The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  “No,” the man said. “No, that’s not it at all. I just can’t believe you’re asking about that envelope. Green ink? Little wavy lines in a repeat about half an inch wide?”

  I looked at the envelope.

  “Yes,” I said. I felt my heart start to beat a little harder and I wasn’t as hungry or tired anymore.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “That is us. And I can tell you exactly when that came into production, because it was the first thing I did when I got hired here. See, when I came on here—I’m a manager, I been in paper all my life but before that, I was in drafting—well, I’ll get to that—see, OK, let me start again.”

  “Sure,” I said. Suddenly this envelope man was the most enthralling man in the world. I grabbed a pen and my notebook to take notes.

  “When I started here,” the man said, “we were buying our security paper from, well, I probably shouldn’t say who, but I will tell you they were overcharging us. So I go to the president’s office, third week on the job—I am sweating bullets, let me tell you—and I hand him a piece of paper. Now, this was the old president. The father. Tough man. I hand him a piece of paper that I stayed up all night working on. He looks right at me and says, ‘Son, what the heck is this?’ and I say, ‘Sir, that’s our new security paper. Because I cannot in good conscience allow you to continue buying from’ —well, if you know paper, you can guess from who. Then I showed him my spreadsheets. I’d crunched all the numbers, done all the comparisons. Stayed up two nights in a row doing the math. That was one of the longest moments of my life right then, waiting for an answer.

  “Well, long story short, we went into production on my paper the very next week. And we told you-know-who to go to hell. And to date, I’ve saved this company over 164,000 dollars since then by making our security papers in-house.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I still can’t quite figure out where I got the balls to do it. Pardon my language.”

  “Pardoned,” I said. “So what year was that? When you started making the new paper?”

  “The year I started here,” he said again. “1994.”

  “You’re sure?” I said. “You’re absolutely sure? That paper went into production in 1994?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “October ninety-four. Do you want to know what it’s called? The paper?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

  “Green Waves on a Day of Dark Fog,” he said. “That’s what I called it.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s very poetic.”

  “Thank you,” the man said, sounding very sincere. “I really do appreciate that. I’ve never seen the ocean, but I always imagined it looks like that.”

  “It does,” I lied to him. “Just like that.”

  I thanked him a few more times and we got off the phone.

  * * *

  I didn’t know what I’d found, or how to make sense of it, or what it had to do with Merritt. But Ann was still alive in 1994.

  Here’s what I figured: Merritt was writing a letter to his friend Jacob Heartwell. As he often did, as many artists did, as many humans did, he drew on the back of the envelope before he sent it. But when Merritt was writing this letter, he was with Ann, who was supposed to be dead. Not only was she not dead, but she added a bee to the drawing. Was she trying to send a message to Jacob, whoever he was, to let him know she was alive? Or was she just idly sketching? I didn’t know the answers. I also didn’t know why Ann would have pretended to be dead if she wasn’t.

  But the envelope was from 1994. She was supposed to be dead in 1993. She’d drawn that bee.

  When Adam had handed me the Merritt Underwood file it felt like a cord of dead wood I was going to have to drag around with me until I got my license.

  Now it seemed like a jewel box of treasure that all the forces of earth couldn’t keep me away from if they tried. Now it seemed like an oyster, with my pearl somewhere in there, waiting for me to discover it.

  Now it wasn’t just a crime. It was a mystery. My mystery.

  I started again.

  The letter was addressed to a man named Jacob Heartwell. On Melrose I found an internet café and booked an hour of time and searched for Jacob Heartwell. He was a painter who taught at an art school in San Francisco. He’d taught at Parsons in New York for a few years, which was where Merritt had tried, and failed, to get a letter to him. Heartwell didn’t look oversized and sex-powered like the male artists I’d met in Los Angeles. He was thin and had a long face and looked sad.

  It took nine phone calls over eleven days before Jacob Heartwell would talk to me. Including three times that he hung up on me. Finally on the fourth try I got him to stay on the line long enough to explain that I was a private investigator and I was investigating Merritt’s death.

  “Oh,” Jacob Heartwell said, not seeming to be particularly moved by this. “I thought you were a collection agency.”

  I thought he was probably right and I was—PIs were the collection agencies of information, tracking down unpaid knowledge debts and bail jumpers from facts. But that was all somewhat more poetic than was called for by the situation at hand so I just said, “No, not at all. Sorry about that. I’m working for—well, we were hired by Merritt’s parents, before they passed away. Anyway. Yes. Not a bill collector. Can I ask a few questions about Merritt?”

  “Oh,” he said hesitatingly. “OK. That’s somewhat painful.”

  “Were you friends?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said after a long moment. “But we hadn’t spoken in, well, almost two years. When he died.”

  “That sounds like a story,” I said.

  “Well,” Jacob Heartwell said, “anything is a story if you tell it right. But this one, yes, I think you’re right. I think it’s a story. Now, the problem with stories is always where to begin,” he said.

  “At the beginning?” I suggested.

  Heartwell laughed. “Fair enough. Merritt and I went to school together. High school. Pasadena. We were both artists. We were both, you know, fascinated with the world. Full of—well, it seemed like rage at the time. Now I think it was just a kind of love. We were in love with the world, and we wanted the world to love us back. Anyway, we were very close. Best friends. Merritt was the first person to know I was gay. And he took me to a gay bar in Hollywood. Hand to God. This straight boy from Pasadena.

  “After high school, we drifted in and out of each other’s lives, but we were always close. You know what men are like. We don’t need to talk every day for our relationships to be real. Most of the time, we don’t even need to talk at all.

  “And then, he met Ann.”

  Jacob Heartwell paused.

  “You didn’t like Ann?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and I realized he was trying not to cry. “I loved Ann. And I loved Merritt, with her. Ann and I became very close. Immediate friends. We went to plays together. Bad plays, usually. She was so well-read. She read like a gay man—Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, Joan Didion. And when she died, I just could not handle it.

  “And I could not handle Merritt. I didn’t mean not to speak to him for so long. It had nothing to do with Merritt. I wasn’t mad at him. After the funeral I just—I don’t know. I needed a new start. I’ve lost so, so many people. Ann was the last one I could take.

  “I couldn’t keep going after that. It was end my life or start over. I’d done my part, lest you think I just ran away. I nursed many, many men out of this life. Cleaning, medications, the IVs. I told eleven mothers that their sons had gone. No fathers. Not one father wanted to hear it. My life in Los Angeles had become a funeral.

  “So I left Los Angeles, came up here, and started a new life. I’ve . . .”

  He inhaled deeply and sighed.

  “I’ve made the best of it,” he finished. “And then Merritt died, and I realized I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake going so long without speaking with him. I was trying to be someone new,” he said. “And in
the process of doing so, I let go of the best part of myself. I’d lost touch with my family, with—well, Merritt WAS family.”

  “So,” I began, struggling to say something I didn’t have words for. “Did you. I mean. After that.”

  Somehow he answered the question I didn’t know how to ask.

  “There is no map,” he said. “I miss Merritt every day, but as for what I did wrong—starting again is uncharted territory. Everyone has to feel their own way through. But now, every day, I wake up, and I call my sister. And then I call my mother. And then, because I can’t call him, I light a candle for Merritt.”

  That night I tried lighting a candle for Constance. I bought the candle in a drugstore—it was the big kind in a glass jar—and back in my room I thought about Constance and I lit it and nothing happened.

  * * *

  I drove over to Adam’s office to talk to him about it. I sat across from him at his wide messy desk and spelled it all out for him.

  “I don’t know what you want,” Adam said when I was done.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I wanted either. I wanted to solve the mystery of the bee. I wanted Adam to like me. I wanted Adam to be Constance. I wanted to be happy, or at least to envision what happiness might look like. I wanted to be the best detective in the world. I wanted to take every ounce of pain I had ever felt and condense it and transform it into something terrible and beautiful and throw it back to the world and say Now do you see how wrong you were? Don’t you fucking see it?

  “So should I keep going?” I finally asked.

  “I’m not your boss,” Adam said.

  “Well, it’s your case,” I said.

  “My case is closed,” Adam said. He said it as if he were talking to a child. As if I needed things explained to me. Which apparently I did. Adam went on, “Whatever you do next is up to you.”

  I sat there for another minute and neither of us said anything until finally I said, “Well, OK. Thanks,” and Adam gave me one of his little non-smiles and I walked out. Out on Sunset the sun was coming down like an atomic bomb and I realized I’d forgotten to bring in my papers for Adam to sign. My hours. I’d left the papers in my hotel room.

  A woman came up to me. She was about fifty, maybe, and wore an old pair of sweatpants and a halter top and plastic flip-flops. She was sunburned and dirty and was maybe homeless or sick or maybe just drunk or very poor. The lines between categories of undesirability were easily blurred, as I knew all too well. Start off as just poor and it was pretty easy to get to homeless and addicted. Start off addicted and it was a short walk to poor.

  “You got a quarter?” she asked. I didn’t but I had a dollar and so I gave her that instead.

  “You’re a good girl,” the woman said. “You’re a nice kid.”

  They were the kindest words anyone had spoken to me all week. Likely all year. Possibly ever.

  I could have gone back to San Francisco. Gotten my hours signed somehow, gotten my fucking little card. I could have given up on California and gone back to New York or Dallas or Portland and worked some cases and made some money. I could have gone to work for Richter.

  But I didn’t even think about any of those things. They walked into my mind as half-formed and probably wise ideas and then walked right back out.

  Instead my mind stayed with Ann. My mind stayed with the bee.

  I booked my hotel for another week, and starting looking for Hernandezes.

  * * *

  On page 109 of the Richter file was the police officer who’d dealt with Ann’s accident. His name was then Officer, now Detective Hernandez.

  “I don’t think it was me,” he said at first. I’d gotten him on the phone by leaving a bunch of lies on his voice mail. Urgent, murder, et cetera. “There’s a lot of Hernandezes on the force. And I thought you had information regarding an ongoing investigation.”

  “Forty-nine Hernandezes,” I said, “and I do.”

  I reminded him again about Ann’s case and quickly, before he could hang up on me, reminded him that less than two years later, her boyfriend died in a similar accident in Topanga Canyon.

  “That’s not really what we call evidence,” Detective Hernandez said. “This is Los Angeles. You ever been to an emergency room in Los Angeles?”

  “Not today,” I said.

  “You’re waiting nine, ten hours,” Detective Hernandez went on. “You know why? Because every time you’re up, there’s another car crash.”

  “OK,” I said. “It isn’t impossible. But you know,” I said, “it’s a pretty big fucking coincidence.”

  I heard a big sigh from the other end of the phone.

  “Yeah, OK,” he said, still half in his sigh. The universal words admitting life was more complicated than anyone wanted it to be. Yeah. OK. “I’ll see what I can remember and I’ll call you back.”

  “Can we meet in person?” I asked, and added fast: “I’ll take you to lunch. My treat. Anywhere you want.”

  A homicide detective’s day is ten or twelve hours of misery. They aren’t investigating people who were nice to each other. A decent lunch wasn’t the worst offer I could make.

  “OK,” he said. “Tomorrow if I can, the next day if I can’t.”

  It was four days before he had time for me. Or, maybe, before he had a day dark enough to gamble that anything, even a PI, would be better.

  “I’m in Beverly Hills,” he said on the phone. It was close to eight o’clock. He sounded lost, like he didn’t know where Beverly Hills was. “It’s too late for lunch. But if you want to talk anyway. I found my old files. I found them for you.”

  He said it like it was his last lifeline. I grabbed it.

  I met Detective Hernandez at Nate ’n Al’s on Beverly at eight forty-five. He was forty-something, worn-out and heartbroken, serving penance for who knew what sins.

  “It was a strange one,” he said about Ann’s case. “Right by the Magic Castle, off of Hollywood.”

  “Not on Hollywood?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “On Franklin. Just by the Magic Castle. I brought you this—”

  From a briefcase he pulled out a file folder—the file on Ann’s car crash. I felt a rush of endorphins at the sight of it. Before you really saw something, I realized, was the best moment you would have it. Before it could let you down, when the dice were still in the air. For now, the file could be full of mysteries, secrets, solutions, puzzles, everything good.

  From the folder he took a printed, generic street map, some kind of cop-form crime-scene-tool, over which he’d roughly sketched the accident. A car smashed into another car, the second one leaving the curved driveway from the Magic Castle.

  “Franklin Avenue,” he said again. “See this here?” He pointed at the intersection of the two cars. “This always hit me as strange. It was almost as if she was aiming to hit this car. See the angle?”

  I did. He meant that Ann, driving down Franklin in the first car, had meant to hit the person coming out of the Magic Castle.

  “How fast was she going?” I asked.

  “Fast,” Detective Hernandez said. “That’s another strange thing. Had to’ve been doing sixty, at least, for this kind of damage.”

  He showed me pictures of Ann’s car, what was left of it. It was sickening to imagine someone had been in there, every piece of its front half broken and twisted and shattered.

  “How was the other car?” I asked. “I mean, the person in it?”

  “Fine,” the detective said. “Which is odd. Look—”

  He pointed at the drawing again. Ann’s car had hit the other car, a Honda, just at the side of the front end, he explained. The Honda was stopped, waiting for a chance to exit the Magic Castle driveway. The Honda was badly damaged. The driver was fine.

  “Who was the driver?” I asked.

  “Good question,” he said, and rummaged through his papers. He found a name and address, which, against all law and procedure, he wrote down for me.

  �
��So did you ever find out what happened?” I asked.

  He knew what I meant: why this happened; what happened before it.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “She was drunk, driving too fast, hit the car at, like I said, sixty or seventy, head-on. Head hit the windshield, and . . .”

  And she died. “From what I heard about her,” I said. “This doesn’t sound like something she would do.”

  “I know,” Detective Hernandez said. “That’s why it’s stuck with me all these years. Everyone said they just couldn’t imagine her doing something like this. But she did. One mistake, one stupid night, and that was it.”

  He said the words as if they’d stolen something from him, stolen something he’d believed, maybe the last thing—maybe some belief that there was any order at all.

  “What if she didn’t?” I said.

  He made a face. “I know. I know. But it was all there. Everything fit.”

  I asked how he ID’d the body.

  “Her purse was right there. Husband ID’d her. I mean, by height, weight, hair. Her face was . . . gone.”

  “Husband?” I asked.

  Detective Hernandez frowned and looked at his papers again. “Boyfriend. Merritt Underwood. He ID’d the body.”

  That was all he knew. He admitted it didn’t all seem to fit together as well as he’d first thought but, as I well knew, the truth was not always pleasurable or symmetrical. Life was not algebra.

  After we finished eating, I ordered us both mint tea and asked about what had happened in Beverly Hills that day.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said. But I could tell he wanted to talk about it.

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  He looked at his tea. He was aging before my eyes, ojas and prana leaking out as I watched, chakras winding down to stillness.

  “I’ve worked a lot of murder cases,” I said, which was almost true. “I can take it.”

  We stayed for another hour or two and he told me about what happened in Beverly Hills.

  He was right. I didn’t want to know.

  Driving back to Hollywood from Beverly Hills, late that night, everything seemed seedy and ugly, even the sticky palm trees and the gaudy roses and lurid hibiscus.