“What’s that . . . ?”
His face hardened. He was one of my dark-haired, chisel-featured siblings with piercing blue eyes. “I’m not saying more, not about anything. You need to get out of here.”
Go away, little girl!
I was so sick of my older brothers’ condescension. I strode back to the bedroom. If Gary wasn’t going to tell me
anything, maybe the apartment Karen Johnson had been occupying for three months would.
Then again, I decided after going through the cheery, white-walled, flowery bedroom, the plain bathroom, the dark living room without television or DVD player, much less a book, maybe her connection to this place was no more than what was required to meet the residence requirement. “It’s like a bed-and-breakfast here, except those places at least have something to read. Did she even spend a night here?”
Gary didn’t answer. He’d found a bottle of Merlot—not his taste, so it must have been Karen’s—and was trying to edge out the cork with a paring knife. At the rate he was going, by the time he got a drink he’d need it.
I pulled open the refrigerator. The shelves were empty except for a half pound of coffee and a half pint of half-and-half. “Half-fridge?” Companionable humor wasn’t likely to lead him into unintentional revelation, but it was about the only ploy I had left.
The cabinet next to the refrigerator held a couple of plastic dishes. On the stove was a single saucepan, probably used to heat water. “Look! A cookbook! Planning to be here long enough to have company?” It was the sole book in the apartment.
“Not mine.”
“Karen’s?” I picked up
Soups for Summer.
“It’s new. Was she the dinner party type?”
He let out a somewhat forced sarcastic laugh and then quickly seemed to catch himself.
“Makes no sense to start cooking now, eh? Who’d she know to ask over? Anyway, the case you’ve got was about to go big time, right? That’s why you were up all night researching; why you needed to do something so immediately that you called me to drop everything and amuse her. If you—”
“Doesn’t Mom have this?” He propped the cookbook upright.
I knew he was trying to distract me. “One like it. I’m surprised you remember something like that. The author had a funny name . . . What was it? Plesko? Kresge?” I looked at it: Cesko. That was weird—same name, but definitely a different book. Wait. Same last name, but different first. “And wasn’t there some scandal attached?”
Suddenly, Gary had a peculiar expression on his face. He put the cookbook face down.
“What’s with this? Is there some connection between Karen and this book?”
He ignored me.
And what was it about, that long-ago cookbook? “One time when I came home from college the cookbook—what was it called?
Apples in Autumn?
—wasn’t there. Maybe it’d been gone for years and I just hadn’t noticed . . .”
I grabbed it and checked the back flap. The author of
Soups for Summer
was the niece of the original one. “Hey, maybe I can find this Claire Cesko and see what her connection is to Karen Johnson. It says she lives near Redding . . .” I was just joking so I was caught off guard by Gary’s reply.
“Maybe not a good idea.”
“Why’s that?”
“Trust me.”
“Tell me. You were the one who got me remembering it. It’s just a cookbook.”
He said nothing.
I stood up. “Fine. Well, I guess it’s not. We’ll talk about it when I get back.”
“Darce—”
“But before that, you can give me your car.”
“You want to take my Lexus to the back of beyond! Think again. Besides, up there it’s going to stick out, look a little too, uh—”
“City shyster?”
Only a sister would have spotted the cringe before he shifted, relaunched. “You’re going to drive through all those redwoods?”
“I’m over my tree fear,” I lied. “Just give me the keys, dammit!”
He hesitated, weighing his responsibilities to his client and the law, to his sister and family. “Okay, okay, but it’s crazy to do this cold. There’s a PI John knows up there, Les Wallinsky, who’s helped out looking for Mike. You need a contact.”
“Right.”
I had an idea, a necessary one. “Listen, we never had this conversation.” I pulled a dollar out of my pocket. “I’m hiring you.”
“Good point, everything considered.”
I watched him pull out his wallet, insert the bill, slide the wallet back in his pocket, me weighing whether I really had to ask the question that would bring me a barrage of flak. “What’s your take on Korematsu?”
“You interested in him?”
“No, no! I don’t even know his first name. No, my question is can I trust him.” I told him our conversation at the morgue.
“He said he wouldn’t have you followed and you believed him?”
“Not enough to come right here. I took a few diversionary measures. But Korematsu? Got an opinion?” He was bound to, I knew.
Gary leaned back till the chair almost toppled backwards. He was a master of the trick. He’d used it to attract women, distract opponents, and by now he’d done it so long the balancing actually helped him focus. “The guy seems too decent to be a detective.”
“John’ll—”
“John’d be the first to agree. A detective’s got to be ready to work a suspect. Nobody’s the good cop all the time. What I think about Korematsu is he’s hiding something. I’d trust him with the family silver but not with . . . not with . . . I don’t know what. Besides, he’s reporting to Broder, so you don’t need to waste time wondering if you can trust him.”
I laughed.
Gary started to speak, caught himself, eased his chair back to the ground with more care than necessary. “Darce . . .”
“What!”
“Korematsu, it’s not that he
wouldn’t
protect you in this, it’s that he
can’t
protect you. John can’t protect you; he can’t even protect himself. If he could he wouldn’t be lying low. No one can protect you. Remember how he says: ‘Contraband doesn’t pass through this city without some cop on the take.’ Look, I’m serious about being bound by attorney-client privilege. There are things I can’t talk about, even with you.” He pulled out his keys and laid them in my palm, resting his hand there for a moment. “Karen Johnson did something that got her murdered. I don’t know what. But her killer’s out there somewhere. Be careful. Seriously careful.”
16
THURSDAY
GARY CALLS HIS Lexus his conference room. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club played from the Blauplunkts in the back. Later I could flip to news updates from London, Karachi, or suburban Mars.
I’d slept at the zendo, sat morning zazen, and driven Duffy to the beach for a run. Ocean Beach is only a few blocks from Mom’s house, but Duffy loves to stand on the fine leather seat and peer appraisingly out the window like a right-seat driver. Another owner would blow a gasket at the thought of twenty sharp paw nails scratching across the pale tan leather; another owner would toss Duffy and me onto the street. But likeability is Gary’s forte: it’s not just that he can sway a jury to his side, but that his client and opposing counsel, expecting him to own the courtroom, make their decisions accordingly. In Duffy’s case, a seat cover was all it took for my brother to control the outcome.
It was mid-afternoon before I got out of the city. The Ceskos’ town, Star Pine, was three or so hours up I-5. Gary’s warning about trees had not only been a jab about the embarrassing phobia that had dogged me since childhood—though I’d pretty nearly licked it—but his comment could hardly have been more unnecessary: I-5 runs from San Diego to Redding without a leaf to block the sun. It’s California’s tribute to the Jersey Turnpike.
I caught the freeway north of Sacramento. Of course, the car had cruise control, climate control, and lines of buttons that moved the seat up, down, back, forth, heated it, vibrated the back and much, much more. The car moved north but inside nothing changed. So it was a shock when I opened the door at a rest stop near Redding and stepped out into what had to be a hundred degrees.
“You must be Darcy Lott.”
“
You’re
Les Wallinsky?”
“You look surprised.”
“I just assumed—shit,
assumed
—that my brother’s contact would be a former sheriff.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Pigs may fly.” I laughed. Without creating a picture in my mind, I’d been expecting a friend of John’s to be in his fifties, wearing a shirt that fit ten pounds ago, and a suit that screamed “prosecution witness.” But the real Les Wallinsky looked to be in his mid-forties, buff, wearing a work shirt, khaki chinos, hiking boots. Barely taller than I am, he had an adorable knob of a nose, black button eyes, short wiry blond hair, and a killer grin. If he’d been hired by my sister Gracie instead of John, I’d have wondered if he was a gift for my weekend.
“You need to eat?” he asked, glancing at the restaurant next to the parking lot.
“Is there a place closer to Star Pine?”
He grinned. “Okay, but you’ll have to hold your appetite for an hour. Oh, and leave that car here.”
“Will it be all right?”
“Sure. Don’t worry.” He motioned to a tan pickup. I followed him and he opened the passenger-side door for me.
“How do you know John?” I asked, once we were on the highway again.
“He hired me.” He shot a glance in my direction.
“Why?” I wanted to get this part over with.
“You mean why did he think I could find Mike?”
Suddenly my skin was alive and I was holding my breath. “What makes you think Mike was here?” I hadn’t quite believed Gary. But, of course, I’d wanted to.
“He wasn’t. Trust me, I’ve looked. I like Mike. I mean, it’s like I know him. I can see why he was everyone’s favorite.” He glanced over at me again. “And why you were his. No, wait, I’m not coming on, just saying you both have that right-here kind of thing and a lot of go—you more than him. But he had something else. He was like the dog who can always get out of the yard no matter if you got the CIA in to guard it, you know?”
A new person talking about him was like a whiff of having him back. “I’ll tell him you said that. He’ll like it.”
“I’d really love to find him. That list John gave me, of places he figured he could be, I gotta tell you, that’s garbage. It’s a parent list, know what I mean?”
I laughed. “That’s John. It shouldn’t surprise you.”
“Well, there’s no record of Mike. None of the old-timers around here recognized his picture or him in the video Katy shot that last Thanksgiving.”
“You know my sister, Katy?”
“Do now. Sharp woman. She picked clear shots of him, him talking, him watching you doing a back flip, him standing around—the kind of things a guy’d be doing in an airport. But you,” he said, shooting a glance at the legs I’d flipped over my head way back then, “were a hot little number.”
Who
was
this guy? John had made distrust a way of life and Wallinsky seemed an unlikely exception to such a worldview. I couldn’t imagine my brother fronting money to him.
“No record of your brother anywhere within two hundred miles. Not seen at schools, shelters, monasteries, cults, protests, not working trawlers or herding beef—”
“How long have you been on this?” I asked, amazed. It was such a long shot.
“Fifteen years. On and off. Mostly off.”
Fifteen years! Something else I didn’t know about John. “Steady work for a PI.”
“You could say that.”
“Could say which?”
“I investigate, I don’t do licenses.”
“Mr. By-the-Book’s been paying you? He might as well wear jeans on his days off.”
“Licenses are crap. I’m good: I take a case; I get results. But this Mike thing’s different, you know?”
“Yeah.” People had always connected with Mike—that was his magic. “Mike’s like Gary, but different, smoother. You know Gary, too, right? He’s the un-John. Unlike Gary, Mike never plotted things out, at least not in any obvious way. I don’t think even to himself. And yet—well, obviously—there were things going on . . .”
“I was counting on people remembering him, hoping for teenaged girls sitting by phones, old guys pleased to see a nice kid. I tried every angle. I hitchhiked up and down I-5, hung around the truck stops, ate burgers in every hamlet here to the Oregon line. This could be a lifetime job. It is for John. But I know when over is over.”
I believed him, pretty much, but still . . . fleeting as hope had been, his failure was agony—one less large area where Mike might be, one step closer to none.
I don’t like to let myself think that way. So I flip my thoughts to something—anything—else. “Les, you know John. What about the woman he was meeting at Coit Tower? Was she part of this?”
“No one’s part of this. There is no
this.
”
“So she was just one of his flings?” I threw this out just to see his reaction.
He laughed. “Listen, John may have flung, but to hear him talk, he’s so busy toeing the line he can’t see anything that’s not painted on macadam.”
“But you . . .” I hunted for the right term and ended up with the lame, “you liked him.”
“Hell no, I don’t like John! I respect his commitment and understand his obsession. But
like
him, no way. If I were his kid brother, I’d have been exiting by the second-story window, too.”
“That was me.”
“Really? He said Mike.”
“He’s mixed up.
I’m
the one he caught walking across the top of the roof. He cut down the tree in the front yard just so
I
wouldn’t leap to it. Mike was, well, more subtle when it came to butting heads with the Enforcer.”
“Yeah, well, Mike’s got my sympathy.”
Now I saw why John had hired him. He hadn’t picked the detective he’d like, or feel comfortable with, or even trust. He’d pick the one who wasn’t just the most like Mike, but most like the qualities Mike had that he couldn’t stand. And didn’t understand. Boy, had I underestimated my oldest brother . . . again.