God Is a Bullet (6 page)

How desperate he must be to finally come to her. After Case hangs up, she watches the mother and child fade to dim outlines against the deepening black behind them. She stays by the wall thinking, thinking about the man and his child, until all that is left is a glow of light from a single bulb at the end of the hallway and a night the color of steel and the promise of rain.

It rains on the twenty-eighth. A rain taken to gusts and slashings. Bob drives down to L.A. after dark. The freeway is a ragged line of vehicles slip-streaming through a gap in the foothills toward a dim triangle of light.

The whole trip is an hour of silent running. Just him and a blue emptiness inside the car, which is streaked with the shadow-line of rain trailing down the windows. As the wispy mirage of the city spreads out before him, he begins to consider who this Case Hardin is, beyond what the police in San Diego have told him.

He takes the Hollywood Freeway to Gower, then Franklin west to Garfield. The 1700 block of Garfield runs between Franklin and Hollywood Boulevard. It’s a potluck of low-end apartments, two-story stucco and terrace, and a few straggling homes from another era, the little class they once had flaking away. Some of the buildings have rental signs on them written in Armenian.

He finds the recovery house about five doors up from Hollywood Boulevard. An old brick three-story affair that looks like it has wheezed through the last twenty years.

Case sits in the darkened window seat of her tiny living room watching the street. She smokes, she is apprehensive.
She sees a car slow and cruise the buildings’ numbers and thinks this might be him. The car does a U-turn into a driveway and finds a spot to park near a barred and boarded-up grocery.

She leans in close to the window. In the murky glass the reflection of her eyes and the burning tip of a nervous cigarette are all she sees until a man wearing a black oilskin raincoat with the hood pulled up clears the trees. He makes his way along the sidewalk, carrying a brown leather case. He turns quickly up the walkway, his boots kicking up sprays of water.

It must be him.

She grapples with the moment. “I am here … and now,” she tells herself, stumping the cigarette out against the top of a Diet Coke. She repeats, “I am here … and now.”

The lobby of the building has been turned into a reception and waiting area. A bivouac of cheap metal desks and fake leather couches, sagging from long-term use. A goateed security guard holds the fort from behind a desk. He looks up from a sitcom. Arms folded, leaning back in his chair, he has that air of “try me.” “Yes, sir. How may we help you?” He puts some measure into the word “we.”

“Case Hardin. I’m here to talk to her. I have an appointment.”

“Name?”

“Officer …” He cuts himself off. “Mr. Bob Hightower.”

Hearing the word “officer” draws a few looks from the female residents hunkered down on the sofas in the waiting area. They stare at Bob. He can see right away they assume the worst, and their alliance, like warborn partisans, is with one of their own.

A woman behind Bob says, “I’ll take care of Mr. Hightower.”

He turns. Anne steps out of her office, offers him her hand. “I’m Anne Dvore. Resident manager.”

They shake. She motions with a wave of her hand. “I’ll show you to the elevator.”

They start down the long hallway with its worn-out runner of carpet. Both are quiet. Bob looks the place over, sneaking glances into any apartment with an open door. Anne uses the time to get a picture of the man.

“By the way,” Anne says, “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about what happened to your ex-wife and daughter.”

Bob nods stoically.

They reach the elevator. Anne presses the button. Bob stares back down the hall. One of the women from the waiting area is now by the desk and staring at him.

“Are all these women here for rehab?”

Anne picks up a tone in his voice that she’s heard before, judgment disguised as curiosity.

“It also doubles as a shelter for battered women. That’s why we have the guard up front.”

“I was curious about that.”

He switches the heavy leather case from one hand to the other, then opens and closes his free hand to get the blood back into it. “I assume being the resident manager you’re some kind of therapist.”

She smiles. “Some kind. Yes.”

“Can I ask you a few questions about this woman?”

There’s that tone again, drifting over “this woman.”

“Why not ask her?”

“Listen, since the murder I’m confronted with all kinds of people offering me … hope. A lot of them turn out to be flakes. Flakes I can deal with. It’s disappointing, but I can deal with it. I don’t come at this with any legal authority. But there are a few people I’ve met, on the other hand …”

He doesn’t know this woman’s relationship with Case, so he’s not sure quite how to get where he wants.

“A few,” interjects Anne, picking up where he faltered,
“are untrustworthy. And potentially dangerous. And I assume you’re carrying in that satchel files that might be sensitive.”

“I couldn’t have said it any better.”

“You didn’t say it at all.”

His throat tightens a bit. “I don’t want to get off to a bad start here.”

“Then just approach it, before you judge it, with an open mind. I’m sure you talked to the police in San Diego about Case.”

His eyebrows raise in halfhearted enthusiasm.

“She was in a cult for seventeen years. She is a heroin addict going through recovery. She is what she is.”

“Is she trustworthy?”

“She’s not a saint, but she’s not a congressman either.”

The elevator arrives. Anne pulls open the worn metal door. “Room 333. Turn right when you get out of the elevator, back up the hall, last door on the left by the street. And good luck, Mr. Hightower.”

“She was in a cult for Christ sake,” said John Lee. He grabbed her file off his desk, the one that had been sent from San Diego, and waved it to punctuate his statement. “Assault with a knife. Six months for conspiracy to sell heroin. Do you think this person is trustworthy?”

“I’m only going to ask her a few questions.”

“You want to ask her questions. Fine. Bring her in.”

“She’s in rehab down in L.A.”

“I’ll pay for the fuckin’ cab.”

“People like her aren’t comfortable comin’ in here to talk. I want to try and …”

“No shit, they’re not comfortable.”

“She contacted us.”

“And I’d like to know why. What does she want? Bring her in here. Sit her junkie ass across from both of us.”

“We haven’t gotten anywhere with this investigation. It’s been six weeks, there’s no telling what Gabi is going through out there. If she’s alive at all.”

The words fall with a dead thud. Both men face each other soberly
.

“She was in a cult. She is an addict. But she’s also an expert of sorts. For profiling alone, she’d be—”

“Bob. Time out. Okay. Time out.”

Bob leaned back, quieted. He didn’t want to, but he did
.

“I let you take all those files and run down every lead no matter what. I let you because it has to be done, and I let you … you … because I know I wouldn’t want it otherwise if I were in your spot
.

“But this. This chick is a junkie who was in a cult. She could have her own agenda. Maybe she’s had it with methadone, if she’s on that program, and she’s trying to figure out how to score. Maybe she thinks she could wheel and deal a little info from you that she could sell. Who knows what goes on in those junked-out heads. If you were an experienced investigator who’d handled a few of these before, that would be one thing. But you’re a desk cowboy, okay?”

Bob sat there listening impassively as he was told in no uncertain terms that he was incompetent. At least that’s how he heard it
.

“You want to question her. You bring her in. She won’t come in, forget it. Then give her name over to the FBI. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bob steps out of the elevator and hesitates. He knows he’s broken his word. But what is more troubling yet, he’s not sure if he’s done this wholly because of Gabi or because of a need to prove himself.

Is it pride? The air stinks with something burned on a stove. He can hear laughter, doors closing. More laughter, a wispy uprising of voices till they dust away.

It is pride. A door at the end of the hall opens and the light
outlines a woman. At this distance she looks more like a girl, really. Wiry slim, with faded jeans and black boots and hair cropped like a Marine’s.

She steps out into the hall. “Hightower? Mr. Hightower?” Her voice is like dry leaves brushing over wood.

“Yes.”

He starts down the hall. A few long seconds and they are face-to-face.

“Case Hardin?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Case wears a sleeveless T-shirt, and Bob can see that her arms are covered with tattoos, a fever line of ink designs from wrists to shoulders.

“You want to come in?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find this place okay?”

“Okay, yes.”

She steps back clumsily over the threshold and he follows. She sidesteps to let him pass.

“We should go in the kitchen there, it’s got a table, we could sit and talk.”

He sets the leather satchel down on the couch so he can take off his oilskin raincoat. She stares at the satchel, assuming the horror of his life is there.

“I just wanted to tell you, up front, how sorry I am. I watched it all on TV and … I’m sorry. Your wife … ex-wife, she looked—”

He cuts her off clumsily: “Thanks.”

“—nice …”

Thanks.

He finishes slipping off the oilskin. “Where can I hang it?”

“Drop it anywhere.”

“It’s wet.”

“It’s alright.”

“Maybe we should …” He points toward the closet.

The whole process of going over there and getting a hanger and hanging it up, the whole ritual of it, is a little too much for her nerve endings.

“Drop it right there. I mean, you can see the place ain’t the Ramada Inn.”

She tries to smile. He takes the coat and neatly arranges it over the back of a chair by a wobbly wooden desk.

She glances at the satchel again, then at him. He is taller than she imagined from seeing him on the news.

He follows her into the kitchen silently, carrying the satchel under one arm and eyeing the shabby rooms.

“Sit down. You want some coffee? I need some.”

“Yeah, that would be alright. I’ve been going at it since six this morning.”

“I’d offer you a beer,” she says, “but I’m on the wagon for the next forty or fifty fuckin’ years.”

Case takes a small packet of coffee and tears at the plastic wrapping with her teeth. She turns to him. “The coffee is shit. It’s one of those mail samples.”

“I’m not a connoisseur, so don’t worry.”

“If you smoke, go ahead. Use anything handy for an ashtray.”

Bob smokes, watches her make the coffee. They don’t talk. Her hands tremble. Her moves are jagged and taut at the same time, as if she were cranked up on speed yet bound by some invisible wire. There is something sadly benign about her face, with its broad forehead and jawline of bones that protrude like the thin spine under a bird’s skin. Her eyes are dark, almost black, and they seem blacker against her white flesh.

They sit and talk. Bob opens his satchel and takes out a yellow legal pad. He begins by asking Case questions about her past and her life in a cult, about her time in San Diego, her falls back into drugs. He makes little sidesteps into her illegal
activities, into her present state of mind. His eyes slide back and forth between Case and his notes. She sits there, answering each question. She smokes and coils her hands one around the other until she’s a knot of venom over this interrogation.

“Can I ask you something?”

He looks up from his notes.

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’ve grilled me with this Nazi kind of attitude and asked every fuckin’ question except what size Tampax I use and do I like takin’ it up the ass. Jesus bullshit Christ, what do you think I …”

Without any indication of being startled, Bob replaces the upturned pages of the notepad. Case sits back and presses one booted foot against the rim of the table.

“If I’d have asked you,” says Bob, “to come out to Clay, to the Sheriff’s Department, would you have come?”

She eyes him a long time, her jaw forming a bias across her cheeks. Her arms spread out across the back of the chair like the wings of a hawk getting ready for fight or flight. “I read you, Lieutenant,” she says. “Or is it Sergeant? Or Squire? Or Boss Man? Or is it … Desk Boy?”

Angered, he slips the notepad into the leather case. He closes it, stands. He walks out of the room without a word or a look. She gives his back the finger.

At the front door, though, something comes over him and he stops. The rain gutters along the roof and down through rusty drains. A harsh rattling, comfortless sound. Case stares at him through the framework of the doorway. He’s boxed in like some character on a strange, dark stage.

His voice is barely audible across the lightless room, but she can hear in it waves of sorrow through slow breaths. “I have lost a wife,” he says. “I have lost a daughter. I do not know if she is dead or alive or how to find her or if I ever can.
I’m desperate and close to giving up. I am here. Maybe I did not approach you quite … Maybe you could help me a little?”

She leans forward and rests her elbows on the table and presses her thumbs into the wedges of flesh above her eyes.

“I’m a junkie,” Case says, “and junkies tend to be short of patience and manners on the ride back to that other reality. I’m fighting with myself most of the trip, and I don’t sleep, and I shake, and I hate most everything I see. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I should have ‘asshole’ tattooed across my mouth.”

She looks up and through the door. “Please. Come and sit down.”

Bob drops a stack of manila folders on the table, then looks across at Case. “Do you consider yourself an expert on satanic cults?”