The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “May I make inquiries?”

  I tried to read his expression as freeway lights danced across his face. “Why do I think that line is the opening gambit for something?”

  He laughed when I defined gambit; though his English seemed flawless, occasionally a word or its use would stump him.

  “All right, yes,” he said. “I am caught.”

  “So?”

  “I have some contacts,” he said. “Perhaps, if you approve, I could make some calls.”

  “Of course. Thank you.” Something was up. I could hear it in his voice. “What am I missing?”

  “Maggie, you know I am nothing except a businessman who accepted a political appointment to serve as consul general.” When I acknowledged that I did, he said, “On the other hand, the consul general here in San Francisco is a career diplomat. His appointment to San Francisco is a stepping stone for him. But for me? Well, I am an interloper. What do you say, a temp?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’ve told me.”

  “If I were at all political, and I am not, I would have been recalled a long time ago so that a true diplomat could take over. But, the new administration has been kept very busy, crisis after crisis. As there has been no emergency to handle in my assigned region, and I have managed not to disgrace my country and have actually been of some small service, I have been left in place.” He turned and gave me a pointed look. “I have been here far longer than I expected to be.”

  “Have you been recalled to France, Jean-Paul?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I understand that it will happen.”

  “When?”

  He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me close. “After the summer holidays, perhaps. When the government goes back to work.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  He raised his shoulders, frowned. “My son received his exam results.”

  “Yes?”

  “Dom qualified to enter the preparation course for admission to the grandes écoles,” he said.

  “Congratulations,” I said. This was big news, indeed. Very few French students pass the baccalauréat exams at the level necessary to qualify for the nation’s premier public universities. The bombshell here was that, having qualified to prepare for the grandes écoles, seventeen-year-old Dominic would not be finishing high school in Los Angeles. And I doubted his father was ready to send him back to France, alone. “When do his classes begin?”

  “In September.”

  “Ma’am?” The driver, Rafael, interrupted the dark pall that settled over the car after Jean-Paul’s announcement. “Were you expecting someone?”

  I looked up as we slowly came to a stop at the curb in front of Mom’s house. A man sat on the top step, holding a baseball bat across his knees.

  “It’s the next-door neighbor,” I said. “Something must have happened.”

  Rafael opened Jean-Paul’s door first, and then stood close beside me after he handed me out of the car and walked me up to Jean-Paul.

  “Mr. Loper?” I called, staying near the car as George Loper rose and started down the steps toward us. “Is there a problem?”

  “That damn hoodlum.” He smacked the side of his leg with his bat. “I told him that if I saw him hanging around here anymore, I wasn’t going to call the cops again. Next time I’ll take care of him myself.”

  “Are you talking about Larry Nordquist?” I asked.

  “Damn right,” he said.

  I saw some movement behind the big hydrangea next to the front porch. So did Rafael. Before he could move or say anything, I gripped his elbow. When he looked down at me I mouthed, No. He got the message and he stayed where he was.

  Loper, sounding like the patronizing jerk I remembered him to be, said, “I don’t want the guy skulking around, not with you alone in the house.”

  “I’m not alone now,” I said. I introduced Jean-Paul to him.

  “Well, well.” Finally, Loper smiled as he offered his free hand—the one without the bat—to Jean-Paul. “The boyfriend we’ve heard so much about. My wife would love to meet you, Mr. Bernard. She’s a regular Francophile. Can I offer you a drink? A little nightcap?”

  “Thank you,” Jean-Paul said. “Perhaps another time. I’m afraid that it is quite late.”

  “Rain check, then,” Loper said, releasing Jean-Paul’s hand.

  I wished him good night and thanked him for his concern. As he turned to leave, he winked at Jean-Paul while aiming a finger at me.

  “Take good care of our girl, now,” he said. “Trouble seems to follow her around.”

  Jean-Paul said, “Good night.” He sounded genteel; he meant Go away.

  We watched Loper until he reached his own front walk.

  Rafael asked, “What do you want done?”

  I knew he was referring to the person hunkered behind the hydrangea. I said, “Would you please help us with the things in the trunk?”

  The three of us huddled over the open trunk. I explained to them who Larry was and that I wanted to speak with him. “Please don’t let him get away. He’ll probably try to run.”

  Rafael laid out a strategy. Jean-Paul gathered our bags and Rafael collected the two towers of green silk-covered candy boxes that the chocolatier had given Jean-Paul to hand out as promotional gifts. With Jean-Paul on the porch beside me and Rafael waiting at the bottom of the steps, I unlocked the front door.

  As soon as I opened the door, the two men sprang into action. Jean-Paul dropped the bags and dove right, toward the hydrangea, flushing out Larry. Larry, rising from a crouch, was off balance, easy pickings for Rafael, who grabbed the smaller man, pinned his arms behind him and marched him into the house.

  “Hello, Larry,” I said, as he was quick-walked across the threshold past me.

  “Yo, Maggie,” he said, giving up his resistance to Rafael. “Long time no see.”

  “Do come in.”

  Rafael sat him down in a chair in the living room as Jean-Paul moved into position blocking the most obvious escape route, with Rafael standing as backup near the locked front door. Larry seemed agitated, sweating profusely, as he noted where Jean-Paul was. I wondered, as Beto had, if he was on something.

  I said, “Can I offer you a cup of tea, a glass of juice?”

  “I could use a shot of something a hell of a lot stronger than tea.” Larry pushed off his hood and shook out his ponytail.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That’s all I can offer.”

  “Yeah.” He settled into his seat and looked around the room. “It’s nice here. Really nice. Comfortable, you know. Not all formal like I expected. Some places, jeez, they’re so done up you’re afraid to touch anything. Know what I mean?”

  “You’ve never been inside the house before?” I asked, thinking about the person in the house the night before who moved about as quietly as a shadow, as if he were familiar with the layout.

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” he said, his tone bitter, defensive. He picked up a coaster from the table beside him, glanced at it and tossed it back down. “Like maybe you invited me to your birthday parties with all your prissy little friends? That never happened.”

  I heard self-pity in his tone and found it worrisome. I said, “I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yeah, well.” He flicked his chin toward Jean-Paul, a question in the gesture. “It’s kind of personal.”

  “Larry, this is my friend Jean-Paul Bernard. Jean-Paul, meet Larry Nordquist.” They exchanged perfunctory nods. “Larry, Jean-Paul is staying, and so is Rafael.”

  He swiveled in his seat to find out where Rafael was.

  “Why don’t we just get it over with?” I sat on the sofa, facing him across the coffee table. “Before someone like Mr. Sato or Mr. Loper knocks your block off for sneaking around.”

  He dropped his head, chagrined. But he remained quiet.

  “Sir,” Jean-Paul said. When Larry looked up, he said, “It is quite late. Miss MacGowen has had a very long day. If you ha
ve something to say...”

  Larry nodded, but seemed unable to begin. I tried to nudge him along.

  “Beto told me you want to make amends to people you feel you have harmed,” I said. “You and I had a couple of run-ins when we were kids, but I don’t feel you harmed me.”

  Again he glanced at Jean-Paul. “Did she ever tell you she beat the crap out of me?”

  “I never laid a hand on you,” I said.

  “But you still won, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings that day,” I said. “Is that what you want to talk about? That fight? What you said that day?”

  “No.” He swiped the arm of his sweatshirt across his glistening face, took a deep breath, and squared his shoulders.

  “Maggie,” he said. “I did wrong you. And I’m sorry if what I did hurt you or put you in danger.”

  “If it’s not the fight, then what are you talking about?”

  “I saw you on TV,” he said. “When that woman died.”

  “You mean Isabelle Martin?”

  “Freaked me out,” he said, nodding. “I mean, I knew her. When I saw her picture on TV and they said she was your mother I about lost it, you know? Because I knew her.”

  “What do you mean, you knew her?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain.” He scratched his neck, looked behind him, hoping maybe for some help to appear.

  “Do your best.”

  “The woman who died? Miss Martin?” he said. “Way back then, she got me to report about what you were doing all the time. She gave me stamps and paper, and I wrote stuff to her. Sometimes she called me on the phone and asked about you.”

  “You spied on me for her?”

  “She paid me.” He shrugged, a sheepish grin on his face. “I didn’t look in your windows, or anything. I just told her about school, like the time you played some kind of bird in the school play.”

  “I was an owl,” I said. “Fourth grade.”

  I glanced up and caught Jean-Paul smiling. Rafael must have thought that the situation was under control. Quietly, he slipped outside to collect the bags and chocolates we had left behind. But when he came back, I heard the snick of both deadbolts shooting home. So did Larry: He watched Rafael the way that prisoners watch their keepers, always knowing where they are, always wary, afraid that they’ll be called out.

  “What you did was—” I searched for the right word.

  “Bizarre,” Jean-Paul supplied.

  “Definitely, bizarre,” I said. “But I never knew about it. And nothing happened to me because of what you did.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I still needed to tell you.”

  “Thank you for your honesty, Larry,” I said. “I’m sure it was difficult for you to come forward.”

  “Pffh.” Uttered with an eye roll as if coming clean were no big deal.

  I said, “A couple of people think you might have been sleeping in the backyard here.”

  “That’s bullshit,” he said with a smirk. “Why would I do that? You think I’m homeless?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said.

  “The thing is, I come by now and then to water the garden,” he said. “That old Jap gardener only shows up maybe once a week. If it was left to him, the whole yard woulda dried up and died a long time ago.”

  “How in the world did that come about?”

  He pointed at his chest. “You mean, me watering the place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, yeah, well, see.” His face colored. “I was always curious, you know? I mean about what it was like back there. I used to hear your family out in the yard all the time, and I always wondered what it was like on your side of the fence. So when I heard no one was home here, I just came in to take a peek.”

  “You could hear us?” I asked. “I don’t remember that we were especially noisy. Where were you that you could hear us?”

  “That’s the thing of it,” he said. “I kind of made myself comfortable in the bushes where I was tonight and sort of listened.”

  “To my family?” Creepy, I thought. But he didn’t seem to think it was especially strange. “Because Isabelle Martin paid you to?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “But that’s how it got started. One day, you guys were eating dinner outside, the way you did. I was just hanging out in the bushes, minding my own business, when she showed up. Scared the shit out of her when she stepped on me.”

  Feeling absolutely nonplussed, I looked over at Jean-Paul. He seemed thoroughly puzzled, but fascinated as well.

  “Why?” I asked Larry.

  “You all seemed so normal,” he said. “I only wanted to know what that was like. You know, being normal.”

  “And Isabelle gave you an excuse to keep spying on us,” I said.

  “Not an excuse, exactly,” he said. “When she caught me, she promised that she would tell on me unless I wrote to her about you. She scared the shit out of me, too.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Yeah. But what I told you already, that’s only part of it.” He looked around, his glance shifting from Rafael to Jean-Paul. “I know you, ­Maggie. Or I used to. We could talk about it, you and me. But I don’t know these guys.”

  “They’re my friends.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck who they are; I don’t know them.” He brushed his hand across his balding pate where he once had a pompadour and finally I recognized the old Larry. The punk. The lost boy. The bully. He checked again on Rafael and began to rise from his chair. “If you want to hear what I have to tell you, lose the friends.”

  Mr. Sato was right, I am nosy as hell. I wanted to know the rest of what he had to say, but I didn’t want to be alone with him, not when he was so agitated. Clearly, Larry wanted to be the one calling the shots. There was a chance, I thought, that if I could keep him talking he would change his mind and open up.

  I asked, “How long did you spy on me?”

  “Couple o’ years.” He stayed on the edge of his seat, poised to go. “Until that day—”

  “Until the fight?”

  “That day, anyway.”

  “Beto’s mom died that day,” I said, watching his face. When he nodded, I asked, “Is that what you want to talk about?”

  “Something like that.” He stood abruptly. “When you’re free to talk—just you—let me know.”

  “You know where to find me,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt back up over his head and started toward the door. Rafael stepped aside; the man was not a prisoner.

  “Do you need a ride anywhere?” I asked, hoping to find out where he was staying at least; Father John did not know.

  “Who, me?” He had a sardonic grin. “You offering me a ride in that hearse you drove up in?”

  That wasn’t my offer to make. I turned to Jean-Paul.

  “Certainly,” Jean-Paul told him. “Just tell Rafael where you wish to go.”

  “S’okay,” Larry said. “I have wheels.”

  We followed him to the door.

  “Larry,” I said as I threw the bolts. “Next time you see me, don’t rabbit.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” He paused in the open door to zip up his sweatshirt. “The thing is, I’ve caught you on TV a couple times, but I haven’t seen you in person since way back. So the other day when I saw you in the yard, you know without all that TV makeup crap on, saw just you, I freaked. I mean, I really lost it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you look so damn much like that Miss Martin. And I know she’s dead.”

  He stepped outside. With his head hunched low, he checked for enemies, and quickly walked away into the night.

  Chapter 8

  “Looks to me like a string of substance abuse-related offenses.” Sergeant Richard Longshore, an old friend who works in the Homicide Bureau of the L.A. County Sheriffs, read to me from Larry Nord­quist’s rap sheet. I called him first thing Saturday morning, while Jean-Paul w
as in the shower, and asked him to find out who I was dealing with before I tried to shake the rest of the story out of Larry.

  “Petty theft, shoplifting from a liquor store, public nuisance—urinating. He did some weekends in custody for drunk-and-disorderly; looks like he’s a scrapper when he has a bag on. There are some possession and possession-for-sale charges that got him county jail time, but he always bounced out early because of overcrowding. We have DUI, DUI, DUI, driving on a suspended license while under the influence. Solicitation, public intoxication.”

  “Solicitation?” I said.

  “Earned a buck or two on his knees to buy drugs,” Rich said. “He’s a problem child, Maggie, but it was all petty crap until he went down for aggravated burglary. Because he took a firearm to that party he drew three years at Soledad and his first strike. The firearm enhancement put him in the bigs, so when he was charged with manslaughter—couple of drunks got into a fight and one died—he drew a full five years as guest of the state, and strike two.”

  “Maybe going away for a while was good for him,” I said. “Gave him a chance to dry out, got him into a twelve-step program.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” he said. “And take care. If he draws one more strike, he goes down for a long, long time. Guys in his position can get pretty desperate if they have something they need to cover up. And it sounds like maybe your boy does.”

  “Did you find anything about Ennis Jones, the man who was once accused of the Bartolini murder?”

  “Pretty much what you thought I would,” he said. “He pulled fifteen-to-life on two counts of rape, one of lying-in-wait. Served five before he was sent to a sex aversion program at Atascadero. Died six months later in an altercation with another prisoner, also a convicted sex offender. End of his story.”

  Jean-Paul came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and began dressing in work clothes: old jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Thanks, Rich,” I said.

  “Maggie?” Rich said. “Don’t try talking to the Nordquist guy alone, all right?”

  “He said that what he has to say is for my ears only.”

  “Too damn bad,” Rich said. “Unless you want your family to be doing some sad singing and slow walking, you don’t go in with the guy alone. Got it?”