I didn’t want to spook young Scorpio, so I didn’t want to ask any more questions. Instead I just had Claude surveil until Rob showed up. We figured it was a weeknight (weeknights were cheaper) and we figured it was late (Rob did not strike me as a morning person). Claude staked out the rehearsal studio Monday night, then Tuesday night, then Wednesday night. He had never done intense observation before. I gave him the rundown. Drink few liquids and carry empty bottles. Bring some audiobooks or good music—you can’t count on radio reception. Whatever helps you focus is good—coffee, tea, cocaine, Adderall—and whatever spaces you out is bad—heavy meals, opiates, marijuana.
Thursday came and went. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Monday he switched to day.
On Tuesday night I went over all the evidence again, the whole file. It was thin and weak. Maybe my worst file ever. Even the Case of the Miniature Horses was thicker and more organized. I looked again at the Tearjerkers record, Lydia’s first band. I put on the B-side this time, “Never Going Home.” The band was loud and tight and polished and very good—it was no shock they’d become somewhat big after this.
I looked at the sleeve again. Produced by Kristie Sparkle. Two minutes on the Internet and I found the woman once known as Kristie Sparkle again, now Kat Dandelion, an herbalist in Marin County. On her Facebook page she wrote:
I am also known by the names Kristie Sparkle, Mistress Kitty, Kris K., Kristine Katalyst, and Kristen Bachman. I have been a music producer, a sex worker, a performer in a traveling circus, and a professional body piercer. I am now an herbalist in Marin County. I specialize in miracles.
The drive over the Golden Gate Bridge never stops being beautiful. In every kind of weather on every kind of day it’s a different kind of beautiful. On the other side of the bridge I veered off the highway onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, which I could never quite believe was a real road—I kept expecting a man in a hat and ascot to jump out and detour me back to the 101—and drove into the woods around the outskirts of Fairfax. Kat Dandelion’s house was up a hill that might have been called a mountain in another state. A twig fence surrounded the lot and was just high enough to keep out the deer, one of whom was peeking over it to see the beds of herbs within.
Before I got out of my car I took a pair of dice from my purse. One was lapis and one was turquoise. I tossed them on the empty passenger seat.
Snake eyes. Not encouraging. I figured it earned me an extra bump. I’d done a few lines before I left the house and they were fading fast.
“They don’t eat them,” Kat said, coming out of the house to greet me. She meant the deer and the herbs. “Too powerful. Only they don’t remember that until they’ve tasted them all and trampled them half to death.”
Kat was about fifty and wore a long white dress and a white turban with a gold pin in front. She led me into the house and we sat at a wood table in what had been built as a kitchen and was now an office/exam room. Herbs in glass jars lined the walls, labeled with their Latin names:
Camellia sinesis;
Trifolium pratense;
Amanita muscaria.
A long exam table lay empty.
We sat at the wood table. I became self-conscious of my inability to sit still, which made me fidget worse. Kat Dandelion didn’t seem to mind.
“So,” she said. “How can I serve you?”
“I lied when I made the appointment,” I said. “I didn’t really come to see you about herbs. I came to see you about Lydia Nunez.”
She didn’t seem surprised.
“Why did you lie?” she asked.
“I figured you might say no,” I said. “I’ll still pay you for your time. We made an appointment.”
She reached out a hand to my wrist. She looked at my fingernails as she took my pulse.
“Only if you let me do something about this liver heat,” she said.
“I’m already seeing someone,” I said, as if we were all dating.
“Are you doing what he told you?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“It’s into your lungs, too. Hot and dry.”
She got up from the table and started pulling glass jars off the shelves.
“If I make you something that tastes bad,” she said, “you won’t drink it, will you?”
“Probably not,” I said.
She nodded and looked at the herbs again.
“So ask me about Lydia,” she said, with her back to me. “I heard her husband was killed.”
“He was,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m a private detective. They’re also friends of mine. I mean were.”
“You mean you’re not friends anymore?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I mean Paul’s dead.”
“I saw her not long before he died,” she said.
“Really?”
She turned back around, more glass jars in her hands. She put them on the table. From a cupboard she got a plain paper bag.
“Really.”
“Why?”
She looked at me. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said.
She started shaking out herbs into the paper bag, mixing them with her hand. I remembered the dice. Snake eyes.
“It might help me solve the case,” I said. “I’m trying to find out who killed Paul.”
She stopped, holding a jar of herbs in midair for a long second before she started again.
“My job,” she said, “is to create miracles. People come to me when they have no other hope. Possibilities are my department. Facts are yours.”
On the side of the bag she wrote the herbs she’d put in. Mint, Chrysanthemum, Honeysuckle.
“I’m not that kind of detective,” I said. “I just want to know who killed Paul.”
“Will he be less dead,” she asked, “if you find out?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe some part of him somewhere will be less dead.”
I thought about saying
Maybe I will
but I thought about it and realized it wasn’t true.
She folded the paper bag over and shook it up.
“Make a tea,” she said. “You don’t have to steep it too long, it’s mostly flowers. There’s some to cool your liver and some to ground you. You could use a rest.” She handed me the tea and I took it. “And use this around your nose.”
She handed me a small lip-balm type tube.
“It’ll stop the bleeding,” she said. Without thinking I reached a hand up to my nose. It came away streaked red.
“When you’re ready to stop, let me know,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more with Lydia.”
“You could,” I said. “But you don’t want to.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s true. I’m sorry I don’t want to help you more.”
I paid her for the appointment and the herbs and left.
I drove out to Point Reyes to check on the miniature horses.
“We’ve got a lot of leads,” I told Ellwood James. “A lot of new evidence. But nothing firm.”
Then I drove up to the Spot of Mystery. Jake was in his office. We went out to sit at the picnic tables.
“Got any leads?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “My guess is the guy has a mountain lion issue. Maybe a bobcat. Shoulda thought of that before he started shrinking horses.”
The things we should have thought of could fill the ocean. Back in my car my heart was racing from the rail I’d done in the bathroom at the Spot of Mystery. I waited for my heart to slow down before I started my car. The sun was bright and warm in the parking lot, almost like summer, almost like something good.
O
NE HUNDRED AND EIGHT DAYS
after Paul died, Friday afternoon, at four thirty p.m., Claude called me: he’d spotted Rob. I was in my apartment getting dressed and starting my day and pretending I had something to do. I had nothing to do. I’d blown off all my other cases. I could barely make it to my car without stopping for air and my thoughts had lost distinct edges and bled into each other, cutting each other where they’d been broken and torn. I was dressed and doing lines off the kitchen counter while a video of Iggy Pop doing “Gimme
Danger” played from my computer.
I had planned this whole cool surveillance situation where we would follow Rob back to his place and surprise him and I would be a calm professional detective and Claude my trusty assistant. But I was pissed off and high and not thinking especially clearly, and so instead I jumped in my car, drove to the studio, stopped my car in the middle of the street and jumped out and ran into the studio and grabbed Rob by the collar of his stupid leather jacket from behind—he was turned toward the drummer and bass player, tuning up—and pushed my gun against his cheek.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Claire.”
The rest of the band looked as if we weren’t real and said nothing and did nothing. They watched with wide eyes as I left and took Rob with me.
We took Rob to Claude’s apartment in Berkeley. We didn’t plan it that way, but it made sense. To Claude. I was high and my head was full of thorns and out of sense, so I deferred to his wisdom. Claude lived in a two-bedroom with a roommate, also a chipper and cheerful Berkeley scholar, who was making scrambled eggs when we arrived. Claude pushed him out the door with apologies.
Claude waited in the living room and I took Rob into Claude’s spotless bedroom. I wanted Claude outside for two reasons: to stop Rob if he tried to leave, and because I thought I’d do better alone with the kid. I figured another man would put his defenses up more than a woman alone. It was just a hunch, but it was right.
Rob looked ready to cry by the time I pushed him into a chair at Claude’s desk. A poster hung on the wall:
GRADUATE STUDENT BOOK FAIR! DON’T MISS IT!
Underneath that a picture postcard of Vladimir Nabokov sitting at a desk, looking at the camera like we were bothering him. Well, Vladimir, some of us have mysteries to solve.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me about Lydia and Paul. And don’t even dream of lying. Don’t even think about it.”
“I don’t know why you’re doing this to me,” Rob said, scared and indignant and petulant. I hadn’t let him talk in the car, and now the words spilled out, overeager excuses and lies. Now that I had him to myself I saw how young he was, how unformed. His hair was short like a little boy’s. His face was unlined and unwise, eyes blank but trying for something more. “I hardly even knew Paul. I mean, yeah, I fell in love with his wife, and I know that’s completely fucked up. But, you know, shit happens in life. He could have treated her better. Maybe none of this would have happened if he’d treated her better.”
I looked at him. What a little nothing. What a little worm. Especially compared to Paul. Paul who was dead while this piece of shit lived.
I sat down on Claude’s bed and let myself think about what I shouldn’t. Paul. Paul who wasn’t coming back, even when everyone knew who killed him. The musician in the living room with the gun. The detective in her apartment with the rolled-up fifty. I’d never be able to tell him about how I solved his big murder. At least not anytime soon.
Rob stood up as if I were letting him go.
“No no,” I said, standing up and pulling the gun back up and pointing it at Rob. “No more spacing out. Let’s stay focused here.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have any plan. I had trusted divine providence to provide me with the clues. Divine providence had failed. I didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” he said, whiny and defensive. “I don’t know anything about any of it.”
Suddenly I knew this was real. Suddenly I knew I was alive and I knew exactly what to say. My head was clear and the drugs coursing through me sharpened into something cruel and cutting, something that would get this job done.
“No,” I said. “That time is done.”
Everything was entirely, completely real.
“The time for making up stories and acting like a boy is over,” I said to Rob. “You got mixed up in some things you couldn’t understand and you couldn’t handle. And that’s happened to all of us. But you can’t go back and change that by lying about it now.”
His eyes were wet but he tried to keep his face blank and strong.
“Now,” I began again, “it’s time to start acting like a man, and end this, so we can all move on.”
He started to cry. I let him.
“I know you have Paul’s Wandre,” I said. “It’s gonna be very easy to find now that I know about it. I already have your phone tapped.” That was not true. “I have twenty-four-hour surveillance planned the second you walk out that door.” That was also not true. “There is no way you can get away with this. None at all. It’s over.”
He looked everywhere but at me. Tears ran down his face and his nose started to run. No big handsome punk boy now. Were all men like this underneath? All women? Was there anyone left who went to the chair screaming their innocence, or cracking wise to the executioner? Or were we all so fucking guilty about everything, all the time, that when we finally murdered someone we were ready to confess a lifetime of sins?
“So tell me,” I said. “And believe me, I’m the person to tell. You don’t think I’m a very nice person and you’re right about that. But I know the truth when I see it, and if you tell me the truth I’ll believe you. I’ll make sure everyone else does too.”
He pulled his lips together tight and wrinkled his face and looked at the floor for a long minute. Without moving his head he looked up at me.
“I did it,” he said. “I know it was wrong—Jesus. I didn’t want it to happen. Any of it. He—he came in and he found us. Me and Lydia. Together. She had no idea. I mean, of course she knew he found us, but he just, he just, he turned around and left. Lydia knew he was pissed, but she didn’t know the rest. It was later, later that night. We went out and Lydia, she went with her friend to the club and I went back to the house. I went back to the house and. And.”
He looked at the wall. More tears. His mouth shook.
“That was good,” I said. “But not good enough. Now tell me the truth.”
He turned to me. “I’m telling you,” he said, confused. “I’m telling you what happened.”
“No,” I said. “Tell me the truth.”
“I told you,” he said. “I did it.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “Now tell me how Lydia killed Paul.”
M
Y MIND WAS STILL
and all of my attention was focused on Rob Scorpio. I was entirely alive; I smelled diesel fuel in the air and heard three sparrows outside. In the apartment next to Claude’s someone was taking a bath. I felt a heavy bass line from a car half a mile away in my chest.