Trust Me

by Javorsky, Earl

  He had fallen asleep almost immediately the night before, still dressed, cupped up to Holly, aware of his warm breath on the back of her neck. Some time later he had awakened to Holly’s hand on his skin, caressing his chest, down over his stomach, hinting with a gentle push at the button of his jeans. They had made love slowly in the light of a big rising moon and then fallen asleep as the night air moved in softly through the window and dried the perspiration from their bodies.

  He left Holly sleeping when he got up that morning, and wrote a note to her and another to Ron. Now, at five fifteen, driving back from the lab in Silverlake, he wondered who would be there to greet him: he looked forward to seeing Holly, touching her, but was apprehensive about what Ron’s reaction to her presence might be.

  Driving up Sunset Boulevard, he saw a dirty brown haze in the sky, becoming darker somewhere over beyond the hills to his right. It was the burning season in California, and the Santa Monica Mountains, already ripe for fire after the long dry summer, were primed by the Santa Ana conditions. Somewhere up by Mulholland, he thought, people were piling their belongings into cars. The optimists would wet down their roofs and hang tight.

  It was refreshingly cool in the house, which was quiet and empty. On the kitchen table there were two messages. The first was from Holly, telling him thanks, that she had gone to swim at the gym, not to worry, she would be back at seven. And that she had talked to Ron, and what a nice man he was. The second was from Ron, saying, “Time for a pow-wow. Seven thirty, at Nick’s. The four of us.”

  He showered and dried off, then folded a towel on his pillow and lay down, covering himself with a second towel. Within minutes he dozed off. In a dream he spilled a glass of whiskey, which spread across a canyon and caught fire. Fingertips touched his forehead and brushed back through his hair; he opened his eyes to see Holly sitting on the bed looking down at him.

  He tried to pull her to him, but she laughed and shook her head and pulled him up to a sitting position instead. “We’re supposed to meet Ron in twenty minutes.”

  “Jesus, it’s past seven already?” He stood up, wrapping the towel at his waist, surprised at his new instinct for modesty. “It seems like I was only asleep for a minute. I was having this crazy dream . . .” He shook his head and went to the dresser, choosing fresh jeans and a navy blue golf shirt.

  “I’ll drive,” Holly said. “How far is it to Nick’s?”

  “We can get there on time if we leave now.” He dressed, grabbed his wallet and keys, and ran a comb through his hair.

  He liked sitting in the BMW, with its nice leather seats and solid feel, the top down and the wind rushing by so they had to talk loud. The smell of smoke was in the air now, and the pall had spread throughout the dusky evening sky. For the first time, he heard the distant wail of sirens, the long, low blare of a fire-truck horn.

  “What’s going on, do you know?” He realized he was shouting.

  Holly brought up the windows, which made it relatively quiet in the car, with only the air rushing overhead to intrude on conversation. “The radio said it’s Nichols Canyon, up by Mulholland. And Thousand Oaks is out of control. I hope it’s not as bad as a few years ago.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  At the restaurant, they found Ron and Leanne seated at a corner table, speaking with a waiter, who wrote something on a pad and walked away.

  “We took the liberty of ordering for you,” Ron said.

  “Hot sauce on the side,” Leanne added, grinning at Jeff.

  He introduced Holly to Leanne as they took their seats. He was glad that they could meet; he had a feeling it would be good for Holly to know this woman.

  “It smells so good in here. What do they have?” Holly unfolded her napkin and placed it on her lap.

  “I’d label it upscale hippy health food,” Ron said.

  “With Americanized East Indian curry dishes,” Leanne added.

  “And a killer hot sauce.” Jeff sipped at his water. A paper-thin slice of lemon floating above the ice gave it a sweet fragrance.

  They made small talk until dinner arrived, touching on the fires, the weather, upcoming elections, laughing as they tried to find music that all of them had in common.

  “Elton John,” Holly offered. Jeff and Leanne raised their hands, but Ron shook his head. “How about Horace Silver?” he asked.

  “Who?” Holly and Jeff replied in unison. They finally all agreed on Ray Charles. “Yeah, the album with ‘Georgia On My Mind,’” Jeff said.

  “Right,” Ron chimed in. “And ‘Ruby.’”

  When the food came, Holly said, “This looks wonderful.” He told her to watch out for the hot sauce and then watched in horror as she poured the evil brown liquid liberally over her rice and ate a spoonful of the drenched mixture. Even Ron and Leanne watched in silent anticipation as Holly chewed.

  Holly swallowed, intent on her plate, and began to lift her next bite to her mouth. Suddenly she stopped, her fork in midair. “What?” she asked.

  “Jesus, Holly. That stuff could burn the paint off your car.” He shook his head in disbelief.

  Holly grinned. “One of my secret vices. I eat jalapeños like popcorn. This”—she gestured with her fork—“is a world-class hot sauce.” She raised the next bite to her mouth and chewed enthusiastically.

  They finished their meal in near silence, punctuating it with comments about the food or how hungry they were. When the waiter returned, Ron asked for a pot of herbal tea and the check. Holly asked if they could get some of the hot sauce to take home and the waiter said he would see. He returned shortly with tea, check, and a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid on it. Jeff lifted the lid and saw that the cup was half full of the sauce. He lifted it to his nose and said, “Whew! That stuff is evil.”

  Ron sipped at his tea, then put it down and said to Jeff, “I read your note this morning.” He paused. Jeff didn’t say anything. “And I want you to know that, as a rent-paying housemate, you have every right to have a guest. So,” he turned to Holly, “welcome to our home.”

  “Thank you.” Holly dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. Jeff watched as she looked to Leanne, as if she were seeking a cue or encouragement.

  “Okay, we got that settled,” Ron said. “But let’s not kid ourselves about our situation. We’ve got a very sick man out there and he’s our problem.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Jeff said. He told Ron and Leanne what he had found at Holly’s place. Holly filled in details.

  “Wait a minute,” Leanne interrupted at one point, addressing Holly. “What made you think of tearing up the rug in your closet?”

  “I just felt that there was something wrong there. That’s where the vulnerable spot was.” She shrugged. “You know?”

  When Jeff got to the part about the bottles on the dirt floor of the hidden room, Ron asked, “Moosehead and Bushmills—aren’t those the brands you told Joe Greiner about? Art’s—Jack Stanley’s brands?”

  He nodded. “He used to stock them by the case. Like a drug addict. He didn’t want to run out.”

  Ron leaned back in his chair and folded his hands at his belly. “Well, that doesn’t leave much room for speculation.”

  “I knew who it was before Jeff found the bottles,” Holly said. “I just really wanted . . .” She faltered.

  A chiming sound filled the space of Holly’s silence. Ron’s hand slapped to his side and the chime stopped. He pulled his cell phone from his belt, viewed the caller ID, and then looked back at Holly. “Just wanted what?”

  “I wanted to believe I was crazy. That none of this was really happening. I mean, sitting in my own home, feeling like when you’re little and there’s a monster in the closet, except this one is real—I think I would have preferred for it to have been a delusion. You know, a paranoid psychotic episode or something.” She looked at Leanne, this time, Jeff thought, searc
hing for understanding. And, he imagined, finding it.

  Ron said, “Excuse me. I need to get this.” He indicated the phone in his hand.

  As he listened, Ron’s face expressed a tension that Jeff could see and feel. It was in the set of his jaw, the silence as he sat and placed his elbows on the table, lightly bouncing his fingertips together. Leanne put her hand on his arm, a concerned look on her face, but said nothing.

  “That was Joe Greiner.”

  “Where was he?” Jeff asked.

  “At your friend Lilah’s.”

  “What?” This wasn’t making any sense.

  “He was at the apartment of your friend Lilah O’Hare, in Brentwood. I called him earlier and asked him to trace a number and go there. She was nearly beaten to death. Two men in the apartment weren’t so lucky.” Ron turned to Holly. “One of them is your old friend Tony Petracca. Dead now, his head bashed in with a heavy object. Probably a tire iron, Joe says.”

  Holly’s face was white. She closed her eyes and trembled slightly but perceptibly, as though suddenly chilled. From across the table, Leanne reached out and covered Holly’s hands with her own.

  “Is Lilah okay?” He felt sadness for her, an urgent hope that her manic spunk would see her through this.

  “She was alive. Paramedics took her away.” Ron paused.

  “Who else was there?” He asked.

  “Someone named Richard Cahn. They found his body in the closet of a room that had a big brick of cocaine on the dresser. Know him?”

  It seemed so insane, the past that he had walked away from intruding like this. Absurdly, he thought of the twelve thousand dollars he owed to a dead man, how the burden of the debt was now relieved. “Jesus. Richard is dead?” was all he could say.

  “Who do they think did it?” Holly asked, staring straight down at Leanne’s hands on her own.

  He watched Ron glance at Leanne, run his fingers through his hair, before he spoke. “The neighbors said that there had been a fourth person staying at the apartment. Someone who drove a green Jaguar.”

  Holly didn’t look up; she just nodded slowly, unsurprised. As she continued to nod it seemed to Jeff she was coming to a conclusion about something, consolidating an inner resolve.

  “So,” Ron continued, “Joe wants to meet us up at the house. He’s on his way now.”

  They settled the tab and walked out to the street. It was dark now, the air crackling with dry heat from the desert winds. Opening the door of the Land Rover for Leanne, Ron said, “You two go on ahead. I’m running on empty and have to stop for gas. We’ll be right behind you.”

  CHAPTER 60

  ⍫

  They drove without speaking, Jeff at the wheel, all the way to Highland, then onto Sunset. Holly had put up the top; now the silence in the car was palpable, filled with a quality that took him some time to decipher. It was anger, he realized, radiating from Holly like heat.

  She spoke for the first time as he turned right on Franklin. “I’ve always hated guns . . .”

  He looked over at her, the set of her jaw, her lips pressed together, the cold flash in her eyes as she glanced back at him.

  “. . . but I’d really like to have one right now.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that. Yes, it would be nice to have the Walther; the police still had it and he wasn’t sure if he could get it back. Or if he wanted to.

  The wail of a siren made him look in the rearview mirror. Flashing colored lights were overtaking the cars behind him and, as he pulled over to the right, a fire truck bore down on the BMW and passed them, its deep horn blaring. A second, then a third, truck followed.

  Six cars were stopped in a line at the entrance to Beachwood Canyon. A fire captain’s red sedan was parked at the curb. In the center of the street a black-and-white patrol car had its colored lights strobing. A cop with a flashlight spoke to each driver, waving several of them through. Two had to make U-turns around the patrol car and re-enter Franklin. When Jeff and Holly pulled up, the officer motioned for them to stop. Jeff hit the button to make the window go down. “What’s going on?”

  “Fire’s made it to the top of the hill. Residents only beyond this point.”

  “That’s okay, we live up here.” He hoped the cop wouldn’t ask for a driver’s license.

  “What’s the address?”

  “454 Sycamore.” He had found the address easy to remember because there were four hundred and fifty-four grams in a pound. And it rhymed. It struck him that part of his old self would always be with him.

  A blast of static and garbled speech came from the red sedan at the curb to their right. He heard the fireman yell something about holding back any more cars. In his rear-view mirror he saw a new line formed behind him.

  “Thank you very much, officer.” He looked up and nodded as the man waved him through. Driving away slowly, he saw the red sedan in his rearview mirror as it moved diagonally into the place the BMW had just occupied, blocking the line of waiting cars.

  It was with a sense of relief that he pulled into the gravel driveway and parked the BMW next to his own car. The darkened house looked peaceful, isolated from the insanity Ron had reported at the restaurant, and he was glad to be home.

  He unlocked the front door and followed Holly through the living room as she angled left toward the kitchen.

  “How about some coffee?” She seemed relieved to be back also.

  “I don’t know, it’s pretty late,” he said.

  “I doubt I’ll be sleeping any time soon.” Holly put the cup of hot sauce and the leftovers from Nick’s on the counter, opened a cupboard, and pulled out two coffee mugs. She placed them on the wooden table in the middle of the kitchen.

  “There’s decaf in the freezer. It’s good, vanilla flavored.” He sat at the far end of the table, facing the doorway to the living room.

  Holly measured the grounds and poured them into a filter, added water to the Melitta, and switched it on. He watched as she took the plastic cap off the cup of hot sauce.

  “What should we do with this?” Holly put the cup to her nose and smelled the contents.

  “Well, we could save it in case the drain ever gets clogged.”

  “Very funny.” She put the cup down on the counter. “I meant, is there anything I can put it in, like a glass jar?” She surveyed the open cupboard.

  “I don’t know. I’ll look in a little while.” He watched her, the way her hair picked up the light, her slender grace as she reached up and pulled down a bag of turbinado sugar. The coffee began to drip.

  Over her shoulder, she said, “I like it here. It feels safe.”

  “I know. I’m glad.” A distant siren screamed, and the wind kicked up outside. Something wasn’t right. A corollary breeze blew into the kitchen.

  “You didn’t open any windows before we left, did you?” He was sure he had closed them—in this weather the house maintained a cooler temperature that way.

  Holly turned to look at him. “No. In fact I closed the one in the bedroom. Why?”

  Even as she spoke, he looked up to see an image he at first rejected as impossible, like a hallucination from a bad drug. He sat paralyzed, vaguely aware—as though from a distance—of a startled yelp from Holly, an intake of breath so abrupt that it created a vocal expression of pure dread.

  Doctor Jack Stanley stood in the doorway, the darkness of the living room behind him.

  “Knock, knock, knock.” He smiled amiably, echoing his words by rapping three times on the doorframe with a long metal bar. In his left hand he held a paper grocery bag. “Isn’t this cozy?”

  Jeff looked at Holly, who stood frozen with her back to the counter. He tried to picture himself blocking the tire iron, wresting it away, overpowering the man, but his heart was beating too fast, his breath was too short, the will to move was not forthcoming.

 
“Well, isn’t anyone going to invite me in?” Jack stepped forward to the chair opposite Jeff, hooked it with his foot to pull it back, and sat. He put the bag down and let the tire iron rest on the table. The claw end of the shaft of the iron was matted with hair embedded in a sticky-looking rust-colored substance. His rumpled suit was streaked and spattered in the same color. There was a mad, hysterical glint in his eye, but when he spoke he sounded to Jeff like the same old Doctor Jack.

  “So. I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.” Jack smiled again, closing his eyes and lolling his head from shoulder to shoulder as though enjoying music that only he could hear. The guy has lost it, Jeff thought. Now. It’s time to act.

  Jack’s eyes snapped open, staring at him. “The bad news,” he turned to his right to face Holly, “the very sad news, is that this will be the last of our little times together. I’m sure you know how much I’ve come to cherish them.” He turned back to Jeff. “The good news”—now he reached into the bag—“is that I come bearing gifts.” Out of the bag he pulled two squarish bottles, which he placed on the table. One—it was Bushmills, Jeff noticed—was half empty. The other had the familiar black-and-white label of Jack Daniel’s.

  Doctor Jack let go of the tire iron and removed the top from the Bushmills. He took a long, hard hit from the bottle, staring directly into Jeff’s eyes even as he tilted his head back. He put his bottle down, unsealed the Jack Daniel’s, and leaned forward to pour from it into Jeff’s empty coffee cup. Now, goddammit. Now. At least get the tire iron. But he sat, immobile, unable to grab the part of the shaft that was closest to him, the blood still sticky on the black metal. Idiotically, he wondered whose hair was matted on it.

  “Just like old times, isn’t it?” Doctor Jack settled back and grinned. “Oh, here, I almost forgot.” He reached into the lining pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a plastic baggie with a large white lump in it, which he then mashed between his thumb and forefinger. Opening the bag, he leaned across the table again and dumped the powder on the table in front of Jeff. “Your favorite, as I recall.”