by Rain, J. R.
Karen makes a small squeak and shrinks in on herself. “Just that she was going for a hike, I think.”
“Was she going to meet someone?” My voice is barely above a whisper.
Karen brings her knees up to her chest. She stares at me like I’m something that has crawled out from beneath her bed. “I’m—I’m pretty sure she didn’t say she was going to meet someone.”
I thank her for her time and Numi helps me up. Once we are standing in the hallway, with me leaning heavily onto Numi, he says, “You really think the killer could be the deliveryman?”
“Probably not,” I say. “I have nothing else to go on.”
“That’s a lot of nothing.”
“Come on,” I say.
“Where to?”
“Let’s get some pizza.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Numi and I are in his silver Cadillac, cruising through the streets of Echo Park. Cool as cool gets. It’s evening but the day is still warm. The heat seems to rise from the pavement in waves. For some reason, I’m having a harder time than usual catching a full breath.
Numi looks at me. “You okay, cowboy?”
“Been better.”
“Need to go to the hospital?”
“Not yet.”
Numi glances at me sideways. Although I’m looking ahead and holding on to the overhead handle—anything to help open up my lungs—I know he is giving me a full body scan. If I don’t catch my breath soon and calm down, I also know that our next destination is going to be L.A. Memorial Hospital.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Really.”
Except Numi isn’t buying what I’m selling. He glances at me again as we arrive at our destination: the Pizza Hombres.
It’s a hole-in-the-wall joint, one of many retail establishments that line the street. There is some parking out front. Numi slows his Caddie and waits for an old man to back out, a centimeter at a time. Numi watches him impassively, but I sense his frustration. After all, the old man is costing me valuable time. And time is what I don’t have and Numi knows this.
When the old man has finally backed up and pulled forward, Numi slips into the vacant spot and turns off the ignition. He looks over at me. I still haven’t gotten a full breath and I’m struggling. I hold the handle above to open up my lungs—anything to help get that full gulp of air.
It’s not working.
Panic grips me. I need to breathe. It’s a hell of a shitty feeling knowing that your lungs are progressively getting worse, knowing that someday they are going to shut down completely, that I will undoubtedly suffocate to death.
A helluva shitty feeling.
So now I’m struggling, fighting for air, knowing that I’m gasping, knowing that Numi is close to starting the car up again and taking me to the closest hospital. But I can’t worry about that now. No. I need air. I need to breathe.
Badly.
So I fight. I suck. I force my lungs to work. Nothing’s working.
Numi reaches out, grips my shoulder. “Calm down, brother. It’s going to be okay.”
I nod, still struggling. Can’t speak.
“I’m here, man.”
I keep fighting. Keep gasping. A fish out of water. A drowning man. Same damn thing. I twist slightly in the seat, trying to free up my lungs. My head feels lighter and lighter, now spinning. Numi grips my shoulder tighter, fingers digging.
“It’s okay, boss,” he says. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Numi…”
“Calm down, calm. Breathe, brother.”
“I… can’t… breathe, Numi.”
He squeezes my shoulder tighter and I now see the tears in his eyes. “Yes, you can, cowboy. Just calm down. You’re going to be okay.”
I feel the tears come to my own eyes. They always come when I can’t breathe. Maybe it’s my body weeping for itself, its own demise. Or maybe I’m just a big ol’ baby.
I continue struggling, gripping the bar overhead. Numi continues gripping my shoulder, giving me his strength, willing me to breathe.
And there—finally, finally, mercifully, thankfully—my lungs kick in. Air fills them completely, filling them so full that I don’t want to exhale. I relish the feeling of completeness, loving the air, the oxygen, the life.
Numi’s patting hand turns to a gentle rubbing. Sometimes all I need is one good inhalation. One good lungful.
Welcome to my life.
“You okay, cowboy?” he asks. He still rubs me affectionately, but now I want him to stop. I still struggle with his intimacy, and so I shrug a little and Numi gets the idea. He removes his hand although I see that he’s hurt.
“I’m okay,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Numi finds us a booth as I approach the counter.
The place is bigger than expected, with two pool tables and dozens of old-school arcade games in the back. The cash register is manned by a cute girl who’s probably eighteen or nineteen. There’s a separate bar area to order beer and wine.
I put in an order for a large pizza and two beers and scan the place. There’s someone working in the kitchen, but that seems to be it. I know I’m grasping at straws here. My instincts are off. No doubt because of my time away, or because of my sickness. Probably both. Truth is, I don’t know what to think. So, better to check out everything and decide later what it means.
I pay for the food and the girl gives me one of those little table signs with a number on it and says the pizza will be ready in twenty minutes.
“Did you find the killer, Sherlock?” asks Numi when I sit down and place the number on the corner of the table.
“No, but the pizza will be ready in twenty minutes.”
“Way to go, dynamo. How you feeling?”
“Better.”
Sometimes it’s better for me to not talk about breathing to take my mind off it. To fixate on it can sometimes bring back another episode, and Numi knows this, and so he changes the subject. And the subject he chooses is nearly as bad.
“Tell me about your brother, boss.”
Numi knows he has me for twenty minutes.
“Here?”
“No better place, ace.” He opens his big hands and looks around. “We alone and we waiting for pizza.”
I smile at his slang. “It’s been a long time,” I say, “since I’ve talked about it.”
Numi nods and waits. He stretches out his long legs and sits back. As I speak, he clasps his hands over his flat stomach and closes his eyes the way a dog might. Just enough to relax but not enough to miss anything around him.
And so I tell him, “We were at Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium, waiting for the game to start. I was seventeen and making some money working nights at a warehouse. It was my brother’s birthday and I wanted to do something special for him. My mother was against it from the beginning. Maybe she had gotten a psychic hit or something, who knows. But I talked her into it, reminding her that I was an adult and could watch my nine-year-old brother, Matt. She relented, but not happily.”
I take in a lot of air, ignore my faltering lungs, and continue the story, “I had gotten off work early and picked up my little brother. My brother wore his Dodgers ball cap and a mitt. Matt’s excitement was overflowing.”
Numi nods, his eyes still closed. I pause for a few moments and get my breath.
“But we got to the game way too early. Even too early to catch batting practice. So we decided to take a walk through Elysian Park. It was a beautiful July day, not too hot for once. The plan was to play a little catch and wait for the gates to open.”
I pause in my retelling as the young girl brings us our beers. I rarely drink beer these days. I’m really not supposed to have any alcohol at all. I don’t care. And Numi doesn’t seem to care either, for once. I think he thinks that I might need this beer. So I drink some, spilling only just a little. Since when were beer mugs so damn heavy?
As I think back on that fateful day, I realize I can’t
begin to explain to Numi my kid brother’s innocence or capacity to find joy in everything, his complete trust in the world, his forgiving and accepting nature. He was a godsend to my mother, especially after my father’s car accident that left her a single parent.
Words and strength fail me, so I keep to the point.
“We found a good spot to throw the ball. There were a lot of people picnicking, so we had to find a space to ourselves. We threw the ball a few times and—”
I can remember their faces like it was yesterday, especially their smiles. For a few years, I blamed them for my brother’s death. Hell, sometimes I still did.
No one else’s fault, I thought again. No one but your own.
Of course, that wasn’t quite right either. My brother’s death was very much the fault of someone else.
Numi waits with half-closed eyes, breathing easily, legs stretched before him. The half beer gives me an instant buzz. So pathetic.
“There were two girls, two cute girls. One of them had sprained her ankle. The other was helping her over to the restrooms. I asked them what happened. The one girl, the blonde, had stepped on a tree root, rolled her ankle. I helped her into the bathroom. I then offered to get her some ice from some picnickers nearby.”
I took another draw from my beer. I could not meet Numi’s half gaze now. Instead, I studied a flashing neon advertisement in the window nearby.
“I went and got the ice.”
“And where was Matt?”
“He was looking for our ball.”
“Where?”
“In the woods behind the park.”
“How did the ball get there?”
“I threw it,” I say.
“You threw it into the woods?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I—” but the words don’t come. They can’t come. I’ve locked them up for so long.
“You threw the ball into the woods to buy yourself some time with the girls,” says Numi.
I don’t nod at first, but finally I do. I can feel the weight of Numi’s stare. No longer are his eyes half-closed.
“What happened next, Jimmy?”
I cover my eyes with my hands. The tears are coming freely now, down my cheeks, down my hands and wrists and forearms. I can’t speak. The words are gone as I recall again for the millionth time the panic, fear, and helplessness as I searched for my little brother, searched and searched, until my voice was hoarse. Others in the park had searched, too, and soon the police and my mother had shown up. A massive search party turned up nothing. Many heart-wrenching days would pass before we received the news we were most dreading: Some hikers had found his murdered body miles away in Laurel Canyon.
His desecrated body with the massive figure “8” carved into his little chest.
It’s then that I realize that Numi has gotten up and come over and wrapped his forearm around my shoulders, and he holds me like that as I continue weeping into my hands.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My instincts are off.
I can feel it. Been out of the game for too long. Been sick for too long. Solving a crime that reaches down through the decades is a lot to ask of a guy who’s living on borrowed time. I need the police report. And I need Detective Dobbs’s help.
Which is why I’m back in the conference room, this time with Numi by my side instead of in the hallway. He’s my note taker and support system. I’m also hopped up on caffeine.
Numi has already helped me look the best I can. Earlier, I let him trim my hair and help me into my freshly dry-cleaned suit. I even let his expert fingers knot my tie. I persuaded him to apply Preparation H around my eyes to tighten up the bags. This is a trick that everyone who works in Hollywood knows. As Numi applies it, he asks how I know about this trick. I tell him I saw it once on Oprah. He next asks who the gay one is. I tell him to shut the hell up as he grins.
On the way to the police station for the second time in one week, I down five espressos from a local Starbucks. Now that I look a little less like death warmed over, I wait impatiently in the conference room for Detective Dobbs. Except my hands are shaking from the caffeine and my stomach is queasy from all that espresso.
Come on, dammit. Where are you?
If I want Dobbs to help me, I must appear better. I must be up to the challenge, so to speak. The caffeine is helping. Any other day, getting dressed up and having my hair cut would have put me in bed for hours. So, yes, I know I’m living on borrowed time. Which is why I’m relieved when the detective finally strolls in. I see he has Olivia’s file with him. So far, so good.
“Thanks for meeting with me again, Paul,” I say, perhaps a little louder than I had intended. The idea was to make him believe I was healthy enough to be involved in the case. Not blast him out of his chair.
“How you feeling, Booker?” he asks, settling in his chair across from us.
I hold my smile and say the only thing that will get me the file: “I’m feeling better, Paul. I’m taking new medications now and they seem to be helping.”
“New medications, huh?”
“Yes.”
He nods and takes me in, his eyes moving over my face. Something is setting off his cop instincts. Perhaps he senses my lies, or my weakness. Any good cop can read anyone like a book. It’s what they do. It’s what I do, too. I keep smiling.
“You look better.”
“I feel better.”
“Unless you’re faking it.”
“I’m hurt.”
“No, you’re desperate.” He pauses and looks from me to Numi, then says, “I looked into your brother’s case, Booker. I think you’re onto something. I think we might need you.”
I nod and wait.
He pushes the file in my direction. “I want you to use the copy machine behind me and accidentally make a copy of this file.”
“I do tend to be accident-prone these days.”
The detective almost smiles. “It’s against policy for me to give you the file, as you know. But…” He raises his hands.
“Accidents do happen,” I finish.
I do not reach for the file because my hands are shaking badly. I do not want the detective to see how bad off I really am. His sudden change of heart might just swing back the other direction.
“Now, I’m going to leave my office and get a donut,” he says, standing. “I am, after all, a cop, and that’s what cops do when not chasing the bad guys. It’s in the handbook.”
“Right next to how to grow a regulation cop mustache.”
He shakes his head. “Always with my mustache. Anyway, I expressly forbid you to use the copy machine located directly behind me. I also expressly forbid you to press the green button and wait ten seconds for it to power on.” He stands. “When I come back, I want you clowns gone. And Booker?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not much of an actor, but I am sorry to hear about your brother.”
“Thank you,” I say.
He looks at me some more, then turns and leaves.
“You heard the man,” I say to Numi when the detective is gone. “Let’s hurry and not copy the file.”
“Americans are weird,” he says, and takes the file over to the copy machine and proceeds to not copy it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Laurel Canyon.
The day is bright. A smattering of clouds. The back road is quiet when Numi stops his Cadillac.
“You sure you’re up for this, boss?” he asks.
“I’m sure.”
He gets out and comes around to my side of the car. Having a grown man help me in and out of a car is hard on the ego. When you’re sick and dying, the ego is and should be the first thing to go. I know there’re gurus who teach people how to release the ego, to conquer the ego. I get it now, but I didn’t back when I was healthy. It’s moot now. The guy who falls off the toilet and knocks himself out no longer has an ego.
Numi helps me out of the car as he wraps a blanket around me, fol
lowed by his strong arms. I’m weaker today. That happens sometimes. Weaker some days, stronger others. Admittedly, the weaker days far outnumber the strong days.
He helps me down a gentle incline and over to a bench that overlooks the canyon. Beyond are trails and wilderness and nature at its best. Southern Californians are sort of nature-deprived, but Laurel Canyon is a fair substitute.
Before the drive out here, Numi gave me one of his natural body cleanses to extricate the toxins. The cleanse consisted of green tea with organic honey, and he also made me a lentil soup he insists will help me feel better. I do not tell Numi that I don’t feel better. I act as if I do, although I’m certain he sees through my charade. Mostly, though, he sees in me a renewed purpose. A reason for living. And Numi is all for me living.
It’s been two days since my visit with Detective Dobbs and I’ve read and reread Olivia’s police file, making notes until I couldn’t write any more. I feel even closer to Olivia now. Which is odd to say. Once I study up on them and the case, I always feel closer to the victims. That closeness drives me to find them or their killers. As if the dead speak to me from within the pages of the case files.
As Numi and I sit together, I shrug off his arm that’s around my shoulder. I need my space, dammit. Of course, that’s the ego talking. Maybe I haven’t eradicated it yet, after all.
Fifty feet below us is a trail through the canyon. One of many trails. Olivia’s body was found not too far from here, just off the trail.
The location is just feet from where my own brother’s body was found nearly twenty-two years ago. The same canyon. The same damn hillside. I am stunned by the proximity of two bodies found not far apart, but twenty-two years apart. There were, of course, more similarities. Disturbing similarities. My gut instincts wake up.
Something scurries in the brush nearby. In the branches above, a crow caws incessantly. A small wind lifts my just-trimmed hair. My head feels lighter since Numi’s haircut. On the wind are many scents, juniper being the only one that I recognize.