“When did he start running?”
“Ace Hotel.”
“Damn,” says L. Crenshaw, adrenaline still flowing. “Serious distance. Wouldn’t think a cellist could do that shit.”
We both look at the cellist. He stares back, unblinking, as though he’s been here before. Or I’m imagining it, but I don’t think so. He stays silent. Sweat drips from his black, curly hair; his nose is banged up; his neck is scraped. I sit, catch my breath, reach for my notebook, slide it back into my pocket, check my shield, gun, and wallet. Intact. I’d love a drink, but that’s hours away. A breeze curls up the stairs, cooling me, blowing papers and cups, specking the air with grit. I stand.
“Take this guy, right?” says L. Crenshaw.
“Read him his rights, process him, and put him in a box. I’ll be there soon.”
“What about this bow thing? Could be a weapon.”
“Made of horsehair.”
“Who thinks up shit like that?”
“Take it.”
I head back through the market and buy bottled water from a taco stand. I splash my face and feel a stillness inside, as if peeking out of the back end of a storm. Tranquil, almost. Content to have run like a madman over all those blocks and come away with a suspect. I walk to the station, take the elevator up, turn left, and see Ortiz ferreting toward me, file in his hand, tie loosened, glasses perched on his forehead.
“Hey, Carver, heard you took a little jog.” He laughs. “Wish I could have been there.”
“Don’t mess with me.”
“Looks like the Ace thing panned out.”
I had gone to the hotel earlier after cross-referencing musicians’ guilds, orchestras, opera, and chamber society websites for cellists. I scrolled through bios and photos and came across Levon Sokolov, a Russian American born in West Hollywood. Thirty years old. Curly, black hair. Impressive résumé: Colburn School, the Royal College of Music in London, and the Moscow Conservatory. He performed with ensembles in Europe, returned to LA to play on movie soundtracks and occasionally with chamber quartets. Lately, he’s been a cellist for hire, working weddings, brunches, a petting zoo, and a yoga retreat in the Palisades. He’s had gaps in his bookings, but the asterisk stood out: he had performed with “the incomparable” Katrina Ivanovna. A wider Google search found he was playing at the Ace with a pianist and a violinist as part of a downtown cultural series. I took a seat in the back. He was tall, slender, and in shape. His tux was tailored, not rented, and an air of privilege came off him—a fallen grace, perhaps, but that may have been the score, his half-closed eyes and his gentleness with the bow, which moved across strings in slow, slanting angles, the music sounding like someone awakening in darkness to an unexpected frost. I approached him after the recital. He had a small fan club, mostly girls taking pictures, and an elegant woman with a tapered scarf and silver-black hair. She kissed him on the cheek, whispered in his ear, and left. I stepped closer, complimenting him, easing my way in, but when I identified myself, he bolted before the last syllable of Carver hit the air.
“Why did you run?” I say.
He looks at me from across the table. A Band-Aid covers the bridge of his nose. His neck is raw and bruised. His jacket is off; blood speckles his white shirt, which is torn at the right shoulder and sleeve. His hair is wild, and his dark eyes move over the box: table, three chairs, two-way mirror, cameras in corners, black scuffs kicked onto walls over the years by suspects who had run out of answers. Ortiz calls the box the ultimate personality test, the place where a man factors his equations, weighs his sins, calculates his truths and lies and the nuances in between, and makes a play for walking out the door and back into the night. Most don’t know how doomed they are. Levon’s eyes stop on the black scuffs—all their eyes do—and then scan on, rolling over the ceiling and settling on me.
“Why did you run?” I repeat.
He says nothing.
“You play well,” I say. “The ending adagio was inventive.”
He leans forward, puts his hands on the table. They are clean, unscarred—long, slender fingers drawing you in, tempting you to admire their symmetry. Antonio Garcia was right. Levon’s hands, pale in their splendor, are attuned to their craft. He watches me. He knows their power. He slides them back and rests them in his lap.
“You’re a musician?” he says.
“I play a little.”
“What?”
“Piano.”
“Hmm.”
“Why did you run?”
“I didn’t know who you were.”
“I identified myself.”
“Who knows who is who these days?” A slight crack in his voice.
“You’re on edge,” I say. “A man who runs from a cop, something’s wrong there.”
“People come up all the time. You never know.”
“I don’t believe you. You knew what I wanted.”
He runs his hands through his hair, shakes his head.
“Tell me about Katrina Ivanovna.”
“I want a lawyer,” he says.
“We can do it that way.”
I let him sit, think about it.
“Let me just ask you one question though,” I say. “When did you last see her?”
“That night . . .”
“What night?”
“The night she died.”
“How did you know it was the night she died?”
“Because the next day it was all over the web.”
“Where did you see her?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’re doing fine,” I say.
We sit in silence. I nod toward the mirror. Ortiz walks in with the cello and the bow. He leans them in the corner. Levon goes to them. He lifts the cello, runs a hand over it, plucks a string. He sets it down and examines the bow. He bends and slides it across the strings—a single forlorn, vanishing note. He sits.
“I’ve had it since I was a boy. It’s a Stradivarius. My great-
grandfather played it in Saint Petersburg. He died. My parents brought it when they came here during communist times.” Ortiz leaves and closes the door. “I can’t believe I left it behind.” Tears edge at eyes, but he swallows and composes himself. “I don’t know what I’d be without it.”
“You played for Katrina?”
He bites his lip. I think he’s going to ask for a lawyer again, and if he does, I’ll have to relent.
“Just the two of us,” he says. “In her loft. Only there. She loved the way I played. She’d take my hands and kiss them and say, ‘Play it sweet.’”
“What did you play?”
“She didn’t want ballet music. She liked David Lang and Bach. She’d dance slowly around me for hours. I think it took her away, you know? I’d get tired, but she wouldn’t allow it. She’d yell at me to keep playing, and when she was done dancing, she’d collapse on the floor and cry. We’d drink vodka and do it again.”
“Why so intense?”
“She said it was like floating away in the night. She said it with a Russian accent, and it fit, you know, the whole Russian dark-soul thing.”
“She drank a lot, took a lot of pills.”
“I don’t know how she kept going.”
He keeps looking at his cello, wanting to touch it again. He starts to stand. I shake my head no.
“She was hoping for a comeback,” he says. “She kept telling me she wanted one more great performance.”
“How did you meet?”
“Our parents had mutual friends back in Moscow.”
“Were you lovers?”
He looks around the box, down at his hands.
“No. I only held her on the floor while she cried.”
“You wanted to be a lover?”
“Anyone who knew her wanted to be her lover,” he says
. “She had a lot. She just wanted me to play.”
“You saw her that night.”
“She texted me. She was going to the NoMad to meet someone. She wanted me to come by. I had written a piece of music for her. She wanted to see it. I was with an old teacher of mine from Colburn. We were going to see a soprano he knew who was having a late dinner at the Eastern Building. We met Katrina in front of the NoMad. She walked a block with us. I gave her the score. She hugged me and walked toward Spring.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“We went to dinner,” he says.
“What’s the teacher’s name?”
“Michel Avanti.”
I leave him alone in the box. Ortiz and I sit on the other side of the mirrored glass. We stare at Levon. It’s like watching a still life. He sits, hands on table. Nothing moves. He must be exhausted. The tightness, nerves, scrapes, and bruises. His wondering about where things are headed. He pushes his chair back and goes to the cello and bow. He sits and plays. I don’t recognize the piece. Perhaps it’s the one he wrote for her. His eyes close.
“It’s like listening to the past,” says Ortiz.
“What do you mean?” I say.
“The things you don’t get back.”
We let Levon play for a while.
“He’s grown but he’s like a boy,” says Ortiz. “How old is he?”
“Thirty,” I say.
“Kinda in-between.”
Levon pulls the bow slow; the music almost disappears, so faint, and then returns.
“First cellist we’ve had in the box,” says Ortiz.
“We had that sax guy a while ago.”
“He didn’t play though. It all changes when they play.”
“What are you thinking?” I say.
“I’m going to call Michel Avanti right now,” says Ortiz, stepping into the hallway and leaving me alone with the music.
I’m tired. My joints are stiff. I feel my bruises too. It’s late. It’s always late in this job; day slides into night in a trick you never see. Levon plays. I think of Madman Across the Water and how long ago it was when I heard the name Levon for the first time, sung from my mother’s record player, the small one she kept on her dresser and listened to when she couldn’t sleep.
“Alibi’s good,” says Ortiz, poking his head in the door.
“What now?”
“Gotta cut him loose.”
I step back into the box. Levon leans the cello against the wall.
“I think there’s something you’re not telling me,” I say.
“I don’t know anything. I played for her. We were friends.”
“Did she talk about her family? Russia?”
“Never about her family,” he says. “Two men came once. They spoke Russian. I speak a little from my time in Moscow, but not well. I was sitting with my cello. They looked at me. She took them outside to the hall. I went to the door and listened. I didn’t hear much.”
“Why would you listen?”
“I could see she was uncomfortable. When she came back in, she went to the window to see if they had gone. She stood there a long time.”
“What did they . . .”
The door opens. Ortiz steps in with a man in a blue suit and a hurried, perturbed look about him, as if he’d been rousted from bed and thrown in a shower. He smells of talcum and cologne and has the manicured arrogance of a man who charges a thousand or more an hour and knows half the sins committed in Beverly Hills on any given night. His hair is black, his business card tastefully sparse. He moves right to Levon, holding a finger up, demanding silence. Levon, I can tell, has never seen Bernie Mathias, of Mathias, Epstein, and Raines, before.
“My client will say no more.”
“He didn’t call a lawyer.”
“And yet, as you can see, Detective, here I am.”
“We’re not holding him.”
“I know you’re not.”
“We’d like to talk to him a little more,” I say. “He was just telling me—”
“We can arrange a time later. Right now, he’s been through an ordeal. He’s tired.”
“He ran from the police.”
“Are you charging him?”
Ortiz and I look at each other.
“No,” I say.
“Collect your things, Levon.”
He lifts his cello and bow and disappears out the door. I follow.
“Levon, you didn’t tell me why you ran. Was it those men?”
“Detective, this is over,” snaps Mathias. “Say nothing, Levon.”
He and Levon step outside and walk toward a Mercedes. Levon, his torn white shirt bright in the night, looks a mess, disheveled and rushing across the plaza, laying his cello in the trunk, and slipping into the backseat—I can see inside—next to the elegant woman with the silver-black hair who whispered to him after the recital. The door closes. The car speeds away. Levon turns, his face, pressed against the window, disappearing in a light rain, the kind that falls in the sleeping hours and is gone by dawn.
Chapter 10
Lily Hernandez is curling barbells, listening to a global hip-hop mix, and looking at me the way she does when I’m late. I step through the half-open door of her Boyle Heights apartment, not far from the café, opened by two white artists, that set off the latest outrage among Latinos over gentrification and race in a neighborhood that was once the entry point for immigrants—Jews, Salvadorans, Mexicans—in a tiny, ever-changing nation in east LA. Rents are going up, accents changing. Neighborhood activists are throwing real shit at gallery walls and phoning death threats to bohemians and start-up geeks. The protesters want to keep these streets from changing beyond what they can afford, but you can’t keep what you don’t own the same. The city is fluid, stretching and blurring in changing patterns of pastel, stucco, brick, wood, stone, edging out from the center toward ocean and desert in endless languages. I mention this to Lily. She is not amused.
“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.” Her muscles tighten and shine. She drops the weights and starts sit-ups. She’ll do a hundred a set, five sets, before stopping. Up and down like a piston. She’s a cop with six years on the beat, a daughter and granddaughter of cops, living on the second floor of a wood-sided house painted white and trimmed in blue. I step to her back porch and look to a garden and a small arbor of grapes, tended by the man downstairs, a retired teacher in a beekeeper’s hat. Rust blooms from the steeple cross at St. Mary’s on the corner, and the air is hazy and heavy, rolling west toward the skyline in the late quiet of a Saturday morning.
“What is it with you and time, Carver?” says Lily, into her third set.
“The dead-ballerina case,” I say, sitting in a porch chair by the door.
“The lost-body case,” she says, not even panting.
“Not you too.”
“Irresistible. Lose a body, Carver, you’ll get shit.”
“I didn’t lose it.”
“Your case. You own it. Besides, you’d be late no matter what.”
“I’m here. I’m ready. Where today?”
“Short one. Five miles. Then a shower and later dinner.”
“I’ll cook.”
“We’ll see,” she says. “You’re a man of good intentions, anyway.”
She hops up, her short, black hair is wet, as if she had stepped in from the rain.
“New shorts?” she says.
“You like them?”
“If they make you faster.”
“I know you’re in great shape, but I keep up.”
“Get real.”
We run to the corner, take a left on First Street, passing the taquería I like near Felipe Bagues Mortuary, and keep pressing west. Girls in dresses file up the stairs at the Bethesda Tabernacle, where a
preacher stands in amber light, fans whirling overhead. Skateboards skim past, and a half-dressed mariachi band sits in the plaza shade beneath the Virgin of Guadalupe, her robes blue and green and flung with stars. A girl holds up a crying baby, a dog scatters doves. Lily pulls ahead. I find my pace. We fall into our rhythm, her looking back to keep the distance between us respectable. Two boys yell, “Lilyyyyy.” A mother waves, and a skinny man in a cowboy hat and curled boots sprints off the sidewalk and runs ten yards with her before fading. Lily is refracting light—a cop, an Ironman competitor (she finished third in the women’s division in Australia a few years ago), and the girl they watched grow up, making confession, taking communion, dancing at her quinceañera, burying her father, who was killed by gangbangers. We pass the mural of Lily’s face, painted two years ago on a café wall by a boyfriend who refused to scrape it away after they broke up. It is gray and black, the color of ash, of something purified by fire: her black eyes drawing you in, a red bandanna around her neck, a rose in her hand, looking like a rebellious campesina from a long-ago war. Her old boyfriend says it’s not Lily, but a dream of all the women below the border. Everyone knows it’s a lie, and when people stroll by it, they smile, knowing the story.
Lily crosses Boyle Avenue and runs down the hill along the tram tracks. I cross Boyle a minute later, thinking about stopping for a latte at La Monarca Bakery but knowing that this wouldn’t be a good idea. I see the speck of Lily turning right along the river. I pick up the pace, my breath coming easier. I feel a slight lift from the endorphins and I like the prospect of leaving it all behind for a few hours to roam the ragged backside of a city that these days is colored by wrens and graffiti and signs of stirring life. I run past tattooed men at the river’s concrete edge, speaking Spanish, polishing car fins, listening to Selena, and drinking beer.
Lily knows about Dylan Cross. She was the uniform on duty at the murder scene of Dylan’s second victim, Paul Jamieson, a smug, talented rapist architect. Lily studied the knife wound, walked around Jamieson’s apartment. I was impressed by what she drew from the clues and the setting of things, knowing that a murder is its own universe. I told Ortiz she would make a good detective. We started working out together, and many nights I appear at her apartment, sitting on the back porch with her, drinking beer, talking. We listen to the sleeping street and feel the wind rush and die and pick up again, on and on out of the stillness. Lily sleeps with me, not out of love—at least, not yet—but out of necessity. We are loners with needs. We understand this about each other—the limitations, but the unexpected moments, too, when we catch each other’s eyes and feel a kind of grace. We were raised in the church. We drifted from it, but we know the narrow space between the sacred and the profane, although that may be overstating it, but I don’t think so. Childhood hymns play somewhere deep, and when Lily says, “Make love to me, Carver,” it sounds like both plea and prayer.
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