When we had wrapped up the preliminaries, I thanked her for her time. “At least we’re holding up our end of the bargain,” I told her. “The painting is first-rate, and if they buy it, they won’t be making some hideous mistake.”
“After I think about it, I’m sure I’ll find that comforting,” she said with asperity. “Tell them this artist’s works should be in museums.” She shook her head. “If museums had any money to buy them.”
I picked up my things to go and then turned back to her. “Karin, have you ever heard of an art collector named Natasha Ivanova?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
“I just got off the jury that convicted her murderer. In the last couple of days, I’ve been hearing things about her art collection, and I wondered if you knew anything.”
“I don’t wish to brag, but if she was a serious collector, I would have heard about her,” she said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Still, let me check my records.”
She called up the names on the screen. “No, nothing. What kind of art did she collect?”
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “But she got whacked over the head with an Erté statue and died of her injuries.”
She looked at me over the top of her glasses. Whenever anyone did that, it always reminded me of the girls’ vice principal at my high school, the same one who had the job of scrutinizing skirt lengths for conformity to decency and regulation.
“I trust you’re joking,” Karin said.
I shook my head. “Afraid not.”
She snorted delicately. “Well, no wonder.”
It was rush hour on the freeway, so there was no point in trying to hurry home. Navigating L.A. takes an amazing amount of planning and patience. If you screw up, you can end up stuck under some graffiti-covered underpass for ten minutes at a time, sucking in exhaust fumes.
I stopped at a Salvadoran fast-food stand not far from the gallery and picked up some pupusas, a kind of Salvadoran taco, and yuca con chicharrones. Michael and I used to have the same dishes in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant with neon beer signs in the window. They were better there, but I just didn’t feel like going back after he died.
“What is it?” I ask him, peering at the unfamiliar food as if it will leap off the plate if I take my eyes away. I am twenty-one and untutored in gastronomic adventures.
“It’s ‘yuca,’” Michael says with a smile. “It’s a root. It tastes like potatoes. Try it.”
I push a bite around the plate with my fork and finally lift it to my mouth. It does taste like potatoes, a little. I smile back. “Not bad,” I say.
He looks into my eyes and takes my hand. “No, not bad,” he says.
My heart expands.
Here is the problem with memories: The less they hurt you, the more you’ve lost of the person you’re remembering. The price of breaking free from the pain is loss of feeling, loss of intensity and clarity.
Mostly, the memories crept up on me at unexpected times, but sometimes I called them up on purpose, to make sure I could still feel them even if they broke my heart. Lately, I’d had trouble remembering the details—What shirt was he wearing? What music were we listening to? If I concentrated, I could find the answers, but it was clear that one day I wouldn’t be able to. The inevitability of it filled me with sadness.
I checked my watch, willing the memory away. A diversion was called for, before I sank into a swamp of self-pity, a state I did not admire but with which I was all too familiar. I knew what I was going to do, but I wasn’t sure why I was going to do it. I got back into the car, consulted the map, and took surface streets to my destination.
I found the place without any trouble; I’d seen the address on enough documents to burn it into my mind. I pulled up beside a palm tree (species: Washingtonia) and parked. Across the street were the very posh offices of Ivanova Associates.
Natasha had died there.
I felt like a veteran returning to the site of some particularly hard-fought battle, with a mixture of exhilaration and dread. What was I doing there? It certainly wasn’t out of nostalgia for the glory days of the trial. It was something more than curiosity, though. I felt drawn to see the place for myself, though I can’t imagine what I expected to find. It was just a building, a generic, upscale, glass-fronted corporate suite. I could see the reflection of my car in its polished surfaces.
There hadn’t been any reason to tour the death site, so we didn’t get a jurors’ field trip to look around and sneak a peek at the personal life of the deceased. I’ve already mentioned the pictures, but those were close-ups of the interior and the body. This was my first view from the street.
I sat there replaying in my mind what I had heard at the trial.
It had been late—or early, depending on your perspective—and presumably pretty dark. I looked around for streetlamps. There was one about a half block away. It was the low-sodium kind.
Ramon Garcia had let himself in with his mother’s key, long after the staff had finished cleaning and gone for the night. Where did he park? I looked around. The entrance to the offices faced a courtyard, so the only parking other than the underground garage, which he presumably would not have had access to, was where I was sitting now.
It made me shiver a little, but maybe it was just the evening clouds rolling in.
Natasha would have parked in the garage and taken the elevator—keyed, I assumed—up to her office on the third floor. The office was dark, so she turned on the light, and—
No, that wouldn’t be right. If she surprised Ramon, he must have been there with the light on already. It was chancy, but you can’t see very well with just a flashlight, and Ramon probably thought he’d be in and out pretty quick.
So why didn’t she hesitate when she saw the light?
Maybe she couldn’t see it until she was too far inside to turn back.
Maybe she was expecting a light to be on.
Why would it be on? Was it always lit at night? Was she expecting to meet someone? If so, why hadn’t that ever come out in the courtroom?
I decided to put that question aside for the moment.
Inside, Ramon was looting the place with abandon when Natasha appeared. He must have heard her and stepped into the executive bathroom just beyond her desk, but not before he’d grabbed the Erté. When she walked by, he’d stepped out of the bathroom and smacked her in the back of the head.
Maybe he hadn’t meant to kill her. Probably not, in fact. But he surprised her, certainly; the coroner’s report showed that there had been just the one blow. Her hands were unmarked, so she hadn’t seen it coming. She couldn’t protect herself.
So what did Ramon do next?
I saw him bending down to inspect the body, taking off his glove to feel for her pulse. She was still breathing for a few minutes after he hit her, so maybe he didn’t know she would die. Maybe she moaned a little, or stirred, and that’s when he touched the statue with his bare hand, leaving a partial print. Maybe he thought about stealing her watch but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
I’d like to think a seventeen-year-old boy didn’t know he was a killer when he coolly collected the answering machine, the money out of her desk, her ATM card, and various other items—all totaling less than three hundred dollars on the street—and put them into the cloth bag he had brought for the purpose.
It was all speculation. Ramon hadn’t testified, and nobody else knew the truth. When they caught him, a short time afterward, he still had the evidence in the trunk of his car. He’d clammed up and refused to talk to anyone. Either he’d seen a lot of cop-and-robber movies, or he was well coached. Maybe he was just smart, but I doubt it. He’d already been caught at just about every minor crime you can think of, beginning when he was ten years old.
But I was getting ahead of the script.
He had his bag. He pulled a dark knit cap onto his forehead and turned out the light. He locked the door behind him. He went
down the stairs, the way he had come.
He must have stopped somewhere to put the bag in the trunk. If it had been me, I would have thrown the bag in the backseat and rushed out at all deliberate speed, stopping a few blocks away to transfer the bag to somewhere out of sight, in case I got a ticket or something. Or in case my mother got suspicious and wondered where her car was in the middle of the night. If Ramon did that, too, then all he had to do was walk to the car, open the door, get in, and drive away.
Just a minute or two, in all.
Still, enough time for somebody to see him.
I considered this. The police report said that an anonymous caller had reported a possible burglary. So somebody in the neighborhood must have seen the light or heard something out of the ordinary for the hour.
My head ached a little, and the air inside the car was getting stale. I got out and stretched, looking up at the offices and condos facing out over the street, wondering where the call had been made from.
The windowpanes stared back blankly. I walked up and down the street, looking up. A couple of passersby regarded me curiously, and one, an elderly gentleman with a small white dog, circled back around and discovered I was still there. I smiled at him, and he nodded in return. His look conveyed that he was giving me the benefit of the doubt but that he had his eye on me. I wondered if he could be the caller, but he looked like the type who would have given his name instead of remaining anonymous. And insisted you spell it right, too.
My neck was getting stiff, and I felt foolish, especially since I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I tried putting myself in the caller’s place. What had he seen or heard?
I swung my attention in the direction it should have been facing all the time, toward the offices of Ivanova Associates. I stood squarely across the street and looked straight on at the building. The flat, shiny surface at street level distorted my reflection like a fun-house mirror.
That’s it. That’s all I could see. The building was so opaque it was impossible to see into the interior offices. I moved down the street to the right, then to the left, all the way to end of the block in both directions.
Nothing.
Okay, I reasoned. So maybe the caller couldn’t see into the offices. Maybe he or she had a clear view of a kid coming out, wearing dark clothing and a knit cap and carrying a canvas bag, and assumed the worst.
Still, if this was a generic there’s-somebody-doing-something-he-shouldn’t-in-my-neighborhood kind of call, how had the caller known it was Ivanova Associates that had been burgled? There were plenty of other offices, their names tastefully advertised on the front of the building, sharing the same floor.
Troubled, I squinted again at the offices (bifocals were just around the corner, too) and got back into the car.
A sense of uneasiness, of something not quite right, haunted me all the way home.
6
“Get a life,” Mark said, when I told him how I had spent the afternoon. We were sitting knee-to-knee in the complex’s biggest hot tub (there were several). To one side of us, beyond a glass wall, was the ocean. On the other side was a huge pool surrounded by tropical landscaping—hibiscus and plumeria. In a word, paradise.
“I have a life,” I told him. Well, what could I say?
“Then get a better one. One you like well enough to keep from wasting your time dredging up silly doubts about your murder trial. You did the right thing, Ellen. End of story.”
“How can you say that? You’re the one who started dropping hints that there was more to Natasha Ivanova than meets the eye.”
He hoisted himself up on the edge of the tub, providing an excellent view of his perfectly flat abdomen and well-developed pectorals. From his vantage point, he could look directly down on my thighs, magnified out of proportion by the water. I tried not to think about it.
“There’s more to everyone than meets the eye,” he said. “So what?”
“So—I’m curious. I want to know why Natasha’s name keeps popping up in every conversation I have lately. I want to know how she could be having big socialite art parties but nobody in the profession ever heard of her. Most of all, I want to know how somebody called the police to report a possible burglary to her offices when he—or she—couldn’t possibly have seen what he said he did.”
Mark shook his head. “Look, I hate to be flippant about this, but I think what you’ve got is a form of buyer’s remorse.”
“What?”
“You know, when you sign a contract to buy a house you think is perfect, and the next day you wake up and absolutely hate it. You kick yourself for being so stupid. If they let you, you’d back out of the deal.”
“I don’t see—” I began.
“Sure you do. You spent weeks on that trial. You considered all the evidence. You thought you’d reached the perfect verdict. May I point out, eleven other people thought so, too.”
“Mark—”
“Hear me out,” he said. “Now it’s morning. You have to face the fact that you sent the kid away for twenty-five-to-life, and it’s not an enjoyable feeling. Then you hear something or think you see something, and it feeds your guilt. It’s only natural. But I really don’t think it’s a solid basis for a major attack of angst or an instant replay of the whole murder. What were you thinking of doing, getting them to reopen the case? A judge would laugh you right out of court.”
“I know that,” I told him. “I’m bothered, but I’m not crazy. I mean, Ramon told the police Natasha had given him the stuff out of her office—her ATM card, for God’s sake! I’m still ninety-nine percent sure he’s guilty, but I want the answers to those questions. I’m an interested party, can’t you see that? I sort of feel I owe it to her or somebody to find out the whole story, just on the basis of that one-percent margin of error.”
He looked down at his watch. Someone had dropped a soggy potato chip on the tile next to the tub. He picked it up gingerly, examining it with caution as if its fat-making propensities might ooze into his arteries by osmosis. “How can anyone stand these things?” he asked, tossing it into a nearby trash can. “You couldn’t pay me enough to eat one.”
I ate them occasionally, but this was not the moment to confess it.
“Ellen, you haven’t by chance gotten any more of those ‘die, racist bitch’ phone calls, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Good, because I wouldn’t want to think this whole thing is fueled by some kind of latent PC guilt over convicting a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Or worse, out of fear of whoever’s calling.”
“No, it isn’t that. Of course I’m afraid of whoever called me, and I admit it’s made me think about a long, quiet vacation somewhere far away. But I think the police were right—in the end, it’s just empty talk.”
He nodded. “Good,” he said again. “You know, doctors do this, too, when they start out.”
“Do what?” I knew I would be sorry I asked.
“Obsess on their cases. Go over and over every detail. Try to figure out where they might have gone wrong. But later on—”
“They stop caring whether the patient died or not,” I offered.
He ignored me. “Later on, they develop perspective,” he emphasized. “They don’t focus on the one percent, Ellen. It’s not healthy to live your life that way.”
“Why are you making this sound like some sort of perverted fixation? All I said was—”
“That you were curious, I know,” he said in a tone that was maddeningly patronizing.
“Stop being smarmy,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” I confessed. “It crops up in English novels. But I’m pretty sure it’s a cousin to ‘obnoxious.’ Patronizing. Condescending. You get the point.”
“I do,” he said. “But even if I’m the Poet Laureate of Smarm, it’s still not your job to investigate what happened. Maybe you don’t want to let go of this trial for other reasons.”
“Such a
s?”
“Such as, you don’t feel comfortable with the fact that your Mexican father was guilty of treating you unfairly by running out on you, and you don’t want this Latino kid to be guilty either.”
I tried not to flinch. I didn’t want him to see that he had touched a nerve. “If I’d known you were going to throw my past up at me, I never would have told you my family history,” I said. “Anyway, that’s ridiculous.”
Michael reaches across the table for my hand. “For a Latina, you don’t seem to know much about the food,” he says with a laugh.
I pull my hand away. “I’m not Latina,” I say. “Not the part that counts, anyway.”
“It all counts,” he says. “Do you think you can divorce your past?”
“It’s not me,” I insist. “It’s nothing to do with me.”
“Absurd,” I reiterated.
“You’re in denial,” Mark said.
I was getting very hot in the tub, but I didn’t want him to think I noticed that he was towering over me, at least physically. “Oh, please,” I told him. “People always fall back on jargon when they can’t think of anything substantive to say.”
“I’m very substantive,” he protested. “But you don’t have to buy my analysis. Maybe you’re clinging to this trial thing because there’s nothing else going on in your life at the moment. When was the last time you went out on a real date?”
“Now that is obnoxious,” I said angrily, heaving myself out of the water. It’s hard to stand on your dignity in a wet bathing suit, but if I stayed in the water any longer the spandex might melt in the heat. “In fact, it’s the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard you say. Get a man, and all your problems will go away.”
“That is not what I’m saying, and you know it. Look, Ellen, I’ll back off if you want me to. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. But we’re friends. I’ve lived next door to you for three years. In all that time, I haven’t seen you have a single relationship with a man who wasn’t a pal. Don’t you get lonely?”
Staying Cool Page 6