Coffee gurgling on the counter next to her. She saw my reflection in the glass and turned around.
“Morning,” I said.
She saw the question in my eyes. “I got a little worried when you didn’t answer, so I let myself in.” Her voice rose at the end of the statement, making it sound like a question. Last summer, after locking myself out of the house twice in two months, I decided a spare set of keys was called for. I gave the set to her for safekeeping. She’d never used it before.
“It’s okay,” I said. We stood there, the coffeemaker producing the only noise in the room. I knew that of the many reasons for the awkwardness, there was at least one about which I could do something. “Let me put some clothes on,” I said.
I expected a snappy comeback, but instead she just looked at me, something far away in her eyes, and nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
By the time I’d changed into a T-shirt and a pair of sweats, Jen had poured two cups of coffee, added cream and sugar, and sat down at my small kitchen table. The corners of her mouth turned up slightly as I sat across from her, but the smile didn’t take hold in her eyes. I’d rarely seen her drink coffee—usually only on the occasional stakeout or all-nighter.
&n
bsp; “How you doing?” I asked.
“Didn’t sleep well.” There was more she wanted to say, but I could tell it wasn’t going to come out. “About yesterday—”
“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”
She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine. We sat there a long time.
After the task force meeting—during which we ate doughnuts, drank coffee, and read our appointment books to each other—Jen made a call from her desk while I sorted new entries for the files. When she hung up, she turned to me and said, “Want to take a ride?”
Near the coast, Pine Avenue is among the hottest sections of Long Beach, with chic new restaurants and hip nightspots opening monthly. The upwardly mobile vie for the brand new (but oh-so-limited) “loft style” apartments that are popping up in the old downtown buildings. Just head north a few miles, past Pacific Coast Highway, which takes a break from its shore-hugging route for a bleak inner-city detour, and you’ll find yourself in some of the diciest territory south of Los Angeles’s famed South-Central district. You’ll be right in the heart of the LBC made famous by Dr. Dre and by Snoop Dogg, way before he dropped the diminutive “Doggy” from the middle of his name. This is where, in a tiny two-bedroom house that shared a half-acre lot with three identical structures, Rudy Nguyen and his family lived.
Jen parked at the curb, and we got out. Across the street two late-teen boys stared at us, not even bothering to put out their blunt, as we walked up the driveway. A tarnished brass C was fastened with twisted wire onto the rusting, black-steel security screen.
Jen rapped on the door frame, causing a hollow metallic rattle. A moment later, the door opened, and a young man in low-slung jeans and an olive T-shirt said softly, but with conviction, “Keep it down, I got—” Rudy cut himself off when he saw Jen outside the screen. “Sensei,” he said quietly.
“Hi, Rudy,” she said.
“What’s up? What are…what are you doing here?” He seemed to be trying to process that odd disconnect that occurs when completely unrelated spheres of your life come crashing together.