Unzipped

by Lois Greiman

  —Glen McMullen,

  imparting wisdom to his only daughter

  I WOKE UP STARING into a broad bank of snowy clouds. Hmmm. Apparently, I’d made it to heaven. So Father Pat’s prediction had been entirely wrong, despite the fact that he’d found me necking with . . . What was that kid’s name? I could remember his face perfectly. It had been as red as his hair and . . . Marv Kobinski. He’d had ears the size of cantaloupes and . . .

  “Mac?”

  I turned my head and was mildly surprised to find Elaine sitting beside me. Her eyes looked shadowed and her face gaunt.

  “Laney?” It seemed unlikely we’d wind up in heaven at the same time. Or at all, maybe. “Umm . . .”

  “Mac!” She was holding my hand. “You scared me to death. I thought . . . But you’re okay. Right? Just bruised?”

  I stared at her in a haze for a moment, then shifted my gaze around the room. Turns out the ceiling wasn’t made of clouds but of bumpy white plaster. The room’s linoleum was beige and the other bed was narrow and perfectly made. Nothing looked familiar, and I was pretty sure my bed had never been perfectly made. “You were scared?”

  “I called your mother.”

  She was scared. No one called my mother unless absolutely necessary. Dad’s Chevy had once broken down on I-294. So he’d hitched a ride north in a cattle truck, then hoofed it home for the last four and a half miles. Mom had been telling him for weeks to get his car in the shop. Anyone with half a brain would rather take their chances afoot on the interstate than be I-told-you-so’d by my mother. “Why would you do that?”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  Huh, I thought, but didn’t voice my cleverness out loud.

  “They brought you in last night.” Her perfect face creased. Did I actually fraternize with someone that pretty on purpose? How masochistic was I? And did I use the word fraternize in everyday conversation? “Don’t you remember anything?”

  “No,” I ventured, then, “Yes.” A few details were drifting back to me. “The food’s really great at Chin Yung’s. I had chicken fried rice, and then . . .” It all rushed at me like high tide. “Oh, crap! There were flashing lights . . . and people.” My head hurt. I raised a hand to probe my cranium. “They were holding up fingers and asking me to count them.” I scowled, but my skull seemed to be in relatively good repair. “If they didn’t know how many fingers they had, couldn’t they ask someone else?”

  Elaine laughed and stroked my hand, and I noticed that there were tears in her eyes. Holy cow! She must have been worried. She didn’t even cry at Gone With the Wind. “I told you to get more sleep.”

  I tried to follow this new line of logic. “I fell asleep?”

  “Don’t you remember? You were on Mulholland Highway. And—” Her attention shifted away. “Oh, Lieutenant,” she said and straightened. “Hello.”

  My gaze skipped past the bumps my feet made in the white coverlet. Lieutenant Rivera stood directly between them, looking dark and lean and carrying a good-sized parcel.

  “What are you doing here?” Maybe it wasn’t the most polite salutation, but I was still struggling to separate the memory of chicken fried rice from screeching tires and didn’t want to have to worry about the condition of my coiffure. I stifled a weakling urge to run my hand over my hair. For all I knew someone might have shaved the Lions logo into the back of my scalp but there wasn’t much I could do about it at that precise moment.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Elaine was staring at him, but he kept his eyes on me, which made me wonder in a dim sort of otherworldly way if I was hallucinating. Everyone looks at Elaine.

  “I think I might have had a car accident,” I said.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. What happened?”

  I scowled. I was tired and hungry and didn’t really need the fifth degree from a guy who wouldn’t have sex with me just because I was drunk off my feet. Okay, I’d been a little weepy, too . . . and in his eyes there was probably still the possibility that I was a murderer, but still . . . “You tell me,” I said. I was trying for tough, but I might have just sounded cranky.

  “I know you think my position on the force gives me omnipotent powers,” he said and took another couple steps into the room. His tone was still rough-edged, but there was something almost gooshy in his eyes. Maybe he’d called my mother, too. The thought made me feel a little sick to my stomach. “But I’m a cop, not God.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” I said and noticed that the box he carried said Frank’s Garden Store and had a green plastic bag protruding from the top. “Did you bring me flowers?”

  “I heard they’d brought you here.”

  I think I blinked at him dumbly. “And you came anyway?”

  His lips jumped a little and maybe his eyes laughed as he relaxed. “Yeah. I came,” he said. His gaze was steady on me as he stepped closer. It made me feel fidgety and a little breathless. “What the hell were you doing in the mountains?”

  “I was just . . .” I fiddled with the coverlet. It had a pale blue diamond pattern. Maybe the powers that be thought bright colors would get their patients overly excited and send them spinning into cardiac arrest. “Visiting a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  I gripped the stiff coverlet in my fingers. It was about as cozy as concrete. “I don’t think I owe you an explanation, Roper.” Maybe it was unfair, but the memory of his rejection made me pretty pissed off. “In fact, I don’t owe you anything.”

  “True,” he said and, putting the package on the floor, sat on the edge of my mattress. “Except for a new shirt. That’s the second one you’ve ruined.”

  It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the buttons that kept inexplicably exploding from his clothing. It was probably just poor workmanship. I wanted to tell him to buy American next time. It would have made my Dad proud. But I could feel a blush starting at my ears. I cleared my throat, then turned and stared pointedly at Elaine.

  She stared back, her eyes wide with feigned innocence. “Oh,” she said, with no inflection at all, “look at the time.” She didn’t. “I have to get back to the office. Mrs. Garner’s due in fifteen minutes.”

  She kissed my cheek, whispered good luck in my feverish ear, and departed.

  “You’ve got strange friends,” Rivera said.

  I brought my attention back to him. “I do not.”

  He raised a brow. “Eddie Friar?”

  I felt immediately defensive. Eddie had enough problems without being investigated by a feral lieutenant. Being gay was probably even harder than being hetero. And being hetero very often sucked the big out. No pun intended. “How do you know about Eddie?”

  “You used his dog as a shill to scope out my wife, remember?” he said. “Makes him fair game.”

  I thought about that for a prolonged moment but couldn’t think of any snappy comebacks. The old noodle didn’t seem to be working at warp speed.

  “Did you know he feeds his dog breakfast in bed?” he asked.

  “Lots of people—”

  “His bed.”

  I tried not to wince. “Maybe he’s a little eccentric. That’s not the same as weird.”

  He considered that for a moment, then, “How ’bout Bomstad?”

  “He was not my—”

  “Solberg?”

  I paused, mouth open, then shut it carefully. “Now you’re just being mean.”

  He grinned. It didn’t do anything for my cerebral stability. Turns out he had a smile that’d make Tom Cruise look like a ghoul.

  “What happened, McMullen?” he asked. Maybe I imagined it, but it seemed as if his voice got kind of soft and mooshy.

  I shrugged, trying not to remember how his chest had looked as he lay spread out on my fake Persian rug. “I was just coming back from visiting friends—like I said. I guess I fell asleep.”

  He watched me in silence for a moment. “Do you have a lot of friends on the police force?”

  It t
ook a moment for my synapses to snap in the correct succession.

  “I really hate it when you ask questions you already know the answers to,” I said.

  “Why were you asking about Mrs. Hawkins’s death?”

  “You accused me of murder.” Damn him. His chest wasn’t that great anyway. “Excuse me for trying to clear my name.”

  He was staring at me. “I like it when you get all uppity. It’s sexy.”

  I rejected the idea of dragging him under the covers. “I should slap you upside the head,” I said instead.

  He laughed. My stomach coiled. “You’re not a suspect anymore.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “There’s no substantiation. You can quit playing Nancy Drew.”

  “So who sent Bomstad the wine?”

  The shrug again, slow and languid, but not exactly casual. “Could have been anyone. Turns out the unidentified substance was just a natural sediment of the aging process.”

  “What!” I sat up straight, wanting to kill him. “There was nothing in the wine, and you made me think it had been poisoned?”

  “I had to wait for the tox report in order to—”

  “How long have you known?”

  “I guess the Viagra on top of a heart condition was enough to—”

  “How long”—I took a deep breath—“have you known?”

  It almost looked as if he was trying not to grin as he retrieved the bulky package from the floor and thrust it toward me. “Why don’t you open your gift?”

  “How long?”

  “Just got word last night.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Why would I lie about something like that?”

  I just stared at him.

  He did grin now, just the slightest twist of his lips. “I’m pretty sure I can outrun you,” he said. “At least in your hospital gown. It’s slit up the back, you know. Open your gift.”

  I did so in something of a snit, but the roses I’d anticipated didn’t materialize. Instead, I found myself staring into two prickly branches.

  “It’s a saguaro,” he said.

  I stared.

  “A cactus,” he added.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, because, what the hell, I wasn’t going to win the Miss Congeniality contest, anyway. Not without ice cream. “I’m wondering why.”

  “I think it might be able to survive the hell of your yard,” he said. “And it suits your personality.”

  27

  Today’s problems are yesterday’s mistakes come back to bite you in the ass.

  —Michael McMullen,

  during the philosophical stage of a hangover

  ELAINE DROVE ME home from the hospital that afternoon. I now had a big-ass prescription for amped-up ibuprofen and an order to rest. I had called my mother before I left and simultaneously convinced her that she needn’t fly down and that I was paying an exorbitant amount for the phone call, so I couldn’t talk long. It had been a good day’s work.

  Once home I sat on my couch and wondered what to do with my time. I flipped through the television stations, then shut off the tube and glanced out the window. My yard glared back at me in dusty shades of gray and brown. The green fairy had failed to appear yet again. So I wandered outside and planted the saguaro in the southwest corner of my lot, where it stood prickly and staunch between me and the rest of the world.

  After that, I tried to rest, but I was wide awake. I’d been worried about my continued survival for so long that I no longer knew what to do with my spare time if it weren’t spent ferreting out information.

  Still, I did my best, finally ending up in the kitchen.

  I took a cab to work the following day. Everything still seemed a little surreal, but by Thursday, the universe was starting to settle back into a relatively normal routine. Elaine turned down three proposals from men she’d never met, and Mr. Lepinski expressed concern about his ham on rye.

  On Friday, I felt whole enough to call the shop and ask about my car.

  “Oh, yeah, the ’96 Saturn.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Can you tell me how much damage there was?”

  “Well . . .” I could hear the guy expel his breath and imagined him scratching his head under his well-worn baseball cap—a man’s man. “The body ain’t too bad, considering you took a header into a canyon, but it’ll take a while to fix the brakes.”

  The world slowed to a crawl. My mind crept along at the same lethargic pace. “What’s wrong with the brakes?”

  “They’re wore out.”

  I waited three beats, sure the earth would soon continue rotating at its normal speed. “But I just had them checked.”

  “Yeah? Well, you shoulda come to us, ’cuz whoever’s been takin’ care of you screwed up big-time. Didn’t no one tell you ’bout the brakes?”

  “No,” I said. “No one did.”

  “Huh, that’s funny, ’cuz that lieutenant fella said he would pass on the info.”

  A ngela Grapier was my last client on Friday. She looked small and tired as she sat curled up against the armrest of my couch. I asked her about school, which was going okay, and Kelly the animal, whom she hadn’t seen for a while. She looked a little sad about that. Apparently, she was fond of animals, even ones that were rabid. But upon further discussion, she admitted that she’d met someone new in Algebra. His name was Ethan. He was freaky smart, and he was kind of a nerd, but . . . and then she grinned. The expression was shy and guileless and glowing, exactly like a sixteen-year-old’s smile should be. “Maybe,” she said, “nerds aren’t so bad.”

  It was then that I decided to let her continue to live with her father instead of begging her to move in with me. It’d just get messy if she were around when the LAPD killed me in my sleep.

  As I closed the door behind her, my mind zinged like a sling shot pellet back to my own looming problems. I’d been clinging to my clients’ concerns in an effort to hold them at bay. But I realized as I drove my rent-a-wreck home that my mind was jittery and my hands damp.

  What the hell was going on? What had happened to my brakes? Why hadn’t Rivera told me about them? And had the blue Mazda I’d seen three cars behind on my way to work really been following me?

  At home at last, I sat in the dark on the edge of my bed, having locked every lock and checked every window. Still, I jumped at each inconsequential sound.

  I was entirely alone. I had nowhere to go. Not even to the police. Especially not to the police. I closed my eyes and stuck my hands under my thighs, trying to keep them from shaking as I spun facts through my overtaxed brain.

  Had Meyers’s death really been an accident? And what about Bomstad’s? It seemed terrifyingly likely that they were tied together somehow. After all, they had known each other. But then, Rivera had known them both.

  The idea made my mouth go dry. Had he been in love with Stephanie? Had he been jealous of her relationship with Bomstad? Had he killed them both and made their deaths look accidental?

  I didn’t sleep that night. Instead, I smoked the entire pack of Virginia Slims I’d fished out of the toilet, then considered the third death. Or the first, really—Victoria Hawkins. David’s wife.

  Had Rivera known her, too? Most likely, since he obviously knew David.

  Mrs. Hawkins had died on a curving road just south of where my brakes had failed. But that had been years ago. Still, what were the chances that all those deaths, and my own near death, were unrelated? In my current sleepless state, they seemed astronomical.

  But how would I learn anything about the circumstances of Victoria’s death? I’d be better off sticking my head in the oven than going to the police.

  She’d died in her Mercedes. That much I knew. But Mercedeses were as common as perverts in L.A. Still, maybe someone would remember her car and be able to tell me if there had been any unexplained brake damage.

  I spent the rest of the night and half of the next morning learning all I could about Victoria’s death. The info didn’t
amount to a pile of bunny turds. Nevertheless, I gathered my paltry notes and sat stiff and jumpy at my kitchen table, listening to every insignificant noise with one ear while my other was stuck to the phone receiver. I hit pay dirt with the twenty-seventh towing station I called.

  I sat up straight, hardly able to believe my ears. “A Mercedes? On July seventeen, 2005? You’re sure?”

  “Yep. That’s what I got down here.”

  I sat like a block of salt in my spindle-backed chair and gripped the telephone cord for support. “Do you remember the condition of the car?”

  “Ahh, let’s see. Looks like Billy did the report. Says here the vehicle was broke up pretty bad.”

  “Yes, I know, but I was wondering if they had determined a cause for the accident.”

  “Huh?” he said, then covered the mouthpiece and shouted to someone in the background. “Yeah, you too. See ya Monday.

  “Sorry, what was that?”

  “The cause,” I said, breathless and terrified, “of the accident.”

  “That ain’t our department. We just tow ’em and impound ’em.”

  “Do you think someone else might know more about it?”

  “Listen, it’s time to close up shop. Reeves will be in on Monday. You could stop by then, maybe.”

  Which was a fabulous idea. Only I might not be alive on Monday. “Isn’t there someone I could talk to today?”

  “I’m the last one here and I gotta get home. Wife’s making ribs.”

  He hung up. I sat staring at the phone, but nerves and indigestion wouldn’t let me rest. I made a circuit around my living room and glanced out the window at my saguaro. Maybe there was a camera in it. Maybe they were watching my house every minute. Maybe, I thought—and then I saw the car parked a half a block down on the opposite side of Opus. It was a blue Mazda. And there was someone slouched behind the wheel.

  I felt immediately sick to my stomach. Holy crap! I’d been right. I had been followed. But why? I needed answers and I needed them fast, preferably while I was still breathing.