“Probably not.”
“And even if he did tell her, and she raised a fuss, in that situation the police wouldn’t give a damn. For one thing, if the couple were on a family plan, which most married folks are, both the phones are probably registered to the husband. So technically, and legally, he’d be asking me to copy stuff off his own phone. And anyway, the police have got worse things to worry about too. Rapes . . . murders . . . extortion.”
He seems like a guy who chooses his words carefully, and the last one resonates. “For the sake of discussion,” Richard says, “let’s suppose that somebody came across a cell phone that belonged to someone who died violently. And this person brought the phone to you. My guess is they probably would tell you some bogus story about who the phone belonged to and why they needed the data off it. Something fairly run-of-the-mill. Regardless, let’s say you did what they asked you to do. And then the police found out about it. What would happen then?”
“That could cause me some serious trouble. But if it was brought to me under false pretenses, it’d probably mitigate in my favor. Especially if I then cooperated with the police, and I probably would. I’ve got a couple of kids that depend on me.”
“And a wife, I assume?”
“We’re separated. My kids live with her. I get ’em every other weekend. Want to cut the bullshit and give me a description of this individual who might’ve gotten their hands on the violently dead person’s phone?”
“Happy to oblige. He’d be about my height. Six three or six four. Heavier than I am, probably two twenty-five, two thirty. Dark complexion, dark hair cut short, not much gray in it. Around fifty years old. If I had to guess, I’d say this person might’ve rung your doorbell sometime in mid- to late August.”
“I can categorically assure you that nobody anywhere close to that description has asked me to do anything to a wireless device that belonged to someone who suffered a violent death. Not in August . . . not in September . . . not in October. Not ever, actually.”
Richard’s intuition tells him he’s looking at the man who knows what was on Jacinta Aguilera’s cell phone. It also tells him that this man wishes he didn’t know, that there’s one job he wishes to God he hadn’t accepted. Furthermore, it’s clear to him, perhaps from the expectant expression on Rupert’s face, that the younger man’s last statement was not an attempt to end the conversation, that it was instead an invitation to pose another question. What the right question might be he can’t imagine.
And then, as used to happen with such regularity that it seemed commonplace, the kind of thing that would fall into your lap if you were smart and worked hard and listened to people and showed them you were willing to walk the proverbial mile in their shoes, it presents itself to him. Even as he asks it, he suspects that sooner rather than later, he’s going to wish he hadn’t recognized the opening for what it was. “Has somebody who doesn’t fit that description approached you with such a request?”
“Yeah.”
“Recently?”
“The nineteenth of August.”
The day after the Aguilera shootings. “Could you tell me what he looked like?”
Rupert crosses his legs and locks his hands behind his head. “It wasn’t a ‘he,’” he says. “The person who asked was very much a ‘she.’”
She watches him descend the rickety steps and head for her car. He’s carrying his umbrella, but it’s rolled up, even though if anything it’s raining harder than it was when he entered the house an hour and twenty-two minutes ago. He walks with his head down, studying the ground as if at any moment it might open beneath his feet. He doesn’t even look before crossing the street.
She knows, much better than most, when a man is about to lie to her. And as impossible as it would’ve seemed when she woke up this morning, he’s about to lie to her now. Why he will lie is of greater interest than what he will lie about. She will eventually learn the answer to the latter question, but she suspects she may never know the answer to the former. He must not have a clue how she feels about him. He’d probably be stunned to know that she thinks of him as Sluggo. This is partly due to the deliberate manner in which he goes about his business. But it’s also because that was the name of the dog she had when she was a child. He moved slowly too, especially as he grew older. He lay around a lot. If you dropped down next to him, he would let you rest your head on his broad back. She went to sleep like that many nights, and her father picked her up and carried her to bed.
Or maybe, after all, Richard Brennan knows exactly how she feels about him. In which case his lie will mean many things at once.
He opens the door, gets in but doesn’t speak.
“Well?” she finally asks, a little more loudly than planned.
He won’t look at her. “Another dead end.”
Now she can’t look at him either. She glances at the house. A gap in the blinds disappears. “So he’s not our guy?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“What were you talking about so long?”
“He was explaining how somebody might go about doing what he swears he didn’t.”
She turns back to him just as he’s rubbing his eyes. In that instant, he looks like a man who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. He could be sixty. He could be seventy. “Are you saying you believe him?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”
She starts the car and pulls into the street.
He tells her that after school the next day, Franek is going to L.A. with Sandy and her parents. They’ll be down there for the entire weekend—Bob and Sue plan to take them to Disneyland and show his nephew what’s left of Hollywood—and he thinks he’ll seize the opportunity to drive down there himself and catch up with his editor. There are several other things he needs to discuss with him, and he might well possess some insight into what they ought to do next.
She doesn’t bother to ask if he’d like company. He’s a truthful man. Why make him lie twice?
The Magic Kingdom is right across the freeway. But from Franek’s window, about all you can see is the hotel parking lot and, beyond that, a wrought-iron fence and another parking lot where fifty or sixty U-Haul trucks stand waiting to be stuffed with people’s household belongings.
The phone rings, so he lets the curtains fall shut, steps over to the bedside table, and lifts the receiver.
“Francis X,” Sandy says, “here’s the deal.” She tells him her parents are feeling nostalgic and have decided to drive down to San Clemente, where they spent their honeymoon, and eat dinner on the pier. “Now, officially, we’re invited to tag along. Unofficially, I suspect they’d be positively euphoric if we remained behind and either ate in that café off the lobby or at the taqueria.”
“Where is the taqueria?”
“On the other side of U-Haul. Didn’t you see it coming in? We can walk to it, but they don’t want us to go any further than that. What’s your preference?”
He’s sitting on the side of the bed. A few moments ago, while paging through the loose-leaf binder about the hotel, he discovered you can watch “adult films” on the TV. You have to pay extra for them, though, and he wonders if they would show up on the bill as a specific charge or if it would just say that he watched some movies and not what kind. The free stuff he can view online is getting old. “I don’t know,” he says. “What’s your preference?”
She lowers her voice. “My preference,” she says, “is for you to act like a man. Be decisive. If you were an American, in two or three years you’d be able to vote for president and die in Iraq. You can’t even decide whether you want to eat a taco or a croissant?”
The other day, she debuted new hair. Rather than reddish-brown, it’s now silver with a few darker streaks, and the effect is to make her look older. Last night, for the first time, he let himself fantasize about her. Previously, his conjuring was limited to teachers at his former school. In his favorite scenario, each male in the class is assigned a day and time to appe
ar at a room on the third floor, overlooking Planty. When the door opens, one of the teachers is standing there, dressed all in white like a nurse, and the room has a hospital bed in it as well as an IV stand. She tells you that she’s been assigned as your personal sexual clinician. Unbuttoning her blouse, she says not to worry about making too much noise, because the door and the walls are padded. He usually cycles through two or three teachers per session, but he almost always finishes up with his Information Sciences instructor, Mrs. Jarzynka, who’s about thirty-eight and has hair that looks exactly like this crazy girl’s since she dyed it. It’s uncanny. Last night, he submitted himself to Nurse Sandy.
“Doprowadzasz mnie do szalenstwa,” he says now.
“What in the name of Lady Gaga does that mean?”
It means “You’re leading me to madness,” but he’s not about to translate. Instead, he says, “I want to eat the tacos.”
“All right.”
“But I want to bring them back and eat them here.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“And I want to smoke a joint.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I’ve got four.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She drops her voice even lower. “I don’t suppose you had the foresight to bring along a lighter?”
He hadn’t thought about that. Frantically, he looks around, hoping to see one of those little matchbooks like you’d find in almost any Polish hotel, but there’s not one. They’ve stuck him in a nonsmoking room.
“It’s all right,” she says, as though she’s read his mind. “I saw a 7-Eleven next to the taqueria. We can pick up something there.”
“There is one other thing I want to do,” he says.
“And what’s that, X? Just say it.”
“While we smoke the joints, I want to watch a dirty movie.”
The silence on the other end tells him that he’s gone too far and made a complete fool of himself.
“I will not watch a dirty movie with you,” she finally says, a strange little growl in her voice, “until after I’ve had my dinner. You can mark my words, Francis X. They’re written in red.”
When Bob and Sue Lyons return from San Clemente, all the lights in their suite are on, but Sandy’s not there. He calls her cell but gets no answer.
“She must be with Franek,” his wife says. “But why doesn’t she pick up?”
Dread announces itself in the pit of Bob’s stomach, where space is already at a premium, due to the surf ’n’ turf special, a massive slab of mud pie, and more wine than he should have drunk before driving. Thank God he asked for an extra key. “I’ll check up on them,” he tells Sue. “You go ahead and get ready for bed.”
The room is on the same floor as theirs but about two-thirds of the way down the corridor. When he gets there, he presses his ear to the door but can’t hear a thing. He knocks two or three times, but nothing happens. Finally, he takes a deep breath, inserts the card in the lock, and turns the handle.
The bathroom door is open, and the light above the sink is on. There’s a funny smell in the air, but he can’t identify it because he’s allergic to red wine and his nose is partially plugged. From where he’s standing, the bed isn’t visible. He takes a couple more steps.
His daughter and Franek are lying fully clothed on top of the covers. They’re sound asleep. Her left foot, still shod, rests on his right shin, but other than that they aren’t touching. The boy has a remote control in his hand, but whatever movie they were watching must have long since ended. The set is still on, and a screen icon asks Buy Again?
Gently, he pulls the control out of the kid’s hand and switches off the TV. He wonders if he shouldn’t pick his daughter up, carry her to their suite, and put her to bed. But they’d have to make the sofa down, and she might wake. She looks so peaceful lying there. And anyway, he wouldn’t mind having some fun with Sue.
He tiptoes toward the door and, before leaving, reaches into the bathroom and switches off the light.
Saturday morning finds Richard in San Francisco rather than L.A., in a corner room at the Marriott–Union Square. He drove up here yesterday afternoon to clear his mind before taking the next step, and he chose this particular hotel because it’s the last one he ever stayed in with his family. Back then, it was called the Crown Plaza. They’d driven up to see a Chagall exhibition. November 2006.
He makes a cup of coffee and drinks it while scanning the paper on his laptop. When he finishes, he looks at his phone and discovers a text sent a couple of hours ago by Monika, wondering if he’s communicated with Franek since he left for southern California. He sends her a reply saying he heard from Bob last night, that they’d checked into their hotel and everything was fine. To his relief, there’s no message from Maria.
He showers, then goes out to have breakfast at Lori’s Diner, a place Julia hated but tolerated because Anna loved the retro motifs, especially the ’59 Edsel parked opposite the counter. The booth closest to the old lime-colored hardtop is taken, but he finds one not too far away and orders another cup of coffee and the seasonal fruit salad. He didn’t really come for the food per se.
While he waits for his salad, he sips his coffee and observes the other patrons. It’s late enough that the young couple in one booth, who have chosen to sit on the same side, holding hands and whispering to each other and even exchanging a couple of R-rated kisses, have probably spent two or three morning hours having sex in one of the nearby hotels. But it’s early enough that the couple in another booth are dealing with two ravenous, querulous kids. He can’t see the children’s mother—she’s got her back to him—but the father looks like he woke up wondering exactly what crimes he committed to merit the punishment his life has turned into. Every time one of the kids shrieks, his face tightens. Finally, he leans across the table, and though Richard can’t hear him over the jukebox, he can read his lips: Shut the fuck up.
“Love me tender,” Elvis pleads, “love me sweet.”
He eats his soggy fruit, has a second cup of coffee, and pays the check. On the way out, he has to pass the booth where the family is sitting. The kids—a four- or five-year-old boy with tousled red hair and his strawberry-blonde sister, who’s about a year younger—are happy now, both of them working on stacks of pancakes. But he can tell that their parents are unlikely to utter pleasant words to each other for hours, if not days. Their mother is picking at her poached egg, her eyes narrowed into a look of concentration that neither this egg nor any other could ever warrant. Her husband is shoveling omelet into his mouth, which is probably wise since from the look of things, he’s going to need a certain amount of strength to survive the ordeal that lies ahead.
Decorum calls for Richard to walk past their table and out the door, but his legs have quit moving, though he’s attuned to his surroundings. The Big Bopper is singing “Chantilly Lace,” and a waitress has just stepped away from the counter with two platters balanced on each arm. Through the plate-glass window, he can see a cable car blocking the intersection of Sutter and Powell.
The children pay him no mind. But before long, he’s drawn their mother’s attention away from her poached egg, and that alerts her husband, who is now staring at him too, another hunk of omelet speared on the tines, poised between plate and mouth. The guy’s about thirty, a redhead like his son. He wears glasses with black plastic rims, a long-sleeved polo shirt, and a nice watch—a Tissot, Richard would guess, not one of the flashiest, just a well-crafted timepiece that might last the rest of his life. Some people look stupid, but this man is not among them. He has an intelligent face. He’s smart enough to know a good watch when he sees one, tasteful enough not to value shiny objects with lots of bells and whistles.
Husband and wife finally quit looking at Richard long enough to exchange glances. This is their family that’s arrayed around the table, and a strange man is standing over them. You never know what kind of crazy person you mig
ht meet in San Francisco. He could be about to flash himself, right there in front of the kids. Things like that do happen. He could be about to ask them if they’re saved, or to try to hand them some kind of cult literature. In San Francisco, the fact that he looks like a solid, middle-class citizen might be deceiving. This is not the hinterland. It’s not even San Jose.
Perhaps for the first time since they woke this morning, the children’s parents have reached agreement. Something will have to be said.
The guy lays his fork down. “Do we know you?” he asks.
“No,” Richard tells him. “I was just thinking what a great-looking family you’ve got. I guess it stopped me in my tracks.” He gestures at the intersection, where the cable car is pulling away. “It’s a gorgeous morning. Hope you all enjoy yourselves.” Within seconds, he’s outside, shielding his eyes from the blinding sun.
He returns to the hotel, picks up his digital imaging binoculars, puts on a fleece jacket, and heads for Fisherman’s Wharf.
It’s a cloudless day, not even a wisp of fog, and he’s struck, once again, by the constant smell of food. He can’t think of another city where so many scents ought to seem enticing. Certainly not New York, which to his mind always reeks of the subway, as if the entire city were one big tunnel crying out to be deodorized. L.A. has no identifiable smell. How much of a city can you smell from your car? There’s too much wind to give Boston a characteristic aroma unless you’re within shouting distance of the Union Oyster House. Dublin? Lamb and mint jelly. London? The Thames. Dortmund smells like hops. Why wouldn’t it, with a brewery on every block?
Krakow? Better not go there.
When he reaches Fisherman’s Wharf, he can’t help but wish he were hungry, but he’s not. The last time he was here, he had a bread bowl and a huge shellfish platter, washed down with a couple mugs of Anchor. He also consumed a Blondie Sundae, which was loaded with chunks of brownies and walnuts and ice cream and topped by a Biscoff drizzle. There’s much to be said for maintaining a healthy appetite. Hunger isn’t always a negative. He wishes there were something, anything, that he could honestly say he desires to put in his mouth, no matter how bad it might be for his health. But today there isn’t. Most days there’s not.
The Unmade World Page 19