South by Southeast (29 page)

Home life was excruciating in the days after Dad died. The spaces his absence left were filled with the silence of resentment from Marcela and Chela. They stopped just short of accusations, but I saw their questions in their eyes. My story wasn't enough to satisfy any of us.

Why had I encouraged Dad to work a case so late at night, so unprepared? How could I have left him to die instead of making sure the paramedics got to him quickly? After Chela did some internet research, she casually speculated that sustained pressure to the gunshot wound might have kept Dad alive long enough for life-saving medical treatment.

Marcela was planning to move out. She hadn't said so yet, but I felt it in her silence and her long afternoons away with friends. My house was no longer her home.

Death doesn't always bring families closer together. Maybe it never does.

Every day, new details surfaced about Escobar that showed me how foolish I had been. He had caused hilarity with a prosthetic arm at a Sundance party the previous year. He had been a professional magician as a teenager. In the
National Enquirer,
an email surfaced from Escobar to his agent where he joked about casting me for
Freaknik
“because it would be safer to have a detective on the set.” He had hired me to amuse himself.

Escobar had planned out our collision from the beginning.

The new details only fed the feeding frenzy.

We didn't watch the news anymore, although the Gustavo
Escobar story was exactly the kind that would have kept Dad glued to CNN and HLN. Whether it was Escobar's Hollywood connection, his ties to Cuba's troubled political history, or the trail of dead women he had left behind, Gustavo Escobar was the Big Story. He was a Russian nesting doll, with fresh headlines every day.

I only took calls from my lawyer, and barely. Melanie Wilde was my public face, and I'd agreed to let her write a couple of vague public statements. I had done her family a favor a while back, and she repaid me with legal help whenever she could. She had been one of the first people to call me after Dad died and one of the few to get through to me.

“Brace yourself,” Melanie said when she called the day after the funeral, as if I wasn't always bracing. “Sofia Maitlin is on a goodwill mission to set the record straight about her daughter's kidnapping. She's put out a press release, and she's about to do the morning-TV circuit. She says the FBI took credit, but it was really you. Your hero status is about to balloon to a new level.”

The word
hero
gave me a pain in my abdomen. Maitlin was finally going to tell the truth about how I had nearly died rescuing her daughter. I cynically wondered if she was coming out of hibernation to promote a new movie, but she had enough secrets to make exposure risky.

“I'll ask her not to.”

“Too late,” Melanie said. “The press release is out there making the circuit. It's all over TMZ and the entertainment shows, and the networks won't be far behind. She says, and I quote, ‘I'm not the least bit surprised that Tennyson Hardwick put an end to this monster's reign of evil. Without him, I never would have seen my daughter alive again.' ”

Maitlin might have meant well, but I'd hoped to quietly drop out of the Escobar story after Dad's funeral. That wouldn't happen now. It was bad enough that Marcela was considering a ten-thousand-dollar offer to talk to
Star
magazine; she'd mentioned it at
breakfast as if it was nothing. I was so tired of arguing I hadn't said a word. It was as if Marcela had transformed into the gold digger I'd always worried she was. I would meditate and try to let her grieve in her own way. I try not to judge people, but it was hard.

I thanked Melanie for the information. Sometimes there's nowhere else for bad to grow.

I stayed home despite the reporters camped out on my street. All of my career, I'd hovered close to the celebrity experience without truly tasting it. Now tabloid reporters were going through my garbage, in every possible way.

The sex-worker story had resurfaced. The only thing I didn't mind about Dad being gone was that he didn't have to hear the details. Former customers came forward, women whose careers had waned and who were desperate to be in the public eye. I never saw the story, but I hear there were six women in a roundup. One name shocked me, but if you didn't read it, I won't go into it now. The headline read:
TENNYSON HARDWICK: SEX-CORT TO THE STARS!

I knew why Maitlin had stepped up in my defense. Outside, a war was raging about what to make of me, a larger version of the silent war in my house.

It was all a part of the bad dream that began the night my father died—one continuous dream, with no chance to wake. The world around me melted, and I didn't recognize my new world. In my new world, my father was gone, shot dead after I roused him from sleep and asked too much of him. I'd taken wild chances, just because I'd gotten away with it before.

That was enough ugly to fill up everything. The rest didn't matter.

I was tired all the time. I hated being awake. I hated trying to sleep.

I only opened my door that night because I recognized the face through the peephole. At least the paparazzi didn't ring my doorbell day and night. It's not true that there's no civility left.

Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson was on my front porch in my lamplight, which I took as a bad sign on face value. We didn't like each other—sometimes the sentiment went deeper—and we both had loved the same man. He was so drunk I could see him swaying through the peephole. At least he was in civilian clothes. I hoped that meant he wasn't armed.

“Should I open this door?” I said.

“Depends on whether you're a man or not.” Even drunk, Nelson didn't slur his words.

I wasn't in the mood to trade beatings, but maybe Nelson deserved his chance. I'd been craving some quality time with him for years. He was six-three and solid, with a passing resemblance to Richard Roundtree at his peak. He had to duck to walk into the house, since Alice had been petite and hadn't built her doorway to accommodate strangers.

“Better judgment told me not to come here,” Nelson said. “But here I am. I have to know if it's true.”

I almost laughed to myself. “Which part?”

“You knew he'd taken a gut shot, but you left him to chase Escobar.”

In my head, I saw Dad's blood pooling on his shirt. Smelled it.

“I was following the orders of my CO,” I said. “That's all you need to understand.”

“So it's true,” he said, his red eyes blazing with disbelief. “Preach always said you'd be the death of him.”

I wondered if Nelson would be enough of an asshole to put me in jail for the fight he was starting at my house. “It's not a good idea for us to talk right now,” I said.

“You're so right about that,” Nelson said. “But I just couldn't go another minute without making sure you understood the big picture, Tennyson.” His voice almost sounded warm when he said my name. “All that shit that's on TV now? Mr. Good Time? Gigolo to the stars? He knew all that. There was a whole file on you. That
madam? It came right to his desk. And do you know what Preach Hardwick—the most upstanding cop I ever had the privilege to work with—did with that file?”

Nelson ground his fist on my coffee table. “He squashed it. All of it was wiped away. You, the madam, the whole case. He soiled himself for you. He made himself a hypocrite for you. Pissed away his career—because his enemies used it against him. All that stress and strain before he retired? His heart attack? Congratulate yourself. He did it for you.”

I wished he'd hit me instead. Even if Nelson was exaggerating, it might not be by much. I'd suspected that Dad might have heard about my sex arrest in Hollywood as part of an ongoing sting, but I hadn't known for sure. We had both avoided the subject.

“Is that all?” My voice was a monotone.

“No,” Nelson said. “Just so you know, I'm not the kind of prick who would come piss on somebody when they've just had a family tragedy. Not on an ordinary day. I'm sure you loved him in your own fucked-up way, and I respect that. But when I see you trying to capitalize on it, trotting out Sofia Maitlin to throw your name around—”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“It makes me sick,” Nelson went on, as if I hadn't spoken. “Physically ill. All those sermons Preach gave me about how you'd turned out all right were a load of horseshit.”

That time, Nelson missed his mark. I was glad to hear what Dad had said about me. That must have driven Nelson crazy.

“Get the fuck out of our house!”

My thoughts had come screaming to life but in Chela's voice.

Chela was standing on the stairs, dressed in the baggy UCLA sweatshirt she'd put on the night she came back from Raphael. Seeing the sweatshirt brought that night back to life.

Nelson was startled to see Chela. Maybe he'd thought she wasn't home, like Marcela, who was out shopping for clothes to wear on her interviews. For once, he was speechless.

“How dare you,” Chela said, marching down the steps. Her face was bright red with rage. “His father—my grandfather—just died. I'm going to report you to the chief.”

Nelson's lips fell apart. Chela had him there. One call to the chief's office would get him a formal tongue lashing and maybe worse.

“You remember Chela?” I said. “My daughter.”

None of the tabloids had named her, but the
Enquirer
had mentioned the existence of “a teen prostitute runaway” I'd raised since she was fourteen. When April brought the story to us, Chela cried for two hours straight. She had been avoiding school, and as far as I knew, she was avoiding calls from her boyfriend, Bernard. Chela had lost her privacy, too. I wanted to help her navigate the wreckage, but I was mired in mine.

“I'm sorry you had to hear that, young lady,” Nelson said. “You've been through—”

“You're not sorry,” she said, continuing her march until she was toe-to-toe with him. “You didn't care who heard it. You had to be a jerk. Well, guess what—this sucks for everybody, not just you. So grow up and leave us alone.”

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Nelson blinked, as if Chela had brought him back to sobriety. He gave me a long gaze. “I'm sorry, man,” he said. “I saw that Maitlin thing . . .”

“Not a problem,” I said.

Both of us might have been lying, or maybe not. We also both knew I wouldn't report him to the chief. Ours was a family matter.

Nelson went outside to call himself a cab. I checked the peephole from time to time to make sure he didn't try to climb into his car. I didn't want any more death on my conscience.

“Thanks for that,” I told Chela. She was so upset she was shaking, but I didn't try to hug her. She hadn't come close enough for me to hug her since I told her Dad was dead.

“He's wrong,” Chela said. “It's not your fault. It's mine.”

“That's bull, Chela.”

“I was the one who wanted to find out who killed Maria. I'm the one who went to that club. Maria's always been about the hustle, making a play. What else did I think she wanted?”

“She was your friend, Chela.”

“I wish I had never seen her!” Chela said, screaming again. But screams were better than silence. Her stoic wall was crumbling.

“It's not Maria's fault,” I said. “It's not your fault. It's Escobar's fault.”

If I said it often enough, maybe I would believe it.

“But Ten, why?” she said. “Why didn't you stop the bleeding? You could have saved him. We don't understand.”

The “we,” I assumed, meant Marcela, who had studied enough medicine to know that Dad might as well have been dead when the bullet shredded his liver. But I hadn't known the extent of the damage before I left him.

“He was tired of being sick, Chela,” I said. “Marcela might say she doesn't understand, but she doesn't want to accept it. He asked me to go. He knew what that meant.”

Chela turned away from me. I heard her sob.

We needed a team of therapists. I wouldn't know where to begin.

“And now I have to talk to him,” Chela said, still crying. “He keeps calling me.”

“Who?” I said, right before I remembered Bernard.

I held Chela's shoulders, and she didn't pull away. She looked up at my face, and I saw my misery mirrored there, my twin. “This isn't how you pictured it,” I said. “But this is what you wanted. You have your chance to tell the truth.”

“And then what?” Chela said.

“And then you'll find out who Bernard really is.”

Chela stepped away from me, flicking her shoulders as if my
touch itched. “Maybe it doesn't make sense, but I kind of hate you right now.” Chela said it matter-of-factly. Nothing Lieutenant Nelson said could have hurt me more.

“I know,” I said.
Join the club.

“It's just a phase,” she said. “The first stage of grief is anger—did you know that? I've been researching. It's so true. I want to kill all the fish in the tank and burn the house down.”

“Just give us warning,” I said.

I understood how being around others could feel like a chore. I'd barely spoken to April for five minutes since I'd been back in L.A.

“Is this really happening?” Chela said, the same question she'd asked me when I first called her with the terrible news.

“Yes,” I said. “It's still really happening.”

“It's no big deal if Marcela wants to do that interview,” Chela said. “He wouldn't care. She likes telling everybody how great he was. So what if she gets paid?”

I didn't agree yet, but I was working on it. Chela sounded more sensible every day.

“I'm doing my best,” I said.

“Me, too,” Chela said. “So is Marcela. You should call April, by the way. She's totally into you, and you barely talked to her at the funeral.”