by P. J. Tracy
“If you saw how fat he was, you wouldn’t worry. Thanks for the dog. And especially for the drive. I won’t forget it.”
“Thanks for not puking.”
“Just take it easy on the way back, I’ve got a full stomach.”
As Sam hopped into the Mustang, a white Range Rover with a lot of aftermarket bling pulled into the spot next to it. Melody, lagging slightly behind, was detained by the driver, who had rolled down his window and was delivering an impassioned monologue about the splendor of the car. Whoever he was, he was a Shelby devotee who wanted it and seemed ready to throw cash out the window for it.
“Sorry, it’s not for sale. Have a good day,” she said pleasantly.
The driver jumped out, gesturing at the Mustang worshipfully as he circled it, importuning for just a peek at the interior, the engine.
Jesus H. Christ. It was Rolf. Sam closed his eyes, actually hoping for a hallucination this time around, but when he opened them, Rolf was still there. He sank down in his seat and smashed a baseball cap on his head, hoping he’d give up and leave before recognizing him. But he didn’t leave. His fervor was unrelenting, and Melody was getting flustered, so Sam finally opened his door and stepped out. “You looking for some hot wheels, Rolf?”
His head rolled back and his eyes bugged. “Telegram Sam? No fucking way. What are you doing here?”
“Same as you I suspect, getting an early lunch.”
Rolf’s wide eyes jittered back to the Mustang. “Are you shitting me? This is your ride?”
“Yeah.”
He sucked in his hollow cheeks. “Damn. Damn, what’s the story?”
“Family heirloom.”
“So you probably don’t want to sell it.”
“It’s definitely not for sale. Besides, it doesn’t look like you’re short on cars.”
“I’m not, but I don’t have a drop-dead Shelby GT 500. It’s my dream car and this thing is mint. All original?”
“One hundred percent.”
He gave it a long, wistful look, then returned his attention to Sam, his expression earnest. “Hey, are you doing okay, man? I’m sorry I ran off yesterday, you just rattled me.”
“I’m fine, thanks, Rolf. Glad to see you’re doing okay, too.”
He took a few awkward steps back and showed him the insides of his arms. “You got me wrong, Telegram Sam, I’m not a high-baller anymore. Quit that shit a while ago, but I’ll never get rid of the scars.” He turned and gave Melody a charming smile, as if heroin addiction was an ordinary topic of conversation. Ironically, it was for her, she’d been there herself after the prescriptions ran out. “Sam and I met yesterday. I’m Rolf, nice to meet you, what’s your name?”
“Melody.”
“Pretty name.” He gestured to her tattoos, far more focused on them than any of her other attributes. “Nice. Who does yours?”
“Kjell, he’s in the Valley, just off Ventura.”
“Oh yeah, the Norwegian heavy metal dude. I know him, good guy, he’s done a couple of mine. Are you an actress?”
“No.”
“You should be.” He cocked his head inquisitively. “You work at Pearl Club, don’t you?”
“I tend bar there.”
“I thought I recognized you! I go there sometimes. Great place, love the octopus. I just found out yesterday that Telegram Sam worked there.” He glanced in his direction hopefully. “Have you read the script yet?”
“Haven’t had time.”
“Running into you here is another sign, you can’t deny it. Pops and I come to Pink’s every Friday when they open, it’s the German sausage thing. He’s out of town now, but I always keep up the ritual, even when he’s not around. You being here … we were obviously meant to go deep into the dark together.”
Sam was already very deep into the dark, but he wasn’t going to share that with Rolf. “Right. We’ve got to go, see you around.”
“Hey, wait. Have you had any more of those visions?”
“No.”
“So you don’t see anything on my forehead right now?”
“No, Rolf.”
“I’d like to work that into the script. Call me. Nice to meet you, Melody. Make sure Sam reads it. There’s a part in there for you, too. You’d be perfect as Sam’s leading lady. Actually, standing here right now, I don’t think I can make the movie without either of you. You don’t ignore the signs when things align like this.” He gave a backward wave as he sauntered up to the stand.
“So that’s your scriptwriter?” Melody asked when he was out of earshot.
“Yeah.”
“Telegram Sam?”
“I told you he was weird and annoying. And maybe nuts.”
She glanced at the Range Rover. “Pretty deep pockets for a film student.”
“He’s Hans Hesse’s son.”
“The Hans Hesse? The Dead to Rights guy?”
“Yeah.”
“So Rolf is kind of Hollywood royalty. Wow. That’s a trip.”
“So is he.” He thought she frowned, but he couldn’t really tell with the sunglasses. Frowns weren’t smiles turned upside down. The tells resided almost solely in the eyes and brows, and her sunglasses were covering them.
“What did he mean about the visions?” she finally asked.
“Just something I made up yesterday to try and shake him off me. He’s nothing if not persistent.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. Are you going to read his script?”
“Probably. Eventually.”
“You like him.”
“I don’t even know him.”
“He’s like a sad pound puppy, waiting for you to adopt him.”
“What’s the opposite of ‘anthropomorphize?’”
“‘Zoomorphisize.’ Did I pass my vocabulary test today?”
“I just wanted to know. I had no clue.”
Melody hemmed in a smile and gave him a nudge on the arm. “Oh my God, who doesn’t know that word?”
Chapter Thirty-eight
NOLAN RAPPED HARDER ON THE DOOR of Yukiko Easton’s Marina del Rey rental. It was a gorgeous little bungalow a few blocks from the water and fueled her latent misgivings about her own choice of rental. But a property like this would be far more expensive, so every year she lived in the Valley, she would be putting money in the bank that would eventually accrue into a down payment for a house of her own. With LA’s exorbitant real estate prices, she might be able to afford one the year she retired.
“Ms. Easton? LAPD, please open up.”
Crawford sucked in his cheeks and maneuvered his tongue around his mouth. She tried hard to chase away the image of him coaxing shreds of his breakfast bacon out of his molars. “She’s not home, Mags.”
“And she’s not at work, and not answering her phone.”
“Not everybody is connected to their phone with an umbilical cord. We’ll come back later.”
Nolan crossed the porch and looked through the front window, hoping for a glimpse between the slats of the wooden shade. It was closed tight. “I’m going around the side.”
Crawford followed her along a rock path choked with a tangled mat of flowering groundcover. “If something doesn’t feel right, you kick down the door. I love kicking down doors, just give me a reason.”
“There’s no sign that anybody is in imminent danger. I’m just being thorough, so keep your inner stud on a leash.”
“After twenty years of marriage, I’m not sure I have an inner stud.”
“Keep that information on a leash, too.”
Nolan finally found a window with a half-opened blind that looked into a bedroom and saw a reason for Crawford to kick down the door. But he didn’t have to—it was unlocked.
* * *
Unlocked door, a shattered vase paving the entry with jagged pieces of blue and white porcelain, an upturned table. A chef’s knife lying in a pool of blood on the tiled kitchen floor, and red drag marks smearing the beige hallway carpet.
“She fought,�
� Crawford mumbled.
Nolan felt the anger and depression rising, each negative emotion battling for dominance. She knew it would end in a miserable stalemate. “Home invasion?”
“How about her husband? She opens the door for him, but he’s in a rage over the separation, maybe finances, maybe something else. She fights, she runs, but doesn’t make it any farther than the kitchen.”
“Sam Easton doesn’t strike me as a rager type.”
“What are the odds Traeger’s boyfriend and Easton’s wife were both killed in their homes within twenty-four hours of each other?”
Nolan didn’t like it any more than Al. “Astronomical.”
They carefully skirted the trail down the hall and followed it into the bedroom. A lamp had been knocked off the nightstand, and bloody feathers from a ruined pillow were scattered on the bed and floor. Yukiko Easton was lying on the bed. Without the violence, she might have been taking a nap. The front of her white shirt was sliced open and saturated with blood. She’d also been shot in the head with a large caliber gun.
“Different gun than the one that killed Gallagher. It’s not impossible that there are two perps and two motives.”
Crawford circled the bed, his eyes coursing the room. “There are no coincidences in homicide, Mags. And they’re…”
“Almost always simple. I know, got it.”
“Sam Easton is simple.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
AFTER THE VISIT TO PINK’S AND another bizarre encounter with Rolf, Sam focused all his energy on purging his mind of all worldly sorrows. He lifted weights for an hour, ran ten miles without an episode of any kind, then got down to the business of cleaning the Mustang after her double outing this morning.
He sprayed and soaped and rinsed, then got to work with the chamois, buffing the body until the blue skin sparkled. Once he was satisfied, he moved on to the wheels, polishing the chrome to a blinding finish. The sun was high and hot on his shoulders and it felt good. Sweat dripped down his face like rain and his muscles were aching—sweet distractions from more saturnine thoughts, like the end of his marriage.
After a final inspection of his handiwork, Sam went inside to cool down. He looked out the front window as he drank a bottle of cold water, admiring the Shelby, all fluffed and buffed and sitting in the driveway, on rare display for all to see. Like he’d told Melody, you couldn’t keep a race horse in a stall all its life. Maybe he would drive it more often.
His neighbor, a blond version of Katy Villa who had a rolled yoga mat slung over her shoulder like a weapon, gave it an appreciative double take as she walked to her Volvo. He knew nothing about her or her husband, even after living next to them for four years. Pretending your neighbors didn’t exist was an unspoken canon of LA life. You had to deal with enough unpleasant people on any given day, why risk discovering that you might also live next door to some?
It suddenly occurred to him that in the eight years of their marriage, and even when they’d been dating, Yuki had never asked for a joy ride in the Mustang. She’d been an unenthusiastic passenger on occasion and had never been timid about her contempt for it. The engine was obnoxiously loud, the suspension too stiff, the odor of leaded gasoline nauseating. Maybe their relationship had been doomed from the start.
But now was not the time to dwell on Yuki because there was no definitive conclusion to be drawn until he spoke with her. Agonizing over it now was pointless. If the news was bad, he’d just be living through it twice. But it wasn’t something he could easily shove aside into a mental pending file, and the hours between now and five o’clock spread out before him like an unnavigable sea.
Sam paced the house, frantic for some diversion. He took a shower, but even the mysterious Irish Spring had lost its ability to captivate. Pausing at a bookshelf, he considered the collection of photo albums filled with pictures from better times. No, not a good time for a trip down memory lane, he couldn’t bear it now. He also averted his eyes from the framed photograph of him in Afghanistan with his men, more people gone from his life.
He went outside again and roamed the yard, but visual reminders of pain and loss weren’t just in albums and frames, they were everywhere: Yuki’s beloved persimmon tree, moribund from lack of care; her herb garden, now weed-choked; the empty shepherd’s hooks where her baskets of flowers had hung not so long ago.
It bothered him that she’d taken the impermanent flowers, presumably because she had no faith he’d keep them watered, but hadn’t even checked on her persimmon yesterday. If her intention was to return to him, to this house, she would have, and consequently excoriated him for destruction of precious property.
Sam abandoned the yard and slipped back into the house, feeling even more anxious and aimless. The bottle of rye was calling to him, promising escape, but succumbing to that weakness would be pure self-destruction. Drastic measures were required. He sank into the sofa, grabbed his backpack, and excavated Rolf’s script—the ultimate act of desperation.
FADE IN:
EXT. DESERT—NIGHT
DYLAN WAGNER sits behind the wheel of a Mustang convertible under a sky dense with stars. The vast emptiness of the desert spreads before him. He hears the SOUNDS of crickets, owls, the furtive scratching of rodents. It’s peaceful. Until … A siren WAILS in the distance. He starts the engine. Headlights pierce the darkness.
CLOSE ON
Dylan’s face, illuminated by the dashboard lights. It’s covered in blood.
Sam had never looked at a script before, knew nothing about them. As a reader of books, the format was alien and distracting. Still, this seemed like a pretty good start. He could envision the scene in his mind, and the bloody face was definitely a hook. And who didn’t like a Mustang?
He kept reading.
INT. MOTEL ROOM—NIGHT
Weak, flickering neon from the DESERT DELIGHT INN sign infiltrates a dusty window partially covered by torn curtains. The light pulses on a YOUNG WOMAN splayed across a sagging bed. Her nightgown is bloody and one white arm reaches for something she’ll never grasp, because she’s dead.
The door CREAKS open and the shadow of a man falls across her body.
MALE VOICE O.S.
(agonized, full of remorse)
Bunny. Goddammit, Bunny, I told you not to do it.
Pretty decent noir so far, in the tradition of Papa Hesse. Maybe a little derivative, but still, it painted a picture, and he wanted to know what Bunny had done to get herself killed. He was pretty sure Dylan wasn’t responsible. That would be too obvious, which set the story up for some twists and turns. Maybe Rolf had something going for him after all.
Sam was about to turn the page to find out what happened next when he heard car doors slam outside. Nolan and Crawford were walking up to the house, but their eyes were on the Mustang.
He laid down the script and went to the door. “Afternoon, Detectives. Melody isn’t here, she’s at work.”
Detective Nolan’s expression was grim. Grim was the only thing in her repertoire, at least from what he’d seen. “We’re not here to see Melody.”
“Oh. Here to arrest me, then?”
Nolan shook her head sadly. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Easton. Your wife Yukiko … she’s been murdered.”
Chapter Forty
SAM WAS DROWNING IN A VERY deep, cold pool. Every time he tried to surface, his fingers on the verge of breaking through the sunlit water, it turned to black sludge and dragged him down again. But somehow, he managed to speak and the three idiotic words didn’t sound garbled, like they were coming from underwater. “Are you sure?”
Two somber nods.
“How?”
“She was stabbed and shot in her home, Mr. Easton.”
Sam ran to the bathroom and discharged his Pink’s dog violently. One minute, he was crouched in front of the toilet, the next, he was in his living room, sitting in the very same spot on the sofa he had been last night, looking at the very same people. Nolan’s expression wasn’t just grim anymore, i
t was concerned and pained. Crawford’s was unreadable, but it felt chilly. His words sounded chilly, too, and Sam imagined cubes of ice floating from his mouth as he spoke.
“It’s an understatement to say this is a terrible time, but we’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Easton. What you tell us could help us find her killer.”
Sam was numb, pretty much dead himself, but he knew it was important that he be present, at least as present as he possibly could be under the circumstances. He had to hold it together. Had to. For Yuki.
He wiped his brow, but it was cool and dry. No sweat. The sweat was all in his mind, which was partially back in an Afghan desert. Sweat, blood, it felt the same on your skin whether real or imagined. “Yeah. Of course.”
Crawford leaned forward, braced his elbows on his knees. “We have several witnesses from our canvass that placed your car at your wife’s residence early this morning. It’s an unmistakable vehicle.” Sam nodded, understanding how incredibly bad that looked, and he certainly couldn’t deny it. “I was there. I have nightmares that seem real, and she was in one this morning. She was in trouble, and I had to make sure she was okay.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Someone was strangling her. And she was okay when I was there. I didn’t kill her. Jesus Christ, I didn’t kill her.”
“Did you see her? Speak with her?”
“No, but a light went on in the house about the time she gets up for work. Around five forty-five.”
“So you don’t really know for certain if she was okay then.”
“I do, and you do, too, if you have her phone. She called me later, around eight. We made plans to meet for dinner tonight.”