by Maria Hummel
To my surprise, he grabs my hand and kisses it.
“Please be safe,” he says, and walks away.
When I get home, I toss Kevin’s papers in my work bag with the flash drive, call my parents, and tell them about Greg’s arrest. Then I call my two brothers, John and Mark, and have the conversation all over again. As I repeat the same horrifying facts, my disbelief and worry pile up with their disbelief and worry, and the news begins to fall more heavily through me. By the end of Mark’s call, it’s a hard rain, soaking everything.
Then Yegina beeps in.
“Want to go on a double date with me and Hiro to a Jon Byron show at Bootleg? It’s Tuesday night.” There’s something cagey in her voice.
“Who’s the fourth person?”
“Well, he’s not really a prospect for you. He’s more of a fan of Jon Byron.” She sighs. “Actually I just invited us both along on a man-date—”
“With who?”
“—in which we now both have to pretend we both like Jon Byron even though I think he’s meh and you’re clueless. With Brent.”
“I know who Jon Byron is. He does all the soundtracks for the movies I fall asleep to,” I say. “What am I going to talk about with a surly married man?”
“It’s usually too loud to talk, remember?”
The last time we went to Bootleg, the loudspeakers were turned up so high that they caused a minor earthquake in Altadena, and the pasta dinner looked like it had been poured straight from a can, spat on, and gently stirred. I remember suggesting that we stuff it in our ears instead of eating it.
That night, Yegina and Chad were still together, and Greg was still with me, and Kim Lord was a famous stranger who blessed us now and then with her sharp conversation. I held Greg’s hand all the way to the car afterward, and it felt ordinary, the night in the bar, our laughter and happiness, but now it seems unbearably precious.
“My brother got his last med school rejection yesterday,” says Yegina. “I found out an hour ago. My mom is in pieces.”
“Oh no. I’m so sorry.” Much as Yegina makes light of her parents’ pressure on their children to succeed, her half-white mother grew up hungry and outcast in Vietnam, then ignored by her American father’s relatives. She wants to show them all. “What’s Don going to do?”
“Maybe a nursing degree,” Yegina says skeptically. “Maybe osteopathy. But he’s stopped leaving the house. Just sits at his computer in his room.”
“Count me in for any Don support you need,” I say. “And for Bootleg. But can I ask something? Do you think we should look into what happened to Kim ourselves? I mean, we know the Rocque. We might find something the police missed.”
“Absolutely not,” she says. “We’re not qualified, and besides, if she has been murdered, and if Greg is the killer, your judgment is too clouded to see it—”
“If Greg is the killer!”
“And if the killer is someone else, he’s still out there and you’re putting yourself in danger by snooping around. So no. Don’t get involved.”
“You’d rather let an innocent man get framed?”
She makes a frustrated noise.
“You don’t care what the truth is?” I ask.
“Maggie, you don’t come from a haunted people.” Yegina’s voice deepens. “I do. You can’t just step into this pit and step out again.”
She’s right. I’m already in it. I’ve been in it since Nikki Bolio was murdered, and I thought I’d left for a while, but Still Lives brought it all back: the fear that any path is a bad one, that any surface beneath my feet can break and plunge me into a bottomless dark.
Yegina is still talking. Her tone has smoothed to a warm hum. It says, I know you’re hurt and confused, but time will heal you.
“We’re just laypeople. Rubes,” she finishes.
“Fine. I have to go,” I say.
She doesn’t protest, and we hang up.
Maybe I am a rube. Maybe I always will be. I regard my living room and its possessions: Bare walls except for one print of fishing boats that I brought home from the Mekong Delta. The faded gold couch, the cheap glass coffee table, bookshelves in maple veneer. The only items of value are my books. Their titles gently pull my eye: In Cold Blood. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Kaputt. The Love of the Last Tycoon. Only the books are arranged, cherished. Without them, the room would have no personality but neglect. Without them, a visitor might guess the occupant had just moved in, or was moving soon, or didn’t believe in having taste. Or maybe that she didn’t even notice what was missing.
Three days before the press preview of Executed, the Jason Rains exhibition about capital punishment, Lynne Feldman invited the staff to test it out. Twenty of us showed up, a little crowd, chatty and nervous. Although Lynne welcomed us, it was Brent Patrick, the exhibition designer, who told us what to do. As Brent stood in the darkened doorway to the show, the possessive pride in his face startled me. This show had Jason Rains’s name on it. But it was Brent’s vision, Brent’s staging that would alter us.
“Turn off your phones,” he said. “Don’t touch anything unless we direct you to.”
We filed into the dark theater and each took a number from a machine. Then we sat down on creaky wooden benches and stared through a one-way mirror into the room beyond, where Brent and Dee stood by the brown leather injection chair.
The red number 1 flashed above the doorway between the chambers, and Jayme, holding her number, went through the door in a pale-blue blazer and skirt. We watched in silence as Brent and Dee strapped her in. It took a long time, and Jayme’s ordinarily elegant form flattened and bunched in the chair; her hands groped at air as Brent tightened the buckles. Then we waited again as Dee pulled over the syringes on a small cart. They were filled with lethal chemicals, their caps sealed but the needles aimed straight at Jayme. It was like watching a dentist’s visit crossed with some kind of sick torture. Jayme wiggled in her restraints.
Brent pulled a lever and the chair tilted back. Jayme’s brown knees and chin aimed at the ceiling. Her legs were pressed together, but if she let them open we would see her underpants. Her ankles looked helpless, bare. Brent and Dee could do anything to her now and she wouldn’t be able to escape it. Then I saw Dee frown and touch Jayme’s shoulder. She must have moaned aloud.
I shifted on the bench. I would have to endure ten more of these slow humiliations before I would take the chair myself.
A television screen in the corner glowed with a message:
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS OUR SOCIETY’S RECOGNITION OF THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE.
—Orrin Hatch
Both rooms went completely black, except for the TV. Someone shrieked. We sat in the dark, reading Hatch’s shining words. We whispered and joked about how creeped out we were, and then, as the dark persisted, we fell into silent and individual reveries. I sensed the bareness of the room, the warmth of my own body, my sleeve barely brushing Yegina’s. I was glad not to be Jayme, but I felt like a prisoner anyway. I would have to become her soon.
When the lights came on, the injection chair was empty again. The red number 2 flashed above the door.
Executed. It was destined to be a blockbuster, and it bothered me that Jason Rains would get credit for Brent’s genius. Jason Rains had come to the Rocque with his sketch for the chair and the assistants to make it. He had come with adorably mussed red hair and known relationship woes with a hot British sculptor. But he hadn’t thought about the lag time between visitors trying out his chair, or about whether visitors would want to test it at all. He watched, dazed, at our exhibition-planning meeting as Brent took the sketch and the pen and began to fill in the viewing theater, describing the numbers that people would draw to wait their turn, the lighting. Harsh brightness and darkness would alternate throughout the experience, the way they did in criminal interrogations, to make people feel isolated and afraid.
“You can’t just kill people in your chair,” he said. “That part is pretend anyway. You need to ma
ke them part of the system that kills. That’s real.”
When the red 12 flashed above the door, I was almost grateful to enter the execution chamber. Being told where to sit and where to place my hands was a relief. The belts didn’t hurt. I waved at the darkened mirror. Dee rolled the syringes over, and then my chair lurched back. The tipping changed everything. My head sank like an anchor, dragging on my body. The white ceiling had a slick, sickly sheen. I knew people were watching beyond the mirror. Everyone is watching me, I thought. I felt their eyes. I heard their silence. They were already inured to pity. I strained against the belts. Then blackout.
A second TV flashed the names of the hundreds of people who have been executed in California since 1778.
“That was really eerie,” I said to Brent moments later as he helped me out of the chair. I wanted to compliment him, but my voice sounded false, chirpy. “It must have been something to see your stage sets.”
He inclined his brown head.
“We should do a show of your shows,” I added.
Brent finally met my gaze. Inside his eyes something glowed briefly, like an ember blown by breath. It burned into you, that look, and I could see why everyone worshiped and feared him. He seemed capable of reducing a person to ash. And now that his wife was worse, he acted like he was seeking a target—picking more fights with the curators, talking to his female staff in such an abrasive, flirtatious way it made one of them quit.
“Next person’s up,” he said, dismissing me.
Unsettled by the experience, I couldn’t go back to my office, so I walked down to Grand Central Market in the hot sun and bought a fountain cola with lots of ice. The cold sweetness tasted good. The bustling pupusa stall, with its white counter and round slabs of dough, almost comforted me. The ice-cream place made me pause wistfully, staring down at the pink, green, brown, and speckled mounds. I watched two women bend to bowls of caldo de camarones, their fingers delicately peeling shrimp shells, piling the translucence beside them. Neon signs led me farther. For the first time, I lingered at a jewelry stall, touching rings couched in velvet and name necklaces of cheap, diamond-studded gold dangling from a display. Isabella. Tracy. Samuel. I listened to Spanish radio and rapid spoken Vietnamese. Light spilled into the building from both ends, and the concrete floor wore stars of sawdust. My straw made squeaks on the cup’s Styrofoam bottom.
On the way back, I stopped at a water fountain, refilled the cup, and drank the slightly warm, slightly sugary sluice. I popped the lid and chewed the thin bits of ice until everything was gone. Then I returned to my desk. I did my job fine, but I was pursued all day by the dull sense that I had lost something valuable and could not find it.
After I hang up on Yegina, I go upstairs and try to nap but end up staring. I scrounge in my cupboards for a can of minestrone, heat it, set a neat table with a folded napkin and a full water glass. But I cannot eat. I flip open my phone and contemplate the keypad, but never dial.
Yegina’s right, I tell myself again and again. You can’t step into this stuff and step out again. But I just don’t believe Greg is guilty of murder.
It’s well past dark outside my bungalow when I unroll Kevin’s notes on my little dining table and pore over them, shaking my head.
I still haven’t seen “Disappearances” up close, but I know it resembles a real still life more than any of the others. It is packed with objects, and the objects are arranged, so why wouldn’t the objects hold a meaning? The real question is: What meaning, and how do you know? She doesn’t like what I’m seeing, Kevin told me. I don’t either. Reading his translations of the symbols in “Disappearances” makes my skin crawl. According to him, Kim Lord’s depictions of objects like a bottle, a notebook, and a bloodstained screwdriver each reference horrible crimes against women.
As I fold up the notes and raise my head, I can hear my own breath, feel its dampness. My body is cramped and prickly from sitting so long, but I have the feeling that if I rise from this chair, if I make any big movements, a dark, lurking presence outside will know I’m here alone and enter. I switch off the overhead light. Better. I switch off all the lights in the bungalow, until the only illumination is the orange glow of the rest of Los Angeles extending to the desert and the sea. The glow’s dull persistence is comforting. It will go on until dawn.
I dig in my purse for the flash drive, pull it free.
There’s no path for someone ordinary like me to find one missing woman in this whole city. To rescue her if she needs rescuing. To clear the name of an innocent man. It takes teams of police officers, laboratories, experts, courts. The impossibilities rise around me, steep and sheer. But I think of the hero of Fitzgerald’s last novel, Monroe Stahr, flying over the highest mountains and talking to his pilot about the old railroad men and how they had to lay a track through anyway. You can’t test the best way—except by doing it. So you just do it … You choose some way for no reason at all.
I stick the drive into the computer and open the files, scrolling through them fast. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. One hundred. Kim’s in every frame, bending, collapsed, grinning, stripped and bound.
My phone rings. Yegina. She knows. She always knows.
I keep scrolling, wincing at what I see but not surprised by it. These are all studies for the paintings in Still Lives.
Four rings. Yegina doesn’t leave a message. She calls again, hangs up again when I don’t pick up.
At the very end of the string of pictures are five photos I don’t recognize. They don’t connect with the exhibition at all.
Yegina calls a third time. The rings are like shrieks to me. I take my hand off the mouse and answer.
“You awake?” Yegina says. She tells me that she was phoning to apologize, to say she understands how difficult this is, her kindness like a warm blanket she throws over me.
I close my eyes, close my ears.
“I’m not mad.” I speak low to keep my voice steady through the lie that comes next. “And you’re right. It’s ridiculous to play detective.”
“Phew,” Yegina says. “It’s hard to just sit on things, but that’s what spin class is for. You in tomorrow?”
“I’m in,” I say, surprised at how calm I sound.
MONDAY
14
Of the 231 pictures on Kim Lord’s flash drive, 226 are studies for the Still Lives exhibition. This morning I scan through them a third time before I leave for work. Last night, in the dark, the whole experience felt like trespassing, my heart in my throat as I witnessed each thumbnail, but I am getting used to it now, and with that relief comes the sinking sense that Greg was right, there is nothing to find on here.
Blown up large, and viewed in L.A.’s cheerful morning light, the photos have none of the haunting quality of the exhibition. Instead, the whole slide show seems campy and overdone. Kim Lord donning her wigs, hanging from her arms, lying prone. Girl playing dress-up. Girl playing with mud. Girl playing with roses and blood. The studies for “Kitty Genovese” and “The Black Dahlia” look especially goofy. All that glistening splatter and gore. Finally, I come to Kim Lord sprawled on a table piled with objects—a study for “Disappearances”—her head in some kind of wooden crate. It looks like she tripped and fell into someone’s garage sale.
After these are the last five photographs, the ones that don’t fit. Four pictures show a random dog yawning and wagging for the camera. Whose dog? I don’t recognize it.
The final photo shines on my screen. Last night, I thought it was Kim, disguised in heavy makeup, but this morning I decide it is someone else. Another woman who resembles Kim, only slumped, haggard, and glum-looking. A potential suspect? She doesn’t look capable of standing up, much less hurting anyone.
I force myself through all the Still Lives studies one last time, finding nothing but the inexplicable gap between crude sketches and a finished masterpiece.
Still, anything could be a piece to this story. Today I’m going to find another piece: where Bas went on Monday. I leave
early to beat rush hour, but by the time I make it to the Rocque, a throng of journalists is standing outside, white TV trucks behind them. Their frank, curious gazes follow me like guards at a checkpoint. I can feel their hunger for a new angle, something no one else knows. I duck my chin and hurry past, clutching my bag containing the flash drive and Kevin’s notes.
“Miss … miss …,” one of the reporters calls to me. “Do you work here? Any comment on the Greg Shaw Ferguson arrest?” All the newspeople call him Greg Shaw Ferguson, in that three-beat crescendo that echoes other famous killers.
I shake my head.
“When was the last time you saw Kim Lord?”
I feel a hand on my shoulder, and Jayme’s voice rings out.
“The director is preparing a press conference for ten o’clock,” she says. “Until then, please let our employees get to work.” She muscles in beside me. “Don’t even glance their way,” she mutters.
“Hey, Jayme,” yells another one. “I hear that Kim Lord had a stalker following her to and from the museum. Any comment?”
There’s a sudden silence, in which I can feel the Santa Anas breathing warm desert air on us all. Clearly, this is new and confusing information to everyone. Jayme goes rigid and stops. I keep walking.
“Press conference at ten,” she repeats behind me. Across the glass front of the Rocque I see two pale, bare legs flashing and realize they’re my own. Those are my own hunched shoulders, my fierce, hunted expression.
“You look like you slept about five seconds last night,” Jayme says as we ride the elevator to our floor. She’s ironed her usually springy hair smooth again today, the way she wore it to the Gala. It looks a bit like a helmet. “You talk to Shaw?”
“His attorney. I bet she’s the one who planted the stalker idea with the media,” I say.
Jayme eyes me questioningly.
“If it casts enough doubt on Shaw’s case, then the police may postpone the arraignment until they have more evidence,” I tell her. “She’s trying to get him out.”