Power Slide

by Susan Dunlap

  Surprisingly, she nodded.

  It made me very uneasy. “Okay, here’s what I know,” I said. “Hammond’s Oscar was in a house either he and Guthrie shared, one of them used, or neither of them did and it was only kept as a drop for a burglary ring run by the same woman who actually stole it.”

  “And?”

  “Guthrie hired Hammond to break into his sister’s house, to go down through the fireplace.”

  “And?’

  “That’s it. Now you?”

  She put down her pad and looked directly at me. “The body you found in the park by the Palace of Fine Arts was Ryan Hammond.”

  “What?”

  “The body is Ryan Hammond.”

  I couldn’t take it in. It was all I could do to mutter, “Not Guthrie?”

  Guthrie’s body is Ryan Hammond? How could that be? Guthrie, my Guthrie, the guy who made love to me a week ago, was someone I don’t even know? I’ve never known? He didn’t even tell me his fucking right name!

  Guthrie is Ryan Hammond. He was the kid with Melissa when she stole the Oscar!

  “What do you make of that?”

  How the hell do I know, bitch! You drop this bomb on me, then you sit and watch me smolder in the ruins! I could poke your eyes out with my thumbs.

  “Ms. Lott?”

  Do not give her the satisfaction.

  “Now the issue is who killed Ryan Hammond. Who would have done that?”

  I “saw” Ryan Hammond, the stranger, lying under Guthrie’s car, pretending he was Guthrie as I held his hand and felt him die. That was convoluted crazy, but the whole thing—Guthrie, Ryan Hammond—was like a jigsaw with the pieces all mixed up. I couldn’t make sense of it, not now, not with Higgins staring at my face.

  With everything I’d ever learned about acting, I made myself focus on a pleasant scene, on walking into Renzo’s first thing in the morning and him handing me a white porcelain cup of espresso. I smelled the coffee. I saw him smiling. I felt the back of a metal chair as I sat down to sip.

  I may have had the smallest of smiles on my face when I looked at Higgins. “It tells me I know nothing at all about the man and cannot help you.” I stood up. “Thank you for coming by to tell me.”

  And then I counted the moments till she cleared out and I could get a handle on the guy I’d been near to loving not having been him at all.

  32

  Ryan Hammond was Guthrie. How could he not have told me?

  Ryan Hammond was Guthrie. What did that mean?

  I wanted to jump on a Kawasaki and speed across town, roaring up hills, cutting through alleys, taking corners so fast the pavement would scrape my hip. I wanted the wind to sear my face. I needed to outrace my shock and anger and the mire of confusion.

  I wanted to sit here and bawl.

  Instead, I walked across Columbus Avenue into Chinatown, where you have to be alert on sidewalks jammed with elderly locals and tourists who stop abruptly to stare at dead chickens hanging in shop windows.

  My Guthrie was Ryan Hammond. It was crazy to feel that I’d made love in the back of his truck with a stranger, but I couldn’t shake that. Same guy, just different name. But he wasn’t the same guy. Not at all.

  Our whole relationship was based on not asking. Why are you changing the rules now?

  Because you lied to me, you bastard!

  I crossed Grant Avenue and cut down Kearney against the flow of one-way traffic. Lied? Yes and no. I’d known him ten or so years. By then he—Ryan Hammond—had been Guthrie for a decade. When did I expect him to have told me? Right away? Hardly. When we first made love? Oh, and by the way I’m using an alias? Last Sunday, the day he died?

  Last Sunday. Maybe he would have if he’d met us that morning.

  I’d been in such an analytical mode in L.A., I’d stopped thinking of him here, last Saturday, the day before he died. But suddenly, I was back in the intensity of that day when he said he was near to loving me. And me, him. That day when he was desperate to talk to Leo, desperate to deal with something that was—How had he put it?—beyond absolving. He’d been so close to doing what he had to, so close to being with me. I couldn’t bear to let myself linger on that, on what could have been for him and me. I had to keep walking, pushing the emotion behind.

  But I remembered what I’d said, as we stood in the courtyard, his arms around me. I’d said: “I do know you. There’s something we share—I can’t put it into words, but with you I’m at home in a way I am with no one else. There’s a reason for that and it’s beneath the surface of who you are. I’m not about to give that up. No event is going to change it.”

  After that he went to Gabriella’s to return something. To return something to a woman who was not his sister at all.

  But Gabriella had insisted she never saw Guthrie.

  Of course! She hadn’t seen Guthrie—not her brother, Damon. If she had opened the door, it was to Ryan Hammond, a stranger. She saw a stranger who announced he’d taken on her brother’s identity. Ryan Hammond, the kid lured by her vengeful brother into his burglary scheme.

  I cut across the overpass to Portsmouth Square, zigzagged through the park, took a couple of alleys, and emerged on Polk Street, the old gay mecca back when Castro Street was merely a streetcar stop on the way to the Sunset District.

  I thought of Guthrie’s house in the canyon down south and I laughed. I’d wondered if Guthrie had shared the house with Ryan Hammond. It turns out they kept closer company than I could ever have imagined.

  Those cylinders—chimneys—he built in the desert. He kept lowering himself down to see if he could deal with his fear. The night the real Damon Guthrie hired him for the burglary, the two of them climbed onto the roof. He—Ryan Hammond—was the one supposed to go down the chimney. Had he panicked? Looked down that dark chute and been paralyzed? Was that the reason he kept trying to prove to himself he’d outlived that fear?

  It left me with one question, the same question that Higgins might have been asking herself, if she hadn’t been so busy lording it over me.

  I was nearly to Gabriella’s house. I kept thinking of her entombed behind her blackout curtains, as Tancarro had said, in the once-lovely rooms she’d pine-paneled into a parody of 1950. Was that her own way of grieving for a rejected brother?

  Had she been as outraged as I’d been a while back when a man had taken advantage of his resemblance to Mike? But if an actual impostor showed up at the door and announced he’d come into possession of Mike’s wallet and driver’s license and then he’d taken over his identity—I’d’ve been so furious I don’t know what I would have done.

  Guthrie isn’t Mike. Gabriella’s not you! I had to keep perspective. But perspective goes both ways. No matter how much Higgins had interrogated Gabriella, if she’d been able to at all, she could never see into this issue the way I could.

  I walked through the Marina where the buildings had collapsed in the earthquake. I thought of Dad, whom I’d loved, who died with his guilt. And of Ryan who’d been overwhelmed by his, who’d been about to do what he could to make things right and then was killed.

  I rounded the corner and was facing the Palace of Fine Arts, looking at the grassy expanse that had held the black convertible and his body.

  I let myself pause only momentarily, then charged up the walk and rang Gabriella’s bell.

  The fog had been rolling in for hours. The dark sky suggested a later hour than 7:00 P.M., the time when residents of easy-access houses like this one were accosted by earnest young environmentalists and desperate religious peddlers, a time when answering the door rarely led to a good result. I balled my fist and pounded on Gabriella’s door. Is this what Guthrie—Ryan Hammond—ended up doing? Did she let him in? “I know you’re in there! I’m not going away! Open this door!”

  If a guy showed up at Mom’s house saying he’d slid into using Mike’s identity because a cop stopped him and Mike had given him his license to hold and, well, now he wanted to give it back to her, give her Mike
’s identity back, Mom wouldn’t have focused on the license or his rationale, she’d simply have told him to come in and then asked him the only question that mattered to her. The question that would lead to all the answers.

  “Gabriella,” I shouted, “where is your brother now? Where is Damon Guthrie?” Where is the real Guthrie?

  Were those footsteps inside? I couldn’t be sure. The wind was crackling the leaves in the neighbor’s trees. I yelled louder, “Where is your brother?”

  If this had been Mom’s house, neighbors from both sides would have been heading toward me. Here, no one could see me over the fence. “Where is Damon!”

  It was dark enough for lights, but there was no light escaping through her windows.

  “Damon was up there on your roof! You called the police! He lowered himself down the chimney and then what? He didn’t realize you’d closed it off, did he? What did you do then? Call the fire department? The police? Did you press charges?” I wasn’t even yelling any more, more talking to myself than shouting at the closed door to the dark room. Over twenty years ago, right before the biggest earthquake in a century—not a chance there would still be a record of that cat-up-a-tree kind of call.

  Wherever she was, she was inside and I was here in the dark and fog. She could wait me out forever. “Fine! I’ll just go have a look at that roof myself.”

  I ran around the corner to the alley. Some kind of extension made the fence higher. I leapt and grabbed for the top, but my hands slipped. I tried again—nothing to get ahold of. There had to be something to stand on in an alley.

  Garbage cans. I was halfway down the alley when I found one and wheeled it back.

  I hoisted myself up, propping my elbows on the fence. Light shone at the edge of the curtains in what must have been the kitchen; she was pulling them back, watching me. The roof would be manageable—two stories up, with ramparts to grab onto. Back then Ryan had press-climbed a yew tree and lowered a rope for the others, but now—

  But the yew was still there! Thick, half-dead looking, taller surely, but mostly decrepit. I could climb it.

  This was crazy. What was I going to see, on the roof, in the dark?

  I hoisted myself closer, unwilling to lower my feet into the mire of the overgrown yard until I had to. Branches were bent, broken, as if someone had pulled it—or climbed it—recently.

  Only my guy would even attempt that. Because he’d done it all those years before.

  He was here asking the same question I was: Where is Damon Guthrie? Why did he need to know? Guthrie may have owed him money, but no way near enough to lead him—a guy who really didn’t want to attract police attention—to climb up on the roof. Why was he so desperate to know?

  He parked his convertible right here and climbed up on it and over the wall.

  That’s crazy!

  Building three chimneys in the desert is crazy. Obsessed! Guilt-ridden!

  After that, climbing up on the roof, back up on the roof, makes sense.

  Also makes noise. Gives an assailant lots of time to grab a blunt object and hit you when you’re vulnerable coming down.

  Why was his body under the car?

  What are cars for? To transport things from one place to another.

  I could get up on that roof. There’d be evidence of his being there—fingerprints, threads, DNA. Evidence that would force Gabriella to talk. If I could make them—Higgins—go after it. Fat chance!

  But I had to try. Keeping an eye on Gabriella behind the curtain, I felt for my phone.

  Hands grabbed me from behind and slammed me hard, headfirst, into the wall.

  33

  “IS SHE DEAD?” Gabriella asked Tancarro.

  I must have been unconscious. What brought me to was the thud from Tancarro dropping me on her living room rug. My head throbbed. My eyes were swelling shut. Through my lashes I could see her wiry frame draped in drab, heavy garments suitable to a house like this where she didn’t turn on the heat. She was standing by a sofa facing a pair of leather chairs. It was a moment before I realized she was talking about me.

  No one knew I was here. I could lie on this floor for days.

  Or worse.

  Was this how my guy—it was so hard to remember he was not Guthrie at all, but Ryan Hammond—was killed?

  I stayed scrupulously still. Gabriella wasn’t watching me; she was staring at Tancarro. But he wasn’t letting me out of his sight.

  I had to do something! Get his gun.

  A gun! His gun? But Ryan Hammond hadn’t been shot. He’d been hit with a pole, a poker, a cylinder—I stared at the big pistol—a pistol barrel?

  “Shoot her now. Before she comes to.” Gabriella sounded angry, terrified, desperate.

  “Gunshot wounds leave blood. You want that sprayed all over your rug?”

  “Move her. Put her in”—she pointed across the hall toward the room with the chimney and the walled-in fireplace—“that room. Won’t matter in there. Just do it.”

  He shot her a look of disgust and resignation.

  “Don’t you dare—”

  “Dare what? I’m here, aren’t I? I’ve been here every time you’ve called for twenty fucking years. What more—”

  “You’re here because you conspired in a felony in which a man died.”

  Tancarro blanched. He gave an unconvincing shrug, turned, and looked ready to grab my feet and haul me, head smacking the floor, in the direction she was pointing. Very slightly, tentatively, I shifted my head. The room swam.

  Tancarro was staring at my feet. He was looking at his gun, trying to decide if he could handle both. But he wasn’t about to give her the weapon.

  What did that mean? My eyes were swelling shut. My head throbbed so hard the room bounced.

  “Go on! Dammit, Pernell, what’re you doing—waiting, as usual?”

  Ignore the pounding. Focus! What was going on with these two? No. No time to figure it out. I needed to startle them, jolt them off their track.

  He turned toward her. “If you—”

  Now or never! “Hey!” I snapped. “You can’t kill me. You’re on the Arts Commission!”

  He stared incredulously, frozen for the moment. I clambered up. I had to lock my gaze onto something that wouldn’t move—the armchair. Even so, a wave of nausea almost floored me.

  “Sit down! Or he will shoot you now!” Gabriella yelled.

  I longed to sink into one of the armchairs, let my head rest against its soft back. Like Ryan? Did he—But no. They hadn’t killed him in here; there’d have been too much blood.

  They didn’t kill him in this room, but they did kill him. My chances—

  Forget that! Focus on this moment. Right now, I needed to watch them both. I swung onto the bench of a spinet, landing hard, sending a new wave of misery through my head and stomach. But I kept my attention on them. Suddenly, I really was letting my thoughts and fears go, as I’d done sitting zazen. I was aware of the icy air, the stale smell, of myself, of them, of our connection. I was alert, waiting for my chance. Willing my eyes open, I stared at Gabriella and said, “Is this where Ryan Hammond sat before you killed him?”

  Her gaze darted toward the hallway and back. “You’re not—”

  “—in a position to bargain? Au contraire. I am Ryan Hammond’s girlfriend. I’m the one who knew he came here, remember? Why do you think I felt confident enough to knock on your door?”

  “You’re a fool,” she said.

  “Enough!” He hit the gun on a metal bowl. She jumped back. My head just about exploded. “Forget it, Gabi. We’re not bargaining. Let’s just get this over with. And you,” he said to me, “get—”

  “Gabi!” I said, “Where is Damon? Your brother? Goddammit, where is he?” My voice was loud, but their silence was way louder. They stared at each other, her dead pale, him with his jaw clenched, knuckles white against the gun butt.

  “Where did he go?” I insisted. “Where is he? Did you break through the wall to the fireplace? Did you call the fire
department? The police? What did you do?”

  They looked like they couldn’t speak.

  “You did something!” I insisted.

  They seemed frozen.

  “You had to do something!”

  Omigod! They’d left him there in the walled-in fireplace!

  Suddenly I was shaking so hard I almost slipped off the bench. “The police!” There had to be an explanation. Some other explanation. I was grasping at straws. “You called the police. The guys heard the sirens while they were on the roof. That’s why they scattered. You told me that, Pernell. Kilmurray told me. Didn’t the police search the roof?”

  “I thought”—her voice was almost inaudible—“I thought . . . the boys were gone. The police . . . came and . . . left.”

  “But they were here! Why didn’t you have them check the roof? What harm—” She gasped.

  But I knew the answer only too well. “The family! You didn’t want it to become public that your brother was trying to break in. You didn’t want to hurt the family. Of course, you couldn’t hurt the family. How could you do that to your parents when they trusted you?”

  Tancarro jolted toward me, but Gabriella’s cry stopped him. I’d hit the mark with her.

  I should have left it there, with her stunned, but I couldn’t. I had to ask, “But after, you must’ve heard him in there? He must’ve yelled, pounded. You had to’ve heard him.”

  “No! No! I left. The house shook. I thought he’d dropped something down there. I didn’t know what. I didn’t think it was him, that he’d done something so crazy, even him. I thought he’d dropped a stink bomb or something. Something that would smell up the house. I was furious. I was scared. I’d had enough of him. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t sleep here.” She was staring at me, suddenly begging me to understand.

  I nodded. “So you went to a hotel?”

  “No, I slept in my office that night and the next night, too. And then the earthquake and I—I got sidetracked . . . Damon and his stupid prank. I never would have—” Gabriella seemed to shrink inside her heavy, ill-matched clothes. I tried to picture her as Pernell Tancarro had described her back then—an up-and-coming attorney, racing to court in an expensive dark suit and Italian high heels, a properly weathered leather briefcase slapping against her leg.