Tell No Lies (11 page)

“I suppose a
smart
choice,” Evelyn says, “would have been not to marry someone like that at all.”

“You’re absolutely right. But you know what I did instead? I left him and vowed never to let
anyone,
no matter who they are, no matter where they live, make me feel worthless again.”

Evelyn does something Daniel has never seen her do, not in two dozen board meetings and a hundred socialite brunches. She actually averts her eyes.

Cristina stands and sets her still-folded napkin on her plate. “Thank you for dinner.”

Daniel rises, follows dumbly in her wake. Exiting the house, Cristina says out of the side of her mouth, “How did
you
come from
that
?”

Awestruck, he struggles to keep pace down the marble steps of the front porch. “I…”

“What?”

“I think I’m falling in love with you.”

That wide smile springs up, overtaking her face. She reaches for his arm but then pinches it, so hard he jerks back.

“What was
that
for?”

Already she is two steps ahead again. “So you never forget.”

*   *   *

He paused now before those same marble front steps and looked past the drop at the Pacific. The view was the only thing he missed here, the way the house seemed suspended above the earth rather than attached to it. To the east the Golden Gate Bridge guarded the Bay, the celebrated towers wrapped in fog. The orange-vermilion hue—officially designated “International Orange”—was in fact accidental, the color of a primer coat that just happened to catch the architect’s fancy. It matched the autumn foliage of the bookending headlands while announcing the bridge sufficiently for ships, standing out and blending in simultaneously, unique and paradoxical—San Francisco embodied.

This was, if nothing, a city of contradictions. Synonymous with freedom, yet home to the world’s best-known prison. The heart of the pacifist movement and the brains of the war machine. The blinding edge of innovation, navigated by cable car. The most East Coast city on the West Coast.

As he approached the house, he considered his and Cris’s life together, how they’d always been something of a paradox themselves, how they managed to bring contradictions into harmony, completing the circle.

A middle-aged painter wearing a backward A’s cap paused from his work on the front door to return Daniel’s nod and let him pass. A trace of burning birch laced the air inside. Striding through the well-appointed halls, he wondered if he really had to be here. Maybe Dooley was right and the news of his appearance at the crime scene hadn’t leaked. Maybe he’d overestimated Evelyn’s reach into the city.

He found her in the library against a backdrop of leather-bound books, inhabiting a wing chair like a Bond villain, aside from the seemingly anachronistic iPad in her lap. To her side the hearth crackled behind a triple-panel screen, and above hung that solemn rendering of his father, who surveyed the scene with an air of strained dignity.

On the south wall, a larger rendering of
her
father.

Her eyes lifted, one hand rising to fluff the steel-gray hair away from her neck. “Daniel,” she said sternly. “What’s this about your walking into a murder?”

So much for overestimating her reach.

“I got a letter accidentally—”

“I already spoke to the president of the police commission. I know more about it than you do.” She returned her focus to the iPad, tapping and sliding. “I’m going to have a private protection detail assigned to your house.”

This was why he came. Evelyn didn’t just react to news. She
implemented.

“We’re fine. No need to overreact.”

“You walked in on Jack the Ripper, he took your picture, and I’m overreacting?”

“The guy’s clearly targeting people who he thinks have
done
something—”

“Like burst in on him in the middle of an evisceration?”

“If we feel threatened,” Daniel said, “we’ll take care of it ourselves.”

“So you’re being obstinate and self-denying. Shocking.” A series of cartoonish sneers and twangs emanated from her iPad.

“Mom, are you playing Angry Birds?”

“I can’t help it. It’s so …
satisfying.
” A reluctant smile. “How are you these days? Still rubbing elbows with
criminals
for a living?”

“For now. I’m making a transition into private practice.”

“Thank God. At least that has a
modicum
of respectability.”

Her semi-endorsement of the change grated more than he would have thought. No matter how prepared he was, she always managed to find the chink in the armor. Which is why they were in touch only occasionally, a phone call one month, a brunch the next. While the time between served to layer more sand over the land mines, he still had to watch where he stepped.

He moved to switch subjects. “Are you still seeing that composer?” A Portuguese man twenty years her junior with a full head of hair and an impressive collection of formal wear.

“No. He wanted to have a baby. With me.”

“You sure something wasn’t lost in translation?”

“Well, not
with
me. His sperm would be carried by someone else, and then we’d … I don’t know, raise it. Can you imagine? At my age? I kept picturing a pale, thin-necked boy standing in the corner of the room coughing. No. I sent Leandro packing back to Braga.”

A muffled ringing arose, and she fished around the blanket in her lap and came up with a cordless phone. Scowling, she consigned the caller to voice mail. “We’re getting heavy into leveraged-currency bets these days,” she told Daniel. “Going long on the yuan, since the Chinese are going to own our country in twenty years. Vimal calls every hour like a nervous schoolgirl. He doesn’t have the stones for it like you did.”

“A compliment?”

“Backhanded. I am capable of
those.
Especially when I haven’t seen you in seven and a half weeks. Not that I’m keeping count. Of course, who knows if you’d have what it takes to make the tough financial calls
now.
All that counseling may have softened you up.”

She raised her thin eyebrows to make clear it was a challenge.

The painter entered and tugged off his baseball hat, a display of servility the likes of which Evelyn inspired. “I’m finished with the job, Mrs. Brasher.”

“A day late. I’ll get you your four hundred dollars.”

“The job was for five hundred.”

“You took longer.”

“Shouldn’t that mean I get paid
more
?” He covered with a weak smile.

“As is, you overcharged given my zip code, but I let that slide. We agreed upon a completion date. It wasn’t met. My dinner guests last night entered through a half-painted door.”

“It required multiple coats for proper—”

“James.” Evelyn barely raised her voice, and yet there James appeared in the far doorway. “Please bring me five hundred dollars.”

The painter smiled gratefully, and James produced a zippered leather pouch from which he counted five crisp bills into Evelyn’s hand. Throwing off the blanket, she rose, crumpling the top bill. She threw it over the fireplace screen into the fire, then crossed and handed the dumbfounded painter the remaining four.

The man nodded once slowly in comprehension, then withdrew.

Evelyn moved her gaze pointedly to Daniel to let him know that the challenge still stood.

“You’re really gonna short him like that?” Daniel said. “Just to make a point to me?”

“I’m glad,” she said, “we agree that the point has been made.”

“Lovely visit, Mom.” He started for the door. “See you in another seven and a half weeks.”

Outside, he caught the painter climbing into a beat-to-shit pickup. Pulling five twenties from his wallet, he offered them through the open driver’s-side window. The man looked from them to Daniel and said, “It’s not
your
front door.”

“She’s my mom.”

“Which means?”

“No one should have to endure her but me.”

The man turned over the engine, set his paint-crusted hands on the wheel. “I got my own mom to endure, pal.”

His tires crackled over the quartz rocks, leaving Daniel holding his money.

Chapter 15

By the time Daniel neared home, the sleeplessness of the prior night had caught up to him, turning the dusk beyond the windshield even blurrier. He groaned when he saw the car double-parked in front of the house next door. And there Ted was, popping into view behind the raised hatchback, shuffling reusable shopping bags and three children and gesturing for Daniel to come say hello. Daniel forced a smile as he pulled in to the garage, then walked out to where Ted waited beside the Subaru Outback—the one he’d gone to great pains to tell Daniel was built at a zero-landfill plant.

“Hey, Ted.” Hoping to convey hurriedness, Daniel moved to check his and Cris’s mailbox at the edge of their small front lawn. It also gave him an excuse to avoid full eye contact and—he hoped—engagement.

“Daniel, listen, Danika and I are having another implosion-sculpture event in the back courtyard this Friday, and we’d love it if you and Cristina would come.”

The last one had been excruciating, everyone standing around slurping white sangria while the air was sucked from a giant steel cube, collapsing it in an ostensibly artistic fashion.

Daniel scooped out the mail and paused, collecting himself here in the gorgeous golden Pacific Heights dusk. He was smitten with more aspects of San Francisco than he could keep track of. And then there were Ted and Danika Shea.

Danika had been third-tier on a start-up that in the nineties had blown up sufficiently to turn third-tier stock options into professional-athlete money. Since then she and Ted had dedicated themselves to a life of unremitting self-focus, each trend embraced with the aggressive, authoritative air of the recently converted. Paleo one week, macrobiotic the next. Almonds for sex drive, açai berries for weight loss, fair-trade coffee for the soul. Cross-fit, suspension training, Bikram that will
save your life.
The celebrity chefs spoken of in intimate terms—
You know how Emeril is with his andouille!
And the causes brandished like weapons or NPR tote bags—carbon offset, female genital mutilation, orphans in Rwanda—each charity-of-the-week paid the same loving devotion as the newest windsurf board or Manchego. Five years ago the home births had started, with candles and doulas and tubs of body-temperature water, all recounted with inappropriate detail in bizarrely riveting holiday newsletters. The products of these mystical deliveries were indistinguishable mop-headed blond boys, Jayden and Lucas, who, armed with metal water bottles, were currently dueling over the head of their younger adopted sister, Simone.

Tonight Daniel’s irritation with the Sheas was closer to the surface than usual, perhaps because he’d been worn thin by the past twenty-four hours. Or perhaps it was in reaction to the fun-house-mirror effects his neighbors wreaked on his own values, the contradictions blown huge, the hypocrisies stretched wider. The Sheas were colossal phonies, sure, but Daniel had his own flickers of self-doubt, those mornings when he felt like he was faking it, too, dressing down and going out into the real world. Evelyn’s voice returned:
How are you these days? Still rubbing elbows with
criminals
for a living?

Finally turning to face Ted, he mumbled an excuse for why he and Cris could not make the implosion-sculpture event.

“Well, do your best,” Ted instructed. “I mean, this is silly. We live right next door, and we never see each other.”

Jayden or Lucas bonked the girl on the head, and she gave out a strident wail. Ted crouched, took Jayden or Lucas gently by the shoulders, and said, “I’m hearing Simone say she doesn’t like that.”

Daniel used the diversion to slip away.

*   *   *

Rain hammered the wall of glass, turning the city lights into smears of orange and yellow and making the second-floor perch of their living room feel like a tree fort. Cris lay curled into Daniel on the couch, reading the
Chronicle
and sipping a Pacífico with lime. His feet were propped on the glass coffee table next to their dirty dinner plates, his knees forming a makeshift desk on which he attempted to fill out the termination agreement. Though he was doing his best to concentrate, his mind kept wandering back to that slightly ajar red door at Chestnut Street.

Except this time, instead of pausing, he kicks right through, tearing it from its hinges. The masked man appears in the kitchen doorway, startled, and then he and Daniel charge each other like something out of a samurai-warrior flick. Barely slowing, Daniel embeds the butcher knife in the would-be killer’s solar plexus, and he crumples, and Daniel gets to Marisol, and she’s terrified, yes, but still breathing, and he’s able to untie her hands and dab the blood from her cheeks, telling her help is on the way, it’s all okay now, and—

“You all right up there?” Cristina asked.

“Huh?”

“Your knees are jiggling. I’m getting whiplash.”

The room strobed with a double flicker of lightning, and an instant later the rumble moved through the floorboards. The effect of the vast window and downslanting rain turned the world outside into something treacherous.

“Sorry,” he said. “I…”

“What?”

“I wish I’d gone through her door quicker.” He hadn’t stated it so starkly yet, at least to his wife, and the words hauled up the emotion from where he’d tamped it down.

Cris reached up to touch his face. “I know,
mi vida.
But who knows what kind of mess
that
would’ve led to? Maybe Marisol would be dead anyway and I wouldn’t have you here tonight.” She pushed herself up to face him. “That half hour waiting for your call, Daniel, it felt like a
month.
And I went through it all in my head. The death notification. Your funeral. How I could never live here without you because you’re everywhere I look in this house. And how goddamned angry I’d be with you for running out and getting yourself killed.”