by Jodi Compton
“I’ll come get you,” Serena said.
“No,” I said. “Hold that thought. There’s someone else I want to call.”
After we’d hung up, I scrolled through my list of old calls, finding a number I didn’t use enough to know by heart. Tess answered on the third ring, her voice, as always, slightly British-inflected.
“It’s Hailey,” I said. “Have you seen the news?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you believe it?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t.”
“Then I need your help.”
Tess D’Agostino, the biological daughter of San Francisco organized-crime figure Tony Skouras, had already saved my life once. Last winter she’d called off her father’s henchmen and brought to an end the torture session that otherwise probably would have ended with me floating facedown in the bay; more than that, she’d brought me back to her hotel and overseen my recuperation herself. At first I hadn’t known how far to trust her—she was a Skouras, after all—and I’d been brusque to the point of rudeness, but Tess had been serenely polite in response.
A few days later, she’d called me to suggest that if I stayed in San Francisco and if she in fact took the reins of the Skouras syndicate—which officially was a shipping line and several related import businesses and unofficially brought Asian heroin, stolen artworks, and illegal Eastern European and Central Asian immigrants into the ports of San Francisco and Oakland—she would have use for me. In other words, she wanted what I’d gone on to provide for Serena: a right hand, protector and sounding board.
When she’d called me, I’d been walking on the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been a bright and promising morning, I still wasn’t quite used to being alive when I was supposed to be dead, and despite the rough treatment I’d just suffered, my life at that moment had an anything-goes character, and I’d agreed to meet with Tess that evening to discuss her offer further.
That night she’d bought me dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf. In the intervening hours, my mood had shifted a bit. The bright hour on the bridge was over, and the ghost of my newly severed finger had ached increasingly throughout the day. Over dinner, made more frank than I might have been by a martini and pain meds I’d taken for my hand, I not only turned down any potential job, I discouraged Tess from taking over the Skouras empire altogether.
“You seem to look at me as some kind of hero because I took it on myself to protect a baby whose parents I hardly knew,” I’d told her, “but I didn’t volunteer for that—it chose me. I’m not a hero. Me, my closest friend, most of the people I know—we’re like an evolutionary chart of morally compromised people. I might be a little farther to the right on that chart than most of them, but you, you’re not one of us at all, and I can’t think why you’d want to be. And you will be if you take over your father’s businesses. You won’t change them. They’ll change you. It’s inevitable.”
I don’t kid myself that my advice could have had any effect on someone as self-assured as Tess D’Agostino, but she’d apparently come to the same conclusion. She sold nearly everything, keeping only her father’s minority share in a film and television studio here in Los Angeles. Then she’d used the proceeds of the sale of the other Skouras businesses to buy a majority share. In short, Tess had become a studio head, and she lived locally.
I was reaching out to her now because she had no discernible link to me. No one knew that we knew each other, and thus no one would expect me to be with her. And her home, I felt certain, would be safe from close observation; every rich person I knew valued privacy and security.
So I’d given her directions to the Slaughterhouse—actually, to the intersection of two well-marked streets nearby, the neighborhood being somewhat confusing and forbidding to a newcomer, especially after dark. Then I’d collected my night’s pay from Jack, in fifties and twenties that I divided up between my gym bag and my wallet, and left. I had to resist the urge to hurry. No one in the crowd pointed at me or stared. These weren’t the kind of people who checked the news on their smartphones.
Outside, the temperature had dropped to the high sixties. The streets were mostly empty. The occasional car passed, but I was the only person on the sidewalk. A newspaper skated past my feet. At the corner I stopped, shifted the gym bag on my shoulder. Beyond Tess’s hospitality to depend on, I had six hundred in cash, two Vicodin, and the Browning. No change of clothes, but that was a minor annoyance. There were worse states of affairs.
Besides, wouldn’t this be over in a day or two? Somehow the police had to figure out that there was a mix-up, that Hailey Cain wasn’t their suspect. How could they not? I hadn’t shot a cop or anyone else. I’d been in L.A.
One problem with that: I’d been off the grid a long time. No rental contract. No utility bills. No real job with a W-4 or a time card. Come to think of it, who could even alibi me that the police would take seriously? Serena? Diana? I hadn’t even been hanging with CJ lately.
Oh, God, CJ. Had he seen the news yet? Would he possibly entertain the—
That was when I heard the sirens.
Don’t assume they’re for you, I told myself. This is L.A., after all. I looked around for flashing lights and movement and saw them. Two squad cars were heading my way.
I set the gym bag down, sat on my heels, and quickly retrieved the money from inside. I didn’t want to run with the bag. I didn’t want to run at all, because if there was any chance these squad cars were on an unrelated call, I didn’t want to give myself away. Nothing gets a cop’s attention like someone who runs away from the sight of him.
The two cars turned onto the street I was on.
Tess, dammit, I trusted you.
I abandoned the bag and sprinted, looking as I did so for an alleyway or any tight space I could disappear into. I didn’t want to stay in the open. If I turned this into a footrace, with obstacles, maybe I could win.
The sirens grew louder behind me. Ahead I saw a narrow driveway between buildings and headed for it. When I dived between the buildings, I was almost in full dark while I ran about twenty yards, and then I emerged into moonlight again.
Dead end. I was in a paved area where several buildings backed up to each other. There were two Dumpsters and about several dozen cigarette butts from a legion of workers taking breaks, so many that the ghost of nicotine hung in the air. The doors that I saw were solid windowless double doors, almost certainly all locked. There were no open windows.
“Damn,” I said. “Dammit.” The sirens were growing louder. What now? Climb up on a Dumpster and jump for a low-hanging rain gutter, try to make the roofline?
The cop cars were so close that I could hear the engine noise under the sirens. I turned, resigned, to look back at the driveway I’d run along, saw a brief flash of black-and-white as the cars swept past. Then the sound of the sirens began to lengthen, stretching out in that Doppler fade.
False alarm. I took a breath and began to walk back down the driveway. The sound of the cop cars was still receding. Broken glass crunched under my boots.
Out on the street again, I saw nothing but a dark gray Chrysler Crossfire, the little coupe with that funny, rounded European shape, parked at the curb. The driver’s door was open, and Tess D’Agostino was sitting on her heels outside, examining the gym bag I’d left pushed behind a trash can.
“Hey,” I said when I was close enough, my breathing back to normal. I bent down to pick up the bag. “Thanks for coming.”
Tess straightened up. She was wearing a dark pea coat, heavier than the weather called for, over a collarless white shirt, black trousers, and black stack-heeled boots, the same kind she’d worn the first time I saw her. She’d cut her bronze hair back to chin length since I’d seen her last.
“Did you run when you heard the sirens?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I thought maybe I was too late,” she said. Then she nodded toward the Crossfire. “Let’s not linger here longer than we have to, shall we?”
&
nbsp; 7
Tess lived in Westwood, not far from UCLA, in a Tudor house set back from a quiet street. She led me to a guest room and left me alone to shower, but I couldn’t wait to turn on CNN, to find out what the rest of the world thought it knew about me.
The police officer’s name was Greg Stepakoff. His murder wasn’t fresh news this Saturday night; a line-of-duty death had first been reported in a San Francisco Police Department press release on Friday night, in time for the late news broadcasts. Stepakoff had been thirty-five, with a wife and daughter, and he hadn’t shown up for his midwatch shift as scheduled at four P.M. Friday. His colleagues had been concerned, as Stepakoff was responsible and punctual. Several hours later, responding to a citizen’s phone tip, officers had gone to a St. Francis Wood address, where they’d found Stepakoff’s car in the driveway and the officer dead in the house, shot twice in the chest. An ambulance had been called to transport a second person to the hospital. Pressed for details, the SFPD press liaison would say only that the second victim was a civilian, not an officer. This sparked early reports of a double shooting, which were erroneous.
By Saturday morning the second victim had been identified, and in turn that identification made the story catch fire in the national media. The second victim, who had died late Friday night at UCSF Medical Center, was Violet Eastman, heiress to the Eastman distillery fortune and—under the pen name V. K. Eastman—a science-fiction writer of some note from the 1970s and ’80s. She hadn’t been shot but had died of dehydration, and her tox screen showed high levels of an unnamed sedative.
At a five P.M. news conference, the assembled reporters and the SFPD had different agendas. The SFPD press liaison mostly wanted to stress how much manpower was going into the investigation and to talk about plans for a Stepakoff memorial. The reporters’ questions were much more pointed.
They wanted to know whether Eastman’s death was being investigated as an illness or a poisoning. They also pointed out that the first sign that Stepakoff was missing had been when he’d failed to clock in and that it was apparently his personal car that was found in Eastman’s driveway. In light of that, they asked, could he really be considered to have been killed in the line of duty? And if Eastman had lived alone and had been comatose, how had Stepakoff accessed the house? Had he gone in without a warrant?
And of course they wanted to know about the rumors of a young live-in caretaker at the Eastman house who now couldn’t be located.
The press liaison said simply that the case would be treated as a line-of-duty death until further notice and that they didn’t know how Stepakoff had accessed the house, but “we have no indication that he acted other than professionally.” About the rumors of a young tenant/caregiver, she said again that “leads are being developed, and to comment further would be to jeopardize our investigation.”
That didn’t work as well as the department hoped. An hour later a radio station had reported the tenant/caretaker’s name as Hailey Cain. Neighbors had seen her coming and going from the house, but only at a distance. A few had heard Eastman mention her by name. But no one had seen the young woman since all the official vehicles had convened in Eastman’s driveway, the evening the cop was shot and Eastman was carried out on a stretcher.
The SFPD, apparently deciding that the door had been opened and that it was better to have the eyes and ears of the public working for them, had faxed another news release to the media confirming the tenant’s name and adding a detailed description. That had been the source of the news report that Serena had seen. Now, at eleven, a reporter doing a stand-up outside the Eastman house was telling the world that I was to be considered armed and dangerous and that I was possibly driving a 1999 Mazda Miata.
I’ve never been in a goddamn Miata in my life.
More than anything it was the Miata—evidence of someone else’s taste—that made this situation fully real. Since Serena had called me, I’d been thinking about this mess only as, Hey, it wasn’t me. Now it was sinking in that a real, three-dimensional person had deliberately put on my identity like an article of clothing and presented herself to the world as me.
Everything about it spoke of premeditation. People had seen the birthmark, which meant she’d re-created it with stage makeup. Maybe she’d bleached her hair, too, or gotten brown contact lenses. She’d moved in with Violet Eastman, lived with her. This was no short con. It was a long-term plan, working toward a big score.
And despite the fact that I’d lived in San Francisco last year, this woman didn’t seem to have been afraid of our crossing paths. That was very interesting. Did she know I was in Los Angeles? She couldn’t have found out through public records, since there was no paper trail of my life in Los Angeles. If she knew where I was, that suggested a personal connection. Someone had told her. Someone who knew me had helped her. Maybe not maliciously, but unwittingly.
The hell of it was, I’d also unwittingly helped this unknown girl, the other “Hailey.” Because while I hadn’t died down in Mexico like I was supposed to, I’d gone home to Los Angeles and built a life so far underground it was suspect in itself. Who did I have to witness that I’d been in L.A. the past four months? Gangbangers and petty criminals, who could barely prove their own whereabouts on a regular basis. The hours just after Stepakoff and Eastman had been killed, I’d been in the desert, robbing a pair of trucks. What a great alibi that would make.
I’d thought I was so cool, dropping thoroughly off the grid, turning my back on the system with all its electronic trails and prying eyes. Now how screwed was I? Because just as I’d decided to shed my public self, someone else in San Francisco had been stepping into it.
From the doorway Tess cleared her throat, and I looked up. She’d changed into a fisherman’s sweater and moleskin trousers, her feet bare. She was holding a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other.
“I thought you could probably use a drink,” she said.
“Yeah, I could,” I said, muting the noise of the television.
She took a seat in a wing chair, setting the glasses on the nightstand and pouring us each about three fingers.
I took the square, heavy-based glass from her, tipped my nose down, and sniffed. “Gin?”
“Genever,” she said. “A Dutch import.”
“Wasted on me,” I said. “I would have been happy with Coors Light.”
I don’t know what there was about her that made me want to play the working-class rube. Maybe because I could never have matched her sophistication had I tried. Everything around us spoke of her good taste. The room we were in was mostly Victorian in its furnishings; in addition to the bed and the wing chair, there was a writing desk and a lamp of delicately scrolled brass with a frosted-glass shade. The room’s colors were light as a watercolor painting, touches of mauve and gold and mossy green against the off-white walls and carpeting. On the floor the scuffed black boots I’d shed looked like the corpses of crows in an English garden.
She glanced at the silent TV screen and said, “You haven’t told me yet what you think is going on. Do you have any theories?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, this woman’s motives, when they come out, will be financial,” Tess said. It wasn’t a question. Tess’s businesses had always been legal, but she knew plenty of people who didn’t operate aboveboard, starting with her biological father. “Within a day or two, the papers will be reporting financial irregularities in Eastman’s accounts, check forgeries or large-amount withdrawals.”
“That’d be my guess,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Tess tucked one leg up underneath her. “It isn’t hard to see why she’d target Violet Eastman. She had money, lived alone, and was vulnerable. The question is, why you? How did she choose you to impersonate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think this girl is somebody you know?”
Like an old high-school classmate? I considered that. “I doubt it,” I said. “I haven’t kept in touch with anybody from the old d
ays. The connection might be looser than that. I was thinking earlier that this girl must know somebody I know.”
“Why?”
“Because she seems to have inside information. She knows I wasn’t living in or near San Francisco. It seems like she knew I was in L.A. or …”
“Or what?”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. An idea was tickling the edges of my mind. Slowly I began to put it into words: “Or she thought I was dead.”
Tess grimaced. “Why would she think that?”
“Because there were several guys in particular who last year believed that I was dead. The tunnel rats.”
“Who?”
“Your father’s guys,” I explained. “That’s what I called the guys he sent to Mexico to get Nidia Hernandez. They shot me in the tunnel, assumed I was dead, dragged me off the road, and cleaned up the scene. One of them could easily have set aside my driver’s license and passport. Guys like that would know how valuable genuine identity documents are on the black market and how to find a buyer.”
It was just a theory, but it was coming together fast, making a lot of sense. I’d thought of last year’s ambush in the tunnel primarily as an attempted murder (mine) and a kidnapping (Nidia’s), not a robbery. When I’d woken up in a Mexican hospital without any ID, I’d just assumed that my driver’s license and passport were rotting in a swamp, along with my duffel bag and clothing and everything else Nidia and I had carried with us.
“Plus,” I added, “whoever sold this girl my ID, he could have assured her that the real Hailey Cain wouldn’t raise an alarm about identity theft, because she was a Jane Doe in the Third World morgue. At least that’s what he thought at the time. It’d be a great selling point.”
“Dead girls don’t check their credit scores.”
“Right. And that’s only the half of it. In Mexico I was traveling with a gun. He had that to sell, too.”
“Would she need to buy that from him? Guns are a lot easier to get a hold of than good ID documents. The gun might have come from elsewhere.”