by Nova Jacobs
“I think you’re one of those men who’s important enough to be able to downplay the value of his own work, but you know full well how valuable it is. I bet you think there’s no work in the world more important than yours.”
He wasn’t prepared for this level of psychological dissection coming from his sister-in-law.
“I’m onto you.” She gathered up her shopping bags. “You should let me join your group sometime. I might have a thing or two to say about the universe myself.” She cackled, as if she had said something very clever.
“Hey, thanks for doing all this,” he called to her as she was getting out. “It’s because of you that Jane’s getting better.”
She stuck her head back in the car. “You really think she is?”
“Don’t you?”
She shrugged. “You’re not around her like I am. I don’t blame you for not picking up on the subtleties.”
“You should have seen her before you arrived.”
Faye sighed. “My sister’s not like me. She doesn’t always let you know what’s going on with her. Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door and strode with purpose toward the white-hot blaze of the supermarket.
As Ralphs receded in his rearview mirror, the image of Jane’s smile from the stairs returned, sliding from an innocent expression of trust into an unspoken plea. And as he turned into Anitka’s neighborhood, his wife’s small mouth transformed into a gaping hollow of despair, and just when it had reached terrifying proportions, the cottage door opened and the nightmare vanished.
* * *
He spent the next two hours on Anitka’s full-sized mattress, the two of them blissfully negotiating its meager expanse. But for Philip, the hours weren’t entirely free from worry. His sister-in-law’s prying had made him nervous. If he didn’t get back in time for dinner, he wouldn’t put it past her to check his cover story. Philip quickly showered, dressed, and returned to bed to kiss Anitka good-bye.
“Don’t go, please.” She pulled him back onto the pillow and pretended to tackle him. “Besides, you never showed me your father’s boxes.”
He blinked at her in surprise. “Jesus. You really are a fangirl.”
“You promised.”
“Did I?” He took her hand and kissed it. “There’s nothing to look at, just some books and newspaper clippings.”
She propped herself up on one elbow. “Is my interest irritating?”
“Mildly.” He smiled. “But it’ll have to be next time.”
She gave him a mock frown and rolled out of bed. As he watched her head to the bathroom, he wondered if anyone would be picking over the remains of his own office when he died, or stalking his family for unpublished gems.
Over the aggressive pulse of the showerhead, Philip shouted his good-bye. It was better to make a quick exit. No protracted farewells. But he found it difficult to leave and lingered in the living room. He had not yet spent an entire night at the cottage, though he could have easily come up with a pretext to spend several nights with her: an out-of-town lecture, a last-minute symposium somewhere, a weekend retreat at the Aspen Center. Yet for all his romantic desperation and the many avenues of deceit open to him, Philip lacked the stomach for such an elaborate lie.
He paused at Anitka’s bookshelf, running a finger over his father’s old publications. Remembering that Anitka had said she’d corrected a mistake somewhere, he pulled the papers one by one from the shelf, and, finding one title significantly vandalized with her scrawl, he rolled it up and stuck it in his coat pocket.
A second later, the bedroom door opened and she sauntered over, tying on a loose robe.
He thought of telling her about the paper, but he was sure she would protest, insisting it was nothing. Instead, he kissed her forehead and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As he turned to the front door, he noticed that her whiteboard was now blank. No more doodles. No more Fibonacci spiral. Just the faint afterimage of marker.
“I decided you were right about that Dirac poem, after all,” she said, following his gaze. “It really is depressing.”
* * *
Outside, the Santa Ana winds were coming in cold and strong, and the palm leaves above Philip’s head rustled like butcher paper. Something was nagging at him. Was it Anitka’s enthusiasm for his father’s work? Or was it that he was deceiving his wife in these small, wretched doses? He had parked two blocks away this time in an effort to evade the phantom private eyes his guilty mind imagined were following him, though a block could hardly have made a difference. He followed the chirp-chirp to his Subaru and was just reaching for the door handle when the headlights of a car came on behind him. Philip froze—Ah, it’s over now—and as he turned toward the lights, he tried to invent a reason for his being in this neighborhood.
A woman called from the car. “I’m sorry to alarm you, Mr. Severy.”
He peered past the light and saw a black sedan sitting there. The slim shadow of Nellie Stone emerged from the back seat.
“Ah,” Philip said, relaxing only slightly, “the unrelenting secretary.”
“Whenever my phone rings,” she said, “I’m always hoping it will be you. It never is.”
“Flat-out stalking, is that what we’ve come to?”
“You do make me feel like the unhinged girlfriend.”
“What do you want, Nellie?”
“The car was just cleaned. We could lean against it and chat.” She called to the driver, “Arturo, would you kill the lights?”
The headlights promptly dimmed, yielding to the sodium glow of a streetlamp. Nellie was wearing a charcoal overcoat and scarf. She was without her glasses, which made her look strangely defenseless, like a nocturnal creature tossed outside at midday. Perhaps the lenses had been masking the hollows of her eyes, for Philip could now see she was not younger than him, but a peer.
She reached into her coat for cigarettes and a lighter, extending the pack to Philip as an offering. As he came close, she gracefully hipped the back door shut and Philip thought he saw movement behind the tinted window. Was it just a play of the light? Photons were certainly crafty things, especially when confronted with glass. One never knew what a particle of light might do to fool the eye. As Philip looked at the dark window, his unease increased.
“Someone with you?” he asked, selecting a Dunhill.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she set the end of her cigarette ablaze and did the same for him. The wind picked up, and he inverted the collar of his coat. He wondered if she might suggest the car as shelter from the weather, but she didn’t show any signs of discomfort.
“I was very sorry to hear about your daughter.”
He chose to ignore this. “Did you know there was a recent break-in at my father’s old office?”
“Really?”
“And for some reason, Government-Scholar Relations came to mind.”
She shook her head. “It’s unrelated, I’m afraid. Besides, a burglary would have been unnecessary.”
“Why’s that?”
“GSR is no longer searching for Isaac’s work.”
“Giving up, then?”
She smiled. “You can’t look for what you’ve already found.”
As she studied his face for a reaction, an alarm sounded deep within Philip, accompanied by the sudden need to protect his father’s work—work he still wasn’t sure existed.
“I’d be happy to explain,” she continued, “if you would only consider—”
“Meeting with Mr. Lyons?”
“Actually, that’s not why I’m here.”
He checked his watch. “Then you should get to it.”
“I’m here to recruit you. We’d like you to work for us.”
He laughed. “You really are deranged.”
“Give it some thought. We pay well. Extremely well, in fact—”
“So you’re asking me to leave my position at the university to work for an organization I know nothing about, one that appears to have questionable h
iring practices, and has quite possibly stolen from my dead father—all for the paycheck? You think that’s what motivates me?”
“For the intellectual satisfaction, then.”
“You know my answer.”
“But you haven’t heard the entire question.” She sent a puff of smoke downwind. “I wonder what Anitka Durov would think.”
He frowned. “What has she got to do with this?”
“I thought she might have an opinion.”
“So this is blackmail now?”
“Please, we’re not so classless as that. I’m only trying to get your attention. How about lunch tomorrow, take two?”
He turned to walk back to his car.
“So you have no interest in seeing your father’s work?” she shouted above the wind.
He stopped and turned back. “I have no interest in being shadowed or contacted repeatedly, or having you know more about my life than my family does. I’d like to be left alone.”
“What, so you can slip back into academic obscurity? Let your brain decay while you bed the latest grad student?” She allowed her Dunhill to drop, smashing the butt with her shoe. “Or is it that you’d rather not be reminded of your father’s legacy when you’re struggling so valiantly for a shot at your own?”
Philip froze. He felt his anger rising but could not deny the painful truth of this statement.
She went on. “Could it be that you’re not—an inquisitive person?” Nellie lit another cigarette, the flame of her lighter twitching in the wind. “What about all those questions you had for me that day in Malibu?”
“You mean the day Lyons stood me up?” Philip shouted.
Nellie paused for a reflective moment. “We’ve been unfair to you, Mr. Severy. I’ve been unfair to you, and I’d like to make it up if you’ll let me.”
A staccato buzzing came from her pocket, and her slender hand dove in to silence it. “But looks like it’ll have to be another time.”
“Short leash?”
She gave him a knowing look and pivoted to the car’s back door. When she opened it, Philip moved forward to get a better view of the back seat. But he saw that it was empty—just black padded leather and a snakeskin handbag. The only other person in the car was the driver, who made a move for the ignition.
“Just a second, Arturo.” Nellie rested her arm on the door and turned to Philip.
“Do you remember the one question you asked me that I couldn’t answer?”
“Which one was that?”
“You wanted to know what the P in P. Booth Lyons stood for.”
“You said you didn’t know.”
“It was probably wrong of me to keep it from you, given how important your father was to us.” She snuffed her cigarette in the door’s ashtray, and when her hand returned, it was holding a business card, like magic. He would have been no more surprised to see the queen of diamonds.
“I have one, thanks.”
“You don’t have this one. It’s the only one like it in the world.”
He took the card from her. There was no number or contact information, just a serifed name floating in cream:
Penelope Booth Lyons.
He frowned, struggling to interpret what he was seeing. “Penelope.”
“But I prefer Nellie,” she said. “Fewer syllables.”
She climbed into the car and pulled the door shut behind her. A second later, the window slid halfway down.
“So, I’ll see you tomorrow? No more secrets, I promise.”
Philip didn’t respond. It was as if two incompatible ideas had suddenly catapulted into his brain and were now forced at gunpoint to reconcile.
The engine of the town car hummed into action, and the headlights returned.
“You’ll let me know about tomorrow, then? I’m not going to chase you anymore, Philip. When you’re ready to see your father’s work, you’ll tell me.”
The dark glass of the window gradually eclipsed her assured smile. And when her face had disappeared from view, the car slipped into gear, and the woman who called herself P. Booth Lyons drove away.
– 20 –
The List
It was dusk, and the offices of the Juvenile Protection Unit were nearly empty. From his spot at a window overlooking downtown Los Angeles, Gregory tried to appreciate the twinkling cityscape, how the honeyed glow of sunset could give way so rapidly to night. But he felt uneasy, as if something were about to happen that he couldn’t control. Maybe if he looked hard enough, he’d be able to pick out Tom’s figure below, making its wretched way back to the subway. At some point, he feared, Tom was going to abandon his routine altogether. He might even pick up and move, far from where he could be surveilled. Gregory couldn’t allow that to happen.
He returned to his desk to gather his things and lock up the cabinets. The coffee he’d poured earlier was now cold. Even so, he picked up a spoon and stirred it absently, imagining that if he moved the spoon counterclockwise for long enough, he might be able to suck the heat back into the mug. Longer still, and the cream would unmix itself and swirl back into the hypnotic pattern it had once made. But there was no fighting the laws of thermodynamics. One couldn’t uncool coffee, just as one couldn’t unkill a person.
E. J. paced nearby, wobbling slightly on her heels. Must be date night with her husband. For nineteen years, E. J. had thrown her life into saving the city’s imperiled children, yet despite everything she’d seen in those years, she managed to conduct herself with extraordinary lightness. He had the sense that the second E. J. got home to her husband, she could kick off her shoes, let her job roll off her back, and enter into the ease of spousal banter. That’s the kind of detective she was. She didn’t need to use rage as a release; she didn’t need to meet violence with violence, as he did. She could just switch it all off.
But these past weeks, E. J. had been acting strange: first mothering everyone in the office, and then retreating. Now this emphatic pacing. Her behavior worried him, and he might have asked her about it had he not wanted to invite similar questions about himself. For instance, he’d hardly shown his face at work for the past two weeks. If it hadn’t been for Hazel catching him in the Cadillac that morning, he’d likely still be sitting there now.
E. J. caught him looking in her direction. She scratched her scalp with the corner of a lime green folder.
“You have a second, Greg?”
He hesitated. Curious though he was, he didn’t really have time for a chat. It was his fourth wedding anniversary, and Goldie was preparing a fussy meal that had taken days of planning. She wanted him to be excited about the dinner, though she knew full well that whether it was steak flambé or a ham sandwich, it was all the same to him. Whatever reaction Goldie was looking for, he usually managed to simulate the appropriate response. He was lucky she was rotten at detecting emotional mimicry.
“What’s on your mind, E. J.?”
She zigzagged to his desk and placed in front of him a mug shot of a hollow-cheeked, dead-eyed woman whose gray hair was pulled back from a face that showed no emotion except for the beginnings of a smile. E. J. tapped the photo with a lacquered nail.
“Recognize this harpy?”
He did: that rubber-band crease of a mouth that wanted to stretch into a full smile but settled instead on a smirk. It nauseated him how little shame these criminals displayed on camera. It was the rare mug shot that showed honest disgrace or regret. Most of these people—child molesters, abusers, rapists—held their chins high, as if they had made the decision before the photo was snapped that they were going to retain some motherfucking dignity. Some even smiled, as if looking cheerful were somehow an imaginative response to having been caught doing something deeply horrible. It was the smile of guilt that Gregory had come to know well, the one that said, “Funny how life has led me to this moment, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “They all start to look the same.”
She slapped the back of his head. It was supposed to be playful, but it
hurt. “You think I’m an idiot? I know you don’t forget.”
“The Burgess case,” he said at last. “Rita? Rhonda?”
“Rhoda. Rhoda Burgess, wife of that sadistic fuck who kept those kids chained up in his basement?”
His gorge rose. “Sure. He didn’t even touch them, as I recall, just recorded their gradual starvation for some internet racket. Ran the whole thing out of his house in Castle Heights, until someone from the gas company came to check the meter and found a skeleton trying to break out of a basement window.”
“Mr. Burgess got life,” E. J. said, jabbing the photo again. “While the missus here—”
“Skipped away scot-free.”
“Not a day in prison. Claimed she didn’t know what hubby was doing down there all those years. Cried and carried on in front of the judge.”
“So, what do we have on her?”
“She’s dead.”
“Even better.”
“Died back in August. Took a dive off a downtown overpass. Her head was promptly flattened by a bagel truck.”
“Great. Tape a K on her face and put her on the wall with the rest. We owe the driver a drink.”
“Don’t be patronizing.”
“Well, sorry if I don’t get all misty over the suicide of a woman too stupid to realize there was a miniature concentration camp in her basement.”
“She didn’t kill herself.”
“No?”
“A witness came forward. Homeless guy who lives under the overpass says he saw the whole thing. Says the woman was pushed. There’s more.”
E. J. lined up the green folder beside Rhoda’s photograph and flipped back the cover to reveal at least ten more mug shots.
Gregory sifted through the pile. They were mostly men, a few women—cases that had appeared on his desk at some point. He knew their faces well: the bad skin, the vacant eyes. “Looks like our typical deck of cards,” he observed.
“Really?” She pointed across the office to the karma board. “Half of them have been staring at us for years.”
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“All of them are closed cases, some going back six years. The thing they all have in common? They all got off easy: light sentences, acquittals, community service, finger wagging.”