Downfall (8 page)

We watched the techs leave. Then Felix fumbled along the edge of the register. He pulled out a sealed envelope with The Select’s logo and return address preprinted in the corner and handed it to me. I opened the envelope and slid out a piece of paper. Felix read it over my shoulder.

“What you left me in case you died?” Felix said. “Like a will?”

“She didn’t say it was urgent she find her mom?”

“No.” Felix leaned against the bar. “I didn’t really chat with her. It was busy. And I like Janice, and I didn’t want to get in the middle of a fight between her and her daughter.”

Felix dug in a cooler and produced two icy bottles of Abita Amber lager; I had developed a liking for it, living in New Orleans, and I made sure my bars stocked it if they could get it from a local distributor.

“I made a new friend,” I said after I sipped the cold beer. I told him about the man in black’s offer.

“Okay, don’t call him the man in black because that is and always will be Johnny Cash,” Felix said. “Secondly, call him back and tell him you’ll stay out of his way. You don’t want trouble.”

“They’ll find Diana.”

“Wrong. We’ll find her first,” Felix said. “And why keep him on guard? Make him think he’s scared you away. Be the threat he doesn’t see coming.”

I considered this wisdom.

“Why would he keep offering you whatever you wanted? That just sounds weird. And I love San Francisco, but it can be a crash course in weird.”

“For Diana. He thinks I know where she is.”

“Then we assume she’s not at her mom’s or her own place. She’s hiding.”

“She’s running.”

“Presumably.” Felix took a small sip of beer. “So. What now?”

I had a number of options. “First, we clean up the bar so I can think. Second, we find the getaway car, the Audi, and see who was driving and what they can tell us. Third, we find Janice and Diana.”

“Shouldn’t we find them first?”

“I saw the getaway car’s license. It’s our only thread to follow right now.”

“We should find Diana and Janice first,” he said. “Get them to safety.”

“Easier to find one man than two missing people. If we stop him as a threat, that puts your friends into safety, even if we haven’t found them yet.”

Felix let several seconds tick away, thinking. “You said Diana yelled at you not to call the police. She might not welcome our help.” He set down his beer.

“If we can help her without involving the police, I think she’ll welcome us.”

“There is a chance that Mila will pull you out,” he said.

“No, this guy won’t let up. It’s like leaving the playground to the bully. I end this now.”

“She may not see it that way.”

“She wants me working on the Monroe poisoning attempt. She can think that’s what I’m doing.”

“Then let’s get started.” I fed the Audi’s license plate to him, and he typed again on his laptop. The Round Table manages to have access to all sorts of interesting databases, either through illegal access or backdoor entries that can’t be traced. I don’t judge.

“The car is registered to a Vivienne Duchamp. She lives in Tiburon.” Felix raised an eyebrow. “That’s in Marin County, other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Rich people territory.”

Rich people? “Rich people commit crimes.”

“Yes. Or maybe her car was stolen. Or the car was registered in her name and she’s a victim of identity theft. Or she affords her super-expensive house by being a getaway driver for Russian thugs. I really like option three.”

I took another long swig of beer. “So now we clean up the bar. I don’t want to leave it a mess overnight.”

“We don’t go to the Duchamp place tonight?”

“I already got someone killed trespassing tonight,” I said.

“Not your fault. The man in black would have killed Rostov’s brother just for walking in.”

“Yet he didn’t kill me. Let’s clean the bar. Work will clear my mind.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Felix stood. “No sleep for the wicked.”

“Could you sleep anyway?” I’d forgotten, stupidly, that he was sick. “Wait. You need your rest.”

“I don’t do sick,” Felix said. “Are you afraid they’ll come back here?”

“Not right now. Maybe they’ll come back in a day or so. He might wait to see if I give him Diana, like he hopes.”

Felix looked unsettled. I didn’t blame him. “But I think they don’t want any more trouble. They want Diana, and they’ll only come here if they think she’s here or I know where she is.”

“You told them you’d protect her from now on.”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

The phone rang. I picked it up.

“It’s me,” Mila said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” I decided not to tell her about the encounter at Rostov’s. Not yet. “Are my son and Leonie safe?”

“Yes. They’re both asleep. I told Leonie to call you in the morning. We’ll keep them in Los Angeles until this is settled. I want to know all details.”

“I’m up against a very bad guy,” I said. “And let me handle it, and I’ll call you when I know more.”

“Sam…”

“Mila, this is my problem now. Just keep my family safe.” I hung up.

F
ELIX AND I SWEPT THE FLOOR
, mopped up the spilled vodka and juice and pinot grigio and pale ale and gathered broken barware. With the dual shocks and horrors of the night, cleaning felt like therapy, a bit of calm that let my mind ponder my new set of problems. The work didn’t clear my mind, but it kept me from thinking constantly about two men looking into my eyes as they died tonight. Death is always a lot to process.

There were coats left behind, two purses, a BlackBerry phone, a well-thumbed guidebook to San Francisco. Welcome, tourist. Did you leave your heart here? Gunshots do add that special ambience. Most of the witnesses had gotten their stuff back after they’d given their statements, but these had decided not to come back or would come back tomorrow. Felix got a cardboard box that had once held bottles of Napa Valley pinot noir, and we put all the abandoned belongings into it.

I swept up the broken bottles and glasses by a spilled bin and table near the back hallway. I stepped on something as I swept up the glass. An ornate silver lipstick case, fancy enough I thought it might be valuable or antique. I tossed the lipstick into the box with the other stuff. I wrote
SHOOTING LOST & FOUND
on it with a Sharpie pen. Felix put the box under the bar while I finished sweeping up broken glass.

We got everything cleaned. Exhaustion, emotional and physical, crept up on us. I just wanted to collapse into bed.

“Go home, get some sleep,” I said.

“I’ll be back early,” Felix said. “Sleep seems like a waste of time when you’re sick.”

And I wondered how bad his cancer really was. If just a blot on his lung, couldn’t he just tell Mila? Maybe he didn’t want to spend what limited time he had asleep. If my clock was down to its last ticks, I’d want every second with my loved ones. But Felix had made no mention of family. I remembered his wife had been a suicide. The bar and the Round Table were his life.

But then, we all have limited time, don’t we? The awful truth we never want to acknowledge. The Rostov brothers probably had food in their fridge they’d never eat, phone calls and e-mails they’d never return, plans for this coming weekend. All gone, all to dust.

“Don’t come in tomorrow, I mean today; we’re not going to open. And if our new friend comes back…I don’t want you in danger. This isn’t your fight, Felix.”

“Sam, Diana and Janice are my concern. They brought this on you, and I’m sorry…and so it’s my fight, too.”

“Thank you.” His loyalty touched me.

“Good night, Sam.”

“Good night.” To be safe, in case there were angry, revenge-minded Russians waiting outside, I walked with Felix to his car parked in the small lot behind the bar’s building. I opened the locked gate. He got in and waved, and I watched his car vanish into the curtain of early morning fog.

I closed up the gate, locked it. Then realized—it hadn’t been locked when the woman ran out the back. Maybe someone had left it unlocked. Or someone had picked the lock.

An Audi ready to get the suburban dad—clearly the idea had been to force Diana out the back of the bar and into the waiting car. So perhaps the driver had gotten out and picked the lock. I examined the lock. I could see the scratches of picks against the edge of the mechanism.

Who exactly was I dealing with? Grigori Rostov might have been a run-of-the-mill thug, but the suburban dad and the man in black were not what I expected. Neither was the connection to a prominent businesswoman like Janice Keene.

I went back inside the bar. There is no place quite so lonely as an emptied bar. It is built for socialization, for civilization, and when it is empty, it’s like a stage bereft of actors. I walked upstairs and stripped and fell into the bed, the adrenaline of the night draining from my body. I shuddered under the blanket and cool, clean sheet.

I wondered if anyone had found the Rostov brother’s body yet. I wondered how soon I would be hearing again from Detective
Anitra
DeSoto.

I had killed before, and there is nothing glorious or honorable or cathartic about it, even when it’s done to save another or in self-
defense
. It’s an awful thing, an echo that takes too long to fade. This did not feel good. It felt lousy, horrible, all the things that DeSoto expected me to show on my face and that I didn’t. It made me feel like I had stepped further away from the regular life that I still craved. I was supposed to have a new normal: no more fighting, no more killing. Just traveling like a civilized man, making sure the bars ran well and made a strong profit, coming home to my son. Playing with him on the floor, watching his face light up with a smile, changing his diapers, rolling a ball to him, singing along with the Wiggles, or watching old Mickey Mouse cartoons.

That life of normalcy.

Normalcy might be on vacation. I turned and stared up at the ceiling and wondered what the cool-voiced man on the phone thought he could offer me, in my heart of hearts.

Diana had told Lily that sharing your travel plans on a social networking site was tantamount to stenciling
PLEASE ROB THIS HOUSE WHILE I’M GONE
on your front door, so Lily deleted the status, but now Diana was grateful for her friend’s indiscretion. As of tonight Lily still had ten days to soak up her Corfu sun, and now Diana unlocked the gate to the front door and closed it behind her. Lily had given Diana a key when Lily was given the town house in the Marina District for graduating from Oregon (Lily finishing college had never been a Sure Thing) because Lily needed plants watered during her frequent Grams-funded holidays. Diana hadn’t thought of staying here earlier, simply because she didn’t want to get Lily involved. But it had all gotten much, much more dangerous, and she needed a shelter beyond the backseat of her mother’s car—an old, classic BMW that lacked GPS, which she was driving as it couldn’t be tracked—or a cheap motel room south of the city, which had been her previous night’s bed.

She let herself in. Her heart jumped into her throat at the warning buzz of an alarm, and for a moment her mind went blank as to the correct code. She scurried toward the soft glow of the pad, studied the keyboard, remembered. She keyed in L-I-L-Y. The alarm went silent, the red light switching to green.

Diana nearly doubled over in relief. The air tasted a bit warm and stale. She listened to the silence; it was as welcoming as a blanket on a cold night.

If they knew she and Lily were friends…but they’d have no way to know that she was here. Maybe they could identify her friends, but even if they drove by—her mother’s car was parked four blocks away. Could they guess she was here?

But she had no place else to go.

She went into the kitchen, dropped her purse on the floor. She felt exhausted. She didn’t turn on a light. In the refrigerator she found orange juice, and she drank a glass, happy to feel the cool sting against her throat. Lily had a little flat-screen TV on the counter. Diana remembered the two of them trying to cook along with a Food Network show, a complete disaster; they’d laughed so hard, sipping wine—that seemed a thousand years ago. She turned on the television, finding the all-local news channel. She wanted to know what the police were saying. The news feed was talking about the weather. She huddled against the cabinets on the floor and drank her juice and closed her eyes.

She’d been running for one day and it felt like forever. It was not like how it was in those innocent-person-on-the-run movies. No. Not at all. It was frightening and mind-numbing and she constantly felt like she was going to vomit.

And her mother was gone and not returning her calls. Holistic retreat, right.

Her mom’s whole life had been a lie. A lie of proportions so gigantic it made her bones hurt to think about it. She didn’t even know her mother and now maybe she shouldn’t even try. Her mother was a stranger. A liar.

I did it all for you, baby
, she’d said on the video.
Please understand. It made everything so much…easier. I wanted you to have a better life. And he offered this to me. If I did things for him. To help him, and it helped us.

And now she’d vanished on purpose, and these people were trying to find Diana. Either her own mother had told them that she’d called about what she’d found, or…they had bugged her phone. Or bugged her mother’s phone. Diana left increasingly panicked voice mails for her mother, and that’s when the two men began to show up at the Keene Global office, at her condo, at the places where she hung out. And finally showing up at The Select. They knew about her mother’s life. Maybe they’d killed Mom for telling about them in the video.

You will think I did bad things. But I did them for good reasons. Every advantage you have had is because I made this choice. You need not fear him, Diana. The man in charge—his name is John Belias—he has made our wonderful lives possible. He can help you, too. I want you to have as easy a road as I did. Don’t judge me, and remember, I did it all for you, all for you.

All for you? Why would her mother do this to her? Sure, parents sacrificed for their kids. But didn’t they work so they had a nice life as well? She was grateful to her mother, but…not for this. Not for living a lie.

She opened her eyes as a car commercial ended and the newscaster said, “Violence erupted at a bar in the Haight this evening, claiming one life.” Diana crept close to the TV, crawling across the kitchen floor. One man dead, killed by a bar employee during an attempted robbery of another customer. Is that what people thought this was? She’d said,
Help me
, to the bartender—because Mom’s friend Felix was nowhere to be seen and Felix was over forty, you know,
old
. There was something about the young bartender—he was cute, but beyond the nice face he had a…solidity about him. He was in a suit so he looked like he was in charge. Intelligence and power together. He just looked like the kind of guy who could and would help. This had gone through her mind in two seconds, because she’d sensed from most people those invisible shields that say,
Don’t ask me for help; I don’t want to get involved, this is not my problem
. It was an awareness that had come into her head the moment she needed help. She knew most people were good. But if she asked for help, people would want to know why, and if she said why, her mother would go to prison.

She listened to the news reporter and it didn’t sound like the bartender had been arrested; it sounded like self-defense. The dead man had not been identified. Witnesses said both the woman who was the alleged target (to Diana the word felt like a prod in her spine every time the reporter used it) and the second alleged attacker had escaped.

Escaped? That meant he was still out there, looking for her.

So now what would they do? She’d gotten one of her pursuers killed. These people owned her mother, and if she could never find Mom again—a possibility that kept creeping around her brain and she kept shoving away—then what? She couldn’t run much farther. She could hide here at Lily’s, and if the neighbors asked, she was house-sitting; they knew she was Lily’s friend. But then Lily would be home, in the bubble of her perfect life, in ten days and then what would she do? Where would she go?

She couldn’t join this…little private Mafia Mom was part of. No, not an option. She wasn’t going to sell her soul like her mother had.

Maybe she should go to the police. Explain. Show them the video.

And watch them arrest her mother.

Then the solution hit her. She could edit the video. Mom’s confession meant only for her eyes after Mom’s passing. Lily had a nice computer, the latest Apple laptop, because she remembered Lily didn’t know squat about buying a computer and she’d gone along to help her pick out a model. Lily had pointed to the most expensive one and said,
Ooh, that one
. Of course.

Take out the parts where Mom confessed to doing such terrible crimes, all in the interest of giving Diana a perfect life. Where she explained to Diana that the man who had made her life simpler and easier would perform the same miracle for Diana now. Just leave in the parts about the bad guys, make it sound like Mom had found out about them but wasn’t part of them. She played the video in her head; maybe it would work. At least it would give her another option. If someone questioned the herky-jerky nature of the video—well, they could probably tell the digital file had been edited. That was a worry for later. She’d think of an explanation.

This could be her weapon, a way to fight back, to get them to leave her alone…

She dug in the purse.

Her mother’s silver lipstick case wasn’t there.

No.

She emptied the purse. The small gun Mom usually kept in the BMW’s glove compartment, supposedly for protection. Diana’s own cell phone, turned off in case they were tracking her. Her own lipstick. Her wallet with its thinning amount of money. Her compact red notebook. Old ticket stubs to a movie from last week.

But not the silver lipstick case.

No.
She turned the purse inside out, inspected the pockets. It wasn’t there. She hurried back to her car. She searched the seats, the floor, her breath growing raspy. It wasn’t there. The ragged hole the bullet had torn in the purse…the lipstick case must have fallen out as she fled the bar.

She nearly cried. What if the police had found it? It would be all over the news.

Diana replayed the scene in her head. The bar had turned into a battlefield. What if…it was still there? In the mess. In her mind’s eye she’d seen people running, leaving behind coats and purses and cell phones left beside their beers…Gunfire tended to prompt a stampede. She hadn’t made a copy of the video—to her it was like copying a nuclear bomb, or scanning and saving a murder confession. No, she didn’t know a great deal about computers; she used them at work and to surf the Web, like everyone else. How could she be sure people who could hack her phone, listen to her mother’s phone messages and delete them—how could she be sure any copy she made on any computer she could easily access was safe from her pursuers or from an accidental discovery?

And how exactly was she going to get back into The Select? She would hardly be welcome. Mom’s friend Felix hadn’t been there, but would he realize she was the young woman in trouble? He could call the police. The bar would surely be closed for a couple of days. It was just a lipstick case on the outside. What if it got thrown away? Then it might be in the trash bin. Just waiting for her.

She put her face in her hands, torn with indecision. She had to have the video. She had to have it, because if anyone else had it, then Mom was done. Going to jail and maybe dying there instead of being someplace where they could cure her.

Maybe the young bartender and Felix would help her.

Or maybe they’d call the cops the moment they laid eyes on her.

The bartender had killed the big man. He probably wasn’t going to thank her for putting that burden on his heart. Did bars have security cameras? With a shiver, she realized they must. Would the police put up film of her on TV now? Her friends, who would start to wonder where she was—no social networking updates, no calling anyone, no e-mails, and phoning in sick at work—they would see her. Had the camera caught her face clearly enough to recognize? She shared every detail of her life online, but no, she didn’t want this known. That her mother, her idol, her shining example was a Bad Person. A criminal.

She had to get back inside that bar. She started to think it through and the exhaustion crept into her brain, and she knew she needed sleep. She needed a plan. To simply show up there would never work.

She crawled into Lily’s bed and she pulled the covers over her head. She wondered if the bartender was managing to sleep, and she wished she could tell him she was sorry. And she wished she could tell him thank you. He was her ray of hope after her bank accounts had been locked, her e-mails hacked, her GPS in her beloved Jaguar a beacon for them to find her. She was running, and she was running out of time. Her last thought before welcome, merciful sleep took her, heavy and hard, was
Mom, where are you and what are you doing?