by Jan Burke
“Tell me a Bakersfield story,” I said.
After a brief moment of hesitation, during which he probably figured out that he had pissed me off, he said, “Okay. This one happened not long after I made detective.”
The story was about a hardware store owner who had disappeared. His wife reported him missing, and she was convinced that the guy’s business partner had done him in. They questioned the business partner at the store and didn’t learn much, but Frank thought he seemed nervous. Frank’s partner, a senior detective, agreed, and they kept an eye on the guy. Frank talked to a nosy neighbor. The neighbor was full of complaints about the suspect: didn’t keep his lawn mowed, left his garbage cans out for a day or two after pickup, his house needed painting, his leaves needed raking, so on and so forth. Only thing the guy cared about was his car. Then the neighbor mentioned that the suspect had changed one habit lately: he had been leaving his car out in the driveway, instead of parking it in the garage.
The story was interrupted when we heard a commotion near the front door. I turned to see the maître d’ blocking the way of a dark-haired man wearing jeans, refusing him entrance.
Frank pushed his chair back. The man at the door hovered over the maître d’, saying angrily, “I don’t want to dine in your goddamned restaurant! I’m just here to take someone home. Move out of the way!”
Although I hadn’t seen the man in many years, his face was immediately familiar. “It’s Jerry Selman,” I said. “Andre’s son.”
Before the maître d’ could reply to Jerry, Corbin Tyler came bursting out of the private dining room, panic-stricken. He looked blindly around the room, his gaze finally settling on me. “Help!” he shouted. “He’s having a heart attack!” He ran back down the hall.
Frank was out of his chair and moving after him in no time, pausing only to shout back at me, “Call 911!”
Jerry and I rushed past one another as I made my way toward the maître d’, who was already dialing the phone. I waited until I heard him asking for an ambulance, then went back to the private dining room.
I realized as I walked into the room that I had assumed that Corbin had been shouting about Andre; as it turned out, the assumption was true. In a quick glance, I took in Corbin Tyler, Booter Hodges, Allan Moffett, and Keene Dage all watching nervously from the other side of the room. Roland Hill was with them, too, but seemed merely curious, not at all upset. Frank and Jerry were on the floor with Andre. Frank straddled Andre, doing chest compressions while Jerry knelt near his father’s face, giving him mouth-to-mouth.
“Stay back,” Booter Hodges warned.
“I know CPR,” I said, moving a chair and kneeling down on the floor.
“Pulse,” Frank said between counts.
I reached toward Andre’s neck, my fingers searching for his carotid artery. At first, I felt nothing, and then, a few seconds later, it was there. “He’s got a pulse!” I said.
Frank stopped, felt for it, too. “She’s right.”
“He’s breathing,” Jerry said, and started weeping.
We stayed there, not speaking, waiting to make sure our luck would hold. I heard someone leaving the room, but I was too focused on keeping my fingers on Andre’s pulse to see who it was. Andre’s color changed from a claylike gray to a shade that still didn’t look great, but wasn’t half as frightening.
Paramedics arrived, and at last we stood and moved away. I turned to see that only two of Andre’s friends were still there: Roland Hill and Keene Dage. Keene said, “If you need me, I’ll be in the bar.”
Roland lifted an eyebrow, then said, “Really? Well, I don’t suppose I’ll need you this evening. We can talk about our business tomorrow.” He nodded toward me on his way out, cool as the shady side of an iceberg.
Frank had an arm around Jerry’s shoulders, and talked to him as they followed the paramedics outside. I was left standing alone in the room. I had that wobbly knees feeling that sometimes come after the adrenaline leaves your body, so I sat down for a moment.
I wondered how hard Lisa would take it if her father died. There had never been much affection between them, but that wouldn’t mean that she still didn’t hope for his approval. Jerry — well, Jerry would probably be crushed. I didn’t wish that kind of suffering on him. And even though Andre was a genuine shitheel, I didn’t wish pain or death on him, either. I considered the fact that I had never really known Jerry, who was away at college when I was dating Andre, and that Andre was all but a stranger to me now. They might have changed over the years. Might have. Seemed unlikely in Andre’s case.
Had something upset him this evening, something besides seeing me? I didn’t for a moment believe I meant enough to him — good or bad — to give him a heart attack. I looked around the table.
Most of the dinner dishes had been cleared; it appeared that the meal had been at the coffee-and-dessert stage. I got up and slowly walked around the table, but nothing of importance had been left behind. Even if I had known who was sitting where, all I would have learned was who drank his java black and who took cream and sugar. There was no point in sticking around. I left the room.
Keene Dage was at the bar, doodling on a cocktail napkin.
“What are you having, Keene?” I asked, sitting next to him.
“Just finished a club soda,” he said, standing up. “Not much of a headline, is it?”
He walked off.
I waited until he was out of sight, nabbed his cocktail napkin, and left enough cash to cover our bill before hurrying out to follow my quarry. A cold wind made me hold my coat around me with both arms as I stepped outside. I didn’t see Frank or Jerry, but Keene Dage was waiting for the valet parking attendant.
I called out a greeting.
He stared stonily ahead.
“Now, Keene, this just isn’t like you. You’ve never been rude to me.”
Keene Dage was a big, rough-hewn man, and even at seventy he looked like he could build a skyscraper with his bare hands. He had been in the management end of construction for decades before he retired, but he had come up the hard way and hadn’t forgotten it.
“Goddammit, Irene,” he said, shaking his head. “Go back inside. You look like you’re freezing your ass off.”
“I can take it if you can, old man.”
He laughed, long and hard — much longer and harder than my remark called for, but it probably afforded him the kind of release that club soda won’t provide. “Still full of piss and vinegar, I see,” he said, wiping his eyes.
“Tell me about your dinner meeting, Keene.”
The levity was gone. “Forget all about this. Just forget it. It was a private dinner. Allan’s retired. Until Selman became ill, we were just spending an evening thanking Allan for his service to the city. A sort of farewell for Allan, that’s all.”
“Somehow I don’t imagine Allan will have to make a lot of last-minute, urgent calls when it’s time for his going-away party. When that really happens, you’ll have a little more time to plan a trip in from — where is it now?”
He fidgeted with his tie, loosening it. “Fallbrook.”
“Right. You’re growing avocados now.”
“I’ll send you a box of them next time we pick them. Now here’s my car.”
“Come on, Keene. You can do more for me than this. This isn’t about Allan. You aren’t really all that fond of Allan.”
He had started to tip the valet, but now he paused, still holding the cash in his hand, the wind whipping the bills as the valet looked at them longingly.
I glanced at the valet, and Keene paid him. When he was out of earshot, Keene said, “Where the hell — when did you ever hear of me saying an unkind thing about Allan?”
“Never. You were doing business here, and you needed Allan, and you were too smart to go around saying you didn’t like his style. But I’ve always sensed it. I even mentioned it to O’Connor.”
“O’Connor’s dead,” he said, getting into the car.
“Well, yes
, Keene, I certainly know that O’Connor is dead. When you work with a man for over a dozen years, you notice such things. This is not something I said into a Ouija board. I talked about it with him when he was alive. You haven’t been in town for a few years now. This was before you left, before O’Connor died. He agreed with me — there was some kind of tension between you and Allan.”
He hesitated. “So your old friend talked about me, eh?”
“Yes. He liked you, Keene. Said you and Corbin and Ben were the only honest men in that bunch who had worked on redevelopment in the 1970s.”
Keene looked away for a moment, then turned back to me. “O’Connor was wrong,” he said, and closed the car door.
I thought he would drive of, but he rolled down the window. “Sorry, Irene, guess I’m rude after all. Hope you don’t take this personally. It’s not about you.”
I pulled out a business card.
“I sure as hell don’t want to take that thing from you,” he said. “I’ve got to get back home. Long drive. I’ll be making it again in a few days.”
“Why?”
“Ben’s funeral. You going?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “Don’t come up to me and talk to me there, okay? I’ll send you a box of avocados.”
He drove off.
O’Connor was wrong, Keene said. About Keene’s dislike of Allan Moffett? Or about his honesty?
Frank wasn’t in the restaurant, so I burrowed into my coat and walked around to the parking lot in the back. The sky was darkening, but we had parked near one of the parking lot lampposts, and I could see Frank sitting in the Volvo. As I drew closer, I saw that he had his arms folded over the top of the steering wheel, his forehead resting on them. He didn’t look up when I got in the car.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
It hit me, then. I reached over and placed my hand over his. “Thinking about your dad?”
I heard him let his breath out, a long sigh. He took my hand, held it tightly as he leaned back in his seat. His face gave me the answer before he said, “Yes.”
Frank’s father had a heart attack three or four years ago; Frank was with him shortly before he collapsed. Although Frank hurried back into the room and did CPR, his father had died.
For a long time, we just sat in that parking lot, holding hands, Frank looking out into the night. Rain began to fall. I watched the reflections of the rivulets on the windshield move across his face.
“You never finished telling me that story,” I said. “The one about the man who didn’t park in his garage.”
“No, I didn’t, did I?” he said, and then a look of mild amusement crossed his face. “We waited until the guy came out of his house, and my partner asked him, ‘Could we see the garage?’
“‘Sure,’ he says, ‘no problem.’ He opens the garage door, and the entire floor of the garage is red.”
“Blood?” I asked.
Frank shook his head. “Paint. The guy has painted the entire floor of the garage. The exterior of the house is cracked and peeling, but he’s painted his garage floor. When my partner comments on this, the guy says, ‘Yeah, well, I’m gonna paint the whole house, I just started here.’”
“Right.”
“That’s what we thought,” Frank said. “So while my partner is talking to him, I’m kind of snooping around. This is the cleanest garage on earth. Too clean. It’s been scrubbed. I look up, and I can see that even the light fixture has been cleaned. I wander over to the sink. There’s a shiny new trap under it. I start wondering if anything might be left under the rim of the drain. But then I look next to the sink, and I see a mop leaning against he wall. A good old-fashioned cotton mop. I move it around a little, and poke through the strands, and guess what I see?”
“Bloodstains.”
“Well, no. But I take it over to the guy. What I was showing him was rust from the metal clamp, but he didn’t know that. I made out like I was sure it was blood, and my partner kept his mouth shut. I asked the guy, ‘Why’d you go to all this time and trouble, and then forget to throw the mophead away with the sink trap?’ He started crying — to this day, I’m not sure if it was because we had caught him, or because he had done a lot of unnecessary cleaning. Anyway, he confessed.”
“Was there any blood on the mop?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, the lab guys found traces of it all over the place, even before they wrecked the paint job on the floor.” He smiled. “I got to tell the guy what we were doing to his paint job.”
“I think this is one of your best Bakersfield stories.”
“My dad was still working then. He loved the business with the mop — told it to the other guys so often, it’s a wonder I didn’t end up with a nickname out of it. I’d say, ‘Dad, we would have caught him without the mop.’ He wouldn’t hear a word of it.”
He started the car, turned on the windshield wipers.
“You okay to drive?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. “I’m okay now.”
We were almost home when I remembered the cocktail napkin. Frank saw me pull it out and try to read it, and flipped on the dome light. “What’s that?”
“Keene Dage’s cocktail napkin.”
“What’s on it?”
“The letter Z.” I turned the napkin and frowned. “Or the letter N.”
“Or just a doodle,” he said.
“Right,” I said glumly, which made him laugh.
That was okay.
8
ON FRIDAY MORNING, my time was whittled away on the phone, to no apparent purpose other than strengthening my dialing finger. I was trying to contact people who might know more about Allan Moffett’s resignation. Most of my time was spent talking to receptionists and secretaries whose bosses supposedly weren’t in. Not in now, not expected back in today, probably not in as long as I was the caller.
The people who were willing to talk to me were his political enemies, and although Moffett’s long tenure in a powerful position allowed him to gather quite a few adversaries, it was clear they were not knowledgeable on the subject of his sudden retirement. It was all well and good to allow a few of these frustrated souls to tell me how happy they were that Moffett was gone, but I wanted to do more than gather reactions to his departure.
I listened to their theories, hoping some useful lead might be found. There had been the disappointment around the convention center plans, they pointed out. The city and its developers had suffered a defeat at the hands of the Coastal Commission, which had recently denied approval of a waterfront convention center. But when I countered that Moffett had weathered far worse, no one disagreed.
There were budget shortfalls and an increasingly uncooperative city council. Budget shortfalls didn’t fit with sudden flight, though, or account for the guest list at the dinner meeting, although I kept that to myself. And even Moffett’s enemies couldn’t blame him for problems caused by cutbacks from the county and state. If anything, Moffett had relentlessly urged the city to budget more realistically when cutbacks occurred.
His priorities might not have been universally embraced by the city council, but even I knew that the council had been at his mercy — not the other way around. The city manager could slow a council member’s pet projects to a standstill, just by making sure that his own staff was overly meticulous in discharging their bureaucratic duties. The council also received much of its information from Moffett and his staff, and no politician who wants a second term fails to realize what a valuable commodity information can be. Council members came and went, Moffett stayed. Until now.
His friends weren’t helpful to me in the least, and after the disrupted dinner at the Terrace, his closest pals were all taking the day off — if their secretaries were to be believed.
Throughout the morning, I wondered how Andre was doing, but realized my concern was not really for Andre himself. I was worried about Lisa and, to some extent, Jerry. I pu
lled out the card Lisa had given me and dialed her brother’s home number. I got an answering machine.
“Jerry,” I said, after the beep, “this is Irene Kelly. I don’t know if you remembered me last night at the Terrace, but” — I stopped myself from saying “I used to date your dad” — “er, I was just wondering how things are going today. If there’s anything I can do for you or Lisa, let me know.” I left my number.
I was still holding on to the receiver, wondering why I had done such a lame job of leaving a simple message, when the intercom line buzzed. I punched the button. Geoff, the paper’s security guard, announced that I had a visitor, a Ms. Lisa Selman. He put her on the line.
“Lisa?”
“I don’t suppose you’d be free for lunch today?”
“Sure. Give me a minute, I’ll be right down.”
SHE WAS ENGROSSED in reading a copy of the paper in the lobby when I came downstairs. I stood on the stairway, watching her for a moment. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, but even in the casual attire she looked sophisticated. She glanced up and saw me, and as the light struck her face from this new angle, I noticed dark circles under her eyes. “Just now reading the paper,” she said, shaking her head. “I overslept this morning and haven’t caught up since.”
“Lisa—”
“Don’t get that sympathetic look on your face, Irene, you’ll make me cry. My father’s in stable condition now, thanks to you and your husband, I hear.” She held up the paper, pointing to my article on Allan’s resignation. “Jerry told me that you and your husband happened to be at the restaurant last night.” She paused, drawing her lips together as if suppressing a smile. “Poor Jerry. He really does think you happened to be there.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t actually talk to Jerry last night.”
“Well, whatever your reasons for being there, he was very grateful for your help.”
“I think it was pretty rough on Jerry.”