Flat Spin (27 page)

Buddhists don’t believe they’re punished for their anger. They believe they’re punished
by
their anger. At that moment, I was being punished by both. I unloaded on my former wife like a drill instructor addicted to Red Bulls. Wasn’t she the one who said she was getting strange phone calls and afraid someone was shadowing her? Wasn’t she the one who said she feared for her safety and mine?

“You have no situational awareness,” I said, “and that can get you killed.”

“You’re being irrational.”

“
I’m
being irrational? Who showed up unannounced at my apartment armed like Annie Oakley because they were so goddamn scared? You act like it was all a bad dream. Everything’s peachy once more in the fairy-tale land of Savannah Carlisle Echevarria.”

“Danny Katz is a dry cleaner. Let me repeat that: a
dry cleaner
. Not a murderer.”

“Did I or did I not instruct you to lock your doors?”

“You’re not my boss, Logan! We’re divorced, remember?” She stormed inside her sumptuous house, slamming the door behind her.

I paced the front lawn, trying to chill out. She was right about one thing: I
was
irrational. All that morning, when I wasn’t staring inside charred human remains at the coroner’s office and helping the LAPD with investigative leads, I’d been thinking about Savannah. She said she’d be waiting for me when we parted company outside the West Hollywood jail. In my anticipation and excitement, I had somehow gotten it into my horny schoolboy head that “waiting for me” meant more than it apparently did. Not that I ever expected her to meet me at the door naked. Then again, maybe I did. Hey, I’m male. But the one thing I definitely hadn’t expected was being greeted by an alleged dry cleaning magnate who resembled any number of Mossad and South African field agents of questionable loyalty who I used to cross paths with all the time. Maybe that’s what set me off, the way Katz looked. Hell, he probably was who he claimed to be—a nice, hardworking dry cleaner. Took pride in his work. Got the tough stains out.

I could’ve told her that I was sorry, but I knew that would be a giant time-waster. The Savannah I’d been married to was the kind of woman who took her time forgiving and forgetting—time being measured in weeks and sometimes months, depending on the perceived degree of transgression. Nothing in her behavior suggested to me that she had changed since our divorce. I was in for the cold shoulder, the silent treatment. I didn’t need any more of that. I got more than my share from Kiddiot.

Alameda emerged from the house to ask if I wanted a cold drink. What I wanted was a lift back to Rancho Bonita. She said she’d convey my request and went back inside. I could hear Alameda’s singsong words, muffled through the walls of Savannah’s
nouveau riche
villa paid for with her daddy’s money.

“You want to go back to Rancho Bonita?” Savannah said as she flung open the front door moments later and charged down the steps toward me. “Go on! Leave! Get out of my sight.”

She hurled her car keys at me, turned and marched back up the steps. The front windows rattled from the concussion of her slamming the door behind her.

I wished in that moment there was a way to rewind time. If only I’d checked the “Sorry, Can’t Make It!” box on the RSVP to the wedding of my old academy roommate instead of the box that said, “We/I’d Love To Come!!!” If only I had ducked out of the cathedral before the reception, before the buffet line, before divine providence compelled me to glance up from the sushi rolls I was piling on my plate and across the crowded catering hall—clichéd, I admit—there to meet the gaze of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. If only I had gone and sat down and enjoyed my postnuptials nosh, or chatted up the minister or the bride’s mother. But by that point, I was on autopilot. Savannah Carlisle was engaged in conversation with some nerdy civil engineer doing his best to impress her with all the thrilling details of his latest highway drainage project. She was sipping a Manhattan and trying not to look bored as he blathered on.

“I came over here to ask you if you wanted a drink,” I said to her, ignoring the engineer, “but I have to tell you something right up front: I’m a little concerned.”

“Concerned about what?” she said, like I was about to ask her to donate one of her kidneys to me.

“Hey, buddy, we’re talking here,” the engineer said.

“We were just wrapping things up,” Savannah said to him with a polite smile.

The guy got the hint and retreated to the buffet table. She turned back to me.

“Concerned about what?” she repeated.

“Where all this is headed.”

She gave me a sideways glance. Intrigued but trying not to look like it. “Excuse me?”

“We talk, have a couple of drinks. You give me your number after I get up the nerve to ask for it. I wait the requisite number of days, then call. We go catch a flick, maybe grab a burger afterwards, get past all those pre-game sexual jitters, jump in the rack, and quickly develop one of those deeply satisfying emotional relationships that transcends the mere physical. We realize in short order that this thing has soul mate written all over it, so we decide to cohabitate. Next thing you know, we’re shopping for rings and swapping ‘I do’s.’We buy us a little house in the ’burbs. Picket fence, gardenias, the whole nine yards. You want a family, I want my own airplane, but, hey, what I want more than anything is to make you, the love of my life, happy. So we get pregnant. Now I’m resentful as hell of all the time you’re devoting to little Cordell junior. The romance fizzles. We knock out another kid or two, hoping to save the union, only now I’m putting in sixty hours a week to pay for all the violin and karate lessons, and the new minivan, and the snazzy granite countertops you just
had
to have. You’re so busy arranging play dates for the kids and playing chauffeur—when you’re not whipping out gourmet dinners that I’m too exhausted to eat after work because I’m slaving like a dog—that you start to let yourself go. Pretty soon, you’re wearing muumuus which, as everybody knows, are a big turn-off for any male who isn’t native Hawaiian. So, to cope with our nonexistent sex life and my male ego that requires constant reinforcement, I bed my buxom personal assistant which, of course, you find out about because I completely suck at lying.

Now we have to explain to our children the definition of ‘community property’ and why Thanksgiving at Daddy’s and Christmas at Mommy’s is really super-fun. It’s just so goddamn tragic. So here’s the deal: if you
do
decide to talk to me, let’s just keep the whole thing strictly carnal, OK?”

Savannah’s lips curled in a sly smile.

“Roses,” she said, “not gardenias. Preferably yellow.”

We talked until dawn. Two months later, we were hitched.

If only . . .

I bent down and picked up the car keys she’d thrown at me. A breeze had kicked up out of the west. What few clouds there were in the sky were high and gossamer thin. I would have preferred flying home. My ex-wife’s luxury sedan would have to do.

T
he sign said forty miles to Oxnard. The Jag was on cruise control. Traffic was sparse. I sang along to Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Let It Ride” turned up as loud as it would go. Nothing like a kickass road song and an unclogged stretch of highway to forget what ails you. I belted it out, not giving a damn whether any of my fellow motorists saw me or not.

My phone buzzed. I turned down the radio. Lamont Royale, Gil Carlisle’s right hand man, was on the line. He was curious to know whether the tip he’d passed along, about Janice Echevarria’s engagement ring and the death threat she’d allegedly made against Arlo, had borne fruit.

Janice may have been upset that Arlo Echevarria stole her ring, but she didn’t have him killed for it. Of that I was fairly confident. I was less certain about what role, if any, Janice’s second husband, Harry Ramos, had played in Echevarria’s death—and in that of Gennady Bondarenko. It was Ramos, after all, who had pitched Bondarenko on the merits of an oil venture in Kazakhstan in the weeks before Bondarenko’s death—the very same venture that my former father-in-law, his legal advisor, Miles Zambelli, and Russian business partner, Pavel Tarasov, were now pursuing. The murders of Echevarria and Bondarenko were unquestionably linked—forensics had shown they’d been shot to death with the same gun. But I wasn’t about to get into all of that with the right hand man of the guy who, quite possibly, had orchestrated both slayings.

“Are you asking out of personal interest, Lamont, or on behalf of your boss?”

“Mr. Carlisle has no idea I’m even talking to you, Mr. Logan. I consider him and his daughter family. I’m just trying to help.”

“The police are looking into it,” is all I said.

“Would you know whether they’ve ruled out Mr. Carlisle or Mr. Zambelli as a suspect?”

“They haven’t ruled out anyone at this point, so far as I know.”

“OK, well, whatever. I just thought I’d ask. Like I said, I’m just trying to help, that’s all.”

My phone chirped—a text message from Micah Echevarria. It said, “kneed too talk ASAP.” Proper grammar. The first casualty of the Digital Revolution.

Royale promised to let me know if he came up with any other information. He started to tell me how generous Carlisle had been to him, how he’d saved him from a life on the streets, when we were disconnected. Unreliable cell phone reception. The second casualty of the Digital Revolution.

I returned Micah Echevarria’s text message with a phone call.

“The fucking LAPD’s saying I shot my own father!” he shouted over the phone. “Some detective named Czarnek. I already told them I was in school that night, but he says everybody they’ve talked to was too wasted to remember me being there. It’s fucking bullshit, man!”

“Why tell me all this? I’m the guy you told to go perform a particular carnal act on himself, which, by the way, I’m fairly sure is impossible.”

“Look, I’m sorry, OK? I was pissed. You jumped me and choked me out. What was I supposed to say?”

Micah Echevarria said he’d had time to reflect. We’d watched meerkats on TV together. He liked meerkats. I seemed to as well. Perhaps it was possible that I wasn’t the complete turd he thought I was upon first impression.

“Anybody who likes animal shows can’t be all bad,” he said.

“My cat loves animal shows and he’s beyond bad.”

“Yeah, but he’s just a cat.”

“Good luck telling him that. He thinks it’s his world; we all just live in it.”

“I need you to talk to the cops. Get ’em off my fuckin’ back.”

“They say they have witnesses who saw you at your dad’s place the night before he was shot.”

The kid cleared his throat. “So what? Don’t mean I fucking shot him.”

“You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time. You lied to me.”

“I lied because you came fucking busting into my house! Plus, you said you and my old man were friends. What was I supposed to do? Give you a fucking hug? He abandoned us, OK? He abandoned my mom.”

I told him that I’d seen the clip he’d posted on YouTube. His poem about Echevarria struck me as heartfelt, I said.

“So you’ll tell the cops I didn’t do it?”

“You drove all the way down from Oakland to LA to see your father the night before he died. I need to know why.”

“I wanted to talk to him about a business proposition.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“Are you gonna help me or not?”

“What kind of business proposition?”

He blew some air. I waited.

“A weed dispensary,” Micah said.

“You wanted your father to bankroll a pot shop?”

“For medical purposes. Dude, it’s perfectly legal. Prime location, low overhead. You can make serious bank. He was good for it. He had the coin. That fine bitch he hooked up with after he dumped my mom, she was fucking rich, man. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He said it was a stupid idea.”

I toyed with the notion of setting the kid straight—that “fine bitch” who married his father used to be married to me—but what would’ve been the point?

“So you argued with your father,” I said.

“Yeah, we argued. But that don’t mean I capped him. He told me go talk to my mother if I wanted money. I told him I already did. She thought it was a stupid idea, too. For once, they agreed on something. He tells me I need to get a job, go work for a living for once in my life. Same thing she said. I told him he could go eat his fuckin’ money and rode back up to Oakland. Couple days later, my mother calls and tells me he got shot. I fucking partied all night, man.”

I could hear a diesel engine behind him, revving, and the hiss of air brakes. He was outside a truck stop somewhere. I asked where he was calling from. He said Nevada.

I glanced up in my rearview mirror. A small white car was coming up fast in the left lane. A Honda. With a rear spoiler.

“If you’re innocent, why are you running?”

“I ain’t running,” he said. “I just don’t want to be trying to clear my name from inside a jail cell, that’s all.”

“No such word as
ain’t
,” I said. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

I set the phone down on the center console and watched the Honda converge. Adrenaline sluiced through my veins, a metallic taste on the edges of my tongue. I reached under the driver’s seat where I’d stashed my revolver and wedged it for quick access between my right thigh and the seat cushion. I needn’t have bothered. The white car whizzed past me—a Honda with a yellow Lab riding right seat. The dog yawned as he motored by. I grabbed up the phone. By what manner, I asked Micah Echevarria, did he propose that I get the police off his back?