Fidelity (7 page)

He stepped up to the trailer, grasped the window frame, pulled himself up and looked in the window. He could see two clean dishes on the table, two glasses, and a vase of flowers, the kind that her mother used to grow in pots.

He walked around the side of the trailer to the back end. There was a dim light in the small window above the bed. Hobart looked around, found a big empty pot, turned it upside down and stood on it. He could only see a bit of the bed, but it seemed to be made, and he was sure it wasn’t doing any moving. He heard a car coming, and then saw the headlights shining on the blacktop to his right. He stepped off the pot, spun it upright and set it on the pavement approximately where he had found it. He went around the left side of the trailer and waited near the door, one foot resting on the steps.

Valerie got out of her car, walked to the steps, put her arms around him and kissed him once quickly, then edged past him and unlocked the door. She pushed it open for him, said, “I’ll be there in a second,” and went into the dark.

After about a minute, she came back into the trailer and shut the door. “You feeling jealous, Hobart?”

“Why would you say that?”

“You moved my pot to look in my bedroom window.”

“If you were asleep, I wouldn’t want to wake you up.”

“Sure you wouldn’t.”

He met her gaze for a moment. “Where were you?”

“I went to a movie with Maria.”

Maria Sandoval was one of the people who had grown up with them in the desert. He looked out the window in the direction of the Sandoval trailer. When he looked back at Valerie, she was smiling. “There’s the phone. If you feel like it, you can call her.” She walked toward the back of the trailer.

“Where are you going?”

“To bed. I guess you don’t want to come.”

“Well, maybe I do. It’s been a hell of a long drive, and I’m pretty tired.”

“If you’re tired, then maybe you ought to call Maria instead.” She said it over her shoulder, but the head start she had wasn’t enough, because Hobart was quick. Before she could reach the tiny bedroom he was scooping her up into his arms. He ducked to bring her through the door, flopped onto the bed with her, and in a moment they were wrestling each other out of their clothes.

Later he lay in Valerie’s bed staring at the false ceiling. There was an inch-thin layer of old insulation above, but the roof was metal and he could hear when the desert wind blew the particles of sand and bits of dirt against the walls and made ticking sounds that usually soothed him and helped him sleep.

Tonight it wasn’t working.

Hobart was aware that he had wasted his life, but he seldom spent time regretting it anymore. He could have married Valerie when they were young. She had always wanted to get married in those days, and had stopped wanting to only when he went to prison.

Probably they would have had a few kids and built a place outside Palm Springs, far up in the hills. That was where the really rich people had built winter homes since then, so it was too late now. It was too late anyway. After Hobart got out of prison, five years had passed, and Valerie was different. When he said anything about marrying her, she just laughed and shook her head and changed the subject. If he would let her, she would say, “Why buy the bull when I get the bullshit for free?” or “I’m saving myself for Jesus,” or some other craziness to tell him the time had come and gone. His whole life was like thatburned up. He had no claim that anyone had done this to him. He had burned it up himself, for no particular reason except that he once thought he could get more of everything if he just took it.

Now, when he thought about the past, it was always the old days when he and Valerie had been kids. He would reach all the way back and try to get there and hold himself down, so the two of them would stay on the careful path. He would close his eyes and see her as a fifteen-year-old, walking with him in the desert after school. She was skinny and her long blond hair was sun-bleached, and her skin was always tanned like his. They would walk together but ten feet apart, because the land was empty and private for miles at a time.

The desert was almost silent because the wind needed something to blow against to make a noise, and there were no tree leaves or grass blades to swish and rustle. The only sound it could make was by blowing across the openings of their ears. Sometimes when Valerie talked, it was as though she were leaning her head against his shoulder-no, as though her thoughts found their way into his head. In those days children didn’t talk to adults much, not even their parents. There was too much about their lives that their parents would have stomped on.

There was a group of kids who lived in the trailers and shotgun shacks north of the interstate who met in the desert after school: Maria Sandoval and her brother Augustin, Nancy DuVal, Bill Skinner, Mike Zellner, Hobart and Valerie. Now and then other kids would come into the group for a time because they had fallen into temporary disfavor with their regular cliques, or because they had heard something special was going on. Once Augustin picked up some cherry bombs and M-80s on a trip to Guadalajara, and there was a temporary swell in the gathering. On another occasion Hobart stole a case of beer from a truck idling near a diner in Indio. But most of the time there were only four or five of them who met in the desert to be together and smoke cigarettes.

The talk was sparse and weighted, the words chosen with great premeditation to convey and dispel anxieties, or designed like bait to elicit revealing admissions or concessions from the opposite sex. The answers were big, too, sometimes discussed in whispers by the members of one sex before they decided what answer was best to give. The speakers were representatives and exemplars of one-half of humanity. As the afternoon waned, they left in ones or twos, until most days, only Jerry and Valerie would remain.

There was no way for Hobart’s mind to trace forward from that time to this, because the change, the damage, was so profound and the days in their thousands so full of other places and people that he forgot most of them. And during the intervening times he was often different kinds of men to different people, one no less real than any of the others. When he followed this thread-the boyfriend of Valerie Putnam-there were long gaps when that person had not existed. He had heard somebody say once that as long as a man’s hopes outnumbered his regrets, he was still alive. But by that measure, he had been dead for years.

He just couldn’t get himself to let go, close his eyes, and pull the trigger.

Ray Hall found a parking space near the courthouse complex on Van Nuys Boulevard, walked past the bail-bond shops and the stores playing Mexican music through their open doors, and down Delano Street to the police station. He went in to visit Al Campbell, the homicide cop. They talked about Campbell’s wife, who grew up in Ray Hall’s neighborhood, and about the strategy of the Dodgers, who were consistently beaten by players they had brought up, taught, and then traded to other teams. Then Hall asked him if he knew Gruenthal, the detective who had drawn the Kramer case, and Campbell took Hall to the next office to introduce him.

Gruenthal and Ray got coffee and sat down on opposite sides of Gruenthal’s desk to talk. Gruenthal showed him the drawings and photographs of the crime scene and asked him the obvious questions: what case Phil had been working on, which old cases had left someone angry, what vices he’d had, what his relationships with women were like.

When they had each told each other what they knew, it was clear that they didn’t know much. Hall said, “I’ll let you know if I find out anything,” but Gruenthal didn’t make the same promise.

The conversation exhausted Ray Hall’s will to talk. He was in the middle of a hangover, with a head that was pounding and lightsensitive eyes that had stopped producing moisture and stuck to his eyelids when he blinked. He had been expecting to show up at the office this morning only long enough to pick up his belongings and then go back home to bed, but now he was forced to think.

He decided to find a place to think where the sun wasn’t in his eyes. It had to be one where people spoke English, because he had no idea how to say “shut up” in Spanish, and his head hurt. He stopped at a restaurant he knew called The Sea Grill on Van Nuys not far from the agency office and sat at the bar. The bartender was a middleaged man who seemed to believe that the most important part of his job was cleaning the brass, wood, and glass for the evening, but he managed to pour Ray Hall a glass of scotch.

Hall drank half of it quickly, letting it burn down his throat, and almost immediately began to feel its anesthetic qualities. Then he took small sips and thought about Phil Kramer. Hall had known Phil for ten years, but nothing about his death made any sense to him.

Phil Kramer was big and aggressive, the kind of detective who would smile as he approached a man he wanted to talk to, and then stand too close to him when he asked questions. But he wasn’t a bully, and he wasn’t the sort of man who would forget that a bullet could kill him. Ray Hall had been with him on a number of investigations, and Phil had been careful. If he left his car in a dangerous neighborhood, he would return to it by a different route and see if he found anybody watching for him.

Despite his size, he was good at keeping a low profile. He dressed in drab colors, usually wore a nylon windbreaker, seldom a sport coat because cops and private detectives wore them. He could fade into a crowd of strangers, assess their posture and facial expressions, and imitate them. He would often start a conversation so he would appear to be one of the group instead of an outsider.

He was a credible liar. He never used a simple lie, always a story. When he pretended to be a deliveryman, he acted tired and irritated, a middleaged guy forced to moonlight to pay off a debt. When he pretended to be a lawyer, he was an unethical overpaid one with the perfect amount of swagger and unfounded self-regard. That was his secret: an understanding of credulity. He let people assume the things he wanted them to believe. He didn’t make some bogus claim and then stare into a person’s eyes without blinking, like a bad poker player. Most people didn’t want to stare into anyone’s eyes like that. They wanted to be lazy and comfortable, and Phil Kramer let them.

Phil had always seemed too careful to be murdered in an ambush. And why would anyone want to kill him? Phil Kramer wasn’t anybody’s enemy. He was a mercenary. Nobody hired a private detective until he was pretty sure he knew what the detective would find. His clients were wives who already knew their husbands were getting laid somewhere else, lawyers who wanted to bolster the evidence in lawsuits that had already been filed, businessmen who already knew somebody was skimming the cash receipts. It wasn’t as though killing Phil would end somebody’s troubles. Phil Kramer had been in the business of proving what people already knew.

Hall had been withholding something from the investigators. He had been acting as though he believed the theory that Phil had been on a case when he was killed. That was what everybody on the outside assumed: Detective Gruenthal, Emily. But at the back of Ray Hall’s mind there was a feeling that the idea wasn’t quite right.

The thought brought Hall to a tangle of complications. After Phil got out of the marines over twenty years ago, he went to work as a trainee at Sam Bowen’s agency until he got his license, then founded his own agency. At first he had worked cases alone. Emily would answer the phones, do the billing and filing, and probably write the reports for the clients.

When Sam Bowen closed his own detective agency, Phil had hired Sam to work for him. A couple of years later, he had hired Ray Hall. Ray had been inexperienced then, and he had tagged along with Phil or Sam at first and, in time, had learned to work on his own. As the business grew, Phil added people. He always hired young men who were physically rugged and had a reasonable level of untrained intelligence. He let them work their three years as trainees and tested them by giving them the worst jobs. They were the ones who sat watching an apartment building for seventy-two hours, or went through a neighborhood every day at three A.M. writing down the license numbers of the parked cars, and then spent the rest of the day at the DMV filling out forms to obtain the owners’ names. When the trainees were ready, he would give them cases of their own and hire new trainees. Phil ran his agency like a pyramid scheme.

As the years went by, the young detectives got better and Phil Kramer got lazier and more careful about putting himself in dangerous places. First he stopped taking the hardest cases for himself. Eventually he stopped working cases with the young apprentices to teach them how things were done. Instead, he relied on Hall or Dewey Burns to take them on. Over the past year, he seemed to have lost all interest in the agency. He had let five of the other detectives go off on their own and had not replaced them. Bill Przwalski was now the only trainee, even though there were a dozen applicants a week calling April and asking for the chance to work for a license.

Phil still showed up at work every day, but he often left without telling anybody where he was going. The idea that what he was doing when he wasn’t in the office was working cases had never occurred to Ray Hall. When Ray had heard Phil Kramer had been shot, it had taken a minute or two before he could even concede that his death could possibly have anything to do with a case.

There were other complications to the task of investigating Phil Kramer’s murder. As Hall sat in the bar sipping his second drink, he pictured Emily Kramer at the retirement party the night before Sam Bowen moved to Seattle. Everyone in the agency liked Sam Bowen, and everyone had benefited from Bowen’s vast circle of snitches, cops, lawyers, bail bondsmen, and stringers. Emily Kramer had been grateful to Bowen because she still went over the books in the early years, and she knew what he had contributed to Phil’s income and hers.

The party had been loud and jovial and chaotic at times, but it lapsed into periods of quiet, earnest talk about the past and the future. There had been an edge to these discussions because Sam Bowen said he was sixty-eight years old, but he was actually older. People at the party knew that once Sam Bowen was a thousand miles from L.A., they weren’t likely to see him again.