Silver Lake (8 page)

“Did Mr. Field mention anything that might have been causing him extra aggravation?” the detective asked.

Robbie was tearing up.

“Did he seem at all desperate?”

What kind of lonely, Robbie thought. He couldn’t speak, and perhaps the detective knew not to push him. She gathered the photographs back in the envelope and put away the sketch book. She asked if she could step out to the patio for a brief moment to look at something again, and Robbie neither nodded nor shook his head no, but the detective went out back anyway.

He was drenched with maudlin thoughts about how Tom’s death took time to stage: time to consider the drop, to tie the rope to the tree, to knot the rope and slip it over his neck. His death took thought, it took preparation, maybe for days, maybe for years. However, the police had not found a suicide note and they were never going to find anything resembling one, no matter how hard they searched. The dead man’s motive would remain hazy, and it was possible Tom was only messing around, inebriate, testing himself in a game of auto-brinkmanship. Also possible, he wanted to die, although Robbie could not accept this. It didn’t seem right, it didn’t fit.

He looked out at the patio, where Detective Michaels appeared to have some interest in the wooden fence. With the detective occupied, Robbie pulled back the couch cushion and removed the black object, which was neither a wallet nor a credit card case. It was a palm-sized, gilt-edged address book. On the first page of the address book, in a somewhat younger hand but in the same firm small caps with which he’d signed his drawings, Tom had written his name. The little book must have fallen out of his pocket when he started to pull off his jeans or at some other point Saturday night.

The pages were soft, worn by a decade of thumbing, and Robbie noted that nearly all of the entries had been struck through with a hard stroke of ink or lead, all of the names and numbers crossed out save only a few.

The detective on the patio glanced up at the tree. She looked out toward the Reservoir, and then back at the house.

Later, if he was going to be honest about it, Robbie would have to admit that his true adultery began here, because it was with a quickened heart and the sudden, switched-on heat of infidelity that, as Detective Michaels came back inside the house, Robbie shoved Tom’s little address book between the couch cushions, stood, and saw the detective to the door.

• • •

H
E WAITED UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING
when he was alone again in the house, Carlo having returned to the office. This time Robbie was glad to have him gone. The woman who answered the phone sounded like she’d been interrupted and Robbie identified himself as a friend of Tom’s. He was asked to hold a moment.

He held a full minute before a decidedly older woman came on the line and said, “Yes.”

“Mrs. Field,” Robbie said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Rob Voight. A friend of Tom’s. Calling from Los Angeles.”

“Oh. Yes,” Tom’s grandmother said. “Hello.”

“I wanted to call and say how sorry I am for your loss.”

“Yes. Thank you, yes.”

“I don’t know what the police told you—”

“They told me, yes.”

Tom’s grandmother sounded as though she were holding the phone at some distance from her face. She may not have been holding the phone for herself at all. Her breathing was arduous, her voice feeble.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Robbie said again.

“Yes. Well. Tommy was Tommy.”

Tom was Tommy, Robbie thought.

He said, “I don’t know what the police may have said but I want you to know—”

“He was being dramatic,” Tom’s grandmother said. “Wasn’t he?”

“Exactly,” Robbie said. “Dramatic,” he said.

“Always a dramatic child,” she said. “We didn’t think he’d—”

“No,” Robbie said.

“That’s not Tommy.”

“No.”

“Poor Tommy,” Tom’s grandmother said.

“It’s tragic.”

“Very unexpected.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” Tom’s grandmother said.

Then Robbie didn’t know what to say. He listened to the old woman work at each breath.

“You sound like a young man,” Tom’s grandmother said.

“Yes,” Robbie said, although he was thinking young relative to Tom’s grandmother, not young like Tom.

“You have a life ahead of you,” she said.

Robbie didn’t respond. Tom’s grandmother must have thought he was her grandson’s boyfriend.

“And you need to live that life, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Robbie said.

“Tommy would agree with me, I’m certain.”

“That’s very kind of you to say.”

“Goodnight, dear,” Tom’s grandmother said, and hung up before Robbie could wish her well.

He hid Tom’s address book his underwear drawer in the dresser and then lay on the couch a long while. He didn’t fall asleep, but he was not really in a wakeful state when Carlo returned in the early evening and found him laid out thus. Carlo switched on a lamp and sat down at the edge of the couch.

“Maybe you’d prefer the bed,” he said.

Robbie squeezed a corner of the velvet sofa. He’d been under the impression he was in bed.

“What time is it?” he asked. “It seems late.”

“I stopped by the police station,” Carlo said.

“They called you?”

“No, I went in.”

“Oh. Did they ask you if Tom seemed desperate?” Robbie asked.

Carlo was staring at him as if reading words written on his face, text Robbie would be unable to see unless staring in a mirror. Did Robbie look guilty in some way—did Carlo know Robbie had phoned Tom’s grandmother?

“What?” Robbie asked.

“Right,” Carlo said, “they asked if Tom seemed desperate, but I said you were the one who’d spent more time with him … “

He reached out his forefinger and gently caressed Robbie’s left eyebrow as if flattening errant hairs, then his right. Robbie
took Carlo’s hand and held it against his heart. Don’t move, he was thinking, let’s stay like this.

But Carlo stood, said, “How about I heat up some soup for you,” and went into the kitchen.

Robbie realized he’d been dreaming, and in his dream, it was Saturday night or maybe another night. He had imagined himself sound asleep in bed when suddenly he awoke and noticed Carlo wasn’t lying next to him. Instead Carlo stood at their bedroom window, gazing out at the patio, at the black trees of night and the black lake beyond, the slope of his shoulders in silhouette, handsome, distant. In the dream, Robbie was determined to stay awake until Carlo, apparently unaware he was being observed, returned to bed, but then Robbie yawned—then Robbie fell back asleep. This was what he had dreamed about: not being able to stay awake.

• • •

H
E DUTIFULLY ATE MOST OF THE SOUP
that Carlo warmed up for him, but then Robbie was zonked, and so Carlo put him to bed, the blanket pulled high. Still clothed, atop the blankets, Carlo held Robbie until Robbie fell asleep. Then Carlo retreated to a chair in the corner of the dark room.

He’d lied to the police twice Sunday morning, and initially he wasn’t going to correct the record, but then he understood that his perjury might come back to haunt him. This was why Carlo had gone to the police station to speak with Detective Michaels.

As the detective ushered him to a windowless interrogation room where they could chat, she admitted she was not in the most
jovial mood because she’d only that hour learned that in another case, a key witness questioned by an assistant district attorney had contradicted testimony he’d originally given the detective, throwing the prosecution into disarray. Which was to say Detective Michaels was probably not going to be amused to learn about a relatively less serious instance of fibbing.

“I thought it would be best if I cleared something up,” Carlo started.

The detective pinched the tip of her nose with her thumb and forefinger and held it a moment.

“I said I’d never met Tom before he showed up at our office, but I had,” Carlo said.

“Is that so?”

The detective stared at him, waiting, but it was a difficult story to relay and even now, having decided to come clean, Carlo hesitated. The way the detective was regarding him, half squinting, didn’t help.

“Yes,” Carlo said. “Last April.”

One evening the previous April, he had gone alone to a dinner party at friends in Glendale while Robbie stayed home nursing a cold. Carlo left relatively early and was driving along Fletcher and had passed under the 5 and was coming up to the light at Riverside. He was in the right lane and driving at a more cautious speed than usual because he’d consumed a good amount of wine with dinner, which had been rich, all about cream sauces, a cheese course, a chocolate course, gluttony. He was woozy when he came up behind a car at the red light, and there were no other cars at the intersection. The car, a long black sedan, had its flashers
on—it looked like maybe it had stalled out. Carlo was about to turn into the left lane and maneuver around it when two men shot out of the back of the sedan, flailing their arms yet making no noise he could hear.

Carlo’s first thought was they wanted him to call for help. He rolled down his window as one man approached, and as soon as he had the window part-way down, the man reached in the car and twice depressed the power lock. Before Carlo could react, the second man had opened up the passenger-side and slid in next to Carlo. This second man was pointing a gun at him.

“What do you want,” Carlo asked, “what do you want—do you want the car?”

The man with the gun didn’t respond.

“Take it,” Carlo said and lifted his hands off the steering wheel, and he would have gotten out of the car and bolted if the first man were not standing next to the driver’s-side door and preventing egress.

“What do you want—do you want money?”

The man pressed the gun against the side of Carlo’s ribs, which hurt, and still the man didn’t speak, which only confused Carlo.

“What, my wallet?”

Which was what Carlo reached for—he kept it in his front pocket—but as he did this, his foot began to slip off the brake and he slammed his foot hard against the pedal, which made the man with the gun in the passenger seat jerk forward, his free fist hitting the glove compartment.

“Don’t fuck with me,” the man said and jabbed Carlo in the ribs. “And don’t look at me,” he said. “Don’t look at me.”

But Carlo already had looked at the man, already noted the
way his chin drooped left to right, the way his moustache was similarly angled. Already Carlo had taken a good long look: blue eyes, black hair, young, possibly high school-aged, a constellation of moles by his left ear. Carlo turned instead toward the other man still standing on the street, which was when he noticed that while the man wasn’t holding a gun, he had formed a pretend one with his thumb and first two fingers. Bang, bang.

“Put the car in park,” the man with the real gun said, and Carlo obeyed.

“Get out,” the man with the gun said and shoved Carlo toward the door, again with the gun pressed at, into his ribs, but the second man standing next to Carlo’s door still made that impossible—

“Get the fuck out of the fucking car,” the man with the gun yelled, and so Carlo opened his door, which irritated the second man, although he moved aside and grabbed Carlo’s shirt collar when Carlo did climb out of his car. Also the second man clutched Carlo’s right wrist and pulled it behind Carlo’s back, angling it up, painfully so.

The man with the gun slid into the driver’s seat and tossed his weapon to the man now twisting Carlo’s arm, who guided Carlo swiftly in front of the headlights and back toward the freeway underpass. No one drove by on Fletcher, no one on Riverside, although cars could be heard thrumming across the freeway overhead, useless. They stood in a damp dark space, which was when the second man pushed Carlo against the wall.

He said, “Don’t look. Don’t you look.”

Again too late because Carlo and the man restraining him had made what could only be described as extensive eye contact.
He could describe both perpetrators, similar in height, weight, youth, eye color, haircut—although the one with the gun now had a smoother shave and no mustache.

“Did he look?” the man back in the car shouted.

“He fucking looked,” the second man shouted back, and he tugged Carlo’s wrist up against his back, which sent a charge down through his elbow and up his shoulder.

Other men got out of the ambush car, its flashers still pulsing, two more men, one from the driver’s side, heavy, gesticulating at the guy behind the wheel in Carlo’s car, and the man from the passenger side, now strutting over to the underpass. There were many men against him and the only way not to look at them would have been for Carlo to close his eyes, but he didn’t want to close his eyes and not know what was happening.

“You shouldn’t have looked,” the second man said, and he pressed the gun against the base of Carlo’s skull. “You fucked up big time, looking.”

If Carlo closed his eyes, he thought, it would represent some kind of capitulation, inaugurating the worst scenario. He didn’t move. His forehead was pressed against the concrete wall. He ached everywhere.

The man who had walked over from the ambush car was saying something like, “Let’s go,” or “Let him go,” or “Go at him,” or “Let me go at him.”

Carlo couldn’t hear well because his head was buzzing, and didn’t dare turn to look now, nor did he close his eyes, and he wanted to throw up. All the rich food. Everything was catching up with him and he became pretty sure he was either going to vomit or defecate.

“He fucking looked,” the man holding the gun said to the man from the ambush car.

“Fuck the fuck, and let’s go,” the man from the other car said.

Carlo was thinking Robbie would never understand what happened tonight, and Carlo never wanted him to know. All that mattered in the world was being held in bed at night—everything else was inconsequential. He wanted to close his eyes. Acid ran through his esophagus into his stomach and his thighs were weak, his knees, calves, and ankles weak, giving in, and he wanted to throw up or shit.