Liar (13 page)

I gathered my belongings and headed over to the city council chambers. The chambers were all but empty when I arrived, and except for a few resident gadflies, not many other people showed up. The most interesting item on the agenda was not one most folks would recognize as such-a change in plans for use of a navy property that was coming back into the city’s possession-but that item was quickly tabled. The rest of the meeting plodded along over relatively unimportant issues. Even the usual sideshow was dull-when long-standing opponents took their expected potshots at one another, the remarks lacked heat.

I had positioned myself so that I could see latecomers entering the audience, but never saw anyone who even faintly resembled Geoff’s description of the man who had asked for me.

The meeting finally came to a close, and I rushed back to the paper to file my story. I had already called in to let Morey know that there was no need to hold much space for the council story.

I knocked the story out fairly quickly, then checked my e-mail. Nothing from Travis. I said good night to the few remaining staff members and hurried home.

The dogs bounced and bounded to communicate their joy at my return. Cody gave one yowl and then managed to regain a proper cat sense of aloofness. The light on the answering machine was blinking.

I pressed the play button.

“Irene? Are you there?” Frank’s voice. He sounded tired. “Oh, wait, it’s Tuesday-you’re probably at the council meeting. The flight went fine and the hotel is okay, but we’ve already encountered some problems with the job, so we may be here a little longer than we expected. Sorry to have missed you. I’m pretty beat, so I’ll probably turn in. I’ll call you again tomorrow if I get a chance.” He left the hotel number, said again that he’d try to call the next day, then hung up.

Well, hell.

I went to bed, pulled Frank’s pillow close before Cody could claim it. I was tired, but I didn’t sleep.

I wondered if Margot got lucky. I wondered who the guy was. I was ticked off at her for interfering, but at least she might be able to tell me his name.

I wondered if Travis would call.

I kept thinking about Frank.

The phone rang. I’ll own up to a perverse wish that my husband had been having trouble sleeping, too, and was the caller. But the caller was Rachel.

“Did I wake you up?” she asked.

“No.”

“You, too? First night Pete’s away is always a bitch. And I missed his call tonight-I was out at the store.”

I couldn’t tell her that her disappointment sounded wonderful to me. “I missed Frank’s call, too. Do you have dinner plans for the next few nights?”

“No. Want to get together? That’s exactly what I was calling to suggest.”

“Why don’t you come over here tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

We talked of inconsequential things for a few more minutes, then hung up. I was drowsy by then, and managed about an hour’s worth of fitful sleep before the phone rang again.

“Did I wake you up?” my husband’s voice asked.

“No,” I said.

“Liar.”

“Okay, so I am, but talk to me anyway.”

He did. He couldn’t sleep, had gone for a walk, finally decided to call. We had a long conversation, not about anything special, but one we were reluctant to end. “I should let you get some sleep,” he’d say every so often, and we’d keep talking, remembering something else that had happened that day, or discussing some plan to do something together when he returned, or recalling something we’d meant to ask about.

“Don’t bother with that leaky faucet in the kitchen,” he said at one point. “I’ll fix it when I get home.” He knew I could fix it if I wanted to, I knew he wasn’t trying to tell me not to fix it myself. There was only one phrase in all of it that mattered: “when I get home.”

The reassurance of the mundane, wearing down our troubles.

I didn’t make much progress in my efforts to find Travis on Wednesday. At work, two vague leads suddenly turned into hot but demanding stories that had nothing to do with one another; trying to do justice to both stories, I was too harried to try to locate my cousin-and was forced to cancel my dinner plans with Rachel. I ended up catching about three hours of sleep between Wednesday and Thursday, worked furiously and turned in both stories Thursday afternoon. I was whipped.

In the long run it was worth it, though. Between the time I had spent on the obit on Sunday and his pleasure with the stories I turned in on Thursday, Morey agreed to give me Friday off.

Late Thursday afternoon, by driving like a demon and begging a favor from a clerk I knew in the county records office, I did manage to get a look at Arthur Spanning’s death certificate for about five minutes before the office closed.

As the holy card from his funeral had said, Arthur Anthony Spanning had died a little over three weeks earlier, at the age of forty-eight.

I glanced at the bottom half of the certificate and learned that the cause of death was bone cancer; I was a little startled to see that he had died at St. Anne’s, where my parents died, and that he had been seen for some time by the same oncologist who cared for my father before his death-Dr. Brad Curtis. Later I would consider the irony of Arthur, a man my father had despised, struggling for his life with the help of the same physician, but in that moment I was thinking only of the suffering he had probably endured-the kind of suffering I had witnessed when my father was ill-and for the first time in a long time, I felt something other than anger toward Arthur Spanning.

The clerk reminded me that it was closing time and so I hurriedly turned my attention to the top of the form, “Decedent Personal Data.”

Arthur’s father was listed as Unknown Spanning; his state of birth, unknown; his mother’s maiden name, unknown. Past experience with death certificates had taught me that this did not mean he was illegitimate-only that the doctor filling out the certificate didn’t have the information.

Arthur had not served in the military, and his years of education completed were listed as six-a surprise to me, since I remembered him as a man who could converse easily on all sorts of subjects. I wondered if this was a typographical error. Then again, he had married into lots of money when he was very young, so perhaps he was self-educated.

I wrote down the Las Piernas address listed in the “Usual Residence” section and tried to picture its general location. Downtown; perhaps one of the new lofts or condos. Not really as snooty an address as I would have guessed, especially supposing he had inherited the big bucks after Gwendolyn DeMont’s death. Maybe it was a case of easy come, easy go. Arthur might have blown that fortune in the first few years after her murder.

There was one other surprise on the form. In space number fourteen, “Marital Status,” the word “Married” was typed in; and in space number fifteen, “Name of Surviving Spouse; If Wife, Enter Maiden Name,” was “Briana Maguire.”

“You liar!” I said aloud, causing the clerk to look up at me. I calmed down. Why should I be surprised that Arthur was still occasionally faking people out about his marriage to my aunt? Grudgingly, I also had to admit the possibility that if Travis spent much time around him, he might have been trying to hide his son’s illegitimacy. But why not say they were divorced?

The clerk finally lost all patience and all but snatched the form back from me. When I asked if I could make a copy, she said, “You should have thought of that option four and a half minutes ago. Come back tomorrow.”

A friendly, helpful clerk in county records is an asset in my line of work, and not someone you want to piss off, so I apologized profusely, and told her I owed her big time.

She laughed and said, “Honey, I hear that every day from one person or another, and I ain’t seen no ‘big time’ yet.”

Rachel called on Thursday night to say she hadn’t been able to find anything on Travis, but had some luck locating the DeMonts. I told her I had Friday off, and we decided to meet in the morning.

“You hear anything more from Jimmy Mac?” she asked.

I told her I hadn’t been contacted again by McCain and was beginning to believe he wasn’t much interested in me as a suspect, but she warned me against this kind of thinking. I tried to get her to talk about how she had come to know so much about him.

“See you tomorrow morning,” she said, once again shying away from any discussion about her past connection to him.

But our Friday plans were changed about ten minutes later, when Sophia Longworth called from the Mission Viejo Library.

“I think I know where you can meet up with your cousin,” she said.

“Great!” I said, not realizing that all hell was about to break loose.

Sophia Longworth asked if I had heard back from my cousin by e-mail.

“Nothing yet,” I said.

“He travels a lot,” she said, “and he may not be checking his e-mail from the road. That’s why I posted a note on PUBYAC.”

“PUBYAC?”

“It’s an Internet list for librarians who specialize in services for children and young adults. I received several responses, but most of them were places where he had been, not where he was scheduled to appear in the future. Only one of the librarians responded with a future date. It’s not much notice, I know, but if you can get up to North Hollywood tomorrow morning, you might catch him at the Valley Plaza Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. He’s doing two performances there, one in Spanish, one in English.”

“What time?” I asked.

“The Spanish performance is at nine, the English at ten.”

When I called Rachel back to tell her that my plans had changed again, she offered to come with me. “That way, you can use the carpool lanes,” she said.

“Don’t give me that,” I said. “You’ll never convince me that you’re just volunteering to be my diamond-lane dummy.”

“You can be the dummy. We’ll take my car.”

“The Karmann Ghia will get us there.”

“Yeah, well, my car will get us there and back. I don’t mind driving. Besides, I want to talk to you about what I’ve learned so far.”

So the next morning we were on our way to North Hollywood. North Hollywood, like Hollywood itself, isn’t a city. West Hollywood is, but Hollywood and North Hollywood are part of the City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is full of irregularly drawn boundaries; some of them can be seen on maps.

North Hollywood is near the eastern edge of the San Fernando Valley, about forty miles from Las Piernas. There was no way to get to it during business hours without going through some patch of traffic hell.

Not all of the old freeways between Las Piernas and North Hollywood had been retrofitted with carpool lanes, though, so although we were both curious about Travis’s storytelling, neither of us had wanted to leave at five in the morning and then hang out in the Valley for three hours, which is what we would have to do to be at the library at nine. We had decided we’d aim for the ten o’clock English performance and try to miss some of the morning rush hour-an “hour” that begins around six and often lasts as late as ten.

As we made our way up the San Gabriel River Freeway to Interstate 5, my nervousness over the upcoming encounter with Travis increased. Rachel was humming “Jimmy Mac” to herself again, but I was too preoccupied with more immediate worries to pursue that line of conversation. I feigned an interest in the passengers of other cars, all the while trying to rehearse what I would say to Travis. It occurred to me that he might not even know he had cousins.

It suddenly seemed hot and stuffy in the car, and though I knew the sensation had nothing to do with the climate inside the car, I rolled the window down a little. I was immediately greeted by a puff of diesel exhaust and the rattling, banging metal clamor of a semi in the next lane. I rolled the window back up. Rachel looked over at me, then turned the air conditioner on.

“That won’t help,” I said.

She shrugged and turned it off.

After a minute or two had gone by, she said, “I’ve managed to track down most of the people who were mentioned in those articles.”

“The articles about the murder of Gwendolyn DeMont?”

“Right.” She cast another quick look in my direction, then said, “You know, even if he has no interest in getting to know you and your sister, maybe Travis will want to contact someone in his father’s family.”

“Maybe,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant about that possibility. I pulled the sun visor down, adjusted it up and down as I looked in the little mirror on it-as if I were checking my makeup. It might have been more convincing if I had been wearing any. In the car behind us, I noticed a man in a baseball cap driving a dark green Oldsmo-bile sedan, a car that been behind us once or twice before. I couldn’t make out his face, but there was something vaguely familiar about him.

“Well, if he does want to contact them, I’ve got an address for Gerald Spanning,” Rachel said, getting my full attention.

“Arthur’s brother? I talked to him.”

“The one in Los Alamitos?”

“I didn’t have an address for him, just a phone number. So he stayed in the same town all these years?” I said.

“Looks like it. You’ve talked to him?”

“Very briefly. Says he never met Travis, and didn’t seem to hold doing so as one of his life’s ambitions. You talked to him, too?”

“No, just found out where he lived.”

“Do I want to know how you managed to do this?”

She laughed. “Probably not.”

Curiosity got the better of me. “How?”

“From a voter registration list.”

“Voter registration? That information isn’t available to just anybody. Don’t tell me you-”

“No, I didn’t have to call in any favors,” she said.

“For some reason, I have a suspicion I’m not going to like the answer anyway.”

This apparently did not cause her much concern. “Well, I’ll tell you how someone might get them, then you can stop imagining that I’m bribing people who work in the County Registrar of Voters office.” Making a wholly unconvincing attempt to look as if she were working from imagination rather than memory, she said, “Let’s say a person files as a candidate for an office.”