by Avery Duff
Whether Delfina was inside—anybody’s guess.
Leaping off the front porch, he beat it down Harvard to Evelyn’s back alley. He jammed up the alley to her garage; he tried the gate to her narrow walkway. Locked. Grabbing the gate with both hands, he swung over and landed in her small, tidy backyard.
The garage door to his left—locked, too. Looking through the garage window: no car parked inside. He hadn’t noticed her Volvo parked out front; that didn’t mean she wasn’t inside with Delfina.
Heart pumping, he tried and failed to calm down as he moved to her back door. About to boot it open, he noticed the door was ajar. Easing inside the quiet kitchen, moving through it to the living room, he found that room empty, too; the same went for her bedroom.
In her second bedroom, converted into her office, near-empty garbage bags sagged like tired soldiers on the floor. Stacks of hanging-file boxes lay all around. Looked to him like her leisurely cleanup job had been interrupted.
His eye caught a high school yearbook, middle of her desk. Grabbing it, he read its cover from the ’60s: Franklin High School, Highland Park.
So Evelyn was from Highland Park.
She’d once mentioned her yearbook to him in passing; he tore it open. On the move again, into the hall, he leafed through the yearbook until he found her senior photograph.
Evelyn Draganov. Age eighteen, he guessed. No mistaking her resemblance to Sharon.
Below her name:
President Photography Club, Math Club.
Senior Quote: Why didn’t Marlon B ever show up, Ewa?
Ewa? Must be her Slavic given name, and it didn’t match the Evelyn above her senior photo. Even back then, Evelyn could’ve passed for Latina in mostly Latino Highland Park, and knowing her, she probably passed whenever it suited her.
And Brando again? The mocking tone of a third party resonated from her senior quote. Nothing about the words or tone squared with how Evelyn had lightly described it: I made a joke about Marlon Brando in my high school yearbook.
Still another lie.
End of the hallway, he stopped. Her house sat on concrete slab, no crawl space lay underfoot. That left the possibility of an attic, so he checked each closet for attic trapdoors and came up empty, doubting all the while that Evelyn, healthy or not, could make that climb with Delfina’s body weight.
Delfina was not here.
Back in the living room again, he noticed that two photographs from Evelyn’s wall were missing. He knew them: Evelyn and Chet Jordan in the nightclub—her aging, deranged father in front of her white, wooden childhood home.
Chet Jordan had crossed her, accused her of stealing his watch. Even though Bradley had been joking about Chet’s death, Robert would bet even money she’d arranged Chet’s fatal car crash. Given her father’s missing picture—had she murdered him, too?
Scouring his dealings with her for some kind of insight, he recalled all the times Evelyn had toyed with him. Visiting Teo at Saint John’s, a man she’d just failed to have killed; buying gifts for Teo’s daughter, befriending her; pretending to help her financially. Working him, always testing him, trying to see if he was smart enough to see through the face she showed the world.
He knew he’d been slated to die in the desert and pictured Evelyn at his funeral, comforting Gia, gaming her, too, beside herself with grief. All along, he realized, Evelyn got off on showing him what she was doing. Taking him right up to the line. Daring him to see her true self.
Got off on doing that big-time, didn’t you, you sick bitch?
Something crossed his mind . . . something Delfina told him on the phone after she’d visited Evelyn’s house yesterday: Evelyn let her take out the trash. Same thing Evelyn had done with him. He’d viewed his own moment as helping a woman who seemed to be in pain, but the way he saw it now—she’d looked at him as a servant. Taking out her trash—lesser than her. Looking down on him.
He stepped into her kitchen, asking himself: What was it she did next?
She’d asked him: Get that clicker for me, would you?
Independent Evelyn. Evelyn who didn’t reach out for help. She’d asked him to get the clicker from a kitchen drawer within her own reach. Two garage door openers lay inside: Clickers. He’d picked up one of them.
“Not that one,” she’d said. “The other one.”
The other one had a Harvard Street address label affixed to it: the one she’d needed to raise her garage door in back. But the device he’d first picked up—that one had no label at all.
He slid open that same drawer: both clickers—gone. She’d taken both of them.
Showing him those two clickers, she’d taken him right up to the line again: This is who I am, she’d been telling him. Figure it out, Robert.
He grabbed a hammer from the same drawer and ran out. He should’ve guessed already. At least, he now knew exactly where he’d find Evelyn and Delfina.
Running up Evelyn’s back alley, Robert drew abreast of that neighborhood eyesore. On their walk to Carlos’ house, Evelyn had made a point of stopping here, telling him about her petition to force the owner to clean it up.
Stopping me right here and telling me that. You got off doing it—because this house is yours, too.
In the sand-and-gravel threshold between the alley and this garage: a fresh set of tire tracks. Evelyn’s car had to be inside the garage. He forced a gap in the chain-link fence and squeezed through, redlining adrenaline. The garage door, padlocked. No windows. No need to kick it in and make his presence known.
Evelyn’s car was in the garage, and she was inside this house. So was Delfina.
The back door to the house lay just ahead. He twisted the handle; it opened. Inside, even in the dead of night, this place seemed to hold a deeper depth of darkness. Half expecting to find bodies hung from the ceiling, he felt his way forward with his iPhone flashlight. Moved into a thirty-foot-long hallway with rooms off each side. Empty, unfurnished rooms with boarded-up windows. Cobwebs spanned each door, not the hallway, so he kept inching down it. At the hallway’s end, he faced one final boarded-up window. Nowhere left to go.
Even so, he was dead certain Delfina was inside this house.
To his right—looked like the wall moved. Stepping back, he raised the hammer, pocketed his iPhone. A door began to open; faint light spilled onto him through a growing gap.
“Come in, Robert.” Evelyn’s voice drifted to him from inside the hidden room.
He eased through the open door into a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot, dimly lit, windowless area. The thick door must’ve been heavy-duty hinged; it made no sound, automatically closing behind him. Finished walls, an industrial strainer plate over a drain in the center of a slightly sloped concrete floor, a hundred-gallon water tank.
In the center of it, over the drain, Evelyn sat in a slatted, straight-back wooden chair, her chemo port wrapped around her forearm. Leading to it, a fat syringe filled with liquid.
Delfina lay draped across Evelyn’s lap. Still drugged, he was sure, from Gia’s house. Evelyn gripped a long knife, its tip to Delfina’s throat.
A killing room. The drugs for herself and that knife: the trappings of a murder-suicide.
Facing Evelyn, at the base of a six-foot-tall, freestanding partition, were her two missing living room photographs. And a third, the one she’d requested from Carlos’ house: Carlos on her front steps. Not a memento after all—her trophy.
She eyed the hammer in his right hand. “My people redid this room for me, but I’ve not yet put it to its intended use.” She moved the knifepoint closer to Delfina’s skin. “Your hammer,” she said.
Robert dropped it at his feet.
“Kick it over here,” she said.
He followed her order. She watched the hammer sliding across the floor. He grabbed Teo’s rock from his right pocket, palming it in his right hand.
The hammer slid to a stop near the drain. No echo to speak of, same with her voice in this soundproofed room.
She sai
d, “Thought I was at the end of the line with Carlos dead, but he drew out Teo and Delfina. Should I thank Carlos for that—or should I thank you? You delivered your clients to me, pennies from heaven, dear boy.”
She was transparent now. How she’d craved her decades-long dark game. Even easier to see: from ten feet, he was too far away to rush her without that knife striking home. Taking everything he’d learned about her, he swallowed, his throat raw and dry.
“How is it I show up, what, ten days ago, not knowing the first thing about you or the trust, but I’m standing right here?” he said.
“I wanted you here.”
Evelyn. Still on top. Where she needs to be.
“I know you used me, and I know why,” he said. “‘A real go-getter, this Robert Worth. Why don’t I let him find Carlos’ money?’ But my buddy and me, we lured your people to the desert and drowned them. Oh, yeah—we found Carlos’ money, too. Something you couldn’t figure out if your life depended on it.”
He’d never shown her his hard side, and her reaction was clear. Even in this light, his superior tone grinded on her. Her face drifted down to Delfina’s.
“Again, Robert, who came out on top?”
Noticing the man’s Rolex on her wrist, Robert searched for any way to disrupt her.
“Chet Jordan’s Rolex? I know you stole it. Nothing special about that. Just makes you a common thief. How’d you get away with killing him?”
Murdering Chet Jordan—looked like his guess blindsided her. And engaged her.
She said, “The next-best thing to Brando until Chet’s tragic accident. That it? Or is there more you need to get off your chest before this child comes to?”
Brando again.
Taunting her with that senior quote, he said: “Why didn’t Marlon B ever show up, Ewa?”
A cloud crossed her face, then melted into her facade.
“Daddy’s good friend from the studio? His drinking buddy? Daddy was a liar, a pederast, a violent drunk, and the world’s full of them.”
But somehow her classmates knew Brando had failed to show up. Failed to show somewhere.
“You bragged to your classmates about Brando, right? How your father knew him. Why didn’t he show up, Ewa? You were humiliated, weren’t you? Where was it, Ewa?”
Delfina moaned. Evelyn stroked her face. He looked for an opening, but the knife didn’t move. Evelyn’s eyes never left his.
“Why do Famosas have to die? What did Vincent do to you? A bullshit billing dispute at your law firm? Even you aren’t that petty.”
“Been a busy boy, haven’t you? What if I said Vincent was my first lover? Outside my own father, that is. Maybe Vincent broke a young girl’s heart?”
Lover? Sure. Broken heart? Unh-uh.
She said, “The answers lie down this very street, Robert, waiting for a resourceful man to unearth them. But you, I’m afraid, will be too filled with remorse to care about finding answers. After all, this little girl would be safe had she not met you. Will you be able to live with yourself after she dies, while you could only watch? I wonder, won’t knowing that tear you apart, piece by little piece?”
He stepped down hard on his useless rage. “What’d Carlos say that last time he called you? You talked to him, didn’t you?”
“No, there’s a recording somewhere. Telling me how he followed Ilina home after she broke up with him, and he saw us together. I believe he said—he was crying, it was hard to tell—he said I was evil. But isn’t crying what’s supposed to happen when true love follows a whore home?”
“Beats me, but let’s face it. You see yourself as a puppet master, but you suck at it.”
“Even with all the Famosas dead and dying?”
“Then tell me why, Ewa? This girl dies because Brando didn’t show up somewhere? Daddy broke a promise? What, Vincent took your virginity?”
“Don’t you just love black-and-white boxing photos, the old ones? Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Ali standing over Liston? High contrast, a lifetime captured in an instant.”
Virginity, Vincent, Brando, boxing shots. Is this supposed to make sense to me?
His eyes scoured this small room, looking for any physical leg up and coming up empty.
“Vincent, Carlos, Teo, Chet, your father—it’s not hard to kill innocent people.”
“Only five people?” she said. “You lack imagination.”
He still cupped Teo’s rock in his right hand. She glanced down at Delfina—he thought he had a shot at Evelyn, but her eyes found his again.
“Your father was what—eighty? Like drowning a kitten.”
Delfina moaned. The sound of it rammed a charge through him. Would he get a decent shot at Evelyn’s head, or would he just have to wing it?
Delfina’s body twitched. Sweat stung his eyes.
Evelyn said, “Look, she’s coming to.”
He looked. She didn’t.
Robert said, “This is how far you came in the world? Killing a child because . . . because . . . ?”
“Still don’t know everything, do you?”
Engaged again . . . good.
“I know this: you hurt her, I’ll beat you to death with that hammer.”
“The drugs in my syringe won’t give you that luxury. You carried the hammer in your left hand. I don’t recall you being a lefty?”
“Ambidextrous,” he said. “Tried out for pitcher in high school. Didn’t make the team.”
Two lies. Right-handed, he’d been a decent pitcher, fighting it out for second string.
“What’s that in your right hand, love?”
“Hard to see in this light. Want me to come closer?”
“No need. Let’s see what you’re holding . . .”
His sweat-slicked right hand shook. His lips parted to tell another lie—that Teo had come out of his coma, 100 percent alert and intact—but three things happened. Robert had figured on only one of them.
Delfina’s eyes opened. “Evelyn . . . ?” she asked, looking up at her captor. Then a paroxysm of pain overcame Evelyn. Losing control of her body, she bent over. And from ten feet away, Robert stepped forward and slung Teo’s rock at her head, harder than he’d thrown anything in his life. By the time it left his fingertips, it was only five feet away from its target.
Teo’s rock struck Evelyn’s temple. Robert didn’t wait for anything more. He scooped Delfina into his arms and ran out the way he’d come, running until they were out in the street, where flashing cruisers just now made the turn from Wilshire onto Harvard.
Delfina opened her eyes and asked him, “What’s wrong?”
He couldn’t answer.
“Why are you crying?” she asked.
Choking on the words, he said, “Because I’m so happy.”
Minutes after that, the police gathered in front of Evelyn’s house. Gia was with them, and he handed her Delfina. Gia was overwhelmed with emotions as fierce as any he’d ever witnessed. Later, they were told children’s services was on the way, and both Robert and Gia understood: their role in Delfina’s life had just changed forever.
Evelyn was dead, the police told him, before walking him back through the killing room. Booties, latex gloves, the works, so he could help them reconstruct what had happened. Her dead body was still seated in the slatted chair, black blood dried around her temple.
With the lights up, he learned more about the room. That six-foot-tall, six-inch-thick partition ended three feet shy of the ceiling; it was topped by a varnished two-by-six. That wall partially blocked off a bathroom he hadn’t seen. No door, just an opening into a space with another portable water tank, a claw-foot tub with an industrial-size drain, and a toilet.
Robert explained Evelyn’s hammer and Teo’s rock lying on the drain, Evelyn’s knife at Delfina’s throat, Evelyn’s surge of pain, and Chet Jordan’s watch.
Her three photos still rested against that wall, and he explained his belief that she’d murdered Carlos, her father, and Chet Jordan.
Kneeli
ng down, they all checked the photographs.
“Who’s the old guy?” one of the cops asked.
Robert kept staring at the blurred, out-of-focus left doorjamb behind Evelyn and Emil.
“Her father, Emil Draganov.”
By now, he knew that Gia’s juiced-up kidnap report had helped him out with the police. Almost anything Robert did to get Delfina back was justified once it was on the record that Evelyn had forcibly taken her. Drug testing of Delfina’s blood would back up Gia’s story, too, and because of it all, he faced no criminal jeopardy.
Every so often, the cops would step out of the killing room into the hallway and confer with each other. When they did, Robert checked a curious aspect of the room. Curious because of something Evelyn said, minutes before she died. Something like: Everything I wanted is here in this room.
He slipped into the bathroom, stood on that claw-foot tub, and tried to reach the plank on top of the partition wall . . .
CHAPTER 47
That night at Gia’s house, Robert came in the bedroom and checked on her, wishing more than anything he could join her and decompress. Finally, she cried herself out and drifted off before dawn. On his end, he had no choice—he would spend his time in the living room drafting a narrative that followed the bouncing ball of his clients’ money.
Even so, bone-deep exhausted from the desert, from San Bernardino, and from witnessing Evelyn’s obscene agenda, he dozed in and out that morning.
Scenes of coulda-been-a-contender Brando in On the Waterfront melted into Evelyn; her father, Emil; and her daughter, Sharon. Those images collided with those of Vincent and his two sons. Maybe that’s how part of the answer came to him. He was never sure, half-dreaming, half-awake, how he’d grasped the image that had eluded him when he’d first laid eyes on Sharon Sloan in San Bernardino.
A simple image: that Orthodox-cross postcard on Sharon’s courthouse-office door. A cross with its slanted footrest.