Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  “Good boy,” Dee says again, and runs her hand slowly over his head. “So, eleven?” She turns to me, and there’s sorrow and determination in her narrow face.

  “I’ll try,” I say, distracted by her expression. “Are you … okay? You seem a bit off.”

  Dee stops petting the dog and holds him around the neck.

  “Dee?”

  To my surprise, she gives a forlorn sigh. “I’m sure I will be fine,” she mutters. “Now that my new girlfriend is no longer publicly ignoring me.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know you were seeing someone.”

  “It’s a new thing. Not quite common knowledge.” Dee pulls Dickson closer and he sniffs her ear. “Especially not here.”

  An actress? An artist? A board member?

  “Oh,” I say. “I had no idea.”

  “That’s the way she wants it.” Dee’s voice is grim. “And she always gets what she wants.”

  I pat her bony shoulder, my thoughts derailing like trains. Dee is sad. She is also protecting Brent, and Brent is running away. Strong, burly Brent. He would have enough strength to bash a woman’s head in. But what would be Brent’s motive? To end an affair with Kim Lord? Was she pregnant with his child? He has been so off-kilter lately. What if he did kill her, and was protecting himself by framing Greg? Or what if someone else was protecting him?

  “Do you think Brent and Kim Lord were ever …?” I ask.

  “He admired her. She admired him,” says Dee. Her tone is noncommittal. “They wanted to collaborate on a show sometime. But sex? I don’t think so.” Her eyes narrow. “Is he your latest suspect? There’s no way. No freaking way.”

  There’s always a way. Greg may know. Greg may be the key.

  “Of course not. I’ve got to go,” I say, retreating. “Jayme will kill me if she finds me here.”

  Dee looks up from stroking the dog. “Call me if you change your mind about the tour,” she says. “It’ll be worth it, believe me.”

  24

  Long, damp grass grabs my feet as I search the park, trying not to let my eyes alight for long on anyone on this green beside the defunct, pink-gated tracks. Back when Bunker Hill was filled with ratinfested Queen Annes instead of skyscrapers and hotels, Angels Flight ferried people up the hill from their shopping trips at Grand Central Market and its neighboring stores, but the city leaders shut it down when they paved over the slums. The railway reopened in the 1990s, then closed after a runaway car killed someone. Since then Angels Flight has resumed its air of a dusty ruin, someone’s small, lost vision of human enterprise among so many surging, anonymous towers.

  Greg’s not in the park, not unless jail has transformed him into the pale young addict with matted hair and a sooty coat, one shoe falling off, another gone entirely, his blackened toes flattened and splayed like fingers. Nearby a middle-aged, brown-skinned gent is lying on a bench, trembling and sleeping, but I recognize his disintegrating blue binder and baseball cap. By noon he’ll become a friendly “lost UCLA student” who “just needs the bus fare to get back to campus.” No one believes him, but his ruse is so absurd that most people pay him to go away.

  And he’s one of the easier ones to look at on this steep green, where the hill spills down toward Skid Row. I catch sight of a hump under blankets, shifting and sliding, close to the bushes. Four feet, two heads.

  There’s a pressure on my shoulder. I jump and yelp.

  A familiar voice says my name. I am turning to look now, and my first impression of Greg is of the weird radiance in his eyes, the look people get when they stare into an aquarium. He’s here. It’s him. My body doesn’t know whether to recoil or throw itself against him, but he’s already reaching for me. The moment we collide, it’s worse. Greg is putting his arms around my back, but there are too many of them, stringy and tight, and his mouth feels like it’s suctioning my hair. Is he kissing me? I freeze, letting it happen, but my insides knot. New heat bakes the backs of my bare legs. The Los Angeles sun is climbing the sky.

  Greg murmurs into my scalp something about being sorry and forever, and I let him, because awful as this is, I know it will be harder to look him in the face. Finally he releases me and we just stand there, my eyes on his scuffed blue shoes.

  I don’t know what I imagined this reunion to be like, but it wasn’t this awful squeeze and then me, taking a big step back, digging in my purse and holding up the flash drive. “She was taking pictures of Brent Patrick’s wife,” I say, finally meeting Greg’s eyes. “Do you know why? We need to give this to the police.”

  “Brent Patrick’s wife?” Greg staggers sideways, as if seeing the flash drive has knocked him off-balance.

  We’re attracting attention now, no doubt because I mentioned the police. A blanket hatches and a woman sits up, eying us warily, her blond hair hanging in her face. She could be our age or she could be forty-five. Others are stirring.

  “Let’s get you something to eat,” I say, tucking the drive back in my purse and steering Greg toward the stairs.

  He follows without protest, still unsteady on his feet. He totters and grips the rail as we take the long flights down to Grand Central Market, a block-length edifice broken by columns and porticos. The dark caverns inside are crowded with food stalls and merchandise, lit overhead by neon signs. Outside, I spy a few empty tables at a small, dirty patio. They border the counter of Tropical Time, Yegina’s favorite establishment, a long silver wall with black spouts and colorful placards advertising dozens of juices: papaya, boysenberry, apple, mango, cherry, coconut. All can be ordered separately or combined. I have stood beside Yegina many times, simultaneously overwhelmed by Tropical Time’s lavish offerings and doubting that any of it can be true. “You thirsty?” I say to Greg, because I have already switched into mothering mode.

  He is still descending carefully, frowning and shaking his head, as if trying to loosen a memory. “How did you find out it was his wife?” he asks me.

  Egg sandwiches and juices procured, we find a perch at a patio table so caked with street grit that we have to hold our breakfast above it, hovering like we might bolt. Our conversation is jumpy and disordered, too, interrupted by trucks rumbling by. First topic: Brent Patrick’s wife’s appearance on the flash drive. Greg blanches as I explain that I spotted her photo on Brent’s desk, that she has been in an institution for months for her illness.

  “Jesus,” he says. “Why didn’t Kim say? She could have told me that’s why she was meeting him.”

  “Brent’s just disappeared,” I say. “He went on ‘vacation.’”

  “Jesus,” Greg says again. A pigeon flutters heavily down for a halfeaten piece of pizza near us, its iridescent body lunging. “And they still haven’t gone after him?”

  I lose my appetite as Greg starts harping on the investigation and all the new information that makes no sense to him. The medical examination added several new wrinkles to the case: Not only did the body’s state of decomposition shift the time of death to Friday, but it appeared that Kim had struggled in some confined space—some kind of wooden box—for hours or perhaps days before she perished. Splinters of wood were found beneath her bloody, cracked fingernails. And preliminary toxicology on a couple of tiny wounds in her waist suggested that her murderer had injected her with a tranquilizer.

  I set my sandwich down on the dirty table and drop my napkin over it. “What kind of tranquilizer?

  “Too early to know. They had a huge list, but it’s not like I recognized any of them. Amberbarbital sodium. Nembutal. Sodium therpenal. Pentobarbituate something.” He drops his own sandwich on top of mine.

  “Those don’t all sound like drug names.”

  Greg shakes his head. “I had a hard time listening to Cherie,” he confesses, and then tells me how unnerving it was to be riding in her car, outside in the open air, to see sunlight and billboards and molting palm trees, all while hearing the grisly facts of Kim’s examination. “My mind kept blinking in and out. Finally I just told her to stop.” N
ow he hunches over our pile of uneaten food. “How could someone … hate her so much?” he mumbles, and then his whole body starts quaking with silent sobs.

  I don’t comfort him. I let the gap of air between us stay open. In the mounting heat of the day, I feel a cool energy thread through me. Anyone watching would think I am delivering bad news or breaking up with the man weeping beside me. Anyone watching would pity him, and wonder at the young woman sitting immobile nearby, shadows under both of their eyes.

  But I’m not actually here. I’m not seeing Greg’s pain. My mind is traveling too fast over all the facts. A blow to the head. A tranquilizer. A coffin. So many stages to kill her. Not an expert, then. Or maybe someone who couldn’t kill her all at once. My concentration separates me from Greg, from everything around me: the grind and dust of traffic; the ugly, insistent birds; the eggy smell of the barely touched sandwiches. I have to know who did this. I’ve spent too much time on the what. I recall Jay Eastman’s words again: Never look for the what. Find the who. Who gets hurt. Who gains. Whose life will never be the same.

  “I’m sorry,” I say finally. “About the baby, too.”

  Greg’s head whips up. His face flashes with surprise, then fresh grief.

  “What happened with you two on Tuesday?” I press him. “Were you fighting about Brent Patrick?”

  Greg looks toward one of the stunted trees beside us, also grayed with soot. Without meeting my eyes, he tells me that on Tuesday Kim flipped out after her positive pregnancy test and wanted time to herself. “I thought she meant time with him.”

  “You thought they were having an affair?”

  “I didn’t know,” he says. “She insisted she was working on a show idea with him. About mentally ill women. It fits that she’d take a picture of his wife.”

  It does fit. It also fits that Kim was ultra-private about her artistic process, but that she wasn’t sleeping with Brent. So what is Brent running away from? There’s a missing piece to this equation, some variable I haven’t figured out. Greg. Kim. Brent. Barbara. Four players. One possessive, one secretive, one aggressive, one utterly vulnerable. They could add up to a murder, but I am not seeing a clear chain of events. Unless Greg himself was the killer. Which I don’t think is possible. Although he sure made himself look guilty.

  “When you thought Kim was breaking up with you,” I say, “you texted her seventy times?” I can’t help the ring of anger in my voice.

  Greg looks ill but doesn’t answer.

  Why was Kim working on her next show when Still Lives hadn’t even opened? Because she was scared of going broke? Maybe Greg was right to be suspicious. But not to stalk her.

  “I could have suspected you,” he says accusingly, shading his eyes. “That note. You’d better watch out for Maggie.”

  The statement hits me like a blow. “Yeah. Not to mention my expertise with coffins and sodium therpenal,” I say.

  As I utter the words, I feel something unlatch in my mind, not an answer, just a flash of warning to pay attention to what I’m saying. Coffins. Or maybe not coffins. And not therpenal. Thiopental. Black text on a white background. I’ve seen it before.

  I ask Greg if I can borrow his phone. He pushes it across the table. I take Hendricks’s card from my purse and call him.

  “Maggie,” Hendricks says. “Where are you?”

  I tell him.

  “Good. Stay with him. I’m almost to your apartment.”

  “In the medical examiner’s report,” I ask, “was one of the drugs sodium thiopental?” I know I’ve seen this name, and I’ve seen it at the Rocque.

  Greg’s hand slides from his eyes.

  “He told you about the medical examiner’s report?” says Hendricks.

  I turn away from Greg. “The names of the tranquilizers,” I say. “Do you know what they were?”

  “Who are you talking to?” Greg says, grabbing for my arm. Sweat and tears have soaked his forehead and temples.

  “What else did Shaw tell you?” Hendricks’s voice demands.

  I leap up from the table, out of reach. “I’ve seen sodium thiopental on something. I can picture it in my mind, like I copyedited it.”

  “That’s just one of many possibilities. The full report won’t be back for weeks,” Hendricks says. “But just stay put, okay?”

  Greg’s voice is rising, but I can’t focus on him. As I end the call, I’m still seeing the words. Sodium thiopental. The second word doesn’t look correctly spelled, so my mind stutters over it every time.

  “I don’t understand you,” Greg is saying. “This horrible thing happens to me and you’re the first person I try to see, and you call somebody else to talk about brands of tranquilizers? Do my feelings not even matter to you?”

  “I’m really sorry,” I say, and hand the phone back to Greg. “But I have to go.”

  Although the words don’t sound like mine, although part of me cannot believe how cold I’m being, I leave him and walk down Broadway, into the rising heat.

  “Go where?” he shouts after me.

  I walk faster. Greg doesn’t follow, but I don’t feel like I’ve really left him until I turn a corner and pass a whole block of grimy buildings, with their ancient arches and crates of cheap plastic sunglasses, piñatas, hats, and socks. Even then I can still feel the print of this morning’s embrace on my sweat-stained shirt, and the kiss Greg left in my hair. Inside the shell of my body, however, the rest of me is finally retreating, condensing into a hard core, untouchable. I feel sad for myself, and for Greg, that I held on to the dream of us so long. Maybe if he had felt freer, he wouldn’t have gotten so upset over Kim’s flight from him. Maybe she would have gone home to him last Tuesday instead of vanishing forever.

  A child’s laugh tumbles from an upstairs window. I hear a radio tuned to country music.

  Sodium thiopental. It hovers big and dark, on an empty field, like a title. A caption.

  Find the who. Who gets hurt. Who gains. Whose life will never be the same.

  As I turn back to Bunker Hill and climb the stairs to the Rocque, a curtain rises in my mind. The shadows of characters start to gather. The characters are vivid and real, but they’re far away; I don’t hear their words. All I see is silhouettes moving across a stage, talking, fighting, and embracing in silence. There are two of them. Then four. Then five. The actors have grotesque proportions: hulking shoulders, hands like talons, serpentine necks, as if their human natures are slowly being exchanged with savage animals, and they are battling this, too. In fact, they are battling their own savagery more than each other.

  My thighs ache with the ascent. Sweat starts trickling down my forehead and spine. Ten steps from the top, I stop and look back down at Grand Central Market, the dusty table where I sat with Greg. He’s gone. It’s occupied now by another couple, young and brown, sitting so close they would barely have to lean to kiss.

  I have trampled on a grieving man’s heart, my best friend hates me, I may lose my job, my apartment is unsafe, a killer may be stalking me. And what am I doing? I am standing still again, frozen, and looking back.

  I scan the sidewalk for Greg anyway, and the market entrance, peering into the gloom of food stalls where I wandered, aimless, the day after Brent Patrick put us all to death in Executed. But Greg has really vanished this time, and I have the feeling I will never search a crowd for him again. An old blue Mercedes glides across my vision, low as a boat, anonymous, hinting of days of forgotten glamour. I surge up the last steps to the plaza, into its brightness and fountains, suddenly thirsty again, wishing I had kept my cup. And then I remember where I saw the words sodium thiopental.

  Jason Rains worked hard to obtain real execution drugs for Executed. A compounding pharmacy provided him sodium thiopental on the condition that, when the exhibition was over, the museum registrar would dispose of it at a hazardous waste site.

  Who would ever know if Evie kept the syringes instead? Everyone trusted her to do her job.

  Four players: Greg, Kim,
Brent, Barbara. Enter Evie. A fifth figure set in motion by the other four. One possessive, one secretive, one aggressive, one utterly vulnerable. And one driven by her obsession to the threshold of murder.

  Evie monitored the comings and goings of the art crates, too. Rothkos and Pollocks to the airport. Permanent-collection works to offsite storage. All of them in the same big pine boxes, stuck with labels. Who would ever guess if she shipped something else—a human being—inside? Everyone trusted her to do her job.

  Everyone trusted Evie. Diligent, private, always-working-late Evie, down in her basement office. Theater-buff Evie, who was dazzled by Brent’s genius. They all were dazzled by him downstairs. But Evie, who idealized fame and competed for everything, would want to be the one who got Brent. Secretly or openly. Nothing would mean more to her than possessing a star. Until Kim Lord came along and threatened to steal him away.

  The last time I saw Kim Lord, she was hurrying down the street, and she jumped like something bit her, and then she kept running. The image stuck in my mind because Kim Lord wasn’t the jumpy type. The image stuck in my mind because the woman hurrying wasn’t Kim Lord.

  But everyone, including me, trusted that she was.

  25

  Before I round the corner to the loading dock, I stop to catch my breath. Against a spray-painted concrete wall, I smooth my rumpled skirt and pull my damp hair back from my neck. I run my tongue over my fuzzy teeth and spit. By night, a few people crawl down to this underpass to sleep, but by day the asphalt is empty except for guardrails, dumpsters, and the steady rumble of traffic overhead. It’s hard to believe that the Gala happened here only a week ago, but it did, flooding this grime with its lights and diamonds and spotless tablecloths. That night was a beginning for the rest of us, but for Kim—for Evie—it was an ending.