Tell No Lies

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Chapter 14

  Two stone pillars guarded the entrance to Sea Cliff, the affluent neighborhood nestled above the beaches of the northwest rim of the city. Coasting past the mansions with their terraces and stone lions, Daniel felt the familiar tightening at the base of his neck that came on every time he neared his childhood home.

  His parents had been married here on a bluff overlooking China Beach. At the ceremony’s culmination, they’d released a pair of doves, and two red-tailed hawks had descended from the heavens and torn them to shreds in view of the wedding party—an appropriate metaphor for the marriage. Denis Milner came with money and a business degree, but Evelyn Brasher came with the fortune, amassed by her great-grandfather, who took skillful advantage of Congress-bestowed land grants for the transcontinental railway. Denis adopted the stronger family name, a move that flew under the cloud cover of sixties San Francisco, and adopted the various bank accounts as well. Aside from the two weeks each July he decamped to Bohemian Grove to smoke cigars with Kissinger and Nixon, he worked most waking hours, the better to avoid his barbed wife. When he died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven, one society columnist opined that he’d done so merely to escape Evelyn. Daniel remembered his father as little more than a hazy outline and an oil portrait.

  As he steered into the driveway now and waited on the leisurely parting of the wrought-iron gates, he recalled the first time he’d brought Cristina here to expose her to Evelyn. This was before she’d gotten sick, before Daniel had switched careers and burned the bridge to the family fortune. They’d been seeing each other just a few months, but the relationship had deepened to a level where he felt he owed her more than some vague details about his background. Little did he know that this first meeting between his mother and his future wife would also be their last.

  * * *

  Evelyn greets them in the dining room, fluttering in a gossamer wrap. She touches her cheek to Daniel’s, then offers a firm hand to Cristina.

  “Consuelo, is it?”

  “Cristina.”

  “Well, welcome, welcome.”

  Cristina has brought a little wrapped gift, her grip on it tightening by degrees as the mansion reveals itself. She glances around now at the paintings, her gaze arrested by Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Blanchisseuse, and her knuckles go white. Daniel has warned her that his mother is difficult and privileged, but he realizes now that neither adjective was sufficient.

  Evelyn follows Cris’s gaze and says, “Denis bought that at auction a few weeks before he died.”

  “Denis?” Cristina manages.

  “With one n,” Evelyn says. “As in ‘penis.’”

  That is how hate works when it’s stoked to a bright light. It gets cold.

  Dinner has been timed for after the Giants game—nothing interferes with Evelyn’s enjoyment of her boys in orange and black—and the threesome crests one end of the prodigious table. Evelyn notes the gift Cristina is trying to hide in her lap. “Is that for me?”

  Reluctantly, Cris passes over the small package, her face tense as Evelyn opens it.

  A set of Toulouse-Lautrec coasters is revealed. Cris twists a finger uncomfortably in her shell necklace from the Haight. The gift-store coasters look smaller than they are, diminished before the real item dominating the wall behind them. Evelyn looks up, her gaze holding something like triumph. “Aren’t they lovely,” she purrs, and dismisses them to a butler’s tray with a wave of the hand.

  Roast chicken and baby asparagus are served, along with Riesling from the cellar. “So,” Evelyn says, “you work at a soup kitchen?”

  Daniel can no longer veil his irritation. “I told you she—”

  But Cristina is catching up to the rules of the game. “I’m a community organizer. But I can understand the confusion. Both jobs deal with poor people.”

  Evelyn’s smile turns genuine. Now there is fun to be had. “Do expound.”

  “I’m working to protect the tenants in a few apartment buildings in Dogpatch. They’re displacing all these folks to build loft condos—”

  “Ah, yes,” Evelyn says, spooning more asparagus. “I believe we invested in that. Didn’t we, Daniel?”

  The air goes out of the room. Or maybe Daniel is just working harder to find it.

  “I don’t know,” he says tightly. “That’s Vimal’s division.”

  Evelyn says, “Well, the owners of the private property have decided to put it to more lucrative use—”

  Cris jumps in. “By booting out longtime residents who won’t be able to afford to live in their own city anymore.”

  “Put them in Hunters Point.”

  “Hunters Point? Might as well move them to Mars. That’s like saying you could just live in Oakland.”

  Evelyn sips from her crystal glass. “I could just live in Oakland if I had to.”

  A loaded pause, and then both women smirked at the notion. Honest adversaries.

  Evelyn said, “Do you have any idea the revenue a construction project like this brings to the city? What do you think subsidizes little tax-exempt hobbies like yours?”

  “Aah. Trickle-down economics.”

  “Can you really argue them, Carmela?”

  “Vehemently and effectively. And it’s Cristina.”

  “Mom,” Daniel cuts in, “do you really need to trot out the Joan Crawford routine?”

  “No,” Cris says to Daniel, exhilaration coloring her cheeks. “I got this.” All signs of discomfort have vanished from her manner.

  Daniel takes a healthy slug of wine before Evelyn resumes the ping-pong match.

  “So a few black families get moved—”

  “Enough of this city hasn’t been taken away from African-Americans already?” Cris says.

  “Sure,” Evelyn says, “all the parts they moved into when the Japanese were carted off to internment camps.” She lets the point land before leaning on it. “The blacks coming here to escape Jim Crow didn’t flourish in the Fillmore until the Japanese got rounded up. Every gain comes at a cost, dear. The blacks oust the Asians. The Indians oust the yuppies. The gays, those storm troopers of gentrification, oust the Hispanics. And redecorate—thank God.” She dabs the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “So loft condominiums are going up in Dogpatch and the poor are getting the short end of the stick. This isn’t new. We dwell on Yelamu Indian land, all of us. How are those boys making out these days? The trains built to carry people here rode on tracks laid down by coolie laborers paid pennies a day. That’s how it’s always been—”

  “So that’s how it should always be?”

  “No, dear. It’s how it will always be.”

  The plates untouched. The chicken basting in its juices appears suddenly unseemly. The waitstaff clear and withdraw. Just another night at Brasher Manor.

  “You can’t really think it’ll ever be any different?” Evelyn asks.

  “I think,” Cristina says, the points of her elbows wrinkling the linen tablecloth, “that life is fucking hard. And that we have an obligation to try to make it less hard for others when we can. I think that most folks do the best they can and try to scrape by. Scrape by enough and it can wear you down to nothing. Ever scraped by, Evelyn?”

  “Oh, this is fun,” Evelyn says, not insincerely. “A hard-nosed truth teller. Most people just tell me what I want to hear, but you. You have tits.”

  “It’s an ugly world, Mrs. Brasher. Down off these hills. And I refuse to flourish at the expense of others.”

  “Oh, honey. We all flourish at the expense of others. And wearing ugly shoes and cheap jewelry does not a thing about it.”

  Cristina freezes for a moment, genuinely surprised at the slap. And then she does something that cements her place in Daniel’s heart. She laughs. And not just a titter or a dismissive snicker—a genuine, lovely, full-throated laugh.

  Evelyn watches her anthropologically; she’s supposed to be the only one who enjoys these exchanges. She waits for the spell to pass, then says, “Dessert?”
/>
  “Why not?” Cris says.

  Tea service is brought.

  Evelyn nibbles a chocolate-dipped vanilla madeleine. “I understand you’re South American?”

  “Worse, I’m afraid,” Cris says. “Mexican.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “She’s being ridiculous?” Daniel says. “You’ve yet to ask a question that’s not poison-tipped.”

  “Regarding her ethnic background? Come on. Do you think I’d give a damn if you pranced around town with Carlos Slim’s daughter? I’m not racist. I’m classist. And for good reason. How are you, with your life, supposed to—”

  “Can’t we have this vile argument in private?”

  “I don’t see why,” Evelyn says. “It pertains to all three of us.”

  “I don’t either,” Cris says. “Why not get it all out on the table?”

  “Yes. Let’s.” Her lipsticked mouth firming, Evelyn rotates her focus back to Cristina. “You were married, were you? Before?”

  Mother’s people, always checking up.

  “Mom,” Daniel says. “Even by your own feral standards—”

  “For ten months,” Cris replies.

  “So it didn’t count?” Evelyn says.

  “Not really.”

  “What’s the story of this nonmarriage?” Evelyn presses.

  Cris chews her lip, considers where to start. “I had a crappy childhood, the kind that people write crappy memoirs about. Neglectful parents, leering uncles, the whole nine. I married out at seventeen with parental consent. He drank. I got pregnant. He got laid off, came home late, belligerent and smelling of rum, and the next morning I wasn’t pregnant anymore.”

  Daniel cannot remember feeling so peripheral in his life. He has been stricken dumb for swaths of the conversation, and not just by an eavesdropper’s fascination but by sheer and growing-by-the-second regard for the woman across from him. He is lost in the exchange as if engrossed in a movie. No girlfriend has ever locked horns with Evelyn so proficiently, and it strikes him now that this dinner is a trial to which he has unconsciously subjected Cristina.

  “I suppose a smart choice,” Evelyn says, “would have been not to marry someone like that at all.”

  “You’re absolutely right. But you know what I did instead? I left him and vowed never to let anyone, no matter who they are, no matter where they live, make me feel worthless again.”

  Evelyn does something Daniel has never seen her do, not in two dozen board meetings and a hundred socialite brunches. She actually averts her eyes.

  Cristina stands and sets her still-folded napkin on her plate. “Thank you for dinner.”

  Daniel rises, follows dumbly in her wake. Exiting the house, Cristina says out of the side of her mouth, “How did you come from that?”

  Awestruck, he struggles to keep pace down the marble steps of the front porch. “I…”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  That wide smile springs up, overtaking her face. She reaches for his arm but then pinches it, so hard he jerks back.

  “What was that for?”

  Already she is two steps ahead again. “So you never forget.”

  * * *

  He paused now before those same marble front steps and looked past the drop at the Pacific. The view was the only thing he missed here, the way the house seemed suspended above the earth rather than attached to it. To the east the Golden Gate Bridge guarded the Bay, the celebrated towers wrapped in fog. The orange-vermilion hue—officially designated “International Orange”—was in fact accidental, the color of a primer coat that just happened to catch the architect’s fancy. It matched the autumn foliage of the bookending headlands while announcing the bridge sufficiently for ships, standing out and blending in simultaneously, unique and paradoxical—San Francisco embodied.

  This was, if nothing, a city of contradictions. Synonymous with freedom, yet home to the world’s best-known prison. The heart of the pacifist movement and the brains of the war machine. The blinding edge of innovation, navigated by cable car. The most East Coast city on the West Coast.

  As he approached the house, he considered his and Cris’s life together, how they’d always been something of a paradox themselves, how they managed to bring contradictions into harmony, completing the circle.

  A middle-aged painter wearing a backward A’s cap paused from his work on the front door to return Daniel’s nod and let him pass. A trace of burning birch laced the air inside. Striding through the well-appointed halls, he wondered if he really had to be here. Maybe Dooley was right and the news of his appearance at the crime scene hadn’t leaked. Maybe he’d overestimated Evelyn’s reach into the city.

  He found her in the library against a backdrop of leather-bound books, inhabiting a wing chair like a Bond villain, aside from the seemingly anachronistic iPad in her lap. To her side the hearth crackled behind a triple-panel screen, and above hung that solemn rendering of his father, who surveyed the scene with an air of strained dignity.

  On the south wall, a larger rendering of her father.

  Her eyes lifted, one hand rising to fluff the steel-gray hair away from her neck. “Daniel,” she said sternly. “What’s this about your walking into a murder?”

  So much for overestimating her reach.

  “I got a letter accidentally—”

  “I already spoke to the president of the police commission. I know more about it than you do.” She returned her focus to the iPad, tapping and sliding. “I’m going to have a private protection detail assigned to your house.”

  This was why he came. Evelyn didn’t just react to news. She implemented.

  “We’re fine. No need to overreact.”

  “You walked in on Jack the Ripper, he took your picture, and I’m overreacting?”

  “The guy’s clearly targeting people who he thinks have done something—”

  “Like burst in on him in the middle of an evisceration?”

  “If we feel threatened,” Daniel said, “we’ll take care of it ourselves.”

  “So you’re being obstinate and self-denying. Shocking.” A series of cartoonish sneers and twangs emanated from her iPad.

  “Mom, are you playing Angry Birds?”

  “I can’t help it. It’s so … satisfying.” A reluctant smile. “How are you these days? Still rubbing elbows with criminals for a living?”

  “For now. I’m making a transition into private practice.”

  “Thank God. At least that has a modicum of respectability.”

  Her semi-endorsement of the change grated more than he would have thought. No matter how prepared he was, she always managed to find the chink in the armor. Which is why they were in touch only occasionally, a phone call one month, a brunch the next. While the time between served to layer more sand over the land mines, he still had to watch where he stepped.

  He moved to switch subjects. “Are you still seeing that composer?” A Portuguese man twenty years her junior with a full head of hair and an impressive collection of formal wear.

  “No. He wanted to have a baby. With me.”

  “You sure something wasn’t lost in translation?”

  “Well, not with me. His sperm would be carried by someone else, and then we’d … I don’t know, raise it. Can you imagine? At my age? I kept picturing a pale, thin-necked boy standing in the corner of the room coughing. No. I sent Leandro packing back to Braga.”

  A muffled ringing arose, and she fished around the blanket in her lap and came up with a cordless phone. Scowling, she consigned the caller to voice mail. “We’re getting heavy into leveraged-currency bets these days,” she told Daniel. “Going long on the yuan, since the Chinese are going to own our country in twenty years. Vimal calls every hour like a nervous schoolgirl. He doesn’t have the stones for it like you did.”

  “A compliment?”

  “Backhanded. I am capable of those. Especially when I haven’t seen you in seven and a half week
s. Not that I’m keeping count. Of course, who knows if you’d have what it takes to make the tough financial calls now. All that counseling may have softened you up.”

  She raised her thin eyebrows to make clear it was a challenge.

  The painter entered and tugged off his baseball hat, a display of servility the likes of which Evelyn inspired. “I’m finished with the job, Mrs. Brasher.”

  “A day late. I’ll get you your four hundred dollars.”

  “The job was for five hundred.”

  “You took longer.”

  “Shouldn’t that mean I get paid more?” He covered with a weak smile.

  “As is, you overcharged given my zip code, but I let that slide. We agreed upon a completion date. It wasn’t met. My dinner guests last night entered through a half-painted door.”

  “It required multiple coats for proper—”

  “James.” Evelyn barely raised her voice, and yet there James appeared in the far doorway. “Please bring me five hundred dollars.”

  The painter smiled gratefully, and James produced a zippered leather pouch from which he counted five crisp bills into Evelyn’s hand. Throwing off the blanket, she rose, crumpling the top bill. She threw it over the fireplace screen into the fire, then crossed and handed the dumbfounded painter the remaining four.

  The man nodded once slowly in comprehension, then withdrew.

  Evelyn moved her gaze pointedly to Daniel to let him know that the challenge still stood.

  “You’re really gonna short him like that?” Daniel said. “Just to make a point to me?”

  “I’m glad,” she said, “we agree that the point has been made.”

  “Lovely visit, Mom.” He started for the door. “See you in another seven and a half weeks.”

  Outside, he caught the painter climbing into a beat-to-shit pickup. Pulling five twenties from his wallet, he offered them through the open driver’s-side window. The man looked from them to Daniel and said, “It’s not your front door.”

  “She’s my mom.”

  “Which means?”

  “No one should have to endure her but me.”

  The man turned over the engine, set his paint-crusted hands on the wheel. “I got my own mom to endure, pal.”