“Hi, it’s Maggie.”
“Any response?”
“Almost a smile. That’s something. I think she’s tired.”
“I should come back,” I say.
“You were just here before you went to Europe. No need, Sam. Really, I’ll let you know when you need to come. How was your trip?”
“I had to get away.”
“I know you did.”
“It was good, Maggie.”
“I’m glad,” she says. “What are you working on now?”
“We have a dead ballerina.”
“Is that yours? I saw it on the news. Terrible. And the body disappearing. What a shame. Who takes a body? She was Russian, right?”
“Yes.”
Maggie reads crime novels. She’s full of tips and theories. She follows all my cases.
“I still wonder where Dylan Cross is hiding,” she says. “Somewhere with a lot of pretty architecture, I’ll bet.” She takes a breath. “I know you don’t like to hear this, Sam, but I’m glad she got away.”
“You sound like Ortiz. I’ll find her one day.”
“But what will happen when you do?” Maggie asks.
I don’t answer. We talk about politics and Trump until Maggie, who has marched against just about everything, grows exasperated. “The man drives me to fits, Sam.” She tells me about the cold winds up the coast, and the hard rains that have fallen over the past two days, and the fog that settles thick in the dawn. I can see her sitting on the bed next to my mother, the TV downstairs muted and turned to the Weather Channel, the candle lit by the back door, near the basket where she keeps mass cards for dead friends. The radio in the kitchen tuned low to NPR. I know that a sliver of air slides through a crack in the window—I should have replaced it on my last visit—blowing over the sink, through white linen curtains yellowed by years of sun and smoke. The curtains will be gone one day, and the house will be passed to others, its secrets lost. We say goodbye.
Chapter 14
The elevator opens on the fifth floor. The hallway is polished, light slants through the window at the end, and the ceiling is painted with angels, horses, clouds, and creatures from a madman’s fairy tale.
“Aren’t they lovely?” says Antonio Garcia. “A muralist used to live here. He did a lot of meth. Couldn’t sleep at night, and in the morning, there’d be something glorious. He moved away about a year ago to Denver, I think. This is his legacy.” Garcia opens his door. “Detective, when will they take that yellow tape away from Katrina’s apartment? It’s very disturbing to be reminded every day.”
“It’s still a crime scene,” I say.
“Crime?”
“Open investigation.”
Mannequins in various states of dress are scattered about the loft. They are posed as if at a cocktail party, lingering by the window in 1950s-era gabardine suits and hats, swing dresses, high heels, and pearls, all suggesting Vitalis sheen and postwar confidence. Boxes overflow with scarves, beads, fabrics, scissors, spools, sequins, and other things that glitter. Dress patterns hang on the walls, and a skeleton (“that’s Luis”) fastened to a hat rack stands in the corner beneath reproductions of anatomical drawings by Michelangelo.
“You can’t design clothes, Detective, without knowing bones and tendons and how we’re put together.”
Garcia unbinds his ponytail; black hair falls past his shoulders. He is not as slight or thin as I remember. I don’t remember the angels on the hallway ceiling, either, but I was tired, just in from Europe, on that morning he found Katrina. Garcia cuts a lemon, pours tequila, lights a votive candle (“for Katrina’s memory”) and a cigarette. He holds a glass up.
“You’re on duty, I suppose,” he says.
I nod. He puts it down. We sit in two brocaded, French-style salon chairs, a Turkish carpet and a table (“it’s from Damascus”) between us. Behind him hang a scarlet-and-black vampire cape (“from a crazy Chilean movie”), a nun’s crisp, white habit (“some Belgium art-house film”), and, as if completing a triptych, a black-and-white poster of Katrina—on toes, in tights, back straight, arms out, head like a statue. She is crystalline and luminous, burning out like an apparition. Her eyes and mouth betray nothing except youth. The photo must have been taken years ago, probably after a rehearsal, when all the other dancers filed away and she was alone, still, a girl contemplating flight. “She’s beautiful,” says Garcia, getting up and walking toward her. “Look at these lines, Detective.” He traces her with a finger. “Science, math, and beauty conspiring in one body. That’s as close to the sublime as we get. Look, she signed it for me. ‘To Antonio, fellow traveler.’”
He wipes his eyes and downs another tequila. He walks among the mannequins, pleasantly buzzed, theatrical.
“Don’t mind the mess, Detective. It’s for a film. A Dean Martin biopic.” He bites a lemon. “It would have been lovely to live back then, don’t you think? The jazz. The big cars. The thought that it would never end. All the new money and big houses. It always ends, though, doesn’t it?”
“By the time we realize it, it’s too late.”
“Ah, you’re a romantic.”
“I’m a cop.”
“I’ve heard they can be.”
He sits. A cat jumps on his lap.
“Nishka,” he says, “making mischief.”
“Is that . . .”
“Yes, Katrina’s cat. What could I do? I had to take him in.”
“I’d like to go over a few things.”
I reach for my notebook, hand him a picture of Levon. Garcia holds it up for a long time. I can see the pricks and calluses on his fingers. No wonder he had noticed Levon’s hands—he called them hypnotic—when I interviewed him that day. Garcia’s hands have no elegance or grace, but, as with Levon’s, beauty comes from them.
“He was the one who played for Katrina,” he says. “That’s him. I’m certain. Did you find him?”
“He’s dead.”
“What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
“Looks like an overdose, but we don’t know.”
He shoos away the cat and puts the picture in his lap. He lifts it again, stares at it, hands it back to me.
“What’s going on, Detective?”
“We don’t know. He told us he played for her. Their parents had mutual friends in Russia. They put them together.”
“Were they lovers?”
“He said not. He said that one day two men came to the loft. They spoke Russian and seemed to frighten her. You ever see anyone like that?”
“Men would come and go, Detective. Katrina never wanted to be alone.” He gets up and lingers between two mannequins, as if eavesdropping on a conversation. “She would knock on my door late at night, with a bottle. We would put on whatever costumes I was making and act out skits. Both of us drunk. She ripped that cape from the wall once and whirled around the room and disappeared out the door and down the hall. I caught up with her on the sidewalk. She wrapped the cape tightly around her. ‘I am the night,’ she said. ‘Come to me.’ I coaxed her back inside. The only times I saw her quiet and calm were when he played cello for her.”
“Any threats by other men? Anything you might have heard in passing. Did she ever talk about being scared?”
“Not that I ever saw or heard,” he says.
“Did a woman ever come here? Midfifties, refined, silver-black hair—”
“Cut just above the shoulders. Exquisite dresser. Lovely lines. Yes, I saw her occasionally. I passed her and Katrina in the hall a few days before Katrina died. She didn’t introduce us, but the woman—I assumed she was a relative or one of her managers—had an accent. They changed from English to Russian when they went by. I think it was Russian, maybe Armenian. There are so many of them now. Armenians. Is she involved?”
“We’re looking at every lead,” I say. “You think
you could describe her to a sketch artist?”
He scoffs. “I can do it myself.”
He walks to a drawer and pulls out a pad and pencil. He stands at the kitchen island. His hand moves smooth and fast. Gray blurs sharpen into features: nose, lips, eyes, slant of hair across the forehead; a face taking shape. Slow, sensual, looking up, well-bred, moneyed—the kind of woman you would meet for drinks in a bar on a rainy night in Warsaw or Prague. I can imagine her voice, suave condescension, and a laugh that goes through you. It is the face I saw in the back of Bernie Mathias’s Mercedes when they drove Levon away.
“That’s her,” says Garcia. “What did you say her name was?”
“I didn’t. But it’s Zhanna Smirnov. You got all that from glimpsing her a few times?”
“Look at her. Hard to forget. The soul is out.”
“What?”
“The man who taught me to draw when I was a child used to tell me, ‘Bring the soul out.’”
He looks at the sketch and back to me.
“Did Katrina ever mention a diary?” I say.
“She wrote all the time in little red-bound books. Small ones you slip into a pocket. I assumed they were diaries. She told me once, in her wonderful accent, ‘Antonio, I am making memoir.’”
“Did she give you any details?”
“Not many. I guessed it was about her career. She had them around the apartment. I never touched them.”
“They weren’t there when she died. Did you see them? You were the one who found her.”
“I didn’t notice anything that day except her body.”
“You didn’t take them?”
“I would never.”
“Have to ask. They were there. Now they’re gone.”
We sit in silence. Garcia ties his hair in a ponytail, releases it, ties it again. He stops a tear before it falls.
“This whole thing has taken me apart, Detective. Why is this happening? When I go out now, I crack the door first and look to make sure no one is in the hallway. I don’t sleep well. I hear sounds and think about poor Katrina.” He rips the page out of the sketch pad and hands it to me. “I thought she OD’d. Now, you’re telling me Levon is dead, and her apartment is a crime scene. Maybe whoever is doing this thinks I know something. I was her friend.”
“What do you know?”
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“Have you? I don’t get that sense.”
“What else could I possibly know?”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” I say.
“Well . . .”
“Why you fidgeting?”
“It’s just a pencil,” he says.
“Seems like fidgeting.”
“Is this what they teach you in cop school?”
“Something like this.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Not if you’re telling the truth.”
“I mean, about somebody coming and, you know.”
“I don’t think so. But stick around. I may have more questions.”
I fold the drawing into my jacket pocket. I pass the mannequins and say goodbye to Garcia. The door clicks behind me. I look up at the angels and creatures on the ceiling and wonder how someone finds a face on a blank page. I get into the elevator, the old, slow kind with the wrought iron door you have to close and open by hand. I feel suspended in another time. I descend, thinking of Nishka the cat, the nun’s habit, Garcia’s cut lemons, and Katrina, young and at the brink of all that would come, looking out from her poster. Garcia never asked about her body. How it could have been stolen. I write that in my notebook. I step on the sidewalk, crossing Spring and glancing up at Katrina’s big windows, imagining her dancing while Levon played.
Chapter 15
“Zhanna Smirnov is an alias.”
“One of many, I bet.”
“Yes.”
“Who is she?”
“The FBI doesn’t know,” says Azadeh Nazari. “We think she was involved in the Russian hacking of our elections. Traveled back and forth a lot in 2015 and ’16 on multiple passports. We couldn’t tie anything to her, though. CIA says she spent time in Ukraine. They won’t give us much more. Real pricks, those guys. Don’t know if they know a lot or nothing. Homeland Security same.” Azadeh sips iced tea on the porch of her craftsman in South Pasadena. Her wife, Elsa, gardens near the sidewalk. “She definitely has Kremlin buddies. Same circles as Katrina’s mother.”
“So?”
“That’s all I have. She obviously knew Katrina. Levon too.”
“Can we . . .”
“No, Carver, she’s gone. Unless she comes back, you can’t touch her. You don’t really have much either.”
“Levon’s parents are still missing,” I say. “You heard anything?”
“They haven’t left the country.”
“Unless . . .”
“Fake passports, maybe. Or . . .”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“The ‘or’ is always troubling.”
“The ‘or’ is never good.”
“More pressing for you though. Have you found Katrina’s body?”
“No.”
“Well . . .”
“Well, what?”
“Whole thing dissolves on you,” she says. “No body, no crime.”
“We had a body.”
She smiles, shakes her head.
“What?” I say.
“I can hear the judge laughing.”
I stand in the shade at the edge of the porch, listening to a lawn mower, and two kids pedaling past on bikes.
“You like it up here?” I say.
“Sure. Why not?”
Elsa digs around a bush. Fair, light-brown hair, green eyes. She’s a quiet Swede, a mathematics professor at Cal Poly, whose father is a diplomat to Ghana and a former United Nations weapons inspector. Her mother makes documentary films about refugees. Elsa moved to America years ago, coming out much later than Azadeh when, with uncharacteristic abandon, she painted a rainbow on her face and marched topless with a sword and a shield in the Halloween parade in West Hollywood.
“I don’t think Elsa likes me,” I say.
“She doesn’t like anybody who does what we do. She’s scared one night I might not come home; you know, she might get a knock on the door. Nothing personal.”
“You like that?”
“What?”
“Having someone waiting, watering your roses.”
Azedeh stands next to me on the porch. The house is not far from the library and a café on the corner with Save the Planet signs and photographs of missing dogs in the window. You can’t hear the train from the porch but you know it’s there, running diagonally through town every twenty minutes to points north. South Pasadena is real but isn’t—too neat and swept, a map of make-believe. It’s what some people want. Sprinklers, pastors, incense, a craftsman to restore on weekends. I have to admit, I like those houses, their slants and porches, earthen colors, eaves, and dark little mysteries. They are sturdy, wise, sitting back, watching. I wonder whether Azadeh’s parents, when they escaped Iran and Khomeini, had this in mind for their not-yet-born lesbian daughter: a seven-figure home with a thirty-year mortgage, a Prius and a Fusion in the driveway, a holstered gun hanging on a closet door near a bedroom window that overlooks a gazebo as delicate as a bird’s cage.
“I do like it, Carver. You should try it.”
“Not for me. It’s pretty though.”
“You think I’ve conformed,” she says.
“You’re a Muslim lesbian with a nine millimeter. Not a lot of conforming there.”
“My father would agree. What do you want, Carver?”
“Are you getting existential? I want to catch a killer.”
“But after.”
>
“There’ll be another one after.”
“C’mon, Carver, I can see you shopping at Sprouts, bagging your tomatoes, talking kombucha with lonely wives.”
We laugh. Azadeh rubs my arm, and I think it could be like that, but it won’t be.
“I see you still have the car,” she says, nodding toward my Porsche.
“It runs.”
“Needs paint,” she says, checking her phone. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
We walk down the steps in afternoon heat. Blowing in from the ocean, mountains, and, farther east, the desert, the winds thread and weave around Los Angeles in unpredictable patterns. The air up here is warmer, until night, when breezes from the San Gabriels descend with reassuring purity over the white orchids and eucalyptus. Azadeh kisses Elsa, whispers to her. Elsa wipes the dirt from her hands and walks us to the car. They kiss again, and Azadeh tells me to drive toward Echo Park. She puts on Sudan Archives—African hip-hop rhythms, a violin, and a woman’s voice that sneers and pouts.
“I like this,” she says.
“My recent obsession. She’s from LA by way of Cincinnati.”
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