The Waning Age

by S. E. Grove

  But what I really wondered was how I could feel nothing for the life I’d deliberately, only hours earlier, decided to spare. For a short time, while I contemplated my own face in the mirror, destroying Philbrick had seemed monstrous. Now it simply seemed like a thing that had happened. Unexpected. Unpredictable in its consequences. But no longer monstrous. I imagined them side by side, near an open window, the breeze ruffling their hair. Monica a crumpled sparrow, too-thin arms flung wide. Tanner a frozen rock, eyes open and unrelenting. It was an image that meant nothing, in the sense that it had no moorings in the real world. And it meant nothing because when I thought about it I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  I looked up at Joey, and I could see my own thoughts reflected in his eyes. I pulled myself away from that imagined room in Pac Heights, back into the Oakland apartment. “I think we should get some legal help,” I said aloud, looking at Joey.

  “Yes,” Joey said.

  Troy seemed uninterested. He stared at the bookcases. He was emerging from the hurricane and starting to feel exhausted. Now that it was over, nothing would seem to matter. It would be a while before he realized that there were events and consequences he still cared about. “I have a lawyer,” he said. He gave a hiccuped laugh. “At least, my dad does. I haven’t called him yet, either.”

  I considered. “First lawyer, then cops. Do you know the name?”

  Troy reached into his pocket, took out a silver cigarette case, popped the lid, and tapped at the decal inside it. He was slow and a little clumsy, as if the outburst had frayed the finer points of his movements. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

  The decal showed the contact information for Lester Bloom of Reminsky & Bloom. “This guy is going to have a bad night,” I said, looking at the decal.

  “I’ll call him,” Troy said wearily, reaching up for the cigarette case.

  “Before you do, I want to send this to Joey so he can send it to Cass and Tabby. They’re working with a lawyer who will contact Bloom about your dad’s will and the terms of adoption.” I watched his red-rimmed eyes attempting to keep up. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure, fine.” He had no idea what I’d just said, or no idea what it signified.

  I sent lucky Lester Bloom’s info to Joey, who nodded as it arrived and stepped quietly toward the doorway to call Cass and Tabby. I gave the cigarette case back to Troy.

  It was almost eleven, but Lester Bloom answered on the second ring.

  “Hi, Lester,” Troy said sedately. “This is Troy Philbrick.” He paused. “Yes, it is. Dad and Monica are dead.” Another short pause. “Mom’s in Paris and Charlie is skiing in Tahoe.” A longer pause. “Yes. My friend can call. But we can’t meet at the house.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. I have my car. I can drive there, no problem. Thank you, Lester.” Something the lawyer said made him smile, and he hung up. I was impressed by the man on the other end of the line. Word economy is hard to come by in the law. Consideration nearly impossible.

  “Lester’s in Napa,” Troy reported, putting the cigarette case away. “His place is like a mile from our house in Yountville.”

  “You’re going to drive there?”

  “He said to call the cops and then drive up to Napa to meet him.” He blinked. “Can you call them?” The weariness was starting to overwhelm him.

  “I can. But you need some coffee,” I said to him, “or you’ll end up driving off a curve.”

  He nodded mutely.

  I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, set a cone filter over a cup. While I waited for the water to boil I took out De rerum and sent Gao a message. Tanner Philbrick dead in his home. Looking into adoption fallout. Will need to verify death. Help please? I added Joey’s phone number.

  His response arrived in seconds. Are you making scarce?

  No, I typed back. Wasn’t me.

  Good. Will do.

  Thank you.

  Twice in one day. Do not make habit.

  I smiled and tucked the phone away. My smile faded as I padded back into the living room with a cup of coffee and rejoined Troy. I sat next to him and took his hand. “Before we talk about what you’re going to say to Lester, I want to say something first.”

  He looked at me, his eyes clearly straining to focus. “Yes.”

  “I want to say that what your parents did was unforgivable. I think almost anyone who hears a description of it will agree with me.”

  His eyes were heavy, tears welling in them briefly. “But you don’t believe in guns.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Weapons for weaklings.”

  I shook my head. “No one wants to be weak. But some people are made weak by others. What would the world be like if we blamed people for their own powerlessness?”

  “Are you saying I was justified?”

  There was no right answer to that. My choices were being wrong or being a hypocrite. I dropped my eyes. “I don’t think it’s right. But I find it completely understandable.” I struggled for the sense of clarity that I’d found that evening in the unlikely setting of a steak house bathroom. “I think asking if it’s justified is the wrong question.”

  When I looked back up at him, his awareness had shifted. He was looking inward now, reflecting. “I am weak,” he said, his voice stony. “I’m not like you. You would have run away from them. You would have toughed it out with no drops. That’s what you do every day. I couldn’t even do two weeks.”

  “I can tough it out because I have for years. And because I don’t know what the alternative feels like. I guess I have my mom’s minimum wage to thank for that. In your situation . . . Who knows? I might have become exactly like you.”

  He stared into the row of books across from him. “I have no idea who I am,” he said.

  I considered his neatly trimmed hair, his smooth skin. The white shirt, slightly unbuttoned. The costly watch, hanging loosely on his tanned wrist. A physical person, put together by money and care and food and exercise and more money. What was he made of without all that careful cultivation? What was he, but a body? A body I had pressed up against for warmth. A body that had taken the life of two other bodies. The brain beneath the well-shaped skull was an even greater mystery. That place nourished and poisoned and nourished again by liquid chemicals. What would it be like when Troy’s drops ran out and the deforested landscape of his mind once again fell silent?

  I had no idea, either.

  “Hey,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Let’s figure out what you’re going to say to Lester.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  32

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 15–12:15 A.M.

  By midnight, Troy had left for a caffeinated drive to Napa. Joey had passed the grenade to Cass and Tabby, who had passed it to June, who had verified the Philbricks’ death with the San Francisco Police Department. Then June had contacted lucky Lester, who turned out to be one half of a boutique law firm specializing in family values. He broke the law and proved himself a total fairy godmother twice over by spilling the terms of his client’s will.

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe something like manumission? Instead it was something like a hornet’s nest. “Yeah,” June was saying on the other end of the line. “So basically half of everything goes to Charles Philbrick, the older son, and half goes to Troy Philbrick, though it remains to be seen whether that goes through if Troy is charged with homicide. And there’s a specific codicil that pertains to adoptions and makes Charles the custodian.”

  “Charlie?” I could see him as the head of RealCorp, because his nastiness was all of a piece with theirs, but I couldn’t see him as an adoptive father. Even Daddy Philbrick must have known that Charlie and parenting belonged together like marshmallows and hot sauce.

  “Yes. But there is an angle, Nat,” June said.

  “What?”

  “In suc
h cases where the custodian of a child dies and a new custodian is designated, the court has some say in the suitability of the new custodian. I mean, Charlie’s suitability can be contested. We could try to prove that he is not a suitable. Though I’m not sure how.”

  I heard a steady drumbeat in my ear, a pulse of certainty, maybe adrenaline. “I can do that,” I said. “I can prove he’s not suitable.”

  June paused. “Really? Apart from his just being young?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Well . . . do you think you could do it in a couple hours? Maybe three, at the most? Whatever we’ve got I want to put in front of Judge Horn at four a.m.”

  I thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.”

  I hung up with June and didn’t bother to explain to Joey as I tapped through De rerum, looking for the number Crystal Cleaners had handwritten at the bottom of their invitation to the Philbrick mousetrap. There she was: Ma Ling.

  Joey watched me as I dialed and waited. Ma Ling was not Lester Bloom. The first time it went to voicemail, a grouchy message in Mandarin that I hung up on. But the second time she picked up on the fourth ring. “Wei?” she answered groggily. I guess Ma Ling slept daytime and nighttime both.

  “Hi, Ma Ling,” I said, going for polite tinged with urgent. “This is Natalia Peña. I was in your office a couple days ago when Crystal Cleaners hired me to housekeep for Tanner Philbrick.”

  There was a pause. “Are you there now?” she asked. She was no longer groggy.

  “No, I was there on Saturday. I have a different kind of emergency.”

  She gave it a beat or two. “What is it?”

  I laid the problem out for her. I was murky about the chronology, trying not to shine a bright light on how I’d used Crystal Cleaners as my cover for spying on Philbrick. She didn’t seem to much care about that. But she did care about Charlie Philbrick. “That snake has cost me three good cleaners,” she announced. “Another six I had to give vacations.”

  This was good news, at least for me. I told her about my own run-in with charming Charlie and she gave a sly laugh. I could picture her on the other end of the line: sitting in bed with her flowered nightgown, eyes closed, hair like a tumbleweed, chuckling in the dark. It took some convincing, mainly because she was no dummy and could see the liability for Crystal Cleaners. But in the end, the calculations tipped in my favor. By the time we’d hung up I had ten names with phone numbers and addresses.

  * * *

  —

  Four didn’t answer. Two didn’t see the point in talking to a stranger about past grievances. One lived in Daly City. The other three lived in the East Bay and ranged from amenable to zealous. I made tightly spaced appointments in Fruitvale, Alameda, and Pill Hill.

  Joey had jogged to June’s office downtown and picked up the coupe. By the time I finished my cold calls he was standing on the curb, bouncing the keys. “Ready to go?” he asked me.

  I held up a duffel bag that held the supplies for three different contingency plans and a dozen possible outcomes. An explosive plastic decal, a change of clothes for Cal, a microphone, a pen, a file folder with blank paper, our passports, a baton, a tube of lipstick, and a coil of rope. The handgun wasn’t in there.

  “Ready,” I said.

  As we got into the coupe, he asked, “Do they all have to fit in this car? Because that might be tough.”

  I shook my head. “Signed statements.”

  “Smart,” Joey said, pulling away from the curb.

  I gave him the address in Fruitvale, and Joey drove alongside the lake in silence. We didn’t have much to say. The air outside was cool, redolent with night flowers, deceptive with calm. I watched the minutes go by on my watch. When we reached Fruitvale, Joey said he would stay outside with the coupe and I agreed. I rang the buzzer of the townhouse and a girl in her early twenties opened the door wearing a blue bathrobe.

  “Felicity?”

  “Yup.” She waved me into a narrow hallway and I followed her all the way down past the blank walls to a kitchen lit by a bare bulb. White cabinets, brown linoleum, and a dining table with the surface area of a magazine cover. She motioned to one of the two folding chairs at the miniature table. I sat down across from her. Felicity had bubblegum-pink nails and brown hair with natural corkscrews. Slender nose, dimpled chin, and green eyes. Quite cute. Foul-mouthed and relaxed, like a longshoreman on holiday.

  “Here it is,” she said, pointing to a handwritten page of yellow lined paper. “I want that fucking bastard to go down.”

  I glanced at the paper. “This won’t do that, you know.”

  “It’s a start. Read it,” she ordered. “Let me know if it’s okay.”

  I read. It was energetically colorful, but it was also very detailed and included dates. She had signed at the bottom. “This is great,” I said. “Revolting, first and foremost—the guy belongs in jail. But also great. Hey,” I added amiably. “You should press charges. Why didn’t you then?”

  She rolled her eyes. “My ass clown boyfriend at the time didn’t want me to. Fuck knows why I listened to him.”

  “There’s a few of us, you know. We’d have a good case.”

  She sniffed. “Yeah, maybe. Can’t really afford a lawyer, you know? My wages barely cover the rent for this palace of shit.” She gestured with two pink nails at the kitchen around us.

  I smiled. “If you like I can keep you in the loop. We could share costs. No commitment, of course.”

  “Sure.” She gave me a surprisingly sweet smile as she stood up. “I hope you get your brother back.”

  “Thanks.”

  We parted ways at the door and Felicity waited while I got in the coupe. She gave me a sisterly wave as we pulled out. Silhouetted in the light of the corridor, all the hardness vanished; she became a soft, girlish figure, ushering me out into the dead of night. I waved back, sticking my hand out the coupe window as we peeled out.

  “Next stop, Alameda,” I said to Joey. “We’re making good time.”

  * * *

  —

  The house in Alameda was white stucco with an open front porch illuminated by string lights. Ruby was sitting on the porch at a bistro table. “Come on up,” she called. On the bistro table was a coffee service with two cups and some sheets of printed paper. “Hi, Nat,” Ruby said. “I thought you might want some coffee.”

  “You’re a saint,” I said, dropping into the metal chair beside her.

  Ruby smiled as she poured me coffee. She was one of those women whose features seem poached from a different era. Her hair was in old-fashioned curlers. She had a smooth brow, a wide mouth, dark brown eyes with layers of unaffected calm. Without even trying, she looked like Billie Holiday at home of an evening.

  “Help yourself to cream and sugar,” she said, handing me the cup.

  I did and drank the coffee scalding hot. She watched me as she took a sip.

  “I’m glad you’re doing this,” she said evenly. “At the time I hadn’t the wits or means to do a thing about it. Now I’m on better footing.”

  “Not cleaning anymore?” I guessed.

  She shook her head. “I’ve got a secretarial job in the city. The pay is better and the work sure is better.” She eyed me without judgment. “You still cleaning?”

  “I actually clean at the Landmark Hotel. Crystal Cleaners was kind of a one-off. I can’t pretend it’s good work, but you know what it’s like. Hard to find other work when all you’ve done is scrub toilets.”

  “I know. It took me seven years to get an admin degree at night school.”

  I whistled.

  Ruby picked up the printed sheets of paper and handed them to me. “My job is at a law firm, so I have some idea what this is supposed to look like.”

  “Mind if I read it?”

  “Please,” she said, picking up her coffee cup.


  I read through the statement, two typed pages of clinical precision that could not entirely expunge the brutality of their content. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to recall this,” I said, putting the pages down.

  She lifted a shoulder. “I didn’t think I’d felt it. Only later did I realize that you can not feel a thing and still have it leave scars. You know?”

  I thought about it. I thought about Mom’s hair ruffled by the breeze that came in through the casement window beside her broken head. How many times had I pictured it? Five hundred times? Five thousand? The thoughts built up like grains of sand and now I carried their weight around, day and night. “Yes, I do.”

  “It’s good to have it on real paper. I’ve learned that much at the firm.”

  I’d finished my coffee and put the cup down on her tray. “Thanks a million. And for the coffee.”

  Ruby stood up as I pushed back my chair. “Let me know how it goes, will you?”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  —

  The last stop in Pill Hill was of a different category. The apartment building was little more than a brown box with cutout windows, and half the buzzers at the entrance were broken. Nicole’s wasn’t. She came down to the door in sweats and opened the glass door a foot wide.

  “Nicole? I’m Nat Peña.”

  She wasn’t interested in pleasantries. “I’m having second thoughts about this,” she said, looking past me at the street. She had dirty-blonde hair that hung around her face like seaweed, a face tight with deprivation, shifty eyes.

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t want to push you. No problem if you don’t feel like giving a statement.”

  “Is he going to read it?”

  “Charles Philbrick?”