Howtown (23 page)

Morrow would’ve had just enough time to find someplace like that in Los Robles, have the film developed, see it consisted of pictures of Ruth and substitute another roll of film, filched from a file in Sex Crimes, his last assignment before Homicide. I was sure that a check among photo labs in the area would uncover someone who remembered Morrow bringing the film in, but I was saving this for trial.

If there was a trial. Morrow was getting nervous, sending Ben to see me. Nervous enough to do something stupid, maybe. Or maybe he already had. Ben had slipped when he referred to my witness as “her.” I knew, and he knew, that he didn’t mean Sara. The more I thought about it, the clearer it seemed that he and Morrow had figured out that I’d talked to Ruth. It fit with her sudden disappearance. She’d been warned off, or threatened.

Reaching to the night table I switched on the light and looked at my watch. A little after one. I sat up and pulled the phone over, dialing Elena’s number. I got the same damned answering machine on which I’d already left two unanswered messages. Apparently, Elena was screening her calls. This fit, too. I left another message, telling her that it was urgent that I speak to Ruth.

A few minutes later, the phone rang. I picked it up, expecting Elena at the other end.

“Mr. Rios?” It was an unfamiliar male voice.

“Yeah.”

“This is Don at the desk downstairs,” he said it on a rising inflection, as if he had some question about his own identity. “I’m sorry to bother you but someone just called you when you were on the phone. He said it was urgent. Mark Windsor?”

“Did he say what he wanted?” I asked sitting up in bed.

“Just that it was urgent. He left a number.”

“What is it?”

Don, at the desk, enunciated the number slowly. I immediately recognized it as Sara’s.

“Are you sure it was Mark Windsor?” I asked. “Not Sara?”

“It was a guy,” Don said, “and that was the number he left. Do you want me to call?”

“Please.”

The phone rang twice at the other end before someone picked it up. “Callahan.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, in a complete fog, now. “I’m trying to reach Mark Windsor.”

“Yeah,” he said and I heard a thump as the receiver hit a hard surface. There were a lot of voices in the background. My first thought was that there was some kind of party going on, but that seemed bizarre. More thumps and then someone else, Mark, said, “Hello.”

“Mark, this is Henry Rios. What the hell’s going on?”

With preternatural calm he said, “Sara’s dead, Henry. Could you come here, please?”

I
HADN’T REALLY NOTICED
the pool before, but then I hadn’t ever ventured much beyond the rose garden and had no idea of how extensive the grounds were behind the house. The pool was east of the roses, where the yard descended. All that was visible from the back of the house was the arched wall that ran along the poolside. Between the arches and the water was a cobblestone terrace furnished with wrought-iron lawn chairs and tables painted white. One of the chairs had been upturned. An almost empty bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, the glass still sweating, stood on a tabletop. The wineglass from which the wine had been drunk lay at the bottom of the pool, not far, Mark was telling me, from where they’d recovered Sara’s body.

The lights beneath the water illuminated its still depths. The body had been removed and everyone was gone now, or leaving—the cops, the paramedics, the neighbor whose sleep Sara had disturbed for the last time. She, the neighbor, had heard a scream and shouting but had not been able to make out any words. The noise had frightened her into calling the police. When they arrived, they found the doors locked, the house undisturbed and Sara Windsor at the bottom of the pool. They’d come to the unremarkable conclusion that she’d drunkenly fallen into the water, become disoriented and drowned.

“Why out here?” I asked, standing at the edge of the pool, near where the cobblestones were still drenched.

Mark tossed the match he’d used to light his cigarette and shrugged. “Who knows. She was drunk. When she was drunk, she wandered.”

I looked back at him, where he stood between two arches, the moon fading at his back, and noticed he was wearing his high-school letter jacket, blue and white, the big
I
,-
H
lr
H
,-
I
stitched into one side. For a moment, in the shadowy light, he could have been sixteen again, but then he moved and the illusion was destroyed. He looked a sleepless, puffy thirty-odd, the same as me.

“Paul know?” I asked, approaching him.

He shook his head. “I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Thanks, but I think I should go by myself.” He yawned. “Listen, I could use a drink. What about you?”

“Some coffee, maybe.”

“Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

He was right. A thin vapor drifted off the surface of the water and I felt the autumn damp through my shirt. We made our way back to the house and into the kitchen. He set about fixing coffee while I sat at the table watching him, piling up the day’s events in my head; Ruth’s disappearance, Ben’s visit to me, Sara’s death. Two of the three I was pretty sure were related. Although I couldn’t fit Sara into the equation, I couldn’t add it up without her.

Pouring two cups of coffee, Mark said, over his shoulder, “You take anything in it?”

“Black.”

He excused himself and left the room, returning a moment later with a bottle of Jameson. He poured some into his cup and brought both cups to the table, setting them down delicately. He pulled out a chair and sat down. Closing tired eyes, he took a drink.

He shuddered, drank some more and reached back to the counter for the bottle. Pouring another slug into his cup, he glanced at me and said, “I’ve got a taste for the stuff, too. Not as bad as Sara though.”

“No one starts out a drunk,” I replied.

“That why you stopped?” he asked.

“Yeah. It got out of control.”

He smiled, wanly. “I can’t imagine you ever out of control, Hank.”

Remembering the last time I’d detoxed, I said, “Trust me. This is good, Mark.”

“Coffee and fried egg sandwiches,” Mark said. “The Mark Windsor cookbook. You cook?”

“Sometimes.” We settled into an awkward silence.

“Sara could be a real bitch,” Mark said abruptly, his eyes darkening, “but I couldn’t blame her, not after what she went through with Paul. It’s to her credit that she stayed with him.”

Cynically, I said, “For the money?”

He smiled sourly. “You wouldn’t ask if you’d ever been through a divorce.”

“Well, from what I saw of her and Paul, money sounds more probable than love.”

He brooded over his cup. “You never seem to love the people you’re supposed to.” He ran a fingertip around the rim of his cup. “Like with Paul. He’s my brother, but I’ve never loved him. Or my dad.” He pushed his cup back and forth. “That’s not true. I did love my dad, even if he was an asshole, even if he couldn’t care less for me.”

“What is it about Paul that you despise so much?” I asked. “That he didn’t stand up to your father? It’s not his fault he wasn’t as strong as you. He was just a kid, Mark.”

He worked the muscles in his face. “I need another drink for this,” he said, finally, and filled his cup. “There was just the four of us.” He sipped the whiskey. “There wasn’t anyone else to talk to except Paul about what used to happen. Like the time Mom got so drunk at dinner she threw up and Dad made us sit there and keep on eating, like nothing had happened. I had to count on Paul.” He took another drink, and when he spoke again, his voice had thickened. “But Paul was worse than them. They were just pretending nothing was wrong. Paul really believed it. Really.” He looked at me, his eyes like flares. “I think he made himself kind of crazy so that he didn’t have to deal with it. And that left me alone.”

My first thought was that self-pity seemed to run deep in the Windsor sons, but then I thought of Elena and me. The only difference between the children of the Rioses and the Windsors was the dimension of our isolation from each other.

“Except you,” Mark muttered. “There was you, too. You don’t have to believe this,” he said, “but when I heard you were back in town, I was really happy. It had been too long.”

“I wrote you once,” I said. I would have sounded less like the offended lover had I not been as tired as I was. But then again, it was an exhausting conversation, after all these years. For Mark, too. He was white with fatigue.

“Yeah, I still have that letter somewhere,” he said. “Telling me you were queer.” He clenched his fingers around the handle of the cup. Angrily, he asked, “What did you want me to do? Send you flowers? Tell you it didn’t make any difference? It sure as hell did, Hank. I trusted you, man, and you … I’m not that way, not like you.”

“You think all I wanted was to fuck you?”

For a second, he recoiled from me. Then, in a low, furious voice, he said, “You said in that letter that you loved me. What else was I supposed to think?”

“I did love you,” I said just as angrily. “I counted on you the same way you counted on Paul, to understand me.” I watched him trying to work it out in his head, and plunged on, having waited twenty years for this moment. “It wasn’t about sex. Well,” I relented. It was urgent that I be honest. “Not mainly about sex. I could have lived with you saying no to sex. But when you didn’t answer, you said no to everything, to being friends, to the only happiness I had ever had.”

“That’s how I felt when I got that letter,” Mark said, not yielding an inch to my anger. “I already knew I was a freak, Henry, growing up in that house. Being your friend was the most normal thing I ever did, but that letter changed it.”

“Well, what the hell did you feel for me?”

The question caught him off guard and I watched the anger evaporate from his expression. Finally, he said, “You were my brother.”

“Don’t brothers love each other?”

“Jesus,” he muttered, but I couldn’t tell whether the tone was revelation or resignation.

“Don’t they?” I asked again, quietly.

Setting his hand on the table, he nodded. “I loved you,” he said.

The sourness in my mouth wasn’t the coffee or lack of sleep. And it sure as hell wasn’t victory. It was the twenty years’ worth of regret. “Do you have any more cigarettes?”

“Sure,” he said, surprised. He fumbled in his coat pocket for his pack of Winstons, took two out, handed me one and lit them. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

“Not since law school,” I replied, tasting the acrid smoke.

We smoked in silence for a few minutes. I thought about Sara, whom I’d completely forgotten about for the past half-hour. Yet it was only the proximity of death, her death, that let Mark and me say these things to each other.

“I think I understand now,” he said, finally.

“Good. I’m glad.”

He put out his cigarette in his coffee cup. “I’m broke, Hank, and I’m probably going to go to jail.”

“I know,” I said. “Stein told me. He read some memo in Clayton’s office.”

He yawned. “Well, at least I won’t have to worry about how I stand with you.”

“I’ll represent you, if you want.”

He got up from the table. “Thanks, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to afford you.”

“I didn’t say I’d charge you.”

He patted my shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Hank, have I told you that?” He yawned. “I guess we should clear out.”

“I’d better drive you home.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll walk. It’s not far and it’ll sober me up. What time is it, anyway?”

I glanced at my watch. “Almost five.”

“Geez, if I was twenty years younger or just a little drunker, I’d go out for a run.”

We locked up the house and he walked me to my car. The sky was turning smoke gray as the first light of day edged slowly along the horizon and the air was fresh and damp. Good running weather.

“See you,” he said.

“Mark, what did you want to talk to me about the other night at the Hyatt?”

“Nothing that I didn’t tell you tonight,” he replied. “ ’Bye.”

“See you.”

He walked up the street with a drunkard’s fragile gait, whistling tunelessly, and I didn’t think I’d be getting that call from him when the time came. He’d made his way through life alone and he’d see it through alone, not taking handouts, not trading on an old friendship. Maybe he was just a garden-variety neurotic and no doubt he’d hurt a lot of people to build the business that was now collapsing around him. Still, I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude. It was the weight of what I owed that I felt as I watched him round the corner.

The phone woke me at noon. Reaching blindly, I knocked the receiver to the floor and fumbled with it. I pressed the cool plastic to my ear and shut my eyes against the glare from the windows.

“Yeah,” I managed.

“Catch you at a bad time, sport?”

“Was asleep, Kev.”

“Is that cow town in a different time zone or did you have a rough night?”

“My client’s wife drowned last night,” I said.

“Ah.” He paused. “Have you figured out how you’re going to get it into evidence?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” I replied, awakening. “You’re calling about the file, I assume. Did you have a chance to look at it?”

“Couldn’t do it, old man. The record was ordered sealed.”

I sat up. “Why?”

“My guess is that it was to protect the identity of the victim.”

Yes, that would make sense since the victim was a minor. “How quickly could we get a court order to unseal it?”

“Well,” he said, slowly, “if I went in ex parte today we might get a hearing in a week.”

“Too long. You have any chips you can cash in with a judge down there? How about the one that married you?”

“Frances Flynn?” he asked on a note of rising incredulousness. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”

“It’s really important. There are some very heavy things going on in this case, including this woman’s death last night. I need to see that file.”

“Well, you know your business,” he said. “I might be able to get us on calendar tomorrow afternoon, but I’d just as soon that you came down and handled it.”