The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

“What do you mean?”

  She held up her hand, fingers splayed. I shook my head, no clue what she was talking about.

  “Amy in bright pink nail polish?” she said. “What’s up with that?”

  I left not knowing where I was headed, walked down residential streets in soft, midevening air. People parked their cars, drove away, got home or went out. Others stood in kitchen windows, glanced down out of bedrooms, stood watering plants in their yards. I wanted to head up those paths, stand in those kitchens, sit in a big easy chair in one of those living rooms, and say, So—what’s up? Tell me how you live. Tell me all. Other people’s lives always seem more interesting, coherent, simply more real than my own. Television, books, celebrity culture, even plain watching the world go by: all a desire for an existence that has a directness and simplicity we never feel, that seems real and true in a way our own smudged and fractured days never do. We all want to be someone else for a while. Seem to believe, almost, that we already are, that something stands in the way of the lives we were supposed to have.

  My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. “Yes?”

  “Whozis? Who?”

  The voice was thick and hard to understand. “It’s Jack Whalen,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

  “This L.T. here. It’s the building, you said.”

  “What building?”

  “Shit. You told me money.”

  I realized who I was talking to. “You’re the guy who was sitting at the café in Belltown.”

  “It is. You want what I got?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not involved with that anymore.”

  My interlocutor became loudly disquieted. “You a lying mother fucker! You said you had money. I made the call, cop motherfucker.”

  “Okay, sir,” I said. “Tell me what you have.”

  “Fuck you! How I know you going to pay me?”

  “You got me. But I’m not in Seattle right now. So either you give me what you have, and I pay you later, or I put the phone down and block your number.”

  He didn’t hesitate long. “It’s a girl, bro.”

  “What?”

  “She a kid. Come up the street, last night, late, she stand a front the building. Look like she try a key. Don’t work. She go away up the street. She gone.”

  I laughed. “You saw a little girl come look at the building, then go away? And you want money for that?”

  “You said—”

  “Right. Well thank you. The check’s in the mail.”

  I ended the call and made a note to block the number when I sat down. In the old days I’d be doing something like that once a week. Giving out my number to people who might have information they would feel more comfortable giving out later, when no one was around—then blocking it when they got to thinking they had a friend on the force who would fix their parking tickets or get their aunt out of jail. I did not miss those people. Black or white, young or old, these baffled, violent men with their unhappy, shouting wives, hermetically sealed off from their dreams by drugs, poverty, and fate—and laziness, too, often, along with short fuses and shorter attention spans and a bitter yearning for the easy life that guaranteed that theirs would be anything but.

  I kept walking, and after a time I found myself on Main, passing places like Rick’s Tavern and the Coffee Bean, iBod and Schatzi, Say Sushi and Surf Liquor, environments that had been a casual part of my existence for years. I’d even met Amy in a bar not far from here. I’d been killing an evening with a colleague when a couple of drunks started working a table of women. The deal with a bar’s being cop-friendly is the understanding that—should anyone not realize that the place often contains off-duty policemen and that good behavior is therefore mandatory (for non-cops, at least)—it will be made clear to them. So I got up, walked by the other side of the women’s table on the way to the men’s room, and communicated via a pointed finger that the guys’ attention would be better deployed elsewhere. One looked like he wanted to make something of it, but his friend got the message, and they left without a fight. There was a fresh beer waiting for me on the counter when I got back. So it goes.

  Several months later I dealt with a minor collision a few miles away. One car was inhabited by a pleasant man in his early seventies who was profoundly stoned and admitted his culpability even before he fell down on the sidewalk. The other contained a woman I recognized as having been at the table in the bar. She was sober, calm, and cute. She’d never even noticed me in the bar, but she had by the time this incident was sorted out. I was brisk and efficient with the public. She liked that, I guess. As I came to understand, Amy Ellen Dwyer valued the brisk and efficient above most else.

  A couple weeks later, I was back in the bar, and so was she. Facial recognition occurred in both parties, and I briskly and efficiently stopped by to say hello. Though hitting on the victims of crime was viewed by many as a key perk of the job, it lay outside my own personal experience and I expected nothing to come of it. The women left while I was out back sharing a joint with the cook, but when I returned to the bar, I found she had left her number with the bartender.

  “Call me,” the note said. “Without delay.”

  We met up a few days later and had one of those dates where you start one place and then find yourself in another, and then another, not remembering how or why you moved—because the talk just seems to keep coming and this sense of freedom, of not having to stay put to protect your position and mood, seems to be at the heart of the evening. In the end it became kind of a game, each of us suggesting somewhere more obscure or offbeat to go next, until finally we found ourselves sitting side by side on a bench in a very touristy location and realizing that it felt okay because we didn’t feel much like locals either that night, but as if our lives and selves were in the midst of being freshly minted before our eyes. They were.

  When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That’s why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you’ll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what’s going on.

  It was hard not to think of that evening now that I was here, and of others that had come after it, good and bad. I dropped down Ashland to Ocean Front, headed up past Shutters Hotel, under the long ramp road from the pier up to Ocean Avenue, then onto the concrete path on the beach itself. There’s a run of buildings just up from there, right down on the sand, some of the earliest houses built in the area. They’ve always looked strange to me, incongruous, faux-English mansions behind fences on the beach, squatting in the shadow of the high bluffs like imps on the chest of someone who sleeps.

  The lights on the pier were all on now. I got out my phone and called Amy’s number.

  “Hey,” she said. “Sorry I haven’t checked in. Got hung up at Nat’s. Only just left. You know what she’s like.” I didn’t say anything. “How are things back at the homestead? Got the place warmed up?”

  “I’m not in Birch Crossing,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m in Santa Monica. I flew down this afternoon.”

  There was a pause. “And why would you have done that?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “No idea, hon. Sounds kind of wacky to me.”

  “Hardly seen you this last week. I thought it might be nice for us to meet up. Check out the old haunts.”

  “Babe, that’s a really sweet idea, but I’ve got like a ton of work to do. Need to get my ducks in a row for the meeting tomorrow.”

  “I don’t really care,” I said. “I’m your husband. I’m in town. Come meet me, for coffee at least.”

  There was silence for maybe five seconds. “Where?”

  “You know where.”

  She laughed. “Well, actually, I don’t. Not being a mind reader.”

  “So pick a place,” I said. “And be there soon.”

  “You’re really not going to tell me whe
re?”

  “You choose. And just go there.”

  “Jack, this is a dumb game.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.”

  chapter

  THIRTY-ONE

  On the pier, groups of tourists strolled in the softening light, coming in and out of souvenir stores or suspiciously eyeing restaurant menus. I leaned against the rail and waited, the knot in my stomach getting tight and tighter. Twenty-five minutes later, I saw a woman walking down the ramp from the Palisades. I watched her come onto the pier and move purposefully through the crowd. She was in her mid-thirties but looked younger and was very smartly dressed. She glanced neither left nor right but headed straight to where she was going. She held something in her right hand, something that looked so wrong as to be trick photography, and I realized there had been things I’d misunderstood.

  I let her go by, then got up and followed.

  By the time I got to the end, she was leaning on the railing, looking across the water back toward Venice, a yellow glow surrounding her from the lamp at the corner of this section of the promenade. There were other people nearby, but not many—we had passed the restaurant sections and stores, were almost as far as possible from land. Most people got to this point, nodded at the sea, and turned to head back to where they could buy stuff.

  Amy turned around. “Hey, you found me,” she said. “You’re good.”

  She looked strange. Taller, yet more compact. As if she had edited or improved her form, become Amy 1.1, without consulting me on the development process.

  “Not really,” I said. “This was the only place that made sense.”

  “Exactly. So what’s with the cloak-and-dagger?”

  “I just wanted to see if you could remember.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Jack. We came here on our first date. You proposed to me on this actual spot. We…well, you know. I’m hardly going to forget.”

  “Good,” I said, feeling tired and sad, unable to completely remember what I’d thought the point of the exercise had been. I leaned on the rail next to her.

  “So what’s up?” she said. “It’s lovely to see you, obviously, but I’ve got miles to go and promises to keep and a stack of work to do before I sleep.”

  I shook my head.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “No you haven’t. Got work to do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I called your office before I left home.”

  She pushed back from the rail. “Honey, you’ve really got to stop bugging people where I work. It just doesn’t look very—”

  “There’s no meeting here tomorrow.”

  She cocked her head, Dyer style. I could see her judging how to proceed. In the end she nodded.

  “That’s correct.”

  There it was. Yes—I lied to you. It felt like a cold wind was blowing across the back of my neck, though the night was warm, and there was no breeze.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see Natalie.”

  “Not according to her. She says it was a drive-by and she wasn’t even sure why it happened.” There was a cliff in front of me, the edge of which I could clearly see, yet toward which I was persisting in taking steps.

  “You’ve been to interview her? Wow. Shame you were never this go-getting when you were a policeman, Jack.”

  “I never wanted to be a detective. You knew that.”

  “But now you do? When it’s too late?”

  “I care about this more, I guess.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s you. Because something’s happening that I don’t understand. And you’re not answering my question.”

  “There’s nothing going on, babe.”

  I got out my cigarettes. Took one, then offered the pack to her—something I’d never done before in all the time we’d known each other. She just looked at me.

  “Saw you walk by with one in your hand,” I said. “Found your ash on the deck the night you came back from Seattle, though I didn’t realize it. Saw you smoking out there last Sunday afternoon, too, when I was running. I thought it was just condensation. But it wasn’t.”

  “Jack, you’re being ridiculous. I don’t—”

  There wasn’t enough force behind the lie. I didn’t even have to raise my voice to interrupt.

  “Plus, I found a collection of butts in the bushes. Couldn’t figure how someone could have been out there without you seeing them from inside. But that’s because it was you doing the smoking. Correct?”

  She looked away. Being right brought me no pleasure. “So what starts you up again after…what—ten years? Twelve?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes remained elsewhere, and her mouth was pursed. She looked like a teenage girl stoically enduring being chewed out for breaking a curfew she believed was dumb and unfair.

  “Is it the same thing that’s started you using abbreviations in text messages?”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “You’re a bright woman. You’re capable of understanding the question,” I said.

  “I understand the words, but not what you’re getting at. You’re out on some weird kind of limb here, honey.”

  “I don’t think so. You’re the one who needs to get your head straight. Whatever or whoever’s clouding your mind has you falling down all across the board.”

  “I’m really fine,” she said. “Seems to be you who’s running red lights.”

  She looked so chillingly smug then that I wanted to turn and walk away from her. Or even, for a fraction of a second, to shove her over the railing. To punish this impostor for stealing the identity of someone I loved.

  “Annabel’s birthday,” I said instead.

  She frowned. Even when she spoke, it was with the air of someone treading water. “What about it?”

  “When is it?”

  The penny dropped. She rubbed her forehead. “Oh, crap.”

  “No big deal in the grand scheme of things. But—”

  “Of course it’s a big deal. Shit. Why didn’t Natalie say anything?”

  “Probably didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  “Natalie? Does that seem likely?”

  “Actually, no. But before you leave town, you should see about getting something to the kid, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Christ. What did we get her last year?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Call Natalie tonight, make your excuses, and get a gift suggestion at the same time.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. We seemed to have taken a turn down some baffling side street, and I didn’t know how to get back to where we’d been. So I simply picked up the car and put it back on the other road.

  “Amy, if you’re just going to stonewall, then—”

  “There’s nothing that needs to be talked about.”

  “So how come you’re suddenly listening to Bix Beiderbecke?” I asked, feeling absurd.

  “Christ—you’re really pushing on this, aren’t you? I caught a couple tracks on the radio, thought it sounded okay, didn’t bother to change the station. And anyway—how do you know that’s who—”

  “Your phone is full of it.”

  “You looked through my phone? For God’s sake. When?”

  “The day in Seattle. As far as I could tell, you’d vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “What’s on my phone is private.”

  “From me? Since when did we have secrets?”

  “People always have secrets, Jack—don’t be a moron. It’s how you know you’re a different person from somebody else.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Is that why you tell people you left the police because you’d finally had enough? Why you don’t volunteer the information that one night you just got up and fucking—”

  “Secrets from you, I meant. And what would you prefer me to say? That I near
ly wound up on a—”

  “Of course not. But…”

  She breathed out heavily. The air was beginning to turn, to lose its warmth. We looked at each other, and for a moment it was only the two of us, as if a bubble had burst and any disagreement between us was absurd.

  “You want some coffee?”

  She nodded.

  “Or is it tea these days?”

  She smiled a little, against her will. “Coffee will be fine.”

  We got drinks from a stall thirty yards back up the pier. Started walking together toward the shore but wound up back at the end without discussing it. Whenever we’d come onto the pier together, that’s where we always went, where our feet took us when they were together.

  I found myself saying something from nowhere, something that sounded odd and clumsy in my mouth. “Do you think there’s any of him still here?”

  “Any of who?”

  She knew who I meant. “Don’t you remember the wind? How some of…some got blown back at us, back onto the pier?”

  She looked away. “There’s nothing left. Nothing here, nothing anywhere. It was two years ago. It’s dealt with.”

  “No,” I said. “We haven’t dealt with it.”

  “I have,” she said. “It’s history. Leave it there.”

  It was only for an instant, but I saw her chin tremble, two tiny little twitches. I realized that it had been a long time since I’d seen her cry. Too long, for what had happened.

  “We don’t talk about it,” I said. “Ever.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “There must be.”

  She shook her head, and now her face was firm. “I was pregnant. It died at five months, and I had a dead thing inside me for a while. It came out. It was cremated. We spread the ashes over the sea. My womb is broken, and I’m never going to have a child. There’s nothing else to say, Jack. It happened, and I’m done with it now.”

  “So how come you changed the picture background on your phone?”

  “You know why. Because I was pregnant in the photograph. I’m moving on. You should be, too. Not thinking about it. Not letting that or things that happened fifteen years ago rule my life. Sometimes people die. Children, fathers. You have to move on. Your dumb God of Bad Things is only in your head, Jack. There’s no one to catch, no perp. Nothing to be done.”