Tell No Lies (10 page)

“What’s a janitor
supposed
to wear on the job?” the other inspector said. “Huaraches?”

“Maybe they’re special
teleporting
boots,” Rawlins said. “Got him from Metro South to Marisol Vargas’s place with a click of the heels.”

This was running the risk of turning into a routine.

Daniel held up his hands. Uncle.

Dooley was enjoying all this. “Look, Brasher, I know you stumbled into this thing and wish you hadn’t. But it’s grabbed you now.” She flashed that grin. “So why not use your superpowers for good?”

Before he could respond, the barista called out her name and she skated off to claim her coffee. Daniel stared at the gang tattoo on the guy in front of them—a sombrero struck by a machete, dripping blood. The Norteños were nothing if not subtle. Rawlins’s phone chimed, and he pulled it out, deleted a text. When the background screen came back up, Daniel noticed it was a digital clock, counting down. To midnight tomorrow.

The killer’s deadline.

Rawlins followed his stare, then pocketed the phone quickly. They stood there awkwardly for a moment. “We can’t find a goddamned trace of Lyle Kane.” Rawlins’s voice was strained, confessional. “Nothing.”

“Maybe the killer won’t be able to find him either,” Daniel said. “He did have the wrong address for him.”

“I’d rather not bank on that. The Tearmaker’s one highly organized—”

“The
Tearmaker
?”

Rawlins winced—he hadn’t meant to drop the nickname. “Brainchild of one of the reporting officers. It’s become a cop-shop tag. Can’t accuse us of being unpredictable.”

“Pretend you never heard it,” the colleague said to Daniel, a touch threateningly. “That nickname leaks to the press, it’ll blow up. And so will the captain.”

Daniel nodded. “I never heard it.”

“The
suspect,
” Rawlins continued, “is planning these entries, bringing gear, executing clean exits. He’s got an eye on the victims ahead of time. Which means he’s probably found Lyle Kane by now. Remember—he picked these folks for a reason. Which means
he
knows where to look for them.” Rawlins watched Dooley across the shop, stirring sugar into her coffee. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and take down the piece of shit before the deadline. We’re kicking over a lot of rocks.”

“Anything interesting on the mail room’s security footage?”

“Aside from you?” Rawlins said. “Nope. But Dooley’s lead on the case, and she’s good.”

“Seems that way.”

“Yeah. She may have gotten the job ’cuz she’s black and a woman, but I got this shit ’cuz I’m white and a man, so the way I figure, it all comes out in the wash.”

The other inspector said, “I’ll take her over O’Malley or Gubitosi any day.”

Dooley returned, sipping her drink, resuming the conversation as if there’d been no break. “So, Brasher, I get it. The confidentiality end run’s not gonna work. Fine. I’m just saying, maybe we can help each other out.”

She offered her hand, and they shook.

He started for the door, and she said, “Your drink’s not up yet. What’s the rush?”

“I have to get across town to see my mother. I’d rather be the one to tell her about last night. No imagining what kind of shitstorm she’ll kick up when she hears about it.”

“We kept your name out of the media,” Dooley said. “How’s she gonna find out?”

Daniel said, “She hears about everything that happens in this city.”

Chapter 14

Two stone pillars guarded the entrance to Sea Cliff, the affluent neighborhood nestled above the beaches of the northwest rim of the city. Coasting past the mansions with their terraces and stone lions, Daniel felt the familiar tightening at the base of his neck that came on every time he neared his childhood home.

His parents had been married here on a bluff overlooking China Beach. At the ceremony’s culmination, they’d released a pair of doves, and two red-tailed hawks had descended from the heavens and torn them to shreds in view of the wedding party—an appropriate metaphor for the marriage. Denis Milner came with money and a business degree, but Evelyn Brasher came with the fortune, amassed by her great-grandfather, who took skillful advantage of Congress-bestowed land grants for the transcontinental railway. Denis adopted the stronger family name, a move that flew under the cloud cover of sixties San Francisco, and adopted the various bank accounts as well. Aside from the two weeks each July he decamped to Bohemian Grove to smoke cigars with Kissinger and Nixon, he worked most waking hours, the better to avoid his barbed wife. When he died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven, one society columnist opined that he’d done so merely to escape Evelyn. Daniel remembered his father as little more than a hazy outline and an oil portrait.

As he steered into the driveway now and waited on the leisurely parting of the wrought-iron gates, he recalled the first time he’d brought Cristina here to expose her to Evelyn. This was before she’d gotten sick, before Daniel had switched careers and burned the bridge to the family fortune. They’d been seeing each other just a few months, but the relationship had deepened to a level where he felt he owed her more than some vague details about his background. Little did he know that this first meeting between his mother and his future wife would also be their last.

*   *   *

Evelyn greets them in the dining room, fluttering in a gossamer wrap. She touches her cheek to Daniel’s, then offers a firm hand to Cristina.

“Consuelo, is it?”

“Cristina.”

“Well, welcome, welcome.”

Cristina has brought a little wrapped gift, her grip on it tightening by degrees as the mansion reveals itself. She glances around now at the paintings, her gaze arrested by Toulouse-Lautrec’s
La Blanchisseuse,
and her knuckles go white. Daniel has warned her that his mother is difficult and privileged, but he realizes now that neither adjective was sufficient.

Evelyn follows Cris’s gaze and says, “Denis bought that at auction a few weeks before he died.”

“Denis?” Cristina manages.

“With one
n,
” Evelyn says. “As in ‘penis.’”

That is how hate works when it’s stoked to a bright light. It gets cold.

Dinner has been timed for after the Giants game—nothing interferes with Evelyn’s enjoyment of her boys in orange and black—and the threesome crests one end of the prodigious table. Evelyn notes the gift Cristina is trying to hide in her lap. “Is that for me?”

Reluctantly, Cris passes over the small package, her face tense as Evelyn opens it.

A set of Toulouse-Lautrec coasters is revealed. Cris twists a finger uncomfortably in her shell necklace from the Haight. The gift-store coasters look smaller than they are, diminished before the real item dominating the wall behind them. Evelyn looks up, her gaze holding something like triumph. “Aren’t they lovely,” she purrs, and dismisses them to a butler’s tray with a wave of the hand.

Roast chicken and baby asparagus are served, along with Riesling from the cellar. “So,” Evelyn says, “you work at a soup kitchen?”

Daniel can no longer veil his irritation. “I told you she—”

But Cristina is catching up to the rules of the game. “I’m a community organizer. But I can understand the confusion. Both jobs deal with poor people.”

Evelyn’s smile turns genuine. Now there is fun to be had. “Do expound.”

“I’m working to protect the tenants in a few apartment buildings in Dogpatch. They’re displacing all these folks to build loft condos—”

“Ah, yes,” Evelyn says, spooning more asparagus. “I believe we invested in that. Didn’t we, Daniel?”

The air goes out of the room. Or maybe Daniel is just working harder to find it.

“I don’t know,” he says tightly. “That’s Vimal’s division.”

Evelyn says, “Well, the
owners
of the
private
property have decided to put it to more lucrative use—”

Cris jumps in. “By booting out longtime residents who won’t be able to afford to live in their own city anymore.”

“Put them in Hunters Point.”

“Hunters Point? Might as well move them to
Mars.
That’s like saying
you
could just live in Oakland.”

Evelyn sips from her crystal glass. “I
could
just live in Oakland if I had to.”

A loaded pause, and then both women smirked at the notion. Honest adversaries.

Evelyn said, “Do you have any idea the
revenue
a construction project like this brings to the city? What do you think subsidizes little tax-exempt hobbies like yours?”

“Aah. Trickle-down economics.”

“Can you really argue them, Carmela?”

“Vehemently and effectively. And it’s Cristina.”

“Mom,” Daniel cuts in, “do you really need to trot out the Joan Crawford routine?”

“No,” Cris says to Daniel, exhilaration coloring her cheeks. “I got this.” All signs of discomfort have vanished from her manner.

Daniel takes a healthy slug of wine before Evelyn resumes the ping-pong match.

“So a few black families get moved—”

“Enough of this city hasn’t been taken away from African-Americans already?” Cris says.

“Sure,” Evelyn says, “all the parts they moved into when the Japanese were carted off to internment camps.” She lets the point land before leaning on it. “The blacks coming here to escape Jim Crow didn’t flourish in the Fillmore until the Japanese got rounded up. Every gain comes at a cost, dear. The blacks oust the Asians. The Indians oust the yuppies. The gays, those storm troopers of gentrification, oust the Hispanics.
And
redecorate—thank God.” She dabs the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “So loft condominiums are going up in Dogpatch and the poor are getting the short end of the stick. This isn’t new. We dwell on Yelamu Indian land, all of us. How are
those
boys making out these days? The trains built to carry people here rode on tracks laid down by coolie laborers paid pennies a day. That’s how it’s always been—”

“So that’s how it should always be?”

“No, dear. It’s how it
will
always be.”

The plates untouched. The chicken basting in its juices appears suddenly unseemly. The waitstaff clear and withdraw. Just another night at Brasher Manor.

“You can’t
really
think it’ll ever be any different?” Evelyn asks.

“I
think
,” Cristina says, the points of her elbows wrinkling the linen tablecloth, “that life is fucking hard. And that we have an obligation to try to make it
less
hard for others when we can. I
think
that most folks do the best they can and try to scrape by. Scrape by enough and it can wear you down to nothing. Ever scraped by, Evelyn?”

“Oh, this is fun,” Evelyn says, not insincerely. “A hard-nosed truth teller. Most people just tell me what I want to hear, but you. You have tits.”

“It’s an ugly world, Mrs. Brasher. Down off these hills. And I refuse to flourish at the expense of others.”

“Oh, honey. We
all
flourish at the expense of others. And wearing ugly shoes and cheap jewelry does not a thing about it.”

Cristina freezes for a moment, genuinely surprised at the slap. And then she does something that cements her place in Daniel’s heart. She laughs. And not just a titter or a dismissive snicker—a genuine, lovely, full-throated laugh.

Evelyn watches her anthropologically; she’s supposed to be the only one who enjoys these exchanges. She waits for the spell to pass, then says, “Dessert?”

“Why not?” Cris says.

Tea service is brought.

Evelyn nibbles a chocolate-dipped vanilla madeleine. “I understand you’re South American?”

“Worse, I’m afraid,” Cris says. “Mexican.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“
She’s
being ridiculous?” Daniel says. “You’ve yet to ask a question that’s not poison-tipped.”

“Regarding her ethnic background? Come on. Do you think I’d give a damn if you pranced around town with Carlos Slim’s daughter? I’m not racist. I’m
classist.
And for good reason. How are you, with
your
life, supposed to—”

“Can’t we have this vile argument in private?”

“I don’t see why,” Evelyn says. “It pertains to all three of us.”

“I don’t either,” Cris says. “Why not get it all out on the table?”

“Yes. Let’s.” Her lipsticked mouth firming, Evelyn rotates her focus back to Cristina. “You were married, were you? Before?”

Mother’s people, always checking up.

“Mom,” Daniel says. “Even by your own feral standards—”

“For ten months,” Cris replies.

“So it didn’t count?” Evelyn says.

“Not really.”

“What’s the story of this nonmarriage?” Evelyn presses.

Cris chews her lip, considers where to start. “I had a crappy childhood, the kind that people write crappy memoirs about. Neglectful parents, leering uncles, the whole nine. I married out at seventeen with parental consent. He drank. I got pregnant. He got laid off, came home late, belligerent and smelling of rum, and the next morning I wasn’t pregnant anymore.”

Daniel cannot remember feeling so peripheral in his life. He has been stricken dumb for swaths of the conversation, and not just by an eavesdropper’s fascination but by sheer and growing-by-the-second regard for the woman across from him. He is lost in the exchange as if engrossed in a movie. No girlfriend has ever locked horns with Evelyn so proficiently, and it strikes him now that this dinner is a trial to which he has unconsciously subjected Cristina.