Never Fear (20 page)

“I think you better look at this,” Harrison said.

He was standing at the intercom, reading tenants' names listed next to the apartment numbers.

“Apartment three-oh-six.”

I looked at the name next to the number. “Powell.”

The name Lopez gave me just before he died, and the character my father played in the movie.

“Did Danny write the name Powell anywhere on the map?”

“I don't remember seeing it, but that doesn't mean it's not there,” Harrison said.

The doors to the elevator opened in the inner lobby and a tenant stepped out. He was in his late thirties, dressed in a crisp dark suit, and was already working a cell phone. As he stepped through the doors into the outer lobby I asked him to hold the door and he looked at us suspiciously.

I pulled back my jacket and showed him my badge. “Pasadena PD.”

That we weren't from the sheriff's department seemed to soften the look he gave us.

“Do you know a tenant named Powell?” I asked.

He shook his head and said a few clipped words into the cell phone, one of which was “script.” I suspected he was an agent. We stepped into the inner lobby and took the elevator up to three. The apartment was at the far end around the corner. Sconces in the shape of Greek columns lit the pale rose-colored hallway. The carpeting was a deep burgundy and smelled freshly cleaned.

We rounded the corner and stopped at the apartment. I started to reach for the buzzer but stopped. The paint around the dead bolt had been scraped off and the wood indented.

“This door's been jimmied.”

Harrison slipped his 9mm from his waist holster, knelt down, and examined the carpet.

“These carpets were cleaned within the last few days. This happened before that. The paint chips from the door have been removed,” Harrison said.

He took a position next to the door with his weapon at his side. I rang the buzzer and listened for the sound of footsteps from inside, but there was nothing. I rang it again with the same result. I took hold of the door handle and it turned. Whoever had broken in hadn't locked it when they left.

“You want to bother with getting a warrant?” Harrison said.

I shook my head.

“I wouldn't know what to tell a judge,” I said.

To enter without a warrant could put at risk any evidence we found inside, unless we entered because of concern for the occupants' safety.

“The jimmied door is cause enough,” I said.

I slipped my Glock from its holster and turned the handle, then let the door swing open.

“Police officers.”

We held our positions, waiting for any response, but none came. I stepped in first with Harrison right behind me and swept the apartment with my weapon. Light filtered in through vertical blinds that covered the far wall. The living room appeared clear. A small kitchen and dining area was to the left. A hallway on the right led to what I assumed were the bathroom and bedroom.

I reached around for the light switch and flipped it on. The apartment had been ransacked. Furniture had been overturned, anything that could be gone through or flipped over had been. Harrison moved toward the hallway and I followed. He turned on the light in the hallway and then cleared the bath and bedroom as I waited. He stepped back out and holstered his weapon.

“They're both the same as this.”

I slipped my Glock away and looked around the room.

“This isn't just a burglary. Look at the furniture,” I said.

The fabric on the couch had been sliced to shreds. The frames of chairs were smashed. A mirror on the wall was shattered. I walked over to the kitchen. The cabinets were open. Every glass, plate, and bowl— anything that someone could use—had been broken. I took out a pen and used it to pull open a drawer. The silverware had all been bent in half. An aluminum saucepan on the stove had been crushed. The inside of the refrigerator looked as if a baseball bat had been taken to all the contents. Even a roll of paper towels under the sink had been torn to pieces.

“What's this look like to you?” I said.

Harrison thought for a moment as his eyes went over the mess. “Madness.”

I nodded in agreement. “But whose?”

I walked over to the hallway and stopped at the bathroom door. Two towels hung in shreds on a rack. A can of shaving cream had been crushed on the floor, dried foam clinging to the side of the bathtub. Toothpaste had been sliced open and squeezed out into the sink. Next to it lay a toothbrush with all the bristles cut off and left in a neat pile next to the tap. The mirror on the medicine chest had a spiderweb of cracks spiraling out from a blow to the center.

I opened it, hoping to find some medication that would identify the occupant. A bottle of aspirin had been filled with water, turning it into a white foamy mass that had solidified. A box of antihistamines had been crushed. There was no prescription medicine— nothing remotely personal.

I stepped over to the tub and shower. The shampoo had been spread across the walls, the bottle cut in half. A bar of soap had been sliced into flakes on the bottom of the tub. An ashtray with half a dozen butts mixed with the soap.

“He even destroyed the toilet paper,” said Harrison, who was standing in the doorway.

I reached down and picked up a nail clipper off the floor. The tiny blades had been bent open.

“This reminds me of something,” I said.

I turned to Harrison. “The methodical thoroughness of it. He didn't miss anything, except the lights.”

“He would have needed them to see so he wouldn't miss something,” Harrison said.

“It's like the interior of my house—every inch of it covered in paint or writing. Only here, the violence took over.”

“Or Danny couldn't control it.”

We looked at each other for a moment.

“So who lives here?” Harrison asked.

We moved to the bedroom and stood in the doorway. The blinds were drawn, as in the rest of the apartment. The sheets and blanket had been sliced into strips. The mattress was cut open, its padding and springs spilling out like a gutted animal.

“He probably did it during the day. There would have been fewer people around to hear anything,” Harrison said.

The floor was littered with pieces of clothes, cigarette butts, and torn newspapers. Harrison knelt down and looked at the newspaper.

“These are all dated over a week before your brother was killed,” he said.

I stepped over to the chest of drawers across from the bed and pulled open a drawer. What used to be socks, T-shirts, and underwear was now just a pile of shredded cloth. The rest of the drawers were the same.

“I think you should see this, “ Harrison said.

He was kneeling on the far side of the bed next to a nightstand, holding two small picture frames.

“Whoever did this must have missed these. They fell behind the bed.”

I stepped around the bed and looked. One was a picture of a small girl with dark hair in a blue print dress and saddle shoes. She was looking at something to the left of whoever was holding the camera, virtually no expression on her face—or at least no sense of connection to the moment the picture was recording. The other was a photograph of a boy holding a baseball mitt with a big smile on his face. I stared at them; the same sense of dread I had felt earlier began to send my breathing out of control.

“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Danny was right.”

“Your father?” Harrison said.

I tried to catch my breath but couldn't. Harrison took my arms and sat me down on the bed.

“How do you know?” he asked.

I stared at the photographs for a moment.

“Because I'm the little girl in that picture,” I said.

Until then, I had clung to the possibility that my father was dead—that the nightmare I had been trying to stop had a different ending than this.

“He's alive,” I said.

“That doesn't make him guilty,” Harrison said.

I looked at the photograph of me for a moment and then closed my eyes.

“I don't remember the picture, but I remember the day it was taken,” I said. “I hadn't until I saw this, but I remember it now.”

I stepped cautiously into the memory as if onto a thin sheet of ice.

“I was four, maybe five years old. There was a neighborhood picnic. I was playing with friends and I ran over to our car. My parents were sitting inside it. I decided to sneak up behind it and surprise them. He had his hand on her wrist, and he was twisting it like he was taking a lid off a jar. She would shake her head, and then he would twist it further until she nodded yes at whatever he was whispering to her.”

I took a breath, trying to slow down the memory but it continued to come. I remembered the smell of barbecuing chicken, the sound of a bat hitting a piñata and the candy spilling out. The yellow sundress my mother was wearing. How she held the arm my father had twisted behind her back for the rest of the party so no one would see the rising bruises.

“Someone other than my parents must have taken this picture,” I said.

“You remember what you were looking at?” Harrison asked.

I glanced down at the picture for a moment and nodded. The room began to close in on me as surely as if I were my mother sitting in the seat of the car with my father's hand on my wrist. I walked out to the living room and opened the sliding glass door to the small balcony. The dry hot air offered little escape. I felt like I had walked into a crowded elevator with barely enough air left for a breath.

Harrison stepped out next to me. In the courtyard below, a Hispanic man was slowly skimming the black-bottomed pool. Something lying in the deep end glistened in the dark water.

“Whoever manages the apartment will have his records in the rental agreement,” I said.

“I'll make the calls,” Harrison said.

“We'll take the pictures with us, see if we can get a print off them.”

Harrison nodded.

I turned and looked back into the apartment.

“If you could kill a physical place as if it were a living thing, and wanted to inflict as much pain as possible before it died, this is what it would look like,” I said.

“You think Danny came here intending to kill your father?”

“He either couldn't do it or, not finding him, did this,” I said.

Harrison looked over the room for a moment.

“What if there was a third person?” Harrison said.

I had been so focused on my father occupying this space that I hadn't considered another possibility. I played out the logic for a moment. “The same one who killed my brother?”

I shook my head. “Danny did this. Last night was his way of telling me.”

My eyes ran over the carnage spread across the room, trying to find a connection to my father, and I realized there was nothing there except the mess that he had left behind, just as it had always been.

“I wanted Hazzard to be right,” I said. “If my father was dead, I would know he didn't murder his own son.”

“You don't know . . .” Harrison started to say something, then let it go. “What were you looking at in the photograph?” he asked.

I started to tell Harrison that I didn't know, but there was no stopping the memory that had been let loose. My heart began to beat out of control and I stepped back into the blue dress and saddle shoes. The day had been hot, like today. There were eucalyptus trees in the park where the picnic had been. I remembered finding my mother sitting alone in the car twenty minutes after he had twisted her arm, the scent of his aftershave lingering as she stared blankly out the window, her makeup streaked with tears.

“I was looking for a way to be someone else,” I said.

26

None of the neighbors who were home remembered much about the tenant in 306. A young woman two doors down described him as middle-aged, average height, normal-looking. A tenant in 309 thought a young woman lived there, but wouldn't bet on it. The rest of the neighbors could add little to the description that made it anything other than useless. And no one had heard or seen anything that could pinpoint a day or time the vandalism had taken place.

It was approaching midafternoon when we pulled to a stop at 7928 Santa Monica Boulevard near the corner of Fairfax. Abraham's Property Management was on the second floor of an old Spanish building from the 1930s. The white stucco was now gray with age. The once ornate stonework and tile around the entrance was nearly black from the accumulated car exhaust of seventy years. The terra-cotta roof looked like a 3.0 aftershock would send it all sliding into the street.

An antique furniture store occupied the street level. Age being relative in Los Angeles, the front display window was occupied by a red coffee table in the shape of a kidney bean, a fondue pot, martini glasses, and Dean Martin cocktail napkins.

Harrison rang the bell and we were buzzed in through the heavy wrought-iron security door and walked up the creaky wooden stairs. There were two other offices on the second floor: a Chinese medical practice from which a strange blend of smells drifted out, and a travel agency that, from the brochures taped to the glass on the door, looked as if it hadn't booked a trip since the jet engine had replaced the propeller.

Inside Abraham's, a wooden counter with a swinging gate separated the waiting area from the reception desk and three offices. On the walls were photographs of various apartment buildings and a large map of L.A. with red stars on it marking the locations of properties they managed. A woman who was probably sixty but working hard to look fifty got up from a desk in the reception area and walked to the counter. She had dyed red hair that made her look oddly like Lucille Ball. Her dress was bright green, and her glasses hung on a gold chain around her neck. I imagined she had once been an actress who got no further than holding an extra's union card. A name placard on her desk read MS. WATERS.