by Candice Fox
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just need to say it out loud. It’s been three days. The question keeps rolling around in my skull. Is she dead? Is she dead? Is she dead? If I don’t say it out loud it’ll be me in the asylum.’
There was a knock at the door. Sneak sat upright on her stool. ‘Who’s that?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not expecting anyone.’
I saw the badge immediately when I opened the door, hanging on a chain around her neck. County of Los Angeles Probation Dept. The image seared into my eyes like a blast of sunlight. I didn’t get a look at the woman. The clipboard and the badge hit me, left me blind, stunned.
This is what you wanted, isn’t it? a voice inside me said. You wanted it all to be over. You wanted to go home. Well, it’s happening now.
‘Blair Gabrielle Harbour?’
‘Oh god,’ I said.
‘Not god.’ The woman smirked, flipped the badge on her hefty chest. ‘Jasmine Bahru, Probation. May I enter the premises, please?’
I held the door open, my limbs already seizing with terror and dread. When I turned, I saw that Sneak was gone from the stool by the counter. She’d disappeared like an apparition; her bag had vanished from the couch. I listened but heard nothing at the back of the apartment. There was no way out that way, no back door into the shared courtyard like other apartments had.
‘I’m here to conduct a routine inspection of your living arrangements, Blair.’ Jasmine dumped the clipboard on the coffee table and went straight into the kitchen. ‘Could you please sign here to indicate that you’ve permitted me access to the property?’ I’d had routine inspections from parole officers before, but never an unannounced one, and never one so straightforward and determined. Usually there was small talk. An almost apologetic stroll around the kitchen, the offer and refusal of coffee. Jasmine started pulling open cupboard doors, shifting aside bottles and cans. She peered into my refrigerator, bent to see what was on every shelf.
I signed the document on the coffee table without looking at it. ‘There’s alcohol in the freezer. A bottle of vodka. Alcohol is not one of my restrictions.’
‘I’ll check up on that,’ Jasmine said. ‘Is there anyone else living here in the apartment?’
‘No, just me.’
‘So why are there two coffee cups here on the counter?’
‘One’s from last night. I haven’t done the washing-up yet.’
Jasmine lifted my empty coffee cup and held it in her palm, testing its temperature. We stared at each other. An icy tension rung in the air, the unspoken knowledge that she had come here to get me, and that I could do nothing but allow it to happen, roll over like a dog and let her put her teeth around my throat. I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans.
‘Anything you want to know?’ I asked.
‘Everything I need to know is right here.’ She gestured to the apartment. ‘What’s with the birdseed?’
I went into the kitchen. The gopher’s box was not on the counter. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth.
‘I like to feed the birds. At the park.’
‘You feed them dried grass?’ She picked up the container on the windowsill.
‘Some birds like that,’ I wheezed, thumped my chest. ‘Pigeons?’
‘It’s a public nuisance to feed pigeons.’
I swallowed. ‘Is it illegal?’
‘It’s a municipal code thing. Depends on where the park is. Where’s the park?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You don’t know?’
‘I don’t remember.’
She stared at me for a while and then went into the bedroom. I winced as she opened the cupboards. I expected she’d find Sneak there, crouched behind a row of Pump’n’Jump polos. I stood in the doorway while Jasmine conducted a thorough search of my drawers, my dresser. She looked under the mattress, in the hall cupboard. I silently thanked past-Blair for refusing Ada’s gun. In the bathroom doorway she took a plastic cup from her bag and handed it to me.
‘Let’s go.’ She gestured to the toilet. I sat and urinated into the cup in full view of her, as I had a hundred times before in front of parole officers, police officers, prison guards and a variety of other law enforcement officials. She slipped a drug-test strip into the cup on the counter and I watched the colours turn in my favour. The corner of her mouth twitched, red lipstick on dark brown skin. She headed for the door.
A rustle. Jasmine turned towards me. I fixed myself and stood, my face burning.
‘So that’s it, then,’ I said.
She pushed past me to the bathroom vanity and wrenched open the doors. The gopher’s ice cream container rattled as she threw it on the counter, seed spilling inside.
‘What the hell is in there?’ she asked.
‘A gopher,’ I said grimly. She peeled a corner of the container up and peered inside, shut it tightly.
‘Right.’ She sighed and left the room. In the living room, I watched her snatch up her clipboard.
‘Having pets is not one of my parole restrictions,’ I said, my throat tightening.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But maintaining steady accommodation is. This building is rent-controlled. Pets are prohibited. I’m putting it in your report that you have deliberately sabotaged the conditions of your parole.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s not my—’
‘There’ll likely be a review of your circumstances following this revelation, Ms Harbour.’ She wrote something on the paper with a flourish. ‘You can expect a call from the department within the next twenty-four hours.’
This is what you wanted, I thought. A mixture of dread and sweet, sweet relief flooded over me, warm honey sliding down my neck and shoulders. This is what I had been playing at all along, creeping softly into dangerous territory, following Sneak’s siren call. This was why I had let a possibly wanted lifelong criminal sleep in my house, sit on my couch and do drugs. Why I had gone with her to visit a crime lord. Why I had accepted dirty money and a gangster car from that crime lord, why I continued to pursue a dangerous investigation that was none of my business. It was this moment, the instant it all came crashing down. The fall. The backwards plunge. I’d felt it when I was arrested, the sickening ease of knowing my life and freedom were no longer in my hands. My job was gone. My child was gone. My friends were gone. In a few days I’d be back in Happy Valley, where nothing mattered, where I was required to do and think and be nothing.
You don’t have to jump off a cliff. You just have to lean back, put your arms out, and let the gravity take you. Float away.
I found my fists clenching as Jasmine walked to the door and closed it behind her.
Give up, my mind said.
‘Fuck you,’ I said aloud.
I went to the bedroom and ripped the sheet back from the mattress. They always look under the mattress, but they never pull off the sheets. The stack of notes Ada Maverick had given Sneak and me was fanned under the spot where my pillow would rest, some slipping down the bed. I gathered a handful and folded it as I ran to the front door and out across the lawn.
Jasmine Bahru was sitting in her red Kia, writing more words on her clipboard. I knocked on the window and she wound it down.
‘Don’t hand in that report,’ I said. She stared at me. I steadied myself against the car with one arm, my hand hanging down in Jasmine’s view, and let a couple of the notes fan from my fingers. Jasmine looked at the notes, then at me.
‘Are you offering me a bribe, Ms Harbour?’
‘You came here to fuck me,’ I said. ‘That much was clear from the moment you walked in. The gopher in the bathroom is a stretch, and you know it, but you were determined to catch me on something. I don’t know what you’ve got against me, but let me try to even things out.’
Jasmine sat, watching me. I stood on the kerb with nothing to lose. She could see it. The emptiness, the wildness. She reached up and took the notes from my fingers, counted them. Eight hundred bucks. She peeled the page off the clipboard
and handed it to me. I watched her drive away, feeling tremors start in my fingers and feet.
‘Sneak?’ I called when I got back to the apartment.
‘Help!’
I rushed to the bathroom. Sneak’s legs and ass were hanging out of a manhole in the ceiling, her skirt caught on the edge of the opening. Rippling cellulite, white butt in a purple G-string. I grabbed her legs and did little to help her flop to the ground.
‘How the hell did you get up there?’
‘I’m a gymnast,’ she reminded me. ‘And a drug addict. The easy part of both jobs is getting up. It’s coming down that’s hard.’
I pondered the deeper philosophical meanings of that while I examined the paper Jasmine had given me, sweat-damp and smeared from my hands. It was filled out in full. She had been citing me for breach of efforts to maintain stable accommodation, as she declared she would.
I was familiar with parole reports. What I was looking for was not the report’s breach contents, but a line close to the top of the page. I usually did little to arouse the suspicions of authorities. I lived a good, clean life. There was a box that normally remained empty. But this time, there was a name in the section that read ‘Recommending officer’, the space to record the police or prison authority who had called the parole office, recommending someone check up on me.
‘Detective Al Tasik,’ I read, touching the page.
My phone rang. I went to the counter and picked it up. An unknown number. Ada Maverick’s voice was unmistakeable.
‘I’m gonna give you an address,’ Ada said. ‘Meet me there.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘I got your boy here,’ she said. I heard a whimpering sound in the background, like a dog makes when someone treads on its toes. ‘Dayly’s boyfriend. Come help me play with him.’
JESSICA
Jessica had been on hobo detail plenty of times as a patrol cop. Things had been different back then. Most of the ragged, windswept men she herded out from behind dumpsters or off the sides of busy, dusty highways had been crazy somehow. She’d heard every possible rendition of the world’s coming demise from the alcohol-reeking street-dwellers – tales of asteroids approaching from galaxies far away or electromagnetic pulse bombs from North Korea soaring across the Pacific.
These days there were both men and women in the camps on the rugged hillsides beside the highway, and their tents were equipped for long hauls, sometimes concreted or hammered into place and sometimes equipped with large pieces of furniture. Tents and shacks were fed power from nearby warehouses and some were lit by television sets or battered laptops. The people who lived here weren’t crazy, but were mothers and fathers who had been thrown out of foreclosed McMansions, and young people who turned to crack in college to try to stay awake and ended up on ice because it was cheaper and they were hooked. They were protesters, activists, children of the earth, the awakened, the oppressed, the misunderstood. Sometimes they rented space to travellers in their tiny, misshapen hovels, and some Christmases they hung them with lights. The homeless people Jessica saw now as she walked up the shoulder of the I-10 could afford guns, had a code of conduct and knew their rights when it came to territory and police intervention.
But if there was one thing that hadn’t changed in all the time Jessica had been a member of the LAPD, it was the way homeless men pissed. For all the sophistication that came with being homeless these days, running water was not included, so men from the camps still pissed in soft-drink bottles, and threw those bottles down into the tree-lined ditches separating the highway from the businesses alongside it. They did this to keep the smell away from the camps. Urine stink was the silent enemy of the panhandler. One whiff and the businessmen trapped in their cars on the way into the city rolled up their windows and looked straight ahead.
She crossed the top of the embankment, pulling nitrile gloves onto her hands. She headed towards a camp made from colourful slabs of a ruined billboard, stained bedsheets and blue tarpaulins. Through a doorway made in what she was sure was a slice of Matthew McConaughey’s nose, she could see an old man sleeping on a thin, green mattress. It was early, but haze lingered permanently over the city beyond, a rusty gauze speared by the buildings of Downtown.
A man was standing by a tree, shirtless, the backs of his jeans brown from hours of sitting and ragged at the ends. Jessica stopped a few feet away from him. He turned as he was screwing the cap on a Gatorade bottle filled with foamy yellow liquid.
‘I’ll pay you a buck for that,’ Jessica said.
The guy stared at her.
‘For this?’ He held up the bottle of piss. Jessica nodded, took the garbage bag from her back pocket and shook it out, held it open. The man dropped the bottle into the bag, his face twisted in confusion.
‘Know where I can find any others?’ she asked.
The man pointed down the hill, and as expected Jessica saw dozens of bottles lying scattered or grouped together in the shade, like oil barrels spilled across the surface of the sea.
‘Help me collect them all,’ she told the man. ‘A buck for each one that goes in the bag.’
The man nodded and made his way down the hill. Jessica followed him carefully, stepping over a pile of broken glass and rotting food.
JESSICA
Diggy sat in the passenger seat of Jessica’s Suzuki, watching the house on Tualitan Road that had once belonged to Blair Harbour. Jessica glanced at him now and then, the morning sun bouncing off Diggy’s yellow shirt like white light on water. The shirt was covered in blue rubber-duck images, each the size of a quarter. The forensic scientist rubbed his hands together nervously, his brushy hair almost touching the roof of the vehicle.
‘I don’t understand why my presence is required in this particular situation,’ Diggy said.
‘It’s Brentwood,’ Jessica said. ‘Most of these people have only seen cops on TV. They’ll be expecting two nicely dressed men. We might get away with one Latina and a guy wearing . . . whatever the hell it is you’re wearing.’
He looked at his shirt. ‘I designed this shirt.’
‘Don’t give up your day job, Diggy.’
‘My shirts are terrible. It’s deliberate.’ He smoothed the front of the shirt, making the small blue ducks dance on his chest. ‘The disparate colours and novelty images are supposed to confuse the eye, distract the brain. That’s because there’s actually a Fibonacci golden spiral hidden in each of these shirts.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a nerd thing.’
‘Where’s the spiral?’
‘There.’ He pointed to his right nipple.
‘I don’t see it. I just see ducks.’
‘That’s because you’re not the love of my life.’
‘Are you telling me you wear those terrible shirts because you’re trying to attract the love of your life?’ Jessica scoffed.
‘I’m confident she’d see past the distractions and recognise the sequence. She’d be looking at me long enough, and would be of the kind of mind, to do so.’
‘Have you heard of Tinder?’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘This is a weird clash of romantic fantasy and science, isn’t it?’
‘Not really. Lots of animals use visual or auditory performances to attract their mates. Male pufferfish, and some other types of cichlids, construct geometric patterns on the sea floor to attract females, such as radially aligned ridges and valleys made from sand, rocks and sediments. If the female sees a design she likes, she goes there to lay her eggs.’
‘I sure hope a female human lays an egg on your shirt very soon, Diggy, because my eyes are burning out of my skull.’
‘I don’t want to do this.’ He sighed, looking at the house across the street.
‘Well, we’re here now.’
‘Is it possible you just want me here because you prefer working with a partner?’ Diggy asked. ‘The brain likes patterns, particularly symmetrical ones. You’ve been worki
ng with an assigned partner for more than a decade, usually a male one. You might feel lopsided without a Watson to your Sherlock.’
‘Fuck you, Diggy,’ Jessica said. ‘I don’t need a dick within arm’s length to do my job, and I don’t know a woman who does.’
‘It was an untested hypothesis.’ He shrugged. ‘Based on cognitive neuroscience. I was just saying that maybe there’s a party in your striatum, which is housed in your basal ganglia, when you work with a partner. And when you’re working alone perhaps there’s not.’
‘I’m gonna kick you in the basal ganglia if you don’t start talking like a person soon.’
Diggy considered this.
‘Get in that house.’ Jessica pushed at him. The two got out of the car and walked across the leafy street, up the driveway towards 1109.
This was where it had happened. Jessica could see it clearly now, put sights and smells and sounds to the memory that reading the report on the Orlov murder had been unable to evoke. She remembered Blair Harbour now the way she had found her, standing in her driveway with her mobile phone in her hand, watching the squad cars approach with the stunned, shaken look Jessica had seen so many times, the look of one who has just taken a life. She remembered patrol cops standing on the wet, slightly overgrown lawn, smoking and laughing about Brentwood females and their tempers, about dragging drunk rich girls off each other at parties here during vacation season when the parents were in the Bahamas. As she approached the door, Jessica remembered plastering the crime scene tape here herself, sealing off both the Orlov and Harbour houses as a paramedic briefed her on Orlov’s state. The thought pulsated in her consciousness, a ticking, returning rhythm: if she had made a mistake in the Harbour arrest, this was where that mistake had begun.
The housekeeper, Yume, made three phone calls before letting Jessica and Diggy through the door. Though she stood out of earshot, peering over her shoulder now and then at the two of them standing on the stoop, Jessica was sure the woman mentioned the shirt to the house’s current owners. After fifteen minutes they were admitted, and the woman went back to vacuuming the downstairs bedrooms.