The dumb face worked. He let it go. ‘Arlin was divorced two years ago, no children,’ he said. ‘His ex-wife moved back east, free of his financial mess. He got stuck with the mortgage on the house, which is upside down by eight hundred thousand, and business debts. He was a kitchen and bath hardware distributor. The last housing downturn stuck him with inventory he couldn’t sell.’
‘No sign of a wrench near a loose gas fitting?’
‘You’re asking whether Arlin blew up his house to get out from under that mortgage and accidentally blew himself up as well?’
‘It happens.’
‘Call your employer; get back to me with the beneficiary on his life insurance.’
‘You wouldn’t want to know that unless you’re thinking this was no accident.’
‘I expect to hear from you within forty-eight hours.’
Outside, the setting sun was beginning to gild the waves in the ocean. I found a Whole Foods grocery, got a vegetable salad and a tuna sandwich on seven-grain bread because they were healthy, and a box of chocolate-dipped butter cookies because they were necessary, and drove back to the Sun Coast Hotel.
And then I sat, in the Prius, in the parking lot, wondering whether Rosamund Reynolds was gaming me by sending me off to learn information she already knew. What I couldn’t figure out was why.
Calling her, I got her voicemail. ‘I’ve just visited David Arlin’s house, or rather what’s left of it and, I suppose, of him. The cops are playing things close to the vest, saying only that they’re investigating. I’m thinking you know more than they do, just as you must know more than I could learn about Gary Halvorson. Call me with truths before I waste more of your money.’
I leaned back behind the wheel and shut my eyes, hoping to be calmed by the sound of the surf, but all the water did was pound in my ears, one wave after another. I waited fifteen minutes, then fifteen minutes more. There was no call. There was no calm.
The same short blonde looked up when I entered the office. ‘I’d like to upgrade to a room on the beach,’ I said.
‘A water view would triple your rate,’ she said, casting a new glance at my old clothes.
‘Excellent,’ I said, sticking my hand into the jar of the more lightly tanned taffies.
She gave me a quizzical look and a key to a room that overlooked rocks, some of which were big and some of which were small. But these had an ocean beyond them and a big-dollar veranda from which to enjoy them, all at the expense of the wily Rosamund Reynolds. Upgrading seemed such a perfectly petty gesture.
By now, the sun was almost gone. I slid open the door and stepped outside. The surf had softened. Little silver lines shimmered in the shallows along the beach.
‘Nothing is as it appears,’ a voice said.
A man stood on the next veranda, smoking a cigarette and looking down at the water. ‘Bioluminescence,’ he went on. ‘Microorganisms. Phosphorescence. Things you can’t see, moving beneath the surface. That’s what’s making those silver lines.’
‘Couldn’t prove it by me,’ I said.
‘Some things can’t be proved by anybody,’ he said and went back into his room.
It sounded like a California sort of attitude. I ate the salad, the tuna sandwich and three of the cookies as I watched the last sliver of the sun disappear. Then I took my cell phone down to the beach to walk among the silver lines shimmering even brighter in the moonlight. I thought of Amanda in Chicago and the moonlit beaches we’d shared and were working toward sharing again. And I thought of Jenny Galecki, so much closer up in San Francisco yet now so much farther away, and of the beaches that likely would never be. Jenny and I had come together at a time when Amanda and I were so very far apart. But then a better professional opportunity came for her and Jenny, ever the vigilant newswoman, left Chicago television for San Francisco. We’d stayed loosely in touch, thinking we’d become closer in mind should times change.
I got cold. I went up to bed, hoping the surf would pound loud enough to drown out everything I didn’t know.
TEN
I brewed lousy coffee in the room the next morning and took it with a lousy attitude out onto my three-hundred-dollar a night veranda to call Rosamund Reynolds again. Once more I was routed to voicemail.
‘What’s left of your two-thousand-dollar retainer is stuck, confused and unnecessary, in an expensive room on the sands of Laguna Beach,’ I said to her recorder. ‘The cops won’t tell me anything. To learn more will take time. Call me.’
I went down to the lobby, got better coffee and more of the superb saltwater taffy, and used the guest computer to Google Dainsto Runney, the preacher in Oregon. Nothing new was posted. If he’d been killed or disappeared unnaturally, news of it had not yet been sniffed by the Internet.
I called his Church of the Reawakened Spirit from the sidewalk and was surprised when an articulate, businesslike woman answered instead of some drugged-up dreamer of the lost sixties. It proved, for the first time, that I shouldn’t judge a church by its name.
‘Dainsto Runney, please.’
‘He’s not here.’
‘When will he return?’
‘May I ask who is calling?’
‘It’s regarding an insurance payout,’ I said, because even reawakened spirits love free money.
‘If it’s personal, you should send him a letter.’
‘It’s a sizable amount.’
‘A letter would be perfect,’ she said, and hung up.
And perfect, too, was Runney. He fit seamlessly into Rosamund’s ragged puzzle. He’d either gone away like Halvorson or gone dead, like Arlin. I had no doubt Rosamund knew Runney was missing before she hired me.
I called her again, and again got sent to voicemail. ‘Runney’s missing. I’ll waste more of your money to verify that in Oregon.’
I got my duffel from my room, grabbed a last fistful of taffies from the lobby and headed north to the airport and the safest direct route north to Oregon.
But I slowed, as I knew I would, a mile before the turn to Los Angeles International. I’d been talking to myself above the Prius’s silently sanctimonious electric motor, reminding myself that I had other business in that part of the world, business that demanded more than a simple telephone call. A face-to-face conversation was so very necessary, I told myself.
What I didn’t need to tell myself, I devoutly hoped, was that I had to be careful, that there was rarely even one Amanda for the dumb-luckiest of men and that the odds of getting second chances with such a woman were smaller than moon shots attempted with basement-built rockets.
I blew past the turn-off to LAX and continued driving north.
ELEVEN
Jennifer Gale, as she was known to her television viewers, had come to Rivertown to report the arrest of one of its municipal lizards. Our zoning commissioner, Elvis Derbil, had been caught slapping fake labels on bottles of out-of-date salad dressing, and the symmetry of that was undeniable for television. His was an oily scheme, altering an oily product in an oily town.
Being a good reporter, she’d sought to brighten the odd story with a minute-long color piece on the oddball – me – who lived in a turret across the lawn from city hall. She’d dropped that notion when she’d discovered I was working on a case for one of Chicago’s most prominent socialites. She’d attached herself to my investigation like a limpet mine and led us, on a hot July day, to a fly-covered corpse in a trailer off a dune in Indiana. And that had led to an almost supercharged night back at my turret. But she had been coming off the trauma of her reporter husband’s death in the Middle East and I was descending from the flameout of my marriage to Amanda Phelps. Our ghosts, those who haunted us – hers dead, mine so very alive – had pulled us back.
Jenny left Chicago for better assignments in San Francisco and we didn’t see each other for months. She remained transfixed, though, by the crookedness in Rivertown and when she got tipped off to a Chicago-based Russian gang’s plan to slip their fingers around the greasy ne
cks in Rivertown she took a leave and returned to Illinois, hoping for a career-raising series of reports on new sorts of mob crime in America. Still tethered by our ghosts, we reconnected, warily at first. And then less so.
She returned to San Francisco. I returned to scrambling for insurance company work or, absent that, rounding up semi-coherent sorority alumni to inhale again the vapors of old times.
And I was returned, too, to the periphery of my ex-wife Amanda’s new world.
Her father, Wendell Phelps, had run Chicago’s largest electric utility. Later in his life, he’d sought to build a bridge to the daughter he’d ignored when she was growing up. He’d enticed her to quit teaching at the Art Institute and instead manage big-buck philanthropy through his company. It was an offer to do much good, and one no conscientious person could refuse.
Mindful of his majority stock position in the utility, the company’s need for a ready successor as CEO and her status as his only heir, he’d enticed her to enter his boardrooms as well. It was a prudent, business-like preparation for when the time came.
The time came too soon. Wendell Phelps died. The circumstances of it had brought Amanda and me closer together, and then even more so as she became one of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful people. We talked on the phone two or three times each week and shared dinner, usually on Thursday evenings. At first it was business – her business – and her splashdown into Wendell’s Machiavellian world of corporate politics. But then, little by little, we began to let our past return. We began reminiscing over the little things we’d shared in our brief marriage. There’d been much good in those days.
Amanda was, and would always be, my ghost.
I called Jenny two hours north of Los Angeles. ‘Care to have dinner?’ I inquired.
‘Oooh … you’re here?’ She’d dropped her voice to an exaggerated seductress level.
‘Almost,’ I said, adding, ‘I’m on my way to Oregon,’ because I wanted the call to feel more casual.
‘I’m on the TV this afternoon at five. Big expose: someone’s been juicing up pumpkins, making them bigger and brighter on a supposedly organic farm. Say six o’clock?’ She named a restaurant close to her apartment.
I told her that would be just about right, because at the time I believed it.
TWELVE
The usually malevolent California freeway gods must have been on new meds, for it was exactly six o’clock when I walked into the restaurant she’d named. It was in the Marina District, the kind of out-of-the-way place that she sought. Whereas television’s dark-haired and voluptuous Jennifer Gale was professional enough to welcome interest in her and her station, Jenny Galecki, a no-nonsense Polish girl from Chicago’s northwest side, sought privacy in her personal life. She chose restaurants where Jennifer Gale wouldn’t be stared at.
I knew to look in the darkest corner. She was there, in a beige suit that must have paled even the brightest oranges of the inorganic pumpkins she’d reported on that day.
We kissed, but not as long as the last time we’d seen each other.
She’d ordered me a single Scotch, neat. ‘I’ve been on the road for seven hours,’ I said. ‘This might knock me out.’
‘That’s OK. I live one block up. I can drag you there.’ She said it half-jokingly, watching my eyes to see my reaction.
I hid behind my drink, taking a small sip, though to my shame part of me wanted to wonder what it would be like to gulp the thing down and be dragged up the block.
‘You’re angry,’ she said after a moment. Jenny’s antennae were so very finely tuned.
‘Unsettled. A lying client.’
‘So, heading to Oregon?’ she asked.
‘The third of a trio of men I’ve been hired to look up.’ After making her promise that not one word of what I said would make the news, I told her about Rosamund Reynolds, Gary Halvorson, David Arlin and Dainsto Runney.
She leaned forward. ‘You think the third man, the preacher Runney, has also disappeared?’
‘The woman at his church was too vague about when he’d return. Until I see what I can learn up there, the only solid lead about the trio seems to be Arlin in Laguna Beach. There’s a cop there, a Lieutenant Beech …’
‘Beech, of the Beach?’ She laughed.
I laughed, too. We always laughed well together, Jenny and me.
‘Perhaps a delicate inquiry …?’ she asked.
‘From a foxy TV lady in San Francisco …?’
‘Might yield a little more information.’
‘Only as long as the foxy TV lady doesn’t go too far, or public – at least until I get up to Oregon.’
‘What can this mysterious Reynolds woman be up to?’ she asked.
‘It’s all I can think about.’
She began circling the rim of her own Scotch with a slow, suggestive forefinger. ‘Really? Nothing else?’
It was a perfectly formed forefinger, attached to a perfectly formed hand. ‘Well, perhaps something else did flit in and out of my mind.’ It was true enough; I can be a weak man. And though ours was an unformed relationship, we did have good history, Jenny and me.
The forefinger slowed. ‘Flit? That’s all it was, a flit?’
‘Perhaps a little more extended.’
The forefinger picked up the tempo just a little, ever so tantalizingly. ‘Extended?’ she whispered softly, teasing, sensing triumph.
‘Absolutely,’ I said. I had to look away from the mesmerizing forefinger.
‘What is it, Dek? What else is wrong?’
‘Not so much wrong.’
‘Amanda?’
‘We’re in touch,’ I said.
‘Your ever-present ghost.’
‘Yes.’
She reached across the table to touch the back of my hand. ‘I dream about my husband every night, especially about the last time I saw him. I told you once, remember? I was late for work and he was racing around the apartment packing, late himself to get to O’Hare, to a plane, to Iraq, to his death. I wake up in tears.’
‘You can’t do that, you know.’
‘Punish myself for brusqueness?’ She made a small laugh. ‘You know the difference between us, Dek? The only way I can live is in the present. No future. And God knows, my past hurts too much to want to think about. Yet it comes so very alive when I’m unguarded in my sleep. But you … you have a past that can become a future, a past that can become real again. Your ghost isn’t really a ghost, and that is very fine.’
My cell phone shattered the mood, whatever it was. ‘My elusive client, no doubt,’ I said, a man of dedicated professionalism and suddenly renewed self-control.
It wasn’t Rosamund calling. It was my pal, Leo Brumsky. ‘You’re not alone?’ he asked.
It was an odd thing for him to say. ‘Actually, no.’
‘Hmmm …’ He paused, as he does when he’s slithering toward something salacious. ‘That explains the turret’s being dark and my banging fruitlessly on your door for five minutes. You’re otherwise engaged. With Amanda?’
He was making no sense. Leo, always a romantic, always a believer in the possibility of righting old wrongs, thought I was inside the turret with my ex-wife.
‘I’m in California.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re here. You must be here.’ After the briefest of instants, he asked slowly, ‘Where … in … California, exactly?’
I could envisage the look spreading across his face. Five foot six, one hundred and forty pounds and no doubt garbed as always in a preposterous Hawaiian shirt and neon-colored trousers, the man knew how to offer up the filthiest of smirks no matter how ludicrous his costume.
‘Middle of the state.’ I was speaking to the phone but I couldn’t take my eyes off the forefinger. It had paused, barely moving side to side, but still restless, teasing, promising. I doubted Jenny was aware she was doing it.
‘San Francisco!’ he announced.
‘As a matter of fact, yes.’
‘Tell Miss Galecki I
love her.’
‘Leo says he loves you,’ I said to Jenny.
‘Tell him I love him, too, and that I’m waiting for him to come and rescue me.’
‘Listen,’ Leo said, ‘it’s nuts leaving this thing in your Jeep. People steal them for their copper content.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your furnace. It’s so small anyone can get at it. All they’d have to do is peel off some of the duct tape you’ve used to patch your top—’
‘Leo! Make sense.’
‘The furnace you left in your Jeep. It’s in a cardboard box that’s marked “Furnace,” an invitation to any thief—’
‘My new furnace can’t fit in the Jeep,’ I cut in, trying not to shout.
The restaurant had gone silent. Every head had turned toward me.
‘I’m looking right at it,’ he said.
‘A cut-down furnace box stuffed inside …’ My mind flashed through the possibilities of why I’d been sent out of town. The most horrible of set-ups suddenly seemed probable.
‘Get out of there, Leo!’ I yelled into the phone. ‘Get out of there fast.’
THIRTEEN
I reserved a last-minute seat on a nine o’clock flight to Chicago as Jenny raced me to the airport in my rental.
‘You’ll talk to that cop in Laguna Beach?’ I said as I got out.
‘Discreetly, as I promised,’ she said, offering a small smile up at me through the open window. ‘I’ll see you again?’ she asked.
‘You betcha.’ I pulled my duffel from the back seat. It felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. It wanted to be an anchor, to tug me back into the car.
She eased me away. ‘Remember, I want to know about Halvorson, Arlin and your mysterious preacher, Dainsto Runney,’ she said. ‘I want to know the true identity of the mystery woman who hired you. But first, I want to know what’s in the back of your Jeep.’
There was so much more to say, and I said none of it. I bent down to quickly kiss her and then closed the car door. She gunned the engine and sped away. She’d drop off my rental and take a cab back to her apartment where she’d wait breathlessly, she said, for news I’d made her promise to not break on television.
Hidden Graves Page 4