“I don’t know, but I think he knew who did.” I stared at the letters on the back of the photo, trying to figure out what they meant, then glanced again at the envelope. He’d mailed it two days before. Maybe if I’d checked my mail, I would have asked the right questions when Stewart called and he’d still be alive.
“‘It’s a joke, no shit,’” Cassie said, pointing a ragged purple fingernail at the S in parentheses. “Maybe it’s like a tribute band, you know, Luster is some kind of role model.”
I flipped the photo face up and stared into Luster’s face.
“If it’s a joke, I don’t get the humor in it,” I said.
25
DETECTIVE ROBERT LOGAN knocked on the door to my apartment at nine o’clock the next morning, responding to a call I’d made to report that I’d received evidence in the mail pertaining to the murder of Christine Myers. I stood in the kitchen, backed against the sink with Cassie beside me, and watched a lawyer in a navy-blue suit that cost more than my entire wardrobe open the door to let him in. The night before, when I’d called Frank about the envelope, he’d insisted I have a Scandal Times lawyer present when Logan came calling. He wasn’t being sentimental, he said; they’d take away my camera if they arrested me and without my camera I was useless to the paper. The lawyer resembled the jack of spades, hair slicked back over a Botox-smooth face and a cold, knifey look in his eyes. He’d appeared at my door a quarter of a billable hour before Logan, and we’d spent the time discussing the various strategies I might use to keep my mouth shut.
The lawyer introduced himself as legal counsel representing the weekly newspaper, Scandal Times, and its work-for-hire employee, meaning me, then backed away from the door to let Logan inside the apartment, gesturing with the manicured nail of his forefinger toward the envelope, lying on the dinette. Logan watched the man’s hand until it tired and dropped, a subtle power play to demonstrate he wasn’t going to be ordered around by a libel lawyer, then moved toward the envelope, which I’d sealed in a zip-lock bag. “You opened it?” he asked, glancing up at me.
“Ms. Zero opened it as she would any piece of mail addressed to her,” the lawyer said, “and when she determined that it contained material that could be evidence in a criminal investigation, she placed the envelope in a secure container and notified the authorities at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Logan stared at the lawyer, annoyed, and lifted the baggie by the corner. “What makes you think this is evidence?” he asked, peering at me over the tips of his fingers.
I opened my mouth to speak, remembered I wasn’t supposed to say anything until the lawyer approved, and when he nodded, once, an expression of caution focusing his eyes, I said, “The Mickey Mouse stamps on the envelope, for one; those are the same stamps on the video of Christine’s killing somebody mailed me.”
“If you knew it was evidence by the stamps,” he said, letting the plastic bag swing one way and then the other, pinched between his fingertips, “why did you tamper with that evidence by opening the envelope?”
“Ms. Zero didn’t notice the stamps until she’d already opened the envelope and looked at the contents,” the lawyer explained. “Only after she opened the envelope and noticed it contained a photograph of Andrew Luster did she think to check who may have sent it.”
“Who?” Logan asked, as though not hearing right.
“Andrew Luster,” I said. “Accused of date rape up in Ventura County.”
The baggie swung to a stop and he dropped his hand to his side.
“I’ll advise the lab that biological material containing Ms. Zero’s DNA may be present in the contents,” he said to the lawyer. “The Los Angeles Police Department requests that the publication of any of the material in this envelope be formally cleared with us beforehand.”
“That’s not the way it works,” the lawyer said. “The editors at Scandal Times will notify you of what and when they plan to publish, but they’re within their rights to publish with or without permission.”
Logan made a point of looking at me long and hard, then turned his head to the lawyer. “Remind the editors that cooperation is essential in this case. If they publish this without clearing it with us first, the consequences will be severe.”
The lawyer interpreted that to be the threat it clearly was and asked, “Exactly what consequences are you referring to?”
“Consequences to the criminal investigation, of course,” Logan said, gracing the lie with an easy smile. “Did the girl come within a foot of the envelope, either before or after it was opened?”
Cassie shook her head, purple-limned eyes enthralled with fascination or fear or a combination of both.
“I suppose if the techs find a purple hair, we can figure it’s hers.” He laughed as though demonstrating he wasn’t such a bad guy after all, then turned and darted away, his shoes clipping down the concrete steps.
Later, when we loaded her backpack and the Rott into the Cadillac, Cassie asked why Logan hated me so much.
“You picked up on that?”
“It’s only, like, obvious.”
“Obvious how?”
“Just a vibe I had,” she said, “that if nobody else was around, he’d beat the shit out of you. I got the same feeling sometimes before, you know, when the cops would come visit my mom and one of the stepdads.”
We drove the freeways toward Pop’s house with the top down, the radio blasting hip-hop above the roar of wind. Cassie’s observation about Logan reminded me that her youth was deceptive when it came to understanding all things criminal. She’d been a passive participant in her mother’s cons while still in diapers; when money had been short, Sharon had painted red dots on her daughter’s forehead and begged cash from sympathetic men, claiming she needed to take her baby to the hospital. Most of those born into the criminal life continue the family trade well before reaching maturity, often with the self-awareness of a falling brick, and though Cassie might just as easily return to the short cons of her youth, she had an intuitive grasp of the way criminals think that might allow her to build a better life for herself. She was naturally wary of cops too seeming to know how they regarded the people around them, particularly those they suspected of criminal behavior, and unlike her aunt, she understood that it was far healthier to avoid rather than confront the law.
I hoped she might take advantage of her natural gifts by studying law, maybe become a lawyer, and promised myself I’d support and encourage her if she tried, but that may have been more my fantasy than her reality. The night before, she’d stripped down to a boy-beater T-shirt to model her new tattoo, a suggestively winking blonde Betty Boop inked above a banner etched with Christine’s name. I hadn’t seen too many tattooed, purple-haired lawyers in my travels through the legal system.
I’d hoped to drop off Cassie and her backpack that morning without having to engage Pop in conversation more involved than a wave goodbye, but he stood waiting by the open hood of his Dodge Ram pickup truck and ambled over to meet us before I could take my foot off the brake. He carried a Styrofoam container of hamburger in a grease-stained hand and gave the Rott a good whiff of it before he helped Cassie lift her backpack from the rear seat.
“Brought that toothless dog of yours a little something to eat,” he said. “Why don’t you come inside, I’ll put it in a bowl and he can chow down.”
The Rott was all for accepting the invite. I had to grab on to his collar to keep him in the car. “Busy day,” I said.
“Sure, I understand, just long enough to feed him the grub.”
He gave the meat a little wave to further excite the dog, then he lifted the pack with one hand onto his shoulder and ambled up the walk toward the front door. The thing weighed over fifty pounds, yet he’d picked it up like a sack of groceries. He may have been nearing retirement age but he was still strong, and because he’d figured out a surefire way to get me out of the car, he was craftier than I’d given him credit for. When I let go of his collar, the Rott bounded
out of the car and caught up to Pop’s heels before whirling around to let out a single bark to encourage me to follow.
Pop had cut the waist-high weeds since my last visit and scattered a seed mix that sprouted small, green blades amid the stubble. The front of the house had been scraped of peeling paint, blotches of white primer soaking into patches where the surface had been stripped down to the wood. Next to the front door he’d painted three strips in varying shades of brown, and he turned to point them out as he crossed the threshold. “You got a good eye for color, let me know if you like one of these,” he said, then merged into the interior shadows of the house, the Rott bouncing in behind him.
I stepped into the living room and held my breath as though the air Pop lived and breathed might contaminate me. He continued through to the kitchen, a shadow moving in the open archway, where he clattered a metal bowl to the floor and knelt to feed the dog. Cassie emerged from behind the refrigerator door with a can of off-brand cola, popping the top and swigging away while drifting toward the kitchen table. It shouldn’t have felt so sinister to me, that house. My mother had lived there most of her life. I’d loved my mother, even if we didn’t talk all that often or well. I let myself breathe in the odors of an aging man living alone, the greasy smell of fried foods mingling with dust, mold, and sweat.
“Hey, what’s this?” Cassie asked, hovering over the kitchen table.
“Just an old photo album. I uncovered it the other day while cleaning out some stuff.” Pop boosted himself up with a helping hand on the dog’s back. “It’s got some pictures of your mom in it, back when she was younger than you are now, thought maybe you’d want to see them.”
She flipped the album to the first page and squealed, delighted. I edged into the kitchen, watched her bend over a color snapshot of her mother as a baby. My parents owned an early ’60s Kodak Instamatic back then, the 126-cartridge film so simple to load that it made photography push-button easy. It wasn’t much of a baby shot, angled straight down to Sharon swaddled in her crib, her fat, baby face mottled a sickly blue and purple, the film’s chemistry not stable enough to hold the colors true.
“God, she was ugly!” Cassie said.
“All babies are ugly,” I said, speaking from the experience of having photographed thousands of them.
“Except your own.” Pop leaned his knuckles onto the table and craned his neck to look. “At least, that’s what your mom said, that you were all beautiful babies, though to tell the truth I tended to think none of you were much to look at until you got to two or three years old.”
I inched toward the kitchen table and looked over Cassie’s shoulder while she flipped the page to a montage of baby Sharon photographed in the living room or the front yard, the wheels of Pop’s 1959 Chevy Apache pickup truck the most common background. I’d been born ten years later, the image of my sister as an infant as strange to me as it was to Cassie. The beauty of my mother at age twenty-four in a one-piece bathing suit, two years after giving birth for the first time, shocked me. In all my memories she was old, face prematurely lined by worry and abuse, her body settling down and spreading out to a lumpy shape by the time she’d reached forty. She’d been young and beautiful until the years of children and marriage wore her down, my brother, Ray, coming when Sharon graduated to polka-dot dresses, and then, six years later, when she thought she’d finished with pregnancies, I’d come along, unplanned.
Cassie turned the page to a portrait of the family, dressed in our Sunday best circa 1976, though it was more likely our Saturday best because we rarely went to church. “Probably a wedding,” Pop said. He’d worn his hair longer then, and the suit he’d donned for the occasion sported the grotesquely wide lapels and bell-bottoms of the times, the fabric a shiny purple that would have served better as someone’s bedspread. Mom stood next to him, about a foot to the side and a little behind, her bubble-head hairstyle already ten years out of fashion. Ray huddled on the other side of Mom, shoulders slumping inward, his head raw from the crew cut Pop regularly enforced on him. Sharon stood with her hands on her hips as though annoyed with whoever was taking the photo, about fifteen years old then, her strawberry-blonde hair hanging straight as a plumb line due to the ten minutes she spent every couple of days at the ironing board, ironing it straight. I stood in front of everyone, smiling like a little geek, maybe five years old, my knees scraped red beneath the hem of my lime-green skirt. Something about the photo disturbed me, and it wasn’t until I stayed Cassie’s hand that I noticed that none of us were even close to touching each other.
That realization saddened me, setting me up for the photo on the flip side of the page. We’re all suckers for early photos of ourselves, maybe because they remind us of a time when we still believed in things, when we still had some hope our lives would turn out for the better. In the photograph I’m five years old, sitting on Pop’s shoulders, still in the lime-green dress, my legs wrapped around his neck and my hands holding on to his ears like the reins of a horse, my eyes half-closed and face shining with smiling bliss, while he stares at the camera with a look of supreme paternal tolerance, the kind of look men get when their daughters are pulling their hair or ears or trying to see what daddy looks like with his nose pressed flat against his face. The photograph broke my internal ice faster and more irrevocably than any apology, the sorrow for all the trouble that had come between us welling up so suddenly I threw my hand to my mouth to catch the sob spilling out. I turned to latch on to Pop in a fierce, angry hug and I told him that I must have really loved him then. He stood for a moment with his hands to his side, shocked by the sudden gesture of affection, but when I felt his shoulders shift to return the hug I backed sharply away and slapped the side of my leg to command the Rott’s attention.
“Sorry, like I said, busy day, gotta run,” I said.
I bolted out the front door, leaving Pop stunned speechless, and drove over the pass and down into the San Fernando Valley wondering if I’d unfairly demonized him all these years. Maybe he hadn’t been the bad father I’d remembered him to be. We all behave badly at times. We all have our demons.
Maybe I’d allowed his many moments of violent behavior to blot out memories of the times he’d been patient and caring, and as shocking as it sounded to me then, even loving. His violent rages had victimized everyone in the family, but he’d been more than just an angry father. Maybe I’d surrendered to the pity-me ethos of our times, the cult of victimization in which suffering equals personal merit and becomes a source of social status, encouraging us to feel sorry for ourselves rather than to heal and get on with our lives. The photograph implied that within Pop’s violent core burned a little family love, and for his young, tomboyish daughter he once possessed genuine paternal caring. This did not excuse his angry sulks and violent behavior. He’d beaten his wife and bullied his children, even if he’d loved us in his own remote and abusive way. I had every right to hate him for that, but any feelings of victimization that lingered from my childhood were my responsibility now far more than his. I couldn’t continue to deal with Pop burdened by the pains and resentments of my childhood. Even if he hadn’t changed, I was no longer a little girl helpless before him. I was the stronger one now, I thought, and no, he wasn’t the same man I’d known as a child. Grief had taught him something about remorse and age had gentled him. I had to learn to deal with who he was now, not what he’d been then.
Under those conditions we might be able to coexist.
26
I RETURNED TO Venice intending to catch a little of the sleep that had slipped from me the previous night but the sight of the white Tercel, parked this time in the grocery store lot down the street from my apartment, made sleep a more distant priority. The slot he’d chosen offered a clear sight line to the apartment steps and the front door to my second-floor unit. I parked in my assigned spot in front of the building, opened the door for the Rott, and led him up the stairs, careful not to tip the guy with a backward glance that I was aware he watched. Sean ha
d asked me to call him if the watcher appeared again, but I didn’t intend to play the role of the helpless female. The trip to Pop’s left me with a feeling of restlessness. I needed a little action. I called Frank.
“Whoever owns those plates is working some powerful juju,” he said, the volume of music blaring in the background signaling I’d caught him in his car, moving from one story to another. Warren Devon, it sounded like. “My guy, he’s still searching but the plates don’t show in the registry, like somebody’s blocked them out. He tells me it’s going to take another day at least, and no promises.”
“How could somebody block the plates?” I asked.
“A computer hack,” he answered. “Or an old-fashioned bribe.”
“So we’re talking about somebody with a little juice, maybe.”
“Or a high school kid with a computer and time on his hands. Give my guy a little more time, he might come up with something.”
I’d allowed the ex-con to sit watch on me for days and done nothing about it. I asked Frank if he had time to do me a favor. I didn’t even know if the ex-con worked for somebody or was a solitary nut with an inappropriate fixation on me and my dog. A lot of aimless crazy people live in Venice and I couldn’t discount that as one of the possibilities. After I hung up the call I pulled open the window in the bedroom and gauged the drop, thinking I might tie a couple of bed sheets together until I realized I only owned two and couldn’t anchor them to anything except the doorknob. The two sheets tied together would barely reach the window. The drop measured no more than fifteen feet, but the asphalt below looked hard enough to make my ankles throb just from the thought of landing. Then I remembered the futon in the living room. I stripped away the throw pillows and dragged it through the bedroom door, the Rott watching with the worried excitement dogs sometimes get when humans move things from their familiar places. I propped the futon against the wall and sat on the floor to give the Rott a little quality face time, seeking to reassure him that I was sane no matter how it might look to him.
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