“I just like my car. It runs fine.”
Ortiz shakes his head.
“Get over to that writer guy,” he says. “I’m gonna finish this. The Russian consulate’s coming over in an hour. Wants a brief.”
“They probably already hacked us.”
Ortiz stops in midscowl and smiles.
“Go be useful,” he says.
I take the 101 north toward Los Feliz, get off at Hollywood, and head up the hill toward Griffith Park, turning left on a street of sycamores. I check the address. The door to the Tudor-style house is half open. I knock. “Come in,” a voice yells from the distance. “Be right there.” Bombino is playing soft, wiry blues from Africa, which gives the living room, with its antiques, leather chairs, framed maps, pulled shades, and reading lights, the feel of a desert outpost in the waning days of a colonial empire. I imagine poems in the wind, scarves blowing from the necks of horsemen. That mystique changes, though, when my eye catches two Warhol-like paintings of Audrey Hepburn—topless, beaded in sweat, a whip in her hand—and Lady Gaga, a debutante in black dress and pearls. They hang on opposing walls, sizing each other up, playing tricks with preconceptions.
“I almost did a book with her—Gaga, of course, not Hepburn. Ah, but Hepburn would have been something, another era chicer than this one. The Gaga deal fell through. You get used to it. Fickle bunch, the famous. Always need tending. Like a garden. Stubborn too. You can buy a lot of stubborn with money.” He opens his arms. “Welcome to my home.”
“I’m Detective Carver.”
“I’ve gathered.”
Michael Paine is muscular and short, toweled blond hair, shaved face with the pinched tightness of a recent eye tuck. He’s wearing a Lou Reed T-shirt, black jeans, and beat-up loafers with no socks. He seems a precocious adolescent who stumbled into adulthood and doesn’t want to be there. His words come in bursts. He twirls a finger and points, leading me through the kitchen—deep sinks, stained glass, flowers drying upside down over butcher block—to a patio that rolls into a yard of honeysuckle and bougainvillea. An Aztec statue of a kneeling man looking skyward peeks from ivy. “My spirit brother,” says Paine. He pours iced tea and nods for me to sit.
“The writing life is good,” I say.
“Gaga aside, not bad, Detective. I’m a laptop for hire. The famous have an insatiable need to be taken seriously. I bring their epiphanies, for lack of a better term, to the page. You’d be surprised at how many of them can’t express two articulate thoughts. Makes you wonder. But then some of them—ah, some of them are glorious, really smart. Drink, Detective, drink.” He offers a plate of cookies and biscotti. “I started out as a novelist, but novels don’t pay. Amal and George do. Look around. It’s rather excessive, I know. Children are starving somewhere. But these are our times.” He smiles. “Have you noticed, Detective, I tend to talk a lot? I don’t think I was listened to enough as a child. Cut in any time. You look like the quiet type.” He laughs. “What movie is that from?”
“Katrina Ivanovna.”
“Ah, right to business. Direct.” He bites a cookie. “A tragic loss. And then to be lost. How does that happen, exactly?”
“We’re looking into it,” I say.
“I would think.”
“You met her at the NoMad. Her text to you was her last.”
“She texted she was running late. She appeared minutes after. Swept in like an exquisite piece of candy. She had the faint scent of weed about her. We ordered two dirty martinis and found a place in the corner. The NoMad’s become popular with a certain kind. Downtown is suddenly hip. For a time, I suppose. West Hollywood has become passé. So few things feel new there anymore. Perhaps that’s age and cynicism talking. What do you think? Of course, I live here in Los Feliz—hardly scandalous, but still.”
“Who set up the meeting?”
“Her agent is friends with mine, and yada yada, phone calls were made.”
“She wanted a book?”
“I gathered she’d been thinking about writing her life story for some time. ‘Russian Ballerina Conquers World.’ Could be marketable with all the Moscow intrigue these days. Ballerinas aren’t my coterie, if you know what I mean. I tend to stay away from the classical world. Talk about weird diets, egos, and insecurities. Wow. But she was intense. Agitated. She said she had a tale that would shake things up. ‘Could be exposé.’ That Russian accent, you know.”
“What kind of exposé?”
“Wouldn’t say. She said she wanted to get to know me better. She asked to arrange another meeting. Quite mysterious. I was getting interested. I kept studying her. She was as thin and delicate as a martini glass.”
I wince.
“I thought she was an ‘exquisite piece of candy,’” I say.
Paine smiles, puts a hand to his lips.
“Sorry, Detective,” he says. “I’m prone to metaphors. Writing habit. Her hair was down and wild, and she wore a Thai shirt with pretty buttons, and tight black pants. I could tell she had been crying. I had read about her before we met. Drugs and lovers. Nude photos on yachts. The crash and burns. She mentioned Giselle. She said it would bring her back. So many of them are like that, you know. Unable to accept the inevitable. The turning wheel.”
“Like West Hollywood.”
“Touché, Detective.”
Hummingbirds buzz around the honeysuckle. Paine bites into another cookie, pours tea, crosses his legs, and points his face to the sun. It’s still early. The sky is a yellowish blue of heat and smog that scrims the San Gabriels and stretches to the ocean, making the air bristle and tricking you into thinking rain will come. The backyard is quiet. It is never this quiet downtown, never a veil of silence, except maybe in a church or in my apartment around 3:00 a.m. But even then, a siren or a madman’s screech can find you.
“Where did you go after?”
“We had two drinks,” he says. “We agreed to meet again. She’d call me. She kissed me on the cheek and left. I watched her go out the door to the sidewalk. She stopped and talked to a tall man with curly black hair and a cello case—too big for a guitar, too small for a bass; I’m assuming it was a cello—strapped to his back.”
“What did he look like?”
“I barely saw his profile. He turned toward her, and they were gone. Curly hair, as I said, a little long. He was tall, lean, but put together well. I immediately thought of Eastern Europe, if that means anything. The dark hair. That’s really all, Detective. I didn’t see his face.”
I scribble in my notebook.
“What did you do after?”
“Ah, the alibi. The alibi is the currency of my trade.” He laughs, pleased with himself, but he’d be easy to break. “I stayed for another drink and called my agent. She lives a few blocks from the NoMad, over near Grand. She wants me to do a book with Lindsay Lohan. That’d be a handful. We drank a bottle of wine, and I Lyfted home.”
Paine stands, lights a joint, watches the birds.
“Did you guys find her diary, Detective?”
“Diary?”
“She told me she had kept a diary for years. It was all in there. ‘My sins and sins done to me.’ Said it just like that, in her accent. I can still hear the inflection when she said sins. She told me that if she trusted me, she’d let me read the diary, and we would tell her story.”
“Didn’t give you any hints?”
“She was circumspect,” he says. “A tease. But anxious, you know, like someone with stolen money.”
“Another metaphor.”
“The dope makes them a bit sloppy. Want a hit?”
“I’m working.”
Paine leads me back through the house. Lady Gaga’s eyes follow me across the living room. She is lovely, dressed in retro elegance—another disguise—and I wonder, even if Paine ends up writing a book about her, will he get the truth? He opens the door.
Sunlight fills the foyer hung with old Hollywood photographs. Louis B. Mayer. Charlie Chaplin. Valentino. Mary Pickford. All in black and white. Dark eyes and young faces. Chaplin mischievous, like a child playing in a bowler hat and tails, and Valentino, a busboy who became a sheikh, looking seductive and not at all like a man who would die of ulcers at thirty-one. They seem faint flames reaching out from burial grounds. They watch and soothe, and for a moment I feel suspended with them, insubstantial in the light. When I was a boy, my mother took me to old movies at the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport, Rhode Island. We were often the only two there. We’d laugh, the projector clicking and the screen silent, my mother putting her arm around me as if we were two conspirators on a winter’s afternoon. It was in the years after my father died.
“My wall of ghosts, Detective,” says Paine.
I slip out the door and walk to my car.
Chapter 8
“I feel like I’m waiting for the oracle to speak.”
“Gather your men, Odysseus. We sail at dawn.”
“Not what I was hoping for, Detective Carver,” says Dr. Louis Markle, a department psychiatrist. “This could help, you know. You’re too resistant.”
“I don’t have a problem.”
“Ortiz thought it would be good. He feels you’re not yourself since the Dylan Cross incident.”
“The incident,” I say. “Sounds ominous.”
“You can categorize it any way you wish, but these things, these traumas—and you did experience trauma—stay with us. They don’t just go away.”
I’m fifteen minutes into my second required session with Dr. Markle, who, because of Ortiz, wants to rummage through my demons, which, like all of us, I have. But I’d prefer to keep them hidden in my subconscious, where they are comfortable and quiet at the moment. I tell this to Markle. He is not pleased. I don’t want to be the bruised, tight-lipped (reticent) cop, but Dylan Cross is sacred to me—my mystery and riddle, the one who got away. I still feel her kiss, taste the wine on her lips, and see her standing at my apartment window on that long night when she explained it all and left. I knew even before then. I had seen the video of what they did to her. I understood her vengeance. And I knew why she left me a picture of her playing tennis from her Stanford days. She wanted me to know the prodigy she once was: fierce blue eyes locked on the ball, long muscles, the ease of her backhand. It was the best of her, a glimpse at near perfection, taken before they turned her into something else. She wanted me to know that, to see her as the world once intended. She’s gone. Killed two men; let the third, the weakest one, live. She thought he was a victim, too, and perhaps, after all the blood she let, she allowed in a moment of mercy, though none had been granted her.
“It’s been about a year,” says Dr. Markle.
“Yes.”
“She gave you a nasty blow to the head. Any residual problems with that? Vision? Pain?”
“Headaches for a while. Nothing now.”
“Every time I read the case file, I’m amazed. She broke into your apartment, knocked you out, taped and tied you to a chair. Talked with you for hours. And left. She believed you were her confessor, that you would condone what she had done. You were her moral equation, Carver. If she could convince you that what she did was justified, she would be absolved.”
“Christ, you’re enjoying this,” I say. “Three men raped her. It wasn’t difficult to sympathize.”
“Yes, but not condone. That’s what you had to deal with. That’s what she wanted from you. Absolution. She knew you, Detective. She had hacked your laptop. She scrolled through all your secrets. She knew your history. She knew about your murdered father. How do you feel about that?”
“How would anyone feel? Exposed, violated.”
What I don’t tell Dr. Markle is that I didn’t feel violated for long. After she disappeared, I felt she was carrying something of mine, pieces of me that mattered and that, otherwise, I would never have shared. There was peace in knowing that someone—a killer, yes, but someone—understood me without ever having to ask. She saw me unadorned. I don’t know that I could arrest her now. I tell no one that. I like to believe that I’d cuff her and bring her in. I’m a good cop; I know my duty. What the hell good are you if you can’t do the thing that defines you? Am I only a cop though? There is more to me: the piano in the night, a half-remembered saint, a line from Akhmatova at the prison walls, the sounds of Tashkent and Marrakesh, the calm beyond the breakwater when my father took me sailing in the year before he died. They must accumulate into something. The things Dylan knows. I like that she’s out there, wandering with me inside her. Wherever she is, I’m sure she’s drawing buildings. She’s configuring the math of the architect, the beauty that can lift and slant from a line, like the church she designed in the high desert near Joshua Tree, where I drive on weekends and sit amid the stones, wondering whether she believed in God or whether it mattered, and whether she had the same feeling I do when twilight falls against the stained glass, and the old man sweeps and crosses himself with holy water before locking the doors for the night.
“She knows everything about you,” says Dr, Markle, “and you know everything about her.”
“If we were children, we’d be even.”
“Are you worried she’ll come back to . . .”
“She won’t be back,” I say.
“You’re probably right. Why would she? The perfect crime.”
“No. We know who she is.”
“But from what I know about her—all from your case file, Detective—she’s the kind who can stay lost.”
“It’ll be up to her. It’s always been up to Dylan.”
“You sound resigned.”
“No, we’ll get her one day.”
A silent second passes.
“How’s your mother?” he says. “I know she’s been ill.”
I must look startled.
“Ortiz told me,” he says. “He’s worried about you. He’s a good man. Old school. Do you know he collects old maps? It takes him away from the job. We all need time away from what we do.”
“I’ve seen his maps. He spread a few out in front of me once and said, ‘Look, Carver, see this road here becomes this there and then this road. Roads make us.’ He’s philosophical about his maps.”
I look out Markle’s window to city hall. How many cops over the years have sat where I’m sitting, waiting for it to be over?
“My mother’s mind is gone,” I say. “She’s forgotten my name, my voice. It’s as though I never lived.”
“How do you feel about that?”
I shoot him a look with a bullet in it.
“Stupid question,” he says. “I didn’t mean to degrade it. Just wanted to know how you’re feeling. There’s a lot balled up in you.”
“I find that’s true with everyone. You wouldn’t want to unravel most people.”
He smiles, looks at his clock, caps his pen. Another quiet second passes.
“We did okay today,” says Markle.
“I feel much better.”
He laughs, but there’s no joy in it.
“Ortiz was right. You’re a wiseass, Carver. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”
Chapter 9
The cellist streaks out of the Ace Hotel.
I take off after him, following his black, curly hair down Broadway, past old movie houses and Latino stores selling boom boxes and tuxedos. He’s quick. Long strides, shoulders back, arms pumping, his bow flashing in his right hand like an arrow. Two uniforms in a cruiser try to cut him off on the sidewalk, but he slides across the hood and keeps going, block after block, crowds parting, stepping out of his way, shooting him the finger, as if a squall arose out of nowhere. And this being LA, no one is sure whether it’s the real thing or a movie shoot. People are looking for cameras, stars, and helicopters, as if the Rock is going to sprint o
ut of an alley and take down a stuntman standing in for Chris Pine, right before a car catches fire and a gunfight erupts on the corner of Sixth, just up from Clifton’s, where a cartel deal is going down, and Al Pacino is waiting on makeup. It happens. Sirens wail, and three uniforms join the chase and—back to real life—the cellist is a good twenty yards ahead of me when he cuts into Grand Central Market and disappears among tourists, hard hats, hipsters, lawyers, and office workers in lines for ice cream, pupusas, tacos, Thai noodles, and falafels. He passes the Golden Road beer counter and runs out of the market onto Hill, crossing the street near Angels Flight and racing up the stairs toward California Plaza. My legs are burning; my breath is squeezed. Someone yells, “Catch that fucker!” A young uniform breaks ahead of me, chasing the cellist up the stairs, which, even in this fury, smell like piss and dust. The uniform tackles the cellist, who slips free and bounces up but trips and tumbles down the stairs, stopping at my feet in a tangle of torn clothes, blood, and sweat. Everyone’s clapping, thinking Al Pacino is going to shove me aside and get hysterical right before a director yells “Cut!” The world goes silent. Then everyone returns to their lunches and Instagrams, pleased with their LA moment, not exactly sure what happened but guessing it could be in a movie or a new series on Amazon.
“Let me cuff this motherfucker,” says the quick uniform, L. Crenshaw. “Why you running like that, man? Look at my pants. Tore up my pants.”
He clicks the cuffs tight, yanks the cellist to his feet, pushes him against the fence. A helicopter circles and flies away.
“What’s this?”
“He’s a cellist. It’s his bow.”
“Fuck that. See how he plays with it shoved up his ass.”
L. Crenshaw winks and hands me the bow. His radio crackles.
“You’re pretty fast, Detective,” he says. “But you started slowing once you hit the steps.”
“Thanks.”
Last Dance Page 4