He brought it out and held it up, and then reached out and gingerly unpeeled the fabric, squishy with river water, from itself. A crushed tangle of lace and wire.
“The fuck is that?” said Sunny, behind him. “Is that somebody’s bra?”
“No,” said Ruben, finishing the unfurling, feeling the water seep into his palms. “It’s wings.”
He had no evidence bag, of course, nothing like that, so he just smushed the wet wings into his backpack, and as they walked back it dripped out, getting sludgy water onto the backs of his legs.
Back in the Cosmo’s parking lot, before they got back in the car, he and Sunny stood together for a moment, looking at the murder-scene motel, both of them lost in thought.
He felt jet-lagged. He felt insane. The last month had been a dream. The last ten years.
Then Sunny, for once not smiling or pretending to scowl, took his glasses off, folded them up, and slid them into his breast pocket for him, a gentle and intimate gesture, and for one second he thought she might be about to kiss him.
“Can I tell you something?” she said, clutching his chin and looking into his eyes. “You always think I’m kidding, about wanting to fuck you, right? And I am, definitely, but that’s just because I am a hundred percent gay. But you are hot, Ruben. No joke, straight up. You should fucking own that. OK?”
“OK,” he said.
“OK?”
“Yeah.”
She patted him on the cheek. “OK. Now, go and solve your fucking murder.”
April 16, 2009
All that came after was in shards and fragments, the remaining days of Keener v. Valley Village Hospital Corporation raining down like the pieces of a smashed glass dome.
Shenk did his haphazard best to undo what had happened, to staunch the bleeding. Let the record reflect that he did try. He summoned the last reserves of his fighting spirit and came out relentless with Pileggi on redirect, treating his own star witness like a hostile, reminding her of the confident assertions she had made, becoming adamant with her about her own research, her own impeccable credentials. The clear fit between Wesley’s condition and the hypothetical syndrome she had identified.
But these efforts were doomed to failure, and they did fail: the more he pushed, the more Pileggi receded, her voice growing fainter and fainter, her words smaller and smaller, her presence deflating like a balloon.
His closing argument was a desperate stem-winder, a pointillist re-creation of the entire trial, of every piece of evidence. He raged about Garza’s error, about the surgery having been performed on the basis of someone else’s scans, but—as Riggs reminded the jury in his own closing argument—this error would only matter if it had caused Wesley’s condition, and this crucial link the plaintiff had not established. The world’s great expert in Syndrome K had admitted that Wes might not have it; that Dr. Catanzaro hadn’t given it to him; and that, oh yes, it might not even exist.
It was useless—Shenk had lost the jury. Darlene Stephens, the retired elementary-school teacher, made a show of not buying a word of it, crossing her arms firmly across her chest and pursing her thin lips. Mr. Janes stared angrily at Shenk, shaking his head slowly, clearly getting ready to blame him for the lost hours.
Celia Gonzalez would not meet his eyes at all.
When the verdict came in, Shenk stood up immediately, stuffing papers in his briefcase.
Beth said “Wait” and clutched at his arm, and he could see that she was having trouble breathing, having trouble standing. It was the belated suddenness of the verdict, the hammer falling after months and months of hope. She was baffled by shock, by this redoubling of tragedy, by the years—the lifetime—of financial uncertainty that would now be added to the burden of grief—but her lawyer would offer her no comfort or counsel. Shenk rushed past her and headed for the door.
Riggs offered a handshake and Shenk ignored it, pushing through the massive oaken doors of courtroom 5 and into the hallway, down the stairwell to the lobby.
“We’ll appeal, right?”
Who was this? Ruben. His son, tugging at his arm.
Ruben had followed him out of the courtroom and down the stairs and was tugging on his coat, as he had when he was a toddler. He grabbed his father’s shoulders, trying to steady him.
“Dad? We can appeal?”
But Shenk shook his head. He clenched his teeth. There were no grounds. There was no money. There was nothing.
He stopped and grabbed Ruben’s face, too firm, too fierce, and Ruben saw in his raw red eyes not the details of what his father had done—all of that would come in time—but he knew. Fifteen years old now, and he knew. The depth of the hole they were falling into together but would crawl out of apart.
February 13, 2019
Ruben knocked and got no answer and knocked again, like a persistent suitor. Evie lived in a bungalow in Echo Park, on Montrose, just across from the park itself.
The bungalow was small and old, with stone walls and a terra cotta roof. Evie had no doorbell. He knocked again and waited.
It was a Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon. Evie worked at night. She was home.
Evie was sitting just inside, actually, on the floor of her living room with her back to the front door, so that every time Ruben knocked she felt the vibration in her spine. It felt good, but she wanted him to leave.
But he kept knocking.
He would never give up.
She was home, she was here, and he was not leaving until she came out.
So she opened the door. He stood there twisting his mouth to the side like he did sometimes, and his eyes were full of pity and accusation, so she just said “Fuck,” and he opened up his arms and she fell into them, and she kissed him and they kissed for a long time before anybody said anything. Everything coming out into the open together, all the truth and all the feeling.
They pulled apart and she looked him up and down.
He had grown up nice and tall, her Ruben. Her face fit nicely into the curve of his neck, and she breathed on him, feeling her warm breath against his body.
“All right,” he said, after they held that shape awhile. “You ready?”
They went out to the yard, where she had a pair of plastic Adirondack chairs facing the boulevard and the park. They sat not on the chairs but on the grass, a pair of outsiders surveilling normal human activity. People getting tacos from a taco cart. Families making circles in the pedal boats, past the shallow fen full of ducks.
Evie of course had grown up in the Valley, and Ruben wondered if this was why she lived over here now—not because this was where the young and interesting people lived, but because this place bore no relation to the places that had formed her life.
“I want to start with what’s real,” Ruben said quietly.
Evie nodded. She looked at the pedal boats. She didn’t look at him.
“You went to the desert with your parents, on the anniversary of Wesley’s accident?”
She nodded. Yes.
“And your father had a breakdown. He fell apart.”
Another nod. So that much was true, what she had told him backstage at the Echo, when they first talked. Ruben had stumbled onto this notion, that Richard’s sentence could be mitigated by arguing he was in an altered state at the time of the murder, and Evie had leaped at that possibility. All that was real.
Ruben wished he could stop here. In this world, where they had been working together, all along, allies united by cause. He wished he could live in this world forever.
But—instead—
“Later on, at the Chinese restaurant, you told me that you had overheard a phone call. Richard saying you people leave me alone. And when you told me that, that encouraged me to believe this new theory I had. That it was self-defense. And then we got excited together about me going to Indiana to track it down.” He turned, a quarter way toward her, and looked at the side of her face. “Was that part true?”
She didn’t say anything. She shook her he
ad.
“Evie?” he said. He felt like a judge, in a courtroom. “I need it for the record.”
There really had been a phone call. Theresa had called Rich, and it was even right around when Evie had said it was.
“I didn’t overhear it, though,” Evie said. “It wasn’t some mysterious thing. My dad called me and told me about it. He calls me all the time. We talk a lot. I was just back in town from playing a bunch of dates in the Northwest, and he goes, ‘That girl Pileggi just called me, remember her?’ And I was like, you know—yeah. Who could forget her? He said he hung up on her, but she called back ten times in fifteen minutes.”
Theresa had been calling Richard from the road, from what sounded like a pay phone at a gas station. The crackle of the old line, the rush of highway noise. She called Richard at the house, and God knows how she got the number, although all the old security and secrecy is long gone by now. Nobody cares anymore. Pileggi said she had to talk to them about Wesley. She was coming to town, she was on the way, she would be there soon. She had important information. Crucial. She was coming. She was on the way.
She had to see Wesley.
“My dad sounded, like, horrified,” said Evie. Still looking out at the lake. “And furious.”
“I’ll bet,” said Ruben. His own emotions were subdued. He was curious and kind.
“He said I can’t believe it’s happening again. Like in a horror movie: It’s happening again. You know?”
Ruben nodded. Yes. He knew.
Ruben, by now, knew more than Evie did. Theresa had called on her way down from Alaska, having already stopped Katy and Samir from cracking open Dennis.
But he didn’t say anything. Evie was telling the story now. Ruben let her talk.
“You have to let me see Wesley.”
This was Evie now, telling Ruben what Theresa said to Richard, when finally he answered the phone again: I have to see him I have to see Wesley I have to—
It was necessary. It was imperative.
“And my dad was like—well, you know my dad. He was like: ‘You go fuck yourself.’ Right?”
Ruben smiled. “Sure.”
“But he knew that nothing was going to stop her. She would come to LA, she would come to our house, she would never stop. My dad was like, we can’t do this. We have been through this before, and we can’t go through it again. Which you know just meant I can’t put her through this.”
“Your mom.”
“Yeah. He really loves her so much.” Evie shook her head, half admiringly and half bewildered. “He loves her so fucking much, and he knew what would happen. Beth would get all worked up about it, whatever new idea Pileggi had about Wes. Some crazy new hope. It was the last thing she needed. No thanks. And I agreed with him, by the way. No fucking thanks.”
Evie apparently had not redyed her bright white hair, and it was growing back in brown. Streaks of the natural color intermingled with the rock-star blond, layers of Evies. All the versions.
Ruben put his arm around her without thinking about it. She had tricked him. Thrown dust in his eyes. Sent him on a chase.
On the other hand, he’d been wanting to put his arm around her for a number of years. Possibly his entire life.
“So we made a plan.”
“We? Meaning the two of you?”
“Yeah. My dad and me, you know…in all of this. In all of it, since Wesley, we’ve kind of been. I don’t know.” She smiled up at the dim February sun. “Buds.”
Ruben felt a clutch at his chest. Right at that moment, as if sent by the symbols department, a father came into view along the banks of the lake, holding the hands of his kids, one with each hand. Ruben watching them pass, thinking of all the different forms a relationship can take, between a parent and a child.
Evie and Richard had made a plan together to deal with this looming disaster of Theresa Pileggi roaring back into their lives. A plan to protect Wesley. To protect Beth. To fucking handle it.
“So my dad basically goes, to Theresa, next time she calls—she’s closer now, it’s like a week later, she’s calling every day, ten times a day. He says look, OK, I’ll see you. Sure. She wanted him to bring Wesley, she had to see Wesley, and my dad goes OK. Fine. But he tells her don’t come here. Get a motel room, I’ll meet you there. The plan was he would show up and warn her off. That was it. Come to her hotel, motel, whatever, make it absolutely clear that we as a family wanted nothing more to do with her, and that if she showed her face anywhere near us again…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. He’d do something.”
Ruben nodded, waited. Evie sighed. “I wasn’t supposed to go. We made this plan together, but Rich told me absolutely not. I had a gig that night, and he said you go and play your show. You do your thing. But I, uh…” A hitch in her voice. A pang of distress tightening her face. “I wanted to know. I wanted to hear what she had to say. Isn’t that stupid? Some part of me, I guess…what if she had something? What if she could fix him?”
God, Ruben thought: she played me perfectly. Played on their old affection, on his lifetime of sympathy for her. How clever she’d been, how instinctual. When he got as far as Richard’s altered mental state, Evie saw a way to have it both ways—escape her own culpability, while helping her father escape the worst sentence. But then when she realized how close Ruben was to seeing the whole picture, she’d found a way to send him out of town. Suddenly she’d remembered these mysterious threatening phone calls Richard had been receiving, you people leave me alone, which seemed to buttress the self-defense theory, and Ruben volunteered to go and investigate, and Evie…
She’d deceived him at every step. It was all for good reasons, all perfectly understandable, but she really had played him for a fool. He was not, really, a great private investigator.
Still he kept his arm around her, still he let her cry quietly for a moment, not interrupting.
“So I got all ready to play my show, you know, but I drove to the motel instead.”
All ready, thought Ruben. Wings and all. Standing outside in the parking lot, ear to the motel door. Listening to Theresa Pileggi in the grips of madness, shouting at her father.
“You can’t imagine what she was like, Ruben.”
Except he could, of course. He had been to Alaska. He had seen the ranger station. He knew exactly what she was like.
Richard in the motel room found Theresa Pileggi waiting with the handgun, screaming. She needed that boy. She had to take him. Where was he?
Ruben shuddered to think of it, a night so like the night that Dennis and his motley crew had burst into the kitchen on Tabor Street, needing the boy, demanding him. Their vessel. Their gate to be opened.
But this time was different. What Theresa kept saying, Evie said, was that she needed the boy because she had to protect him. To keep him safe. If anything happened to him, then what was inside him would be unleashed.
“That was the word she used,” said Evie. “Unleashed.”
Ruben just nodded.
It was the same word she had used in Alaska, when she told Katy and Samir they absolutely could not go through with it, crack open Dennis and let loose the future trapped inside.
Because the future was doom.
The promise that was bottled up inside Wesley, the spirit that would strip away fear and grief and anxiety, would do so by stripping away everything. A merciful spirit, oh yes, but the mercy of chloroform, the mercy of ether. This was the secret of the good and golden world, this was the part the night man kept to himself as he drove his followers toward its unleashing.
With knowledge comes suffering, so let there be no knowledge. With love comes the agony of loss, so let there be no love. With consciousness comes pain, so let us be washed clean of consciousness, and let ours become a hollow world, a world of wandering Wesleys.
That had been Pileggi’s final revelation, in her madwoman’s bedroom in Indianapolis, and it’s what had taken her to Alaska, and what she had come to Los Angeles to tell the Keeners. The other w
orld was trying to come in, and we could not let it. It had to be contained, forever.
If anything happened to Wesley Keener, the consequences would be dire beyond imagining. So she had come to take him away. She would take him to Alaska; she would take him to the North Pole; she would take him somewhere, and spend her life protecting him, keeping the vessel sealed; keeping the good and golden world contained.
None of this made any sense to Richard Keener, so she just pointed her gun at him, demanded he bring her to his son, and he lunged at her and she started shooting. Evie screamed and rushed into the room. Richard had grabbed Theresa to take the gun, and he was holding her, but she wouldn’t drop it, and—
“It was out of control,” said Evie, rubbing her nose. “It was beyond. I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was, she was going to kill him. This fucking lady was going to kill my father.” Evie looked at Ruben, right in his eyes, needing him to believe her, needing him to understand, to acknowledge, to know. “She would have killed my father.”
Ruben nodded. He did not doubt it. She was talking about Theresa’s urgency, her mania about Wesley, and he was thinking of Dennis, of Samir and Katy. A serrated kitchen knife against his father’s throat. He didn’t doubt it at all.
But he had to hear the rest. “So?”
“So I hit her with the lamp,” said Evie. “As hard as I could.”
And there it was. Ruben waited. She went on.
“She went right down. Like—collapsed. I didn’t mean to kill her.”
“I know,” said Ruben. “I know.”
“You know that, right?” She turned to him, needing to know. “You believe me?”
“Of course. Evie. Of course.”
Pileggi’s brain inside the fragile ceramic of the skull, rattled into uselessness by the single hammer blow of the lamp. She is there, Theresa Pileggi of Indianapolis, Indiana, this human person all full of motives and lusts and misunderstandings and memories and just like that she blinks out, because after all there is no such thing as a human being, just clusters of memories, connected by wires.
The Quiet Boy Page 36