“Okay,” Deal said, feeling the steady idle of the Ford beneath them. “So forget Mekhtar. But somebody may have killed Barbara. What are we going to do about it?”
“We could still give it a shot with Giverty,” Driscoll said. “But there’s no apparent motive, nothing to make him doubt it’s suicide. He could always say she changed her mind at the last instant, tried to pull away…” Driscoll broke off when he saw the look in Deal’s eyes.
“Hey, it’s possible,” he said.
“She didn’t do it,” Deal said stubbornly.
Driscoll threw up his hands. “Okay, I’ve got another one for you: Even if Giverty was to think it was murder, guess who his prime suspect would be.”
Deal met his gaze. “That’s not funny, Driscoll.”
“I’m just telling you how cops think. Somebody kills themselves, who knows why? There could be any one of a million screwed-up reasons and none I know of makes any sense when you get right down to it. But murders happen for obvious reasons, nine times out of ten. You want to figure out who killed somebody, you consider the simplest possibilities first.”
There was a soft
thump
as the cat Driscoll had flung through the window reappeared on the hood of the car. The thing sat down in front of the windshield and began to groom itself, pausing now and then to glance through the window at them.
“Love and money,” Deal said.
“What’s that?”
“Something you said to me once,” Deal said. “The two simple reasons why people kill other people.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I was just thinking about Barbara, that’s all. She wasn’t in love, or at least I don’t think she was. She’d have said something.”
“How do you know that?” Driscoll said.
“I just do,” he said.
“You seem to know an awful lot,” Driscoll said.
Deal paused. “You trying to piss me off, Vernon?”
Driscoll shrugged. “Force of habit,” he said.
Deal turned away, still angry.
“Say it’s true, no involvements whatsoever,” Driscoll said. “That leaves money.”
Deal laughed mirthlessly. “She was a hostess at a family restaurant.”
Driscoll nodded. “But her old lady just died. Maybe there was an estate.”
Deal looked at him skeptically. “Nothing that I know of. Her father had been dead a long time. Barbara said the hospital bills had taken just about everything that was left.”
Driscoll nodded, watching the cat toy with one of the windshield wipers. “That leaves the sister.”
Deal glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
Driscoll shrugged. “You said they weren’t getting along.”
“I said Barbara was pissed at
her
.”
“You think there’s only one side to these things?”
“Come on, Driscoll. Paige Nobleman got to Barbara’s house after I did. She thought
I
had killed Barbara. She was running for her life when I caught her.”
“Uh-huh,” Driscoll said. “She
is
an actress, as I recall.”
“What are you trying to say? That she shot Barbara and then hid someplace, waiting for me to show up?”
Driscoll sighed and turned to roll up his window. “I dunno. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have a talk with Paige Nobleman,” he said.
Deal sighed.
“Something bothers you about that?” Driscoll said. He was distracted, staring at the cat, which had somehow snagged one of its claws in the rubber windshield blade.
“First, I had to convince her I hadn’t hurt Barbara,” Deal said. “Now we’re going to show up and tell her she’s a suspect.” When Driscoll didn’t answer, Deal followed Driscoll’s gaze out the windshield. The cat was trying to jerk its paw loose from the wiper, but the blade would only move so far before the spring mechanism slammed it back against the glass.
“Yeah,” Driscoll said at last, “but that’s not what’s worrying me.”
Deal glanced at him, curious, “Okay. What
is
worrying you, Driscoll?”
Driscoll pointed. “I’m sitting here wondering who’s going to go out there and get that goddamned cat loose from my car.”
“Beyond ecstasy, huh?” the lady cop was saying. She dangled a Baggie full of bright green pills the size of M&M’s before Paco’s eyes. “Do the nasty all night long behind these, can you?” Her face seemed as hard as the West Texas landscape he’d left behind.
Paco shrugged, trying to suppress a grimace. His hands were cuffed behind him and the top rung of the wooden chair they’d sat him in was digging painfully into his back. How the world turns, he was thinking. Come a thousand miles, find yourself right back in the same little interrogation room, only it was a hard-assed woman with an LAPD shield grinding him this time.
“And this,” the cop said, nodding at several powder-filled bags on the battered table before them. “You don’t have to tell me what this is.”
Paco managed a tough-guy shrug. “Fuck you,” he said through battered lips.
The lady cop laughed, shot a glance at her partner, another woman, who stood at Paco’s shoulder, patting the truncheon she’d been using on him in her palm.
The first cop reached for one of the bags, dipped her hand inside, raised two powder-coated fingers to her nostrils. The sound she made snorting it up sent a chill down to Paco’s toes.
“How about you?” she said, offering the bag to Paco, wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. Her face had flushed red, and moisture glittered at the corners of her eyes. She was pretty good, he thought. Or she was using the real thing.
Paco shook his head. The cop gave him a sympathetic look. She tossed the coke back on the table, shook the Baggie of pills in front of his face. “Maybe a couple of these, then?”
Paco shook his head again, and the cop laughed. She gave a signal to her partner, who snaked an arm around his throat and squeezed. He felt her fingers go up his nostrils, jerk his head back savagely.
His mouth was open, gasping for air, and the first cop was on top of him, forcing pills down his gullet as if he were a goose.
“Now let’s see what he’s got,” he heard the first cop say, and felt a hand jam roughly against his crotch.
He had about as much chance of getting an erection as a palace eunuch, he was thinking, when the sound of a cellular phone’s chirring echoed across the set and Cross’s voice boomed, “Cut!”
Paco felt the hands leave him, heard one of the actresses mutter an obscenity. He spat out the candy pills, brought his head down, his eyes away from the bright spots at last, twisted his shoulders to ease the pain. What had ever possessed him to suggest inserting this scene into the action, he wondered? He should have just gone along with the script as it had been written, let the dealer character he was playing sweet-talk the cop who’d pulled him over and take her right there roadside, in the backseat of the car.
He glanced into the darkness that surrounded the brightly lit set, watched Cross in his tall canvas-backed chair speaking earnestly into the phone. “…middle of a shoot, goddammit,” Paco heard, before Cross saw him staring and turned to shield his conversation.
The two actresses lounged on the neighboring set, a mocked-up car Paco was supposedly driving when arrested by two lady motorcycle cops. The first cop was jittering about, tapping her nails on the hard Ford paint, sucking furiously on a cigarette, further proof to Paco’s mind that the stuff she’d hit from the bag wasn’t just baby laxative. The second cop stared off into the nether reaches of the North Hollywood warehouse they were using, spinning her truncheon idly, her leg cocked up on a fender. He could see that the leather jodhpurs she was wearing had been cut out at the crotch.
Any other time, the sight might have sent toots of steam out his ears. Deliver her to the facility dressed like that, he’d have popped the cuffs on his wrists quicker than the Bionic Man could’ve. He’d been fairly bionic as it was, the first several days of his new acting career, four years of pent-up urges having pretty much carried him through all manner of undignified sexual behavior. On top of that, the very baseness of the actions on the set had appealed to Paco’s innate appreciation of depravity, and he’d been able to carry on just fine without recourse to the range of drugs most of the other actors made use of. It was also some comfort to him that the editing techniques he’d had a look at were able to make even the most jackrabbity of his encounters seem endless when the various angles were spliced.
But now, it seemed, he had finally spent everything he’d stored up in the Permian Correctional Facility, and Cherise, who was playing the first cop, had quickly expended her store of winsome entreaty.
The phone call, in fact, was the second interruption of the morning, and a welcome interruption for Paco. He had already stopped the shooting once, pleading for a short break to get his head together.
“Your head?!” Cherise had fairly shrieked, all her cop brass glittering. “Who gives a shit about your head? That’s not the problem here.”
Maybe it seemed that way to her, Paco thought, trying to console himself, wondering how anyone could blame him, the temperature in the place somewhere in the fifties at best, even under the lights, Cherise now about as come-hither as a longshoreman. He glanced down at his offending member—nobody’d bothered to zip him up again—and wondered if it might be worth it, just take a couple tiny snorts from the bag, get through this scene, go right back to the straight and narrow where drugs were concerned, at least…
…but broke off, knowing he was trying to bullshit the chief bullshitter himself, a couple snorts and he’d be off to the races, have Cherise doing things with him and the other cop and the truncheons and the motorcycle, stuff even she had never dreamed of, soon enough he’d be back in the facility, and there’d be no cutout crotches in any of the jodhpurs there, you could bet your Tony Lamas on that.
He glanced up then, cutting short his reverie, about to call for someone to come and zip up his pants, for Chrissakes, when he noticed that Cross had finished his phone conversation and was walking across the set his way.
“How’s it going?” Cross called to him in his hearty way. They could have been a couple of guys saying hi on the golf course, the way Cross acted.
Paco glanced down at himself, then back up at Cross, who had come to stand in front of him. The guy was rubbing his hands together, staring off distractedly at the two women like there was suddenly something on his mind.
“I’m doing all right, Mr. Cross,” Paco said. “It’s just a little cold in here, is all. Just give me a couple of minutes.”
“That’s okay, Paco,” Cross said. He made placating motions with his hands, his eyes still on the actresses. “We may be putting this project on hold for the time being, anyway.”
“On hold?” Paco tried to envision himself in an unemployment line.
Cross gestured at the two actresses. “How about Cherise over there? You think she looks Asian at all?”
Paco glanced at Cross, craned his neck for a better look across the set. “Asian?” Paco echoed. Cherise was probably 5'10", had red hair, huge breasts, the face of a trailer-park queen.
“Yeah,” Cross said, shaking his head. “It’s going to be a challenge for makeup, all right.”
Paco stared up at him. “We’re going to start a new film?” he said hopefully.
“We may be onto something big, Paco,” Cross said.
He turned, then clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a college boy, aren’t you?”
Paco was wondering what he should say when Cross continued, his gaze traveling back to the actresses, his voice contemplative. “You know anything about how the Chinese like to screw?”
“Where is Florentino?” Paige said, hesitating as she approached the limousine. She’d had to swallow a couple of times, uncertain she could still speak. In the dimly lit hotel room, with its cool currents and muted colors, she’d felt capable, as if she might deal with a world that had turned inside out.
Outside now, into a tropical midmorning that seemed to hum with energy, she felt herself wavering. Her head was suddenly stuffed with batting, her tongue thick. It was as if she were insulated from actual sensation by a thick layer of invisible foam. Even the mighty sun had become a watery disk, its heat a barely perceptible caress. She had to will herself to put one foot forward, then the next…it was as if she were moving through a dream, a nightmare really, where nothing made sense, where the only way to survive was to move. She had no idea whether she was moving forward, of course, but she knew that without putting herself in motion, she would be sucked into a vortex of forces that would pull her so far down she might never see light again.
Despite what she’d said to John Deal about her sister being too angry to kill herself, Paige knew that the very despair that tugged at her was the same force that had claimed Barbara. Given the chance, it would sing its siren song to her, too. Career teetering, lover gone, mother dead, sister a suicide…dear God, where did that put her on the potential-to-end-it-all charts?
Her mother was gone, there was nothing to do but accept that. Until her death, she’d been able to suppress all those ancient feelings, pretend they were just a mother and daughter “who did not talk,” as if that explained something. She’d met other women, a number of them in her profession, of course, who’d become disaffected from their families. The reasons were myriad, and exacerbated by the gulf that separated life as an actor from any normal existence, but she’d taken some comfort in knowing that others had been able to survive without that mythic mother-daughter connection.
She’d even drawn some perverse strength from the fantasy that her reasons were “better” than others’, reasons that she had never been able to share, of course. But with her mother gone irrevocably, she’d had to confront the truth. No reasons made up for the absence of a mother. She, Paige, had run away from the possibility of that bond a long time ago. And now there was nothing that could ever be done about it.
Then, with all that swirling in her mind, had come her sister with her mind-numbing assertion. “She’s not your mother.” Impossible. The sort of insult a jealous four-year-old might hurl at her older sister. But they weren’t kids anymore, not by a long shot.
Paige’s thoughts drifted, seeing herself catching up to Barbara outside her mother’s hospital room, her sister standing grimly at the nurses’ station, grimly signing the necessary paperwork, Paige sidling up to her, trying to keep her voice under control:
What had Barbara meant, saying such a thing?
“It’s true,” Barbara had repeated, never taking her eyes from a form in front of her.
Paige shaking her head, searching for words. Had their mother
ever
said such a thing?
“She didn’t have to,” Barbara had said, scrawling her signature across the form. She glanced through the wad of paperwork, then pushed everything across the counter to a nurse who sat with her gaze averted from the confrontation.
When the nurse confirmed that everything was in order, Barbara nodded curtly and started toward the elevators. Paige caught her by the arm. “Barbara, please, tell me what you’re talking about.”
Barbara paused, turned, her eyes icy. “She adopted you,” she said. “
They
adopted you. And now they’re both dead.” The elevator doors opened and she shook her arm free. “So what does it matter?”
“For God’s sake, Barbara…” Paige came after her, but Barbara whirled upon her, hand upraised, warning Paige away.
“You left me alone a long time ago,” she said, venomous. “But it’s all over now. There’s nothing more to worry about. You can go back to your real life now,” she said. “Go back to California.” Then she was inside the elevator and the doors had closed…
…Paige heard the blast of a horn on the street, shook herself from the memory. Here and now, she told herself. Here and now.
Her new driver smiled, pushed himself easily from the front fender where he’d been resting. “Florentino is become sick, Ms. Nobleman,” he said, extending his hand. “I am Gabriel.”
She wavered then. Through the open passenger’s window, she spotted the plastic Virgin on the dash, the tiny Manatees helmet dangling from the rearview mirror. Baseball and Catholicism, Florentino had happily explained to her: the two spiritual forces in his life.
She felt her hand enveloped in Gabriel’s massive one. He closed his other hand atop hers and bowed. “I am pleased to be of service,” he said.
She withdrew her hand—like taking it from a giant clamshell, she thought, her head still reeling—and nodded. “Gabriel,” she found herself saying. “Like the angel?”
The man’s face lit up behind his dark glasses. “Very much like the angel,” he agreed.
She studied him for a moment, forcing her eyes to focus. From a few feet away, she’d taken him to be Samoan. Now, she wasn’t so sure. His features were unusual: Mongol, she might have guessed, an Asian Cossack in a chauffeur’s uniform…but he was so huge. And something else stirred in those high cheekbones and sallow skin, something she couldn’t be sure of.
“You’re not Cuban,” she said.
Gabriel’s smile was thin but steady. “No,” he said. “Not Cuban.”
She waited for him to continue, then realized he had finished with the subject. He stood with his hands crossed before him, his smile undiminished, staring at her. She felt embarrassed momentarily, as if she’d been caught prying. And she had begun to feel the heat, the press of the sun.
“I hope Florentino’s all right,” she said.
“Just something like the flu,” Gabriel said, waving a hand. “They called me only this morning.”
She nodded. The flu, she thought. Maybe that’s what was happening to her. Florentino had come down with the flu, and he had passed it along to her. The flu on top of everything else. “Well,” she said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Gabriel.”
She started a bit unsteadily for the door then, and Gabriel was there in a flash. He ushered her in like it was something he’d been born to do all his life, and she fell gratefully into the car.
***
Once inside, the quiet rush of the air-conditioning began to revive her. And if she’d had any doubts about Gabriel’s driving ability, she soon put them aside. Though somewhat heavier of foot than gentle Florentino, no sooner had she given him the address than he had them out of the maze of South Beach streets, and within minutes they were onto one of the causeways stretching across the bay.
She sat pensively in the plush seat, wondering now if she were doing the right thing, staring out sightlessly at the coruscated surface of the water, the glitter of the sun dimmed by the heavily smoked glass, the gulls and pelicans turned to shadows, the sailboats and cabin cruisers blanked into silhouettes. When she realized that she’d chewed her thumbnail nearly to the quick, she pulled it away from her lips in disgust.
“Great,” she said, staring at a drop of blood that welled up from her cuticle. “Just great.”
“Excuse me?” Gabriel called through the open interior window.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she added. “Would you mind closing that?”
She saw him nod into the rearview mirror and lean to push a button that sent the tiny window closed, but his eyes were hidden by the dark glasses. Anger had energized her. If she’d offended him, too bad. Why was she worried about everyone else’s feelings all the time, anyway? It was high time she started taking care of Paige Nobleman. All these years of swimming with the sharks, and she was still behaving like some kind of wimp fish.
She saw her reflection in the mirrored glass: staring back at her was a too-thin woman in oversized sunglasses, her face drawn, complexion pasty, the lips thin and chapped, the pale blonde hair lifeless and unkempt. The woman staring back at her needed sun, rest, a bit of food, a good laugh or two. A few weeks ago, Paige had been reading for the part of an accomplished attorney. Now she could be a barfly, a harridan, swell the chorus of the
maenads
…or weep at a graveside, she thought, turning away from her own gaze.
She forced herself back against the seat with a sigh, ruling out any more forays into self-pity, and began to replay the real conversation she’d had earlier that morning with her mother’s attorney.
Her mother
, she thought, interrupting herself immediately. Loretta Cooper. Loretta Cooper
had
been—no, strike that—
was
her mother.
Wasn’t
she? Loretta Cooper had raised her, that much was fact, despite everything that had happened between them, despite the things Barbara had said, despite the gnawing uncertainty that had come to plague her. And today, she had told herself, she would do what she could do to put those doubts to rest.
Her discussion with the attorney had begun with the basics: She learned that what little cash there was—a smallish bank account and the proceeds of the sale of her mother’s home—most would be consumed by the medical bills. With luck, there’d be enough to cover the funeral costs, which would be minimal. Her mother’s wish had been to be cremated. No service, no interment. Her ashes to be scattered to the winds. Nothing for Paige to worry about, the attorney assured her, no hurry, she could contact the mortuary at her convenience.
That would be like her mother, Paige thought while the attorney blathered on, to be unsentimental and self-abnegating to the very end. No surprise that she wouldn’t want to spend her eternal rest next to Paige’s father, of course. He’d been dead a dozen years, and even though they’d continued to live together, even after the things Paige had disclosed on the eve of her departure for California, it had been at best an uneasy coexistence. She and her mother had never had another conversation that you could term intimate after that day, but still, Paige was aware of how things stood between her mother and her father. There had been a few years when she and Barbara still functioned as sisters, at least at long distance. She’d heard enough to know that something had sunk in, despite her mother’s fervent denials.
“I don’t know what it is,” Barbara would say. “But ever since you left, what little bit they had just disappeared, Paige. It was never great, but now they’re at each other’s throats all the time. Or what’s worse, they just circle each other, snarling, and everybody’s always got a drink in hand.”
And each time her sister had said those words, or passed on similar dreary news, Paige had felt a pang. She knew that Barbara, who’d barely reached her teens when Paige left, had gradually come to blame Paige for her parents’ disaffection, to resent her older sister’s absence from what had come to be the familial battlefield.
And it was no mystery, was it? Surely, in Barbara’s mind, Paige had run off to fame and fortune, sharing very little of either, never mind the long letters to her baby sister that so often went unanswered, nor the checks her mother had always returned uncashed. It was as if Barbara had condemned herself, had chosen to tend the hearth like some Cinderella whose prince had never come.
Every time Paige had tried to explain the truth about why she had had to leave, to tell Barbara what had really happened, it was Barbara who had shut her off, who had refused to listen, who could never believe. And despite her unwillingness to believe, despite her natural resentment at Paige’s fleeing the scene, which Paige could well understand, how could Barbara have said what she had said the night of their mother’s death? How could hatred have grown so deep, and so venomous…
And then she felt it and stopped herself. That same blessed warning that had saved her all these years. A chill rushed upon her like a blast of air risen from a tomb and when she felt it, she shut down her thoughts as utterly and completely as if they had never begun. Those things had never happened. That life was not her life. Paige Cooper had ceased to exist many, many years ago. She had become Paige Nobleman, person in her own right. Her very survival depended upon it. And every time she was tempted to remember, the chill winds swept over her and warned her away from the real grave, where only rottenness and decay existed, and to draw a breath was to end her life.
Paige felt the tears begin to well in her eyes and realized that she had once again been tearing at the cuticle of her thumb. Dear God, she thought, swallowing her revulsion. Next she’d be rending the flesh of her cheeks, or whipping herself with a cat-o’-nine-tails. She tucked her hand under her hip and shook her head violently, vowing to be strong, to do what she had to do. What else was there? Sit in her hotel room and stare at the walls until those terrible winds howled up through the floorboards and took her off once and for all?
So she had forced herself up, into the shower, out of the room in the South Beach hotel, which tiny though it was, seemed ever so much more human than the mausoleum where Marvin had put her. Hardwood floors. Blonde maple furniture. Oxblood tile, with matching toilet, and sink basin in the bath. Rounded chrome fixtures that looked like they’d been constructed from pieces of old Buicks and Chryslers. Things that had been new the day she’d been born, and that gave her a certain comfort even in the calamity that her life had become. When she saw Florentino, she would have to thank him for saving her. Had she stayed on in that other place, she doubted she would have found the energy to even draw the thick curtains back, much less take this little trip.
This little trip. Something the attorney had said gave her the idea. Her mother’s personal effects were to be divided equally between her two daughters. Her two daughters. The attorney had been very clear on that. Paige had asked him to repeat the language of the will’s codicil. Of course, the attorney pointed out, all of her mother’s personal effects had been moved to Barbara’s cottage when her mother’s home had been sold.