“I would have been there, right?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And you?”
“I checked Krause. Dead right away. Checked you. Saw the bullet graze and the knock on the head.”
“You held me,” she says.
“I ran out to the sidewalk. The shooter was gone. I came back in and sat with you and waited for the ambulance. You were fading in and out. You kept saying how handsome I was.”
“Dream on, Carver,” she says, smiling and taking the compress from me. “No one hits their head that hard.
“I have to go. You rest.”
“I need to run.”
“Not today.”
“You’re thinking it’s—”
“We’ll talk tomorrow.”
Bill Evans is midway into “Autumn Leaves,” meandering through and around notes, lifting, impossible to catch. Lily looks across the small garden and into the street. A man on a bike pedals past with a shoeshine box, rags twirling in the breeze. Two girls skip rope. Voices from a TV are coming from a window; an old man is picking oranges from a tree in a yard with a high fence. A dog barks far away. Lily says she knows all these sounds: bicycle chain, flapping rags, slap-slap of the jump rope, and the faint snap when the orange stem breaks from the branch and the fruit is taken by Mr. Lorenzo, who once had an affair with a woman from the water department but lives alone since his wife left him. Lily sits back and listens.
“The day my dad got shot was so quiet,” she says. “After they told us, our house went still. Everything stopped. We sat into the night until morning. No one said a word. My mother didn’t turn on any lights. We didn’t eat. We kept thinking that they went to the wrong house. That he would come through the door and reach for a beer, and dinner would come, and the dishes would be done, and the house would be like it was all the other days.” She wipes her eyes. “That’s what went through my mind when I got shot, Carver. Not having days anymore. You don’t even think about them, because you think they’re all the same, but they’re not, you know? Each is a little different, and you only see that when they’re gone.” She shakes her head. “I’m nuts, huh?”
“I was the same when my father died. It’s too big a thing for a kid.”
“It takes up all of you,” she says. “For a long time, there’s nothing else.”
“It finds its place.”
“The rest of you comes back around it, you know, like this island inside,” she says. “I guess there’s nothing original about death except the name that’s gone.”
“They’re going to send you to a psychiatrist,” I say. “They do it for anyone who’s been shot or had a trauma.”
“I know.”
“Ortiz made me see one after the Dylan Cross thing.”
“Advice?”
“Endure it.”
“Hope it doesn’t fuck me up,” she says.
“It didn’t feel like anything was going to go down, did it?”
“No. We had Krause too. He was caving.”
“I don’t think he knew what the two Russians were about,” I say.
“I don’t either. But he was breaking and scared. Bringing us closer . . .”
“Rest.”
I get up to leave.
“You think the shooter wanted to kill me?” she says.
“No. He drew a perfect bead on Krause. He could have done the same to you if he’d wanted. You weren’t a target. He didn’t want to kill a cop. He grazed you before you could react, and he fired three over my head to keep me down. Krause and you were on the floor beside me. He knew I’d have to check each of you. Then crawl over you.”
“Obstacles.”
“Yes.”
“Pro.”
“I have to go,” I say.
“Coming back?”
“Maybe.”
“Bring tacos.”
I turn.
“Hey, Carver.”
“Yes.”
“How’d the shooter know we were cops?”
I meet Ortiz in a café in the Arts District. Two espresso cups and a couple of files set before him. He’s rested, eyes clear, smoothing his mustache, thumbing through a book of black-and-white LGBTQ postcards, and another that has neon words written in night skies in different languages. Chaos. Love. Money. Bliss. Genocide. Silk.
“They go on and on like this,” he says. “Page after page of words.”
“Messages?”
“No. More like who we are as a species. What defines us.”
“Look at this one: ‘Sorrow.’”
“Different skies?”
“Each one over a separate country. They’re all night skies. The words are all neon. What happens when day comes? The words disappear, right? Can’t see neon in daylight. Loses its power. That’s what this artist guy is saying. The words can change. They can fade or disappear. We can become something else.”
“You buying this book?”
“Fuck no. Cool café, though, right? It’s connected to the gallery. Look at all this art shit.”
“What about your barista over at Demitasse? She’ll miss you.”
“I’m trying new things. That’s still my go-to place. But the city’s changing, Carver.”
He finishes his second espresso and waves for a waiter to bring two more.
“How’s Lily?”
“Shaken but fine. She wanted to go for a run.”
“Good to get back to who you are as quick as you can.”
“What’s this?” I say, nodding to the files.
“The beauty of technology.”
He opens a file, slides it toward me.
“Phone records, texts, emails, all kinds of shit. All the stuff that sits out there in the ether.”
The waiter brings espressos.
“Read through them,” says Ortiz. “I’m going to finish this neon book.”
“I thought we had everything from our tech people.”
“They scoured more from her phone and laptop on a second go-round.”
Katrina Ivanovna didn’t text much in the days before she died. Back-and-forths to Levon and Andreas Stein; a few to Michael Paine (which the first check found) to arrange the meeting at the NoMad for a possible book; two to Antonio Garcia to check on Nishka, the cat; one to her sometimes manager, Molly Ames, saying how excited, alone, and scared she felt about Giselle, and how maybe, as everyone said, it was all past her. No emojis. No exclamation points. She texted herself the name Mickey Orlov with a string of links to newspaper and magazine stories about him, most in English and Russian. She texted another line that simply read, “Mikhail Orlov???????” He’s in her phone—nothing substantial, a searched-for name, an unsolved equation. What would a judge do with that? Not enough for a warrant. No diaries. No significant clues—just typed strands from a life ticking, oblivious, toward its end. She left behind broken grammar, twists of unexpected poetry, like etchings left millennia ago on cave walls.
Katrina’s texts to Levon were mostly about setting times for him to come to her loft and play, except for two: a joke about how Levon brooded like Rachmaninoff, and another telling him not to worry about the two big men who knocked on her door when he was there. “They are nothing.” It was written at 10:39 a.m. on the day she died. What was I doing then? Boarding a flight back from Europe. I was in Heathrow, in a bar, with a scotch, watching planes come and go, the clouds low and tinged with light. I remember the feeling of not wanting to come home, not knowing that my trajectory had already been set toward a ballerina in her final hours, in a Spring Street loft. How big and small the world. Degrees that once kept us strangers suddenly rearrange and bring us together. Cop and vic. A story eternal.
Her texts to Andreas Stein are about the second act of Giselle and how she is borne aloft and floats for an instant “shaped to beauty,”
and how a blister on her left foot must be tended but the pain ignored. To Molly, she writes, “Is my vanity making me foolish? The body no longer goes like it used to.” I wonder what Molly made of that. I can still see Molly’s naked pirouette in the room at the Biltmore, the way she fell into bed and kissed me, whispering in a voice from the South about long-ago dancers and backlit stages.
To Antonio Garcia, “Thank you for Nishka. Rehearsals went long. You’re a dear.” But as I turn the page, I see another text Ortiz has marked in yellow: “I hope Paris was good to you. Left you a box. If something happens, do as discussed.”
I look to Ortiz. He holds a finger up.
“Read on,” he says.
I open a second folder, marked “Antonio Garcia.”
I turn to Ortiz.
“You got a warrant?”
“Read,” he says.
I scan page after page of links to stories, and images of costume designs: “Greek aesthetic,” “Elizabethan fashion,” “grunge look,” “punk style,” “silk,” “lamé,” “vampire black,” and “Mad Men hats.” Those links change to articles about death rituals, funeral pyres, human sacrifice, mummification, and sky burials, which, I recall from a Tibetan monk I knew in my Berkeley days, is a ceremony in which the dead are cut into pieces and fed to birds high in the Himalayas. “The body that once ate becomes food,” said the monk. “Nothing wasted on the spirit’s journey to a new life.” The links go on for pages, from the death masks of Egyptian pharaohs to the dead who are burned along the Ganges, their ashes swept into the river in endless cycles. Garcia is fascinated by death—not the soul or the afterlife, but by what becomes of the body. He has spent much time dressing it, so meticulous with his pins and fabrics, so precise in drawing its angles and degrees, understanding its lines, bones, flesh, and cartilage. The body is more sacred to him than the soul. The body is temporal, though, degrading in the seconds and minutes after death—imperceptibly at first, but falling prey to elements and molecular designs, like an unprotected land.
“How’d you get a warrant on Garcia?”
“He’s a suspect,” says Ortiz. “We’ve got nothing, so everyone’s a suspect. Plus, I found a sympathetic judge. Plus, what you told me about Garcia not mentioning Katrina being stolen from the morgue. I thought about that. Odd, right? This guy so wrapped up in her life. Feeding her cat. Got a poster of her on his wall. Why wouldn’t he ask about where her body had gone?”
“Because . . .”
“He knows. Not a mystery to him. You get where I’m going, Carver?”
“He might have stolen it.”
“Why all these links to death rituals and burnings and shit? Why this ghoulish interest right at the time she dies?”
He waves to the waiter for two more espressos.
“Coincidence,” I say. “He’s researching costumes for a movie.”
“Could be,” says Ortiz, smiling and sliding me another sheet of paper.”
“What are these?”
“Texts to and from Garcia to one Wallace Blackman. Wally has an interesting résumé. He once drove for the Medical Examiner’s Office. Picked up stiffs. Didn’t do it long. Couple of years, maybe. Worked at night, took film classes in the day. Guess what he is now? And no, I’m not making this shit up. A makeup and special-effects guy for a B-grade horror film studio. Some YouTube channel that took off and got bought. It’s in the Valley. And—this is the good part—a year ago, he worked on a movie The Night Bride, with guess who? Garcia.”
“We know where Blackman is?” I say.
“No. But he’s trouble. Real fuckup when he was a kid. Delinquent. Stole cars. All kinds of shit. His dad was an assistant fire chief. Real prick. But wired, you know. A lot of cop friends. Little Wally never did time. I guess they must have thought he grew out of it. The old man used his contacts and got him the ME job.”
“Where’s the old man now?”
“Dead, I hope. Like I said, real prick. Faked disabilities, bilked the city out of all kinds of money. False overtime—you name it.”
“Cops have been known to do that too.”
“Yeah, but the fire guys have made it an art form. You ever see them strolling around Smart and Final loading up their carts with steaks and organic mushrooms? All tanned. Shit, man, cops have nothing on firemen when it comes to bilking.”
Ortiz sits back, pleased.
“Krause is the connection to Orlov,” I say. “Torres denies he put Krause in touch with the big Russians.”
“You didn’t expect him to give it up on the first date,” says Ortiz. “We’ll get there.”
“It doesn’t feel right—about him, I mean. Orlov’s too smart to let a guy like Krause in.”
“And still . . .”
The waiter arrives. Tall, black, rainbow eyeliner, manicured nails. He moves with a grace both intimate and aloof. “This one here,” he says, pointing to Ortiz, “is drinking all our coffee.” He winks and slides espressos before us. “Not too much sugar, now,” he says, straightening his white apron and gliding toward another table.
“So you’re buying into my theory that killer and kidnapper are not connected, or at least, not the same.”
“It’s not kidnapper,” says Ortiz. “It’s body snatcher. But, yeah, it’s looking that way. Plus, we know Katrina left something for Garcia. He never told you about that, did he? So . . .”
“Her diaries.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Why him? Why not Paine? Paine was the one she wanted to write her book.”
“Things were happening fast. The Russians come, spook her. She doesn’t know Paine that well. Not at all, really. She trusts Garcia with her cat. Didn’t you say he told you he and Katrina had a bond? Artistic soul mates or some shit. Makes sense she’d go to him. Plus, she tells Garcia in the text, ‘as discussed.’”
“I wonder what language.”
“What do you mean?”
“The diaries. She’s Russian. They’re probably in Russian.”
“She knew English. Look at all these texts.”
“A diary is who you are. A foreign language is not nuanced enough. You think in your native tongue. Or . . .”
“Or what?”
“Nabokov was Russian, but he wrote his best works in English. He had only just learned the language. Maybe she’s like that.”
“Carver, don’t start. These tangents you go on. This obscure shit.”
“Nabokov’s not obscure. He won the Nobel Prize.”
“Okay, good for Nabokov or whatever. If the diaries are in Russian, maybe Garcia doesn’t know what he’s sitting on.”
“Or he’s getting them translated.”
“That’d be a bad move for little Antonio, given all the Russian assassins running around. Speaking of which, where’s Orlov?”
“Torres says he’s on a film shoot in Italy. You hear anything from the FBI? Others?”
“Nothing. Even the Russian consulate’s gone quiet. Guy was bugging me every day about Katrina. Now, silence. That hit on Krause last night, though, I mean, you gotta figure.”
“Everyone’s rattled.”
“Dead ballerina ends up in the middle of a new Cold War.”
“Still can’t prove it.”
“We need the diaries.”
Ortiz finishes his espresso, closes his book of neon words, collects his files.
“How’s Lily, really?”
“Shaken. Who wouldn’t be? Always amazes me how fast something like that goes down. Five shots pulled off, and boom, the guy’s out the door into the night. She keeps playing it back, trying to fill in pieces of it. You never can.”
“I like her, Carver. A real directness about her. No bullshit. You know about her father, right? Cop killed by gangbangers back in the day. A hero. That’s the myth the department created.” Ortiz thumbs through hi
s wallet, lays money on the table. “He was dirty. Nothing big. Lifted a little drug and fencing money off the gangs. Standard procedure. Tried to take a little too much, I guess. Department needed a hero back then though. So they made one.”
“Lily know?”
“I don’t know. Some cops who knew him back then might have whispered something when she got her badge. Maybe she heard shit in the Academy, on the street. Whispers like that keep traveling.”
“I hope she doesn’t know.”
“Me too.”
Ortiz shakes his head. He looks around the café and back to me.
“If you ever find a sacred thing, Carver, let me know. I mean pure sacred. Like communion. I think I see it sometimes at dawn—you know, a sacred thing out there—but it fades in the light.”
“Is that what your neon words say?”
He reaches for the book and opens it to the last page.
“Look,” he says. “Nothing there. No neon. Just a night sky. All the other skies have neon words. But not the last one.”
Chapter 27
Antonio Garcia is not home.
I wait, knock again, put my ear to the door. Nothing. I cross the hall to Katrina’s loft. I decide not to go in. It has yielded little anyway; the home of a wanderer is not where secrets are kept. The hall is quiet. Late-morning sounds drift in from a city at work: voices, horns, boom boxes, jackhammers, a siren, always a siren. I walk to the end of the hall and stand at the window.
A man races past on a bike. A Lyft makes a drop-off; a woman rushes by with flowers; a cop tickets a jaywalker; a couple carries a headboard into an apartment building across the street. Probably New Yorkers. A lot of New Yorkers moving to LA these days. They walk around as if it were theirs, but it’s not. They’ll learn the trick of it in time, as I did—how the city teases and plays and lets you think whatever you want, but underneath, like Katrina’s loft, yields little. That’s what I like about it. It’s not a lie. It’s your own delusion. It’s homeless on sidewalks, and hustler boys in the hills. It’s laborers and Latina housekeepers and billboards of lust, dystopia, apes, robots, Chewbaccas, Kim and Kanye, and Lady Gaga’s latest thing. It’s clear skies, no mosquitoes, and laser-sculpted people with money, hedgerows, and sins. You can make it what you want for a while, like Westworld, or a lover who gives you a key but then one day changes the locks. It’s a thing now. LA. It started a few years ago with artists, tech money, architectural blueprints, cultural essays, countless chefs, battles over income and justice, philanthropic visions. The skyline turned crowded and newly pricked, rising above vintage pastel bungalows that now sell for two million plus and are gutted and remade for the conceits of a new century. I drive into the San Gabriels sometimes on weekends and look back over the city, the glass bright, the ocean shining, Palos Verdes jutting from the south, Point Dume to the north, silent and stretched out, nothing moving except an occasional hawk lifting, circling, gliding, skimming close, and then gone.
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