by Gil Reavill
“Thank you,” Remington said to her lawyer. Since Rick Stills was also her fiancé, he could violate every standard of the legal profession and take his client in his arms.
“I didn’t do anything.” He kissed Remington lightly on the cheek and nuzzled her hair. “You were in there alone.”
They stood together in the hall of the Foltz Criminal Justice Center. Both were well aware that there would be a hungry cluster of media waiting outside. This was their last calm moment before the craziness descended.
“I’ve arranged with the Sheriff’s Department for an escort,” Stills told her.
“I’ve got the truck.”
“Layla, baby, you are not going through this all by yourself.”
She smiled, enjoying the warmth of his concern for her. “I’m parked on the lower level, and there are three ramps out. Remember what Nixon said during Watergate? ‘Let’s head for the Oval Office, because they can’t corner us there!’ ”
“Very funny, but I forbid—”
The word died in his mouth. Forbidding was officially forbidden in their relationship.
“Rick, I’ll be fine. I’m just glad it’s over.”
“It’s not over, Layla.” Stills’s face betrayed his worry. “Don’t go home. Gene is expecting you at his place. There’ll be media. For pity’s sake, just lie low for a little while.”
“Does that mean the wedding is off?”
Remington managed to get out of the Foltz Center unscathed. There were indeed cameras posted at the exit ramp she chose, but no photogs got run over, and she doubted that any of the shots—a woman in sunglasses behind the tinted windows of an SUV—would be usable.
Her cellphone buzzed so regularly that she switched it into “Do Not Disturb” mode. She knew where she ought to be headed. To her place in Topanga, to pick up some clothes for a stay at her father’s condo in Glendale. Yes, yes, lie low and avoid the hyenas of the press. The grand jury’s decision would lead every local TV news report that evening. The lack of an indictment had already spread on social media. Remington could imagine the shrieks of outrage.
Topanga, then Glendale.
Instead, she headed north on the Hollywood Freeway to Granada Hills. Terrible idea, a voice inside her head scolded. Wrong move. No good will come of this. But she didn’t have any real choice. The lies and failings and emotional upsets of events that had transpired ten years before were working their twisted power on her.
That was now. This was then. She wondered if it was possible to be nostalgic about a tragedy.
Wildermanse, when she got there, was deserted. The police and military that had occupied the place during the riots had left behind scattered litter, garbage bags collapsed in on themselves like deflated balloons, trash cans still unemptied and strewing their contents to the winds.
The Sheriff’s Department had recently seen fit to issue Remington a brand-new police-spec Ford Explorer SUV, a mark of her prestige on the force. She was well known in the LASD for working alone, so the truck did not have to be shared with a partner—a “loosie,” “singleton” or “U-boat,” in police slang. She left the vehicle at the driveway roadblock, next to the bank of withered bougainvillea where, days ago now, the dormitory bus had parked for her post-riot sleep.
The abandoned mansion was slated for demolition, she heard. A county waste-transfer station would be put in its place, unless the Granada Hills Homeowners Association could muster the political muscle to prevent it from happening. Brockton Loushane had engineered the deal.
There were books, several of them, written about the doomed Loushanes. A journalist from the Los Angeles Times had written one of the best ones, laying out the complex nuances of the tale. “The West Coast Kennedys” was the tag attached to the family, which didn’t quite say it, as far as Remington was concerned. But the effort to parse the clan’s misfortunes continued. Assorted filmmakers were sniffing around the case.
A decade ago, six days after the epic firefight at Wildermanse and in the midst of a quick tumble of revelations about his secret shadow family in Mexico, Victor Loushane shot himself dead inside a closet in the master suite of the home. A billionaire suicide. For the gaping media hordes, this was the cherry atop the sundae.
Victor had gone under the wire to join the rest of the family members. For that was the real border, the one between life and death, the only one that mattered, marked by el alambre definitivo, the final wire. A line that can be crossed in only one direction.
Remington thought of the dead. They seemed numberless, but if she counted only the core and not the collateral the sum was chilling. Thirteen. The Mexican shadow family, the Zaldivar-Guerreros, one of whom she knew well, others of whom she herself had propelled under the wire of death at the point of a gun. The Loushanes, her L.A. friends from childhood. The two groups were half kin and at one another’s throats, clashing in ignorance and with a feverish, violent urgency. There was no war like a war between brothers.
Approaching the forlorn, decayed mansion on foot, Remington plunged into the past as surely as via a time machine. Shattered glass and leaf debris crackled underfoot. Absent was the sound of the cascade, now demolished and removed from the L.A. water system, its aerating function accomplished by more advanced technical methods.
Why had she come? Because of what she had seen through sleep-deprived eyes, that morning after the riot when she stumbled out of the dorm bus.
A fragile, pale moon of a face had shown itself for an instant in an upstairs window of the mansion. Appearing and disappearing like a ghost. Or a hallucination sprung from Remington’s exhaustion. The memory of it had haunted her ever since.
She walked around to the back of the house. The property’s evil juju had discouraged squatters and souvenir hunters. Brockton had hired guards to patrol the grounds, but they weren’t in evidence that afternoon. The wall of glass doors, smashed through by the zombi army of Fausto Zaldivar, had long been boarded over with plywood sheeting. Remington pried back one of the eight-by-four panels and slipped inside.
A mansion of dust. Some of the same leaf litter marring the front drive had made it into the interior. The big living room–dining room arrangement that ran the length of the back of the place was gloomy in the fading light. Certain of where she was going, she headed into the central hallway and climbed the stairs to the west wing’s second floor.
Remington found Ellis where she thought she might, in the old guest room where they had first kissed. She didn’t think it was sentiment on his part, only that the space allowed a view across the parched, ruined gardens. He sat in an armchair of upholstered leather next to the window, turning his head casually at her approach. As if he had been expecting her. As if ten years hadn’t gone by since they had last seen each other.
Back then, she had followed the story of Ellis Loushane from afar. As the Zuma Beach residence exploded in flames, a burning boy dashed screaming from it, staggering across the sand to extinguish himself in the sea. Witnesses dragged him out of the surf more dead than alive. Behind them, the Loushane beach house went up like a torch.
Third-degree burns covered Ellis’s body. On his left hand the damage was technically fourth-degree, extending into tendons and bones. EMT responders transported him to the burn unit at USC Regional. After pulling him back from death’s door, specialists stabilized the patient and then switched him to a burn center in West Hills.
At the time, Remington reached out to Ellis repeatedly.
“You can’t see him,” Brockton told her, by telephone, when she appeared at the burn center asking to visit. “In fact, you’re such an angel of death I’ve instructed our Graystone operatives, specifically, that if you attempt to get through to him they are to use any means necessary to prevent it. We’ve got an impenetrable firewall of security around Ellis.”
“Firewall,” Remington had said. “Probably not the best choice of words, Brock.”
She had to be content with the dribs and drabs meted out by the media, most of i
t rumor, much of it wildly inaccurate. What seemed verifiable was that the ruined boy had transferred to a burn center in Switzerland and then, years later, turned up as a monk at a Buddhist retreat in Cambodia. People eventually stopped paying attention. Ellis faded from public sight, but never from Remington’s memory.
“Hello, Layla,” he said now, putting his daddy’s drawl on the words. His voice was different, softer, more of a whisper. “I’ve been wondering when you might show up.”
She crossed to him and tried to kiss his cheek. He shrank away from her, so she stepped back, sitting down at the foot of the unmade bed.
“Our old room,” she said, glancing around. More dust and Miss Havisham cobwebs. “So what have you been up to? Anything?”
They both laughed, Ellis’s coming out as a rasp.
Incredible how he looked. Everything extraneous had been burned away—hair, much of his ear flaps, several of the fingers on his left hand. The scarring on his near-lipless face had a glossy sheen. He resembled what Hollywood imagined an alien might look like.
“You’re a police detective now?” he asked. “But not with the LAPD, right?”
In the aftermath of the Loushane affair, Remington’s prospects with the Los Angeles Police Department had evaporated. Amid all the bodies littering the battlefield, it was difficult for her to get too despondent over a mere career setback. But she felt pretty lousy all the same. It had been a dream, and then it died.
A month later a letter had come, inviting her to apply for a position with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Though he denied it, Remington got the idea that her father had something to do with the offer. LAPD or LASD? There was only one letter’s difference, she had assured herself.
“I’m a detective with the county sheriff’s Homicide Bureau,” she told Ellis. “And, come to think of it, a murder squad cop might be the direct spiritual opposite of a Buddhist monk.”
Ellis smiled, a painful sight to see. “Well, I guess they’re both concerned with the endless wheel of life and death. What did Caroline call my dabbling in Eastern religion? Not Buddhism but dude-hism?”
Again, they laughed together.
Making eye contact, Remington was relieved that she was able see her old friend and lover there, wrapped in a much different shell, of course, but alive and present nonetheless. She thought of the twin family portraits, the ones that had first put her onto the fact of Victor’s status as a bígamo, keeping secret his abandoned brood south of the border. The eyes never lie—or, at least, with Ellis they didn’t.
“I know I’m impossibly ugly now. The Buddha says…”
He didn’t say what the Buddha said.
“There are ugly people in the world, for sure,” Remington responded carefully. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with appearance, and you are not one of them.”
She crossed and knelt before him. He gazed down at her.
“Layla…We can’t just begin anew. As if nothing happened.”
“Maybe we don’t want to begin anew. Maybe we want to begin a-old.”
“Corny.” Ellis spread his lips again in a ghastly smile. His post-trauma facial expressions would take some getting used to.
“I know it might be painful—” Remington began, before realizing that to speak to Ellis about pain was wildly inappropriate. A rape-ravaged, skin-charred individual could tell anyone in the world all about suffering.
She began again. “Do you know about Brockton?”
“Everyone knows about Brockton.”
The oldest Loushane sibling had relocated to London and was recognized as one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, and one of the most eccentric, too—which in the U.K. was saying a lot. Unmarried, his mania for secrecy bordering on outright paranoia, Brock was the poster boy for the truism that money can’t bring happiness. He had ruthlessly barred his father’s second wife, Jenna, from any access to the family fortune.
“I think he’s where he always wanted to be,” Ellis said. “All alone sitting on a mountain of gold.”
“I mean—” Remington was still having trouble forming her thoughts into words. “I’m asking you if you know what he did?”
“Hiding in the safe room while Dad begged entry?”
Remington shook her head. Although cowardice was high on the list of Brockton Loushane’s sins, it wasn’t at the very tip-top.
“I mean what he did to your brothers and sisters—your half brothers and sisters.”
The truth had come slowly to Remington over the years. It had so far eluded the army of investigative journalists and nonfiction chroniclers of the Loushane case. Only she understood the truth. She had pieced the timeline together bit by rancid bit.
As far as she could tell, Brock had started the whole business. The wave of killings began not with Tino and Fausto but with Brock. He had somehow discovered the existence of his father’s other family and set about destroying them. He had the will and the resources to be able to do so. Brock hadn’t physically murdered anyone, but he had caused the violent deaths of at least two members of the Zaldivar family—the youngest boy, Guerreros, and the youngest girl, Laura.
So when Tino, Fausto and Hermana embarked upon their own murderous rampage, they saw it as self-defense as well as payback. They took the measure of their half brother across the border, and decided that Brock wouldn’t quit. It was him or them. They constructed their elaborate killing campaign as a sort of tit-for-tat cross-border communiqué. As Laura Zaldivar died, so would Cindy Loushane be killed. Simon would receive the exact same death as his half brother Guerreros. And on and on.
In attacking the Zaldivar brood, had Brock acted under Victor’s orders? Was the son motivated by an urge to protect his father from a bígamo scandal? Or perhaps—and this might have been the root truth—was he simply shielding the family fortune from the claims of interlopers who shared half of his DNA?
“You know,” Ellis said. “He’s still out there.”
Remington understood that he was referring not to Brock but to Tino Zaldivar. “Did you ever hear of a devil’s duel?” she asked. “That’s when both duelists face off and wind up killing each other. I’ve often thought of that in connection with Brock and Tino.”
“It could happen,” Ellis said. “But from what I’ve seen of my brother’s security Val would have a hard time getting through.”
Still calling him Val, Remington noticed, and still employing a tone of respect, sadness, almost affection. “Well, the guy has pulled off the impossible a few times before.”
Ellis brooded silently. “There’s a story of a Buddhist couple, man and wife,” he said after a pause. “They’re on a journey with their only child. They come to a flooded river and the child falls in. He’s being swept away by the water. And you know what? Neither of the parents lifts a hand to help. They stand motionless and watch.”
“And…?”
“That’s it.”
“A little harsh, don’t you think?”
“Gautama Buddha says desire is the root cause of all evil.”
And the root cause of all life, thought Remington.
From Ellis’s fable she took the idea that he did not intend to confront his surviving brothers. Perhaps it was better that way. History is full of beans, which is why it repeats. Better to leave it alone.
What the Buddhists might label it was unclear, but Remington had experienced her own rush of insight ten years previously along U.S. Highway 98. A stranger had dumped a cooler full of ice water over her heat-stricken body, and the shock had jolted her into a visionary realm. She saw life and death as the flip sides of a coin.
Remington had a heart brimming with love for Ellis. It didn’t matter what he looked like, because to her he was still Ellis. She couldn’t know what he felt toward her, or whether that Buddhist desire-as-evil business extended to boy-and-girl stuff. She didn’t mention that she was engaged to be married.
Remington also neglected to inform Ellis that her career in law enforcement
was probably over. Her involvement in a high-profile officer-involved shooting would see to that. The LASD would allow her to bow out gracefully, but she’d have to turn in her badge, she felt sure. Which didn’t mean that she was out of options. Chuck Tester had retired from the LAPD and was running an investigation service. He had made repeated overtures to Remington.
“In the private-eye dodge,” Tester had informed her, “a bad reputation is a good thing.”
Wearing a government uniform or slipping on the gumshoes? Nursing Ellis Loushane for the rest of her life or going through with her marriage to Rick Stills?
It was good for a girl to have choices.
13 Under the Wire…
Southern group
Fausto Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 33.
Sofia Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 20.
Orinda (Oiny) Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 18.
Victoria (Tralla) Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 16.
Hermana Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 26.
Laura Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 19.
Guerreros Zaldivar Guerrero, at death age 18.
Baby Zaldivar (unnamed), dead at birth.
Northern group
Victor Brockton Loushane, at death age 86.
Evelyn DeYoung Loushane, at death age 48.
Caroline DeYoung Loushane, at death age 22.
Simon DeYoung Loushane, at death age 17.
Cynthia DeYoung Loushane, at death age 19.
And three who survived
Valentin (Tino) Zaldivar Guerrero.
Brockton DeYoung Loushane.
Ellison DeYoung Loushane.