“It’s three thirty in the morning. I thought you didn’t have a phone in your flat.”
“You were being missed,” I said. A roar went up from the bar. Monday Night Football on the TV. “I’m at the Clown and Bard. They’re watching football. You know, soccer.”
She didn’t understand what I was doing at a bar at three thirty a.m. I told her I couldn’t sleep.
“So, what, you’ve just been out walking the streets?”
“I was hungry.”
There was a long pause, as if she’d never heard anything so ridiculous in her life. I covered my mouth so I wouldn’t laugh. Then it all went bad. It was the beginning of how I find myself at this moment, with her laying unconscious on my bathroom floor.
“Is it that woman?” she asked. “The one with the learning disability? Is that why you’re out so late? You’ve been out with her?”
“What are you talking about?” What was she talking about?
“The one you sent the hand lotion to?”
I forgot I’d told her Agnessa lived in Prague.
The more I denied seeing Agnessa while I was in Prague, the more Charlotte believed I was lying. I said, “I haven’t seen her. And anyway, we’re non-touching friends.” Charlotte went batshit crazy when I said that. It was true. I’m a good man. I don’t lie unless I have to. When I was in Chelyabinsk, Agnessa let me hold her elbow when we crossed the street. Donnie said that’s how these Russian women are. Until they receive a victory rock, there’s no hope of any action.
“I haven’t seen Ag in months,” I said. “She’s a friend. She reminds me of you. She’s got that sense of humor, but not so cutting. And answer me this, why are Slavic women either as short as they are wide, or supermodels?”
“She’s a supermodel?”
“It’s usually the really old ones who are short and fat. The ladies who sweep the streets.”
“Ray, just tell me. Is there anything going on with this woman or not?”
“Did you know they serve patty melts at the Clown and Bard? Bizarre, huh?”
Charlotte hung up on me. I paid for my half-eaten melt and walked home. If I left the lights off I could sit in the living room and drink a beer and watch my landlady paint her nails in her thong and T-shirt. Charlotte had given me an idea. As soon as Agnessa’s fiancée visa came through I’d tell Charlotte my work in Prague was finished. I’d tell her I was coming home with my friend Agnessa, who wanted to start a new life in the States. Of course, she would stay with me until she found a place of her own. Charlotte would lose her mind. Maybe Agnessa and I could double date with Charlotte and the film critic. It would be fun.
My calls to Charlotte started going to voice mail, my e-mails went unanswered. My landlady got curtains. I took Ray Jr. to IMAX to see a movie about coral reefs. He vomited into my lap. I was counting on associating with Lorna a little, but she clapped her hand over her nose and told me to go home. There was a message on my voice mail from Agnessa, wondering whether I’d made her airplane reservations. Nothing from Charlotte after two full weeks.
I decided it was time to come home.
* * *
The forced-air heat comes on. Outside, big messy snowflakes blow out of the sky. From my window I can see across the snowy street into the Noble Rot, where wine is a meal. Once Charlotte stops playing possum and gets up off the bathroom floor I can take her right over there. Show there are no hard feelings. She thinks I am a vengeful type, controlling, but she has me all wrong.
Playing possum. I have to laugh. It is how we met, how she fell for me. I was still at the pest control company out on Foster Road. One spring morning she’d called up fairly hysterical. There was a dead possum in her tulips. A few of us were in the break room, shaking the snack machine to see if we could free a half-released bag of Doritos. The supervisor came in and thought we might want to draw straws. Charlotte lived in Lake Oswego, where the ladies tend to have nothing better to do than go to yoga, get their nails done, and flirt with the hired hands. Sometimes you can even get lucky.
Charlotte came to the door wearing baggy shorts and a University of Michigan T-shirt. Reading glasses on her head and a pen and sheaf of papers in one hand. Mint-green toenail polish. She held the back door open for me.
“I would have just tossed him in the trash but the garbage isn’t until next Wednesday. That didn’t seem very, I don’t know, hygienic.”
But when we got to the side yard where the tulips grew there were only a few flattened stalks, a petal or two strewn about.
“He was just here,” she said, then whirled on her heel and startled me by punching me in the arm. She had a great loud laugh. “He was playing possum. Oh my God.”
She offered me a beer for my trouble, and I told her that possums don’t actually play dead, that they’re so frightened they fall into a real coma. Then, after a few hours, they rouse themselves and go on their way. Charlotte thought that was fascinating. She made me sit down at her kitchen table and tell her more.
Not many women have ever looked at me that way.
* * *
Tonight she came over to my apartment uninvited. I’d sent her an e-mail two days ago telling her I was home from Prague, in case she cared. I didn’t tell her where I live. I figured I’d let it slip next week, after Agnessa arrives from Chelyabinsk.
“Hello!” she said, stomping the snow off her red cowboy boots before coming right on in. She walked around my front room. Touched the DVDs stacked on top of the TV, picked up the empty Czechvar bottle on the desk beside the computer. Flipped through a stack of mail on the end table beside the couch.
“You settled right in here, didn’t you?”
“It’s good to see you,” I said. It was good to see her. She wasn’t wearing any perfume.
“I got your new address from Elaine,” she said. “How’s the jet lag?”
“Who?” I knew who. Elaine was the only person who was aware I’d moved to Southeast Ankeny.
“I had a dream about you last night.” I didn’t know where I was going with this, but chicks always liked to hear that you had a dream about them.
“I came to get my ring back,” she said. She was in one of those moods. Fine.
“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get it.”
She pulled her hair out of its scrunchie and pulled it back up on top of her head. She didn’t sit down.
I took my time. I walked down the long hallway to my bedroom. I sat on the bed in the dark. It occurred to me that Agnessa was going to need someplace to put her clothes. I didn’t have a bureau, but instead used the top two shelves in the closet. I walked back down the hallway. Charlotte wasn’t there. From the kitchen I could hear the freezer door open, then Charlotte’s loud laugh. Ha!
I stood in the middle of my front room, stared at a poster I’d taken from our old house, black-and-white, a young couple kissing on a Paris street. It had some name in French.
“This wasn’t something I wanted to tell you over the phone, but one night someone broke into my flat in Prague and stole your ring,” I called into the kitchen. I was glad not to have to look her in the eye. “They took my wallet too. And my passport.”
She came back into the living room holding the frozen top layer of our wedding cake. “I can’t believe this.”
“It’s our wedding cake,” I said.
“Yeah, I know what it is. How is it you still have it?”
“You said I could take anything I wanted.”
“What did you do with it for the two months you were in Prague?”
“I got a sentimental streak a mile wide, so sue me.”
She started shaking her head. She shook her head and laughed. Laughing and crying, mascara running. “At first I thought Elaine was the nut job, but it’s you! I didn’t believe her when she said you didn’t even go to Prague. It was impossible. No one is that crazy. She said if I didn’t believe her to check the freezer.”
“Elaine is a nut job,” I said. “She thinks she’s a witch.”
“Stop, Ray, just stop.”
“She wanted to put a spell on you but I wouldn’t let her.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“The guys broke into my flat when I was out one night with Agnessa,” I said. “You wanted the truth and this is the truth. I’m in love with Agnessa.”
“The girl who lives with her parents and likes stuffed animals?” She put the wedding cake on the table so she could cross her hands over her chest like she does and throw her head back, the better to laugh her guts out. She was lucky I didn’t throttle her right there and then.
I said that I strolled across the Charles Bridge with Agnessa, and admired the astronomical clock with Agnessa, and that Agnessa’s family actually owned the Clown and Bard.
She said, “God, Ray, could you be a bigger loser?”
I stared at her. She wasn’t supposed to say that.
“That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.”
She stalked down the hall to the bathroom to find some tissue to wipe her eyes. I followed her, and when she turned around I grabbed her by the neck and gave her a good shake. Grabbing a woman by the arm is a loser’s game. They throw your hand off and shriek, “Don’t touch me!” and act as if you’re some low-life abuser. I just needed her to shut her up, and the neck is the pipeline to the mouth. I will admit that after she got quiet, I tossed her against that scalding-hot water pipe just to get my point across. So sue me.
Back in the kitchen, I put the frozen wedding cake back into the freezer. I looked out the window. Down on the street a girl rode past on her bike, the flakes settling on her hot-pink bike helmet. Portland is cold enough to invite snow but too warm to keep it. It has something to do with the Japanese current. Charlotte could tell you, but she isn’t coming out of the bathroom anytime soon.
* * *
The snow stops like I said it would. I put on my Vans and locate my passport in the top drawer of my desk. Outside, the air feels good on my arms. The back of my neck is nice and cool. The forced-air heat was way too much in that place. In the parking lot I pull the plates off my truck, crunch across the snow, and stuff them into the dumpster behind Esparza’s. Just as I’m closing the lid, I hear the slow koosh-koosh of bald tires on snow and look up to see the art car rolling down the street. I tell you, I’ve always been lucky.
At PDX I call the phone company to turn off my service. I’m doing Agnessa a favor. I only want the best for her and it’s best for her to go with the guy with the multiple TVs. Then I call 911 and report an intruder. I give my address and tell them it’s right across the street from Noble Rot, where wine is a meal. Then I buy a ticket for the next plane out. Like I said before, I’m a simple guy. I take life as it comes.
MULHOLLAND DIVE
BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles
(Originally published in Los Angeles Noir)
Burning flares and flashing red and blue lights ripped the night apart. Clewiston counted four black-and-whites pulled halfway off the roadway and as close to the upper embankment as was possible. In front of them was a firetruck and in front of that was a forensics van. There was a P-one standing in the middle of Mulholland Drive ready to hold up traffic or wave it into the one lane that they had open. With a fatality involved, they should have closed down both lanes of the road, but that would have meant closing Mulholland from Laurel Canyon on one side all the way to Coldwater Canyon on the other. That was too long a stretch. There would be consequences for that. The huge inconvenience of it would have brought complaints from the rich hillside homeowners trying to get home after another night of the good life. And nobody stuck on midnight shift wanted more complaints to deal with.
Clewiston had worked Mulholland fatals several times. He was the expert. He was the one they called in from home. He knew that whether the identity of the victim in this case demanded it or not, he’d have gotten the call. It was Mulholland, and the Mulholland calls all went to him.
But this one was special anyway. The victim was a name and the case was going five-by-five. That meant everything about it had to be squared away and done right. He had been thoroughly briefed over the phone by the watch commander about that.
He pulled in behind the last patrol car, put his flashers on, and got out of his unmarked car. On the way back to the trunk, he grabbed his badge from beneath his shirt and hung it out front. He was in civies, having been called in from off-duty, and it was prudent to make sure he announced he was a detective.
He used his key to open the trunk and began to gather the equipment he would need. The P-one left his post in the road and walked over.
“Where’s the sergeant?” Clewiston asked.
“Up there. I think they’re about to pull the car up. That’s a hundred thousand dollars he went over the side with. Who are you?”
“Detective Clewiston. The reconstructionist. Sergeant Fairbanks is expecting me.”
“Go on down and you’ll find him by the— Whoa, what is that?”
Clewiston saw him looking at the face peering up from the trunk. The crash test dummy was partially hidden by all the equipment cluttering the trunk, but the face was clear and staring blankly up at them. His legs had been detached and were resting beneath the torso. It was the only way to fit the whole thing in the trunk.
“We call him Arty,” Clewiston said. “He was made by a company called Accident Reconstruction Technologies.”
“Looks sort of real at first,” the patrol officer said. “Why’s he in fatigues?”
Clewiston had to think about that to remember.
“Last time I used Arty, it was a crosswalk hit-and-run case. The vic was a marine up from El Toro. He was in his fatigues and there was a question about whether the hitter saw him.” Clewiston slung the strap of his laptop bag over his shoulder. “He did. Thanks to Arty we made a case.”
He took his clipboard out of the trunk and then a digital camera, his trusty measuring wheel, and an eight-battery Maglite. He closed the trunk and made sure it was locked.
“I’m going to head down and get this over with,” he said. “I got called in from home.”
“Yeah, I guess the faster you’re done, the faster I can get back out on the road myself. Pretty boring just standing here.”
“I know what you mean.”
Clewiston headed down the westbound lane, which had been closed to traffic. There was a mist clinging in the dark to the tall brush that crowded the sides of the street. But he could still see the lights and glow of the city down to the south. The accident had occurred in one of the few spots along Mulholland where there were no homes. He knew that on the south side of the road the embankment dropped down to a public dog park. On the north side was Fryman Canyon and the embankment rose up to a point where one of the city’s communication stations was located. There was a tower up there on the point that helped bounce communication signals over the mountains that cut the city in half.
Mulholland was literally the backbone of Los Angeles. It rode like a snake along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from one end of the city to the other. Clewiston knew of places where you could stand on the white stripe and look north across the vast San Fernando Valley and then turn around and look south and see across the west side and as far as the Pacific and Catalina Island. It all depended on whether the smog was cooperating or not. And if you knew the right spots to stop and look.
Mulholland had that top-of-the-world feel to it. It could make you feel like the prince of a city where the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply. The foot came down heavy on the accelerator. That was the contradiction. Mulholland was built for speed but it couldn’t handle it. Speed was a killer.
As he came around the bend, Clewiston saw another firetruck and a tow truck from the Van Nuys police garage. The tow truck was positioned sideways across the road. Its cable was down the embankment and stretched taut as it pulled the car up. For the moment, Mulholland was completely closed. Clewiston could hear t
he tow motor straining and the cracking and scraping as the unseen car was being pulled up through the brush. The tow truck shuddered as it labored.
Clewiston saw the man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform and moved next to him as he watched.
“Is he still in it?” he asked Fairbanks.
“No, he was transported to St. Joe’s. But he was DOA. You’re Clewiston, right? The reconstructionist.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got to handle this thing right. Once the ID gets out, we’ll have the media all over this.”
“The captain told me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling you too. In this department, the captains don’t get blamed when things go sideways and off the road. It’s always the sergeants and it ain’t going to be me this time.”
“I get it.”
“You have any idea what this guy was worth? We’re talking tens of millions, and on top of that he’s supposedly in the middle of a divorce. So we go five-by-five-by-five on this thing. Comprende, reconstructionist?”
“It’s Clewiston and I said I get it.”
“Good. This is what we’ve got. Single car fatality. No witnesses. It appears the victim was heading eastbound when his vehicle, a two-month-old Porsche Carrera, came around that last curve there and for whatever reason didn’t straighten out. We’ve got treads on the road you can take a look at. Anyway, he went straight off the side and then down, baby. Major head and torso injuries. Chest crushed. He pretty much drowned in his own blood before the FD could get down to him. They stretchered him out with a chopper and transported him anyway. Guess they didn’t want any blowback either.”
“They take blood at St. Joe’s?”
Fairbanks, about forty and a lifer on patrol, nodded. “I am told it was clean.”
There was a pause in the conversation at that point, suggesting that Clewiston could take whatever he wanted from the blood test. He could believe what Fairbanks was telling him or he could believe that the celebrity fix was already in.
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