by Maria Hummel
Then, wearing my dark, limp crown, I drive around Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Mid-Wilshire, until I find a parking garage I have never seen before. The city night dissolves behind me as I take the ticket and ease the car through the rising gate. I’m not tired, but I need to be safe. Anonymous. Anyone. Dark hair frames my face. I find the ramp, find a random spot on a random floor, cut the lights, lean my seat back, and stare up at my ceiling for a long time, listening to others arrive and depart. Listening to their door slams, their engines, and the silence. And the silence.
WEDNESDAY
23
Early today!” Fritz beams. It’s 6:00 a.m., but he’s crisp and exuberant in his navy security suit, his hair still showing the furrows of a comb. His tinted lenses are clear for once, and I can see him studying me.
“Yeah,” I say sheepishly, not breaking stride. “I’m probably the first one here.” I clutch my purse, hoping he won’t notice I’m wearing the same clothes as yesterday, that I look like I spent much of the night cramped up in my locked car, sleepless, afraid to get out.
“Nope,” says Fritz, and counts off on his fingers. “Fourth.”
I pause, hoping one of them is not Jayme. I want to make a call first, and I want to take my Rocque work with me, to get it done while I’m away.
“Lynne Feldman was first.” For a security guard, Fritz is a bit of a gossip. He and his wife are empty nesters now, and he gets lonely. “Then Juanita Filippa. Then Brent Patrick. But Brent is gone again already. Vacation, he says.” He shakes his head. “Took a heap of stuff with him. Left his puppy in there for Dee.” He gestures to the carpentry room. “Wonder about his wife.”
I wonder, too. I wonder what Brent was drawing in his office yesterday, if his inevitable resignation is coming. I wonder what happened at Bootleg last night. It sure didn’t look like Yegina was preparing to go on a date with Hiro or to meet up with her brother. Every time I think of the expression on her face when she spotted me outside her door, my stomach turns. So I’m not. Thinking, I mean. I’m just grabbing my work and calling Hendricks and telling him I’m leaving the city, but could he please case my apartment for me.
“You need some gigantic coffee,” Fritz says, and thumps my shoulder.
I thank him and scurry away, past the various crates arriving and departing. I wonder if Evie’s Rothkos are in the air somewhere over America now.
I stop by the mailroom, grab the stack of paper in my box, and rush for the door. Kevin’s name jumps out from a typed manuscript with a yellow sticky on top: Sorry, Maggie! Snaked this from your box by accident.—Dee. Since her last name is Rager she gets her mail right above me. Dee, whose behavior keeps sticking out like a thorn on a branch. Home “sick” last Wednesday and Thursday. And now this. What is she up to? I can’t puzzle it out.
Instead, I start to read Kevin’s article, and almost finish by the time I reach my office. It covers the night of the Gala, and the party’s slow realization of Kim Lord’s absence. The writing is precise and stark, the atmosphere noirish. Shadows flicker, men scowl, and women glitter. If someone pulled out a pearl-handled pistol, I would not be surprised. Kevin introduces me as his PR rep, “a languid, saucy blonde” named Richter. Good ole Richter seems to perceive the dark undercurrent of the evening before everyone else. “Richter won’t even accompany me into the final gallery. She hovers on the threshold, a fairgoer reluctant to enter a haunted house. When I look back, she is shading her eyes.”
I throw open my office door and skim through the rest of the story before tossing it down. As the Gala night continues, I fade out and Kim Lord and her career take over, and then Kevin is back on the roof with the last few crew members. They linger like “desperadoes after a showdown, their hands in their pockets, faces studiously cool.” Most admired Kim Lord. A few thought she was yesterday’s news. They’d laughed at her Hollywood getups, but now they feel guilty about it, in a deadpan sort of way.
Say you’re Kim Lord. Where are you now? Kevin asks them each in turn.
Baja.
Oh, come on, let her get to Oaxaca at least.
Marfa.
Antarctica.
Torrance.
Up in that window there (pointing toward a skyscraper), looking down on us.
Stuck in traffic.
Eloping to escape her suck-up of a boyfriend.
She’s at LACMA. She got confused.
And then, as if they rehearsed it, the crew falls silent as the first limos start pulling up to bring the guests home. Satin-clad and coiffed attendees disappear into dim interiors. One by one, the party is vanishing, a party ruined by the absence of its guest of honor, but from up here, “close to the starless orange ceiling of Los Angeles,” it still seems like it was a grand celebration.
Serves them right, says one of the crew finally. They all wanted a piece of her.
I’m going to go climb into my crappy Corolla now. Anyone want a ride home?
I’m too depressed to go home. Cole’s?
The last limo pulls away. Valets start plucking up the orange cones. They pull their tips from their pockets, counting the bills.
The crew members start to mumble again.
Those guys probably made more money tonight than I made all week.
Yeah, but we made art history. Didn’t we?
Before I gather my books and folders, I get online to let Kevin know I’ve read his article when I see the headline: “Ferguson Released.” It jolts me so hard that I bite the inside of my cheek, making it throb and bleed.
The medical examiner has divulged little, except that Kim Lord died at some point on Friday morning, the morning after the Gala. That, with some other unnamed evidence, exonerates Greg. Greg has an alibi for Friday morning: he was meeting clients. Greg is in several media photos with his face averted; it looks misshapen to me, as if someone broke his jawbone and stapled it back together.
“Clearly there’s been a miscarriage of justice here, but who’s responsible? We don’t know yet,” says Cherie Rhys, also pictured, her brown hair pulled back, sleek and composed. “But we hope the LAPD finds out.”
Death on Friday. It’s hard to believe. Friday means whoever killed Kim knew we all were looking for her, and murdered her anyway, in cold blood. At midday on Friday, I was with Kevin staring at the Angelus Temple, plotting Kim Lord’s implausible self-abduction, wondering if it was just a ploy for more publicity. On Friday afternoon, I was at Craft Club with Yegina, gossiping and dreading Kaye’s horseback party.
Yegina’s message from yesterday, the one I never clicked: Don tried (ineptly thank god) to hang himself. I am on the way home right now. Will update you when I can.
I scan the rest of my inbox, the words not sinking in.
Your phone’s not picking up. Tour is changed to tomorrow, Weds!; meet downstairs at 11am, writes Dee.
Wow! writes Evie. What did you find? Tried calling you back but just got VM. Do you want to come over after work?
My head lowers itself to my desk, my eyelids prickling as if someone scattered sand under them. In my mind’s eye, I see Yegina’s brother, Don, mounting a bicycle for the first time, home on break from college. He was nineteen. He wanted to learn before he turned twenty. So Yegina and I took him to the broad bike path at Venice Beach. Don’s head looked huge in his helmet, and his legs so skinny in their dark jeans. Ignoring the passing Rollerbladers and moms with strollers, he wobbled and fell and rose again, dozens of times. When he had finally gone the length of a block, Yegina and I whooped and hugged each other. “I made it,” Don shouted back, triumphant, righting his crooked helmet.
I don’t want to cry right now. It feels ridiculous to cry. I need to leave. I hold my skull for a while and then pick up my office phone. I dial my parents’ number. It’s one of the few I know by heart anymore. The sequence of digits draws me back to my teenage years, standing at pay phones in parking lots, waiting for my mother to glide up in her blue station wagon, with its flurries of dog hair, the scent of her lavende
r soap. Before the phone rings, I hang up and dial another number.
Hendricks takes a while to answer. “Yes?”
Suddenly the words will not come. I’m holding the phone so hard my fingers hurt. A fan starts inside my computer, making a mechanical hum. I reach with my other hand and touch the cool dust on my windowsill, wiping it away. The street below is beginning to choke with morning traffic. I have to get out of here before Jayme arrives.
“Hello?”
My philodendron is drooping, the leaves dark and wilted. I rub the silk of one leaf; it rips.
“I just have to ask you a question,” I say. “You really grew up in the mountains?”
“I did.”
“You know those cold shadow places?” I say. “The canyons where the light never touches because the hills are too high?”
“Where are you?” Hendricks says.
“They’re so dim you start shivering the moment you enter them—you know those places?”
He doesn’t answer, but he isn’t hanging up either.
“Whoever killed her reminds me—I have reason to believe—” I swallow, trying to summon my inner Cherie, calm and lawyerly. “I have reason to believe there was an intruder in my apartment last night.” Without waiting for Hendricks’s response, I tell him about receiving the handwritten note to Greg, then coming home last night, hearing the footsteps, and exiting swiftly. I tell him about my missing phone. I use clinical, distant words: enter, object, situation, egress.
Hendricks is quiet on the other end. I wait for him to dismiss the whole thing, tell me I am crazy, I am raving about mountain canyons. I can almost picture him, sleepy-eyed, watching my unraveling.
“Linville Gorge,” he says. “I found a patch of snow there once in mid-July.” Then he clears his throat. “You should have told me about the note.”
I don’t answer.
“Did someone follow you? Where did you go? Where are you now?” And then he’s hammering question after question at me before I have a chance to answer.
I tell him I slept in my car and I’m safe in my office with the door locked.
“Steve Goetz called me right after you and I met yesterday,” says Hendricks. “He wanted to inform me about a young blond woman who came to his gallery under false pretenses.”
“Strange,” I say. “I wonder who that was.”
I hear a skeptical silence. “Is there anything else I should know?” Hendricks says.
I tell him about the flash drive Greg gave me. I explain that the photos are all studies for Still Lives and, as such, they are also artistic property. “The artist wanted them destroyed.”
“They should be examined first. I’ll get them to the right person on the squad,” he says, sounding more relieved than anything. “They’ve got a big team on this now.” He pauses. “And that’s it? No more hidden evidence?”
I say no. “Did they find out anything else? About how she died?”
“There were other complications.” There’s a noise like a car door slamming. “And I have no clue what they are yet, so don’t ask.” An engine rumbles to life.
He asks me if there’s a spare key to my apartment, and I explain about the one under the flowerpot. “If you find anything there, I mean, something that connects to Kim’s death—you have to believe it’s not mine.”
“Who else knew about your spare key?” he says.
I tell him Greg did. “But I think the intruder went through the bathroom window. It was open.”
Hendricks asks if this is the best number to reach me.
I realize it’s the only number I have. “For now,” I say, embarrassed.
I should tell him I’m planning to escape L.A. after rush hour. I have an old college friend in Tucson. I could drive there today, just as soon as I see Yegina first.
“Be good and careful,” I say instead, and immediately feel silly. “That’s what my grandmother always said when we went out the door.”
Hendricks hesitates for a moment and hangs up.
I’m about to call Yegina when I spot Juanita mounting the stairs, slowly, her hand on the railing as if she’s afraid to lose her balance. Already? It’s not even eight o’clock. I shove my chair back and sink beneath my desk. It has a front panel that I can hide behind, with a cube of space big enough for me if I sit with my knees curled into my chest. I climb in.
Please, be patient with me, I tell Yegina in my mind. I love you and I’m sorry. My heart hurts for Don, for the whole family. My body is tired.
I must drift off because when my phone rings, my heart pounds so hard I feel my pulse in my ears. I wait for a second, then dart up and grab the receiver, pulling it by the cord down into my hiding place. “That was fast.”
“You’re there.” Greg’s words are raspy, as if he hasn’t spoken aloud in a long time. He also sounds congested, like he’s holding the phone very close. But more than anything he sounds painfully glad to hear my voice.
For a moment, I see Greg years ago, shooting up both hands to wave at me, a victory salute, as my bus glided into the station of his small Thai city.
“Are you home?” I say, rubbing my sleep-glued eyes.
“I’m at the house. I mean, your house. I was freaking out. I rang the bell a hundred times. Why are you at work so early?”
“Long story.” I sit up and bump my head.
Greg has started talking again, his voice like a faucet that won’t stop running. He says he doesn’t know what to do and he can’t sleep and he can’t eat and the press is following him everywhere and he can’t go back to his gallery because they’ll be lurking, so Cherie let him come to her apartment and take a shower but then she kept fussing over him, and all he wanted to do was see me, so he slipped out when she went to get breakfast and took a taxi to Hollywood but I wasn’t there. “When I couldn’t reach you, I really freaked out, Maggie.”
I don’t even know where to begin, what to ask, what to answer. How to tell Greg how sorry I am and how over him I am at the same time. How exhausted and filthy I feel, and how the word shower fills me with longing. A hot soapy shower, with steam so thick it’s hard to breathe.
“Someone stole my phone,” I say.
Greg’s flood resumes, as if he didn’t hear. “I can’t come to the Rocque because there are probably reporters there, too—”
I should wait here for Hendricks to call.
“I’ll meet you,” I say.
By the old, closed funicular railroad, Angels Flight, there’s a small stretch of park above a row of bougainvillea bushes. It’s usually littered with trash and bodies in various states of hunger and drunkenness and brain rot. I’ve never wanted to sit on that grass, though it looks warm and thick and the city must water it, but no one notices anyone in that park. I tell Greg to find me there in forty minutes.
I’m awake now, and I can hear the muffled voices of other employees coming in, and I wonder if I should just emerge instead of hiding. Instead, I hug my knees and tuck my chin, closing my eyes. I don’t want to talk to anyone at the Rocque except Yegina, and she must be on the drive to work now. She never answers the phone when she drives.
Meanwhile Hendricks must be entering my empty house. Why hasn’t he called yet?
Minutes pass. I call my cell phone several times, awkwardly pressing redial from my crouch beneath the desk. No answer.
I slide the receiver into its cradle and feel in my purse for the flash drive. I can’t help wondering what the police will do with it. The woman in the photos, she could still be someone important—maybe I should look one last time. I slip out from my hiding place.
Too late. Jayme and Juanita are rounding the corner, Juanita pointing toward my office. They see me. Their looks of disbelief and displeasure throw me into a blind panic. I grab my papers, sling my purse over my shoulder, and bolt from my office, saying, “Just getting some work! To take home with me! I’ll see you Monday!” and make a dash for the stairway without waiting to hear their response.
I take the
stairs, two at a time, all the way down to the first floor and then the elevator to the loading dock. If Jayme is following me, I’ve got a good lead on her, long enough to sprint to the carpentry room, where I see Dee petting a large black dog with a wide head. Hold on a minute. It exactly resembles the dog on the flash drive. I slip through the doorway. Jayme won’t think to find me here.
“Hey up, Maggie.” Dee’s face splits into a grin when she sees me. “I’m glad you came in. The Janis Rocque tour got changed to today, and I wasn’t sure you could make it. Can you meet here at eleven?”
Black dog. Brent’s puppy. Dee’s sick days. Brent’s sudden departure.
“Is that Brent’s dog?”
“Dickson. Yup,” Dee says. The dog noses her face. “He’s a good boy. He’s such a good boy,” she croons. She sits with her legs splayed, elbows on her knees, loose and unconcerned.
“Where did Brent go?”
Now she tenses. She looks back at his office, then shrugs.
“Fritz said something—” I begin.
“He went on vacation.” Her London accent sounds especially clipped.
“Brent Patrick goes on vacation?” I drift to his door and peer in at his photographs of New York, the striated underside of a bridge looming over a brick building with arched windows, sprays of graffiti. Then my eyes fall on another picture—small, angled away on his desk—and I step around to look at it.
There she is: younger, prettier, with blond 1980s hair poufed away from her face, her eyes dark with liner. Mouth painted pink. Brent Patrick’s wife. The woman in the flash-drive photograph.
“What are you doing?” says Dee.
“I just love Brent’s photography,” I say, emerging, trying to sound cheery and calm. “I never get a chance to study it when he’s in there. He’s too intimidating.”
“Truer words,” says Dee. “He does go on vacation, though. And he doesn’t want people to know where, and I think that’s perfectly fine,” she adds. “Not everyone has to be in everyone’s business.”
No, but not everyone seems like they’re fleeing a murder case, either. Wherever my eyes fall now, the room looks sharpened, the saw and hammers, the nails, the pointy corners of the art crates. Only the eyes of the black dog are soft as he gazes at me and yawns.