* * *
The
house was a cantaloupe orange one-story ranch on a bright, hot street. The lawn
was green pebbles. A garden hose coiled loosely near the front steps, maybe for
watering the elephant’s ears that covered half the front wall. This sisal
doormat read
DJB
over a heraldic crest. The bell chimed do-re-mi.
The
woman who opened the door was petite, of indeterminate middle age, with narrow
blue eyes and a glossy tension around the cheekbones that trumpeted the virtues
of surgical steel. She wore a fitted orange crepe blouse over black leggings
and red Chinatown slippers embroidered with dragons. Her brown hair was snipped
boy-short with feathery sideburns that curled forward. Her right hand gripped a
remote control. A cigarette in her left dribbled smoke that trailed downward
and dissolved before it reached her knee.
She
tucked the remote under her arm. “Lieutenant? That didn’t take long. I’m Nina.”
Her mouth smiled but the surrounding glassy skin didn’t cooperate and the
expression was robbed of emotional content.
The
house had no entry foyer and we stepped directly into a paneled room topped by
a slanted beamed ceiling. All the wood was pickled oak, yellowed by decades.
The carpet was rust plush flecked with blue, the furniture beige, tightly
upholstered and newish, as if it had been plucked intact from a showroom. A
paneled wet bar housed glasses and bottles and a flat-screen TV sat on the
brown tile counter. The set was on. Courtroom dispute, the sound muted— people
mouthing aggression; a bald, scowling judge wielding a gavel in a way that
couldn’t escape Freudian theory.
Nina
Balquin said, “Love that stuff, it’s nice to see idiots get what they’ve got
coming.” Aiming her remote, she switched off. “Drinks, gentlemen?”
“No,
thanks.”
“It
got kind of warm outside.”
“We’re
fine, ma’am.”
“Well,
I’m having.” She walked to the bar and poured herself something clear from a
chrome pitcher. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Milo
and I sat on one of the beige sofas. The fabric was coarse and pebbly and I
felt the bumps against the backs of my legs. Nina Balquin spent a long time
adding ice to her drink. I noticed a tremor in her hands. Milo was taking in
the room and I did the same.
A few
family photos hung lopsided on a rear wall, too distant to make out. Sliding
glass doors exposed a small rectangular swimming pool. Clumps of leaves and
grit floated on greenish water. Rims of concrete decking too narrow for seating
comprised the rest of the backyard.
Walk
out, get wet, come back in.
Nina
Balquin settled perpendicular to us and sipped her drink. “I know, it’s a mess,
I don’t swim. Never used Barnett for the pool. Maybe I should’ve. He could’ve
been good for one thing.” She drank some more.
Milo
said, “You’re not fond of Barnett.”
“Can’t
stand his guts. Because of how he treated Lara. And me. Why are you asking
about him?”
“How
he treated Lara before Kristal’s murder or after?”
At
the mention of her granddaughter, Balquin flinched. “You ask, I answer? Fine,
but just tell me one thing: Is the bastard in some kind of trouble?”
“It’s
possible.”
Balquin
nodded. “The answer is he was rotten to Lara before
and
after. She met
him at a rodeo— can you believe that? She went to good schools, her father was
a dentist. The plan was she was supposed to go to the U. But her grades went to
hell in high school. Still, there was Plan Two, Valley College. So what does
she do after graduating? Gets a job at a dude ranch in Ojai and meets Cowboy
Buckaroo and the next thing I know she’s calling to inform me they’re married.”
She
gulped her drink, swished liquid in her mouth, swallowed, stuck out her tongue.
“Lara was eighteen, he was twenty-four. She watches him rope horses or doggies
or whatever they rope and suddenly the two of them are at some tacky little
drive-through chapel in Vegas. Her father could’ve . . . killed
them.” She smiled uneasily. “To use an expression.”
Milo
said, “Can’t blame him for being upset.”
“Ralph
was
furious.
Who wouldn’t be? But he never said a thing to Lara, kept it
all inside. A year later he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and four months
after that he was gone.” She glanced back at the dirty pool. “Excuse me, not
gone.
Dead.
At the time he was diagnosed we were in escrow on another
house, Encino, south of the boulevard, gorgeous, huge. Thank God Ralph had
decent life insurance.”
“Does
Lara have siblings?” I said, still trying to make out the photos.
“My
oldest, Mark, is a C.P.A. up in Los Gatos, used to be comptroller for a
dot-com, he’s doing fantastic as an independent consultant. Sandy, the baby, is
in grad school at the University of Minnesota. Sociology. It’s kind of endless
for her— school; she already has one master’s. But she never gave me a lick of
trouble.”
She
took an ice cube in her mouth, sloshed it, crushed it. “Lara was the wild one.
It’s only now I’m able to get in touch with how pissed-
off
I am at her.”
“For
marrying Barnett?”
“For
that, for everything— for
killing
herself.” Her hand began to shake and
she placed her rattling glass on an end table. “My therapist told me suicide’s
the ultimate aggressive act. Lara didn’t need to do that, she really didn’t.
She could have talked to someone. I
told
her to talk to someone.”
“Get
some therapy,” said Milo.
“I’m
a big fan of therapy.” She picked up the glass. “Therapy and Tanqueray and
tonic and Prozac.”
I
said, “So Lara was the rebellious one.”
“Even
when she was little, you’d tell her black, she’d say white. In high school, she
got in with a bad crowd— that’s what messed up her grades. Of the three, she
was the smartest, all she had to do was a little work. Instead, she marries
him.
Vegas,
for God’s sake. It was like a bad movie. He was— have you ever seen
his teeth?”
During
the few seconds Malley had faced us, he had never opened his mouth.
Milo
said, “Not in good shape?”
“
Trailer
trash teeth,” said Nina Balquin. “You can imagine what Ralph thought of
that.” Illustrating the contrast, she flashed a full set of porcelain jackets.
“He was lowlife, didn’t have a family.”
“No
family at all?”
“Every
time I asked him about where he grew up, who his parents were, he changed the
subject. I mean, here was this new person in our lives, doesn’t it seem
reasonable to ask?
Forget
it. Strong and silent. Except he wasn’t strong
enough to make a decent living.”
She
drained her glass, steadied one hand with the other. “We’re an educated,
sophisticated family— I have a degree in design and my husband was one of the
best endodontists in the Valley. So who walks in? The Beverly Hillbilly.”
“Lara
met him at a dude ranch,” said Milo.
“Lara’s
earth-shattering summer job.” Balquin grimaced. “
Here
she never made up
her bed, but
there
she could clean rooms for minimum wage. She claimed
she wanted to earn her own money so she could buy a more expensive car than
Ralph wanted to get for her.”
“Claimed?”
“She
quit after two weeks to run off to Vegas with
him.
Never got
any
kind of car until we bought her a used Taurus. She was just rebelling by going
to Ojai, like every other time.”
“You
said Barnett was working some kind of traveling rodeo?”
“For
all I know he put stars in my daughter’s eyes with
rope
tricks. I’m
allergic to horses . . . out of the blue she’s married,
informing me she wants lots of babies. Not just babies,
lots
of babies.
I said who’s going to pay for all those babies, and she had a ready answer.
Cowboy Buckaroo was putting away his chaps and spurs, whatever, and getting
himself a real job.”
Balquin
snorted. “Like I was supposed to stand and applaud. What was this great career?
Working for a pool-cleaning service.”
I
said, “They were married a while before they had Kristal.”
“Seven
years,” said Balquin. “Which was fine with me. I figured maybe Lara was finally
thinking straight, doing some financial planning. She got herself a job— not a
great one, supermarket cashier at Vons. And Cowboy bought himself some chlorine
and went out on his own.”
“You
see them much?”
“Hardly
at all. Then one day Lara dropped in, nervous, sheepish. I knew she wanted something.
What she wanted was money for fertility treatment. Turns out they’d been trying
for years. She said she’d gotten pregnant a few times but miscarried. Then
nothing. Her doctor was thinking some sort of incompatibility. I knew for her
to show up she’d have to want something.”
I
said, “Why was there so little contact?”
“Because
that’s what
they
wanted. We invited them to every family affair but they
never showed up. At the time, I assumed that was his doing, but now I’m not
sure. Because my therapist says I need to confront the possibility of Lara’s
complicity in a destructive dyad. As part of the process.”
“The
process?” said Milo.
“The
healing
process,” said Balquin. “Getting my act together. I have a chemical
imbalance that affects my moods but I also need to take personal responsibility
for how I react to stressful situations. My new therapist gets what loss is all
about and she brought me to the point where I can take the gloves off when it
comes to Lara. That’s why your call was so perfect. After you called, I told my
therapist we’d be talking. She thought it was karma.”
Milo
nodded, crossed his legs. “Did you give Lara the money for treatment?”
“The
two of them had no health insurance. I’m not sure if fertility’s even covered
by insurance. I felt sorry for her, knew it was tough for her to come with her
hand out. I told her I’d ask her father and she thanked me. Actually hugged
me.”
Balquin’s
eyes fluttered. She got up and refilled her glass. “I can get you guys
something soft.”
“We’re
really okay, ma’am. So your husband agreed to pay for the fertility
treatments?”
“Ten
thousand dollars’ worth. First he said no way, then of course, he gave in.
Ralph was a big softie. Lara cashed the check and that was the last I heard
about it. Then back to the same old routine, not returning my calls. My
therapist says I have to confront the possibility that she used me.”
“What
do you mean?”
“It’s
possible they never paid the doctor.”
“Why
would you suspect that, ma’am?”
Balquin’s
hand whitened around her glass. “I carried Lara for nine months and sometimes I
miss her so much I can’t stand to think about it. But I need to be objective
for my own mental health. I always suspected those two spent the money on
something else because soon after we gave it to them, they moved to a bigger
place and there was still no baby. Lara said Barnett needed space for his
piano. I thought what a waste, all he played was country-western songs and not
very well. Kristal didn’t arrive until years later— when Lara was twenty-six.”
“That
must have been something,” I said.
“Kristal?”
She blinked some more. “A cutie, a beauty. From the little I saw of her. Here I
was, a grandma, and I never got to see my grandchild. Lara had choices but I
know
he
had a role in it. He isolated her.”
“Why?”
“I
don’t know,” she said. “That man never once uttered a pleasant boo-hoo to any
of us. Despite our feelings about the marriage, we tried to be nice. When they
got back from Vegas we threw them a little party, over at the Sportsman’s
Lodge. The invitation said ‘Business attire.’
He
came in dirty jeans and
one of those cowboy shirts— with the snaps on it. His hair was all long and
unkempt— my Ralph was a real dapper guy, you can imagine. Lara used to love
dressing up, but not anymore. She wore jeans just as filthy as his and a
cheap-looking little halter tank top.”
She
shook her head. “It was embarrassing. But that was Lara. Always keeping things
lively.”
“Ma’am,”
said Milo, “would it be too painful to talk about the suicide?”
Nina
Balquin’s eyes floated upward. “If I said yes, would you drop it?”
“Of
course.”
“Well,
it
is
painful, but I
don’t
want you to drop it. Because it wasn’t
my fault, no matter what anyone says. Lara made choices her whole life, then
she ended her life with a horrible, stupid, rotten
choice.
”
“Who
says it’s your fault?” I said.
“No
one,” she said. “And everyone, implicitly. Lose a child to an accident or an
illness, everyone feels sorry for you. Lose a child to suicide and people look
at you as if you were the most horrible parent in the world.”
“How
did Barnett react to the suicide?”