They're Watching (2010) (31 page)

"I should go," I said again. But I was still sitting there.

"What's wrong?" Marcello asked.

I took a deep breath.

He followed my gaze to the door. "Scared?"

"Little bit."

"Wanna go out like a man?"

I said, "Yeah."

Marcello cleared his throat. "A NEW BEGINNING . . ."

I got to my feet.

"A MAN ALONE . . ."

I walked to the door.

"AND NOW HE WILL LEARN THAT NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME."

The hall was alive with motion and noise. When I stepped out, the nearby students froze. The reaction rippled outward, faces turning in wave after wave, hands and mouths pausing midmotion, until the corridor was so silent I could hear the squeak of a sneaker against tile, a BlackBerry chiming in someone's pocket, a single cough. As I stepped forward, the nearest clique parted, drawing back and gaping anew.

My voice sounded gruff, preternaturally low. " 'Scuse me . . . 'scuse me."

The kids farthest away were up on tiptoes. A professor leaned out the door of her classroom. A few students snapped pictures of me with their cell phones.

I forged my way through. A conversation burst from the opening elevator doors, gratingly loud in the strained silence, and then two girls stepped out, took stock of the scene, and ducked giggling behind their hands. I passed them stoically, dead man walking.

The elevator had gone, leaving me to confront blank metal doors. I pushed the button, pushed it again. Glanced nervously across the sea of faces. Way down the hall, Diondre stood on a chair he'd pulled from a classroom. I raised a hand in silent farewell, and he smiled sadly and tapped his chest with a fist.

Mercifully, the elevator arrived, and I vanished into it.

Chapter
40

Muted by a coating of dust, the crime-scene tape fluttered across the door. The knob hung a little crooked, broken from the forced entry, and it came off in my hand. I pushed the door open, ducked under the tape, and stepped into the lonely little prefab house I still thought of as Elisabeta's.

The emptiness was startling. Most of the furniture had been cleared out. No bowl of cashews, no banana peels, no porcelain cats and wicker bookshelf. The coffee table stood on end. How clean the place had been. I'd taken it as a reflection of Elisabeta's quiet dignity, never guessing that the furniture had no dust because it had probably just been rented. Another misassumption I'd been primed to make.

I'd been hustled like a rube in a Chicago pool hall.

I crouched, my face burning, fingertips set down on the thread-bare carpet for balance. It wasn't embarrassment, but shame. Shame at my transparency, at how common my hopes and needs must have seemed to this cast of players. At how common they had proven me to be.

With noble indignation, Elisabeta had crossed this very floor to her granddaughter's bedroom. I pictured her, that grave face taut with grief, that hand resting on the knob of the closed door. You come see this beautiful child. I will wake her. You come see and tell me how I am to explain her this is her story.

And me, the concerned fool: No, please. Please don't disturb her. Let her sleep.

I followed Elisabeta's path, opened the door.

A coat closet.

Two wire hangers and a trash bin into which Elisabeta's snow globes had been dumped. They lay cracked and dribbling, price tags still affixed to the bottoms. Props. Beneath them the school photo of the little girl with the frizzy brown hair. The frame had cracked. I raised it, sweeping off the pebbles of broken glass. The picture was thin and came out easily. Not a photograph, but a color copy.

It had come packaged with the frame.

A chill crept along my scalp, down the back of my neck. I dropped the frame into the trash again.

When I stepped back outside, the wind whipped up clouds of dust and snapped my pants at my shins. I walked the front of the house, finally finding what I'd been hoping for: a hole in the hard dirt of a flower bed where a rental sign had been staked. Driving slowly around the housing loop, I called the numbers on various signs hammered into front lawns until I tracked down the right Realtor who also represented Elisabeta's house. When I told her I was interested in the property but curious about the crime-scene tape, she'd been only too eager to reiterate what she'd already told the cops and, from the sound of it, everyone else: It had been a one-month rental paid by money order, the transaction conducted by mail. She'd never seen a soul, and no one had even bothered to come back to collect the balance on the security deposit. Of course, she'd never imagined . . .

Nothing linked that house to me except my word and my memory, both of which were of questionable merit.

Elisabeta was my only breathing connection to the men who had killed Keith and framed me. She alone could corroborate my story, or at least a key part of it, which would go a long way toward clearing my name. She was also at grave risk. Valentine had been unable to locate her, and I doubted that Robbery-Homicide was knocking themselves out to do better.

I thought about jail, about prison, the movies I'd seen and the horror stories I'd heard. That tattooed inmate I'd passed in the corridor at the Parker Center, how the metal chains seemed barely to contain his muscles, how I'd flinched away, a pebble before a crashing wave. What could a man like that, unbound, do to a man like me?

If I couldn't find Elisabeta myself, she'd wind up like Doug Beeman.

And, chances were, so would I.

* * *

I vaulted over our rear fence, one foot on the greenhouse roof, and then down onto the overturned terra-cotta pot and the soft mulch of the ground. A reversal of the leap the intruder had made when I'd discovered him on the back lawn. I'd left my car up the street behind our house so I could come and go unmolested by the media stragglers out front. Since I didn't carry a key for the back door, I circled toward the garage. When I yanked open the side gate, I nearly collided with someone crouched by the trash cans. He and I both let out startled yells. He fell over himself running away, and only then did I see the camera swinging at his side.

Leaning against the house, I caught my breath in the grainy dusk.

Ariana was sitting cross-legged on a spot of cleared kitchen floor, notes fanned in a half circle around her. We hugged for a long time, my face bent to the top of her head, her hands gripping and regripping my back as if she were taking my measure. I breathed her in, thinking how for six weeks I could have done this whenever I wanted and yet for six weeks I hadn't done it once.

I followed her to her workstation--she was always most productive spread out on the floor--and we sat. The ubiquitous fake cigarette pack sat beside her laptop, and a sturdy Ethernet cord trailed to the modem she'd moved into the kitchen; wireless Internet couldn't work with the jammer on. She clicked through a few e-mails. "I was on the phone with lawyers all day," she said. "Referrals and referrals from referrals."

"And?"

"Referrals from referrals from referrals. Okay, I'll stop. The bottom line is that to get anyone worth having, we're gonna need at least a hundred grand for a retainer in case the arrest happens. Which, based on courthouse scuttlebutt that most of them were too happy to impart, seems to be more of a when than an if." She watched this news sink in, her face matching what I was feeling. She continued, "I was on with the bank, and we can max out the home-equity line, which with our income--"

I said quietly, "I got fired."

She blinked. Then blinked again.

"I don't know what to do but keep apologizing," I said.

I braced for anger or resentment, but she just said, "Maybe I can sell my share of the business. I've had buyers sniffing around in the past."

I was speechless, humbled. "I don't want you to do that."

"Then we'll have to sell the house."

When our down payment was sitting in escrow, Ariana and I used to drive up here and park across the street just to look at the place. The trips felt charged and vaguely illicit, like sneaking out at night to loiter beneath the window of your high-school sweetheart. When we'd moved in, with Ari's eye, my back, and our sweat, we'd dressed it up, planing out the cottage-cheese ceilings, switching the brass hinges for brushed nickel, replacing rust carpet with slate tile. I watched her eyes moving around our walls, our art, the countertops and cabinets, and I knew she was taking stock of the same sentiments.

"No," she said. "I won't sell this house. I'll go in tomorrow and see what I can figure out. Maybe a loan against the business. I don't . . . I don't know."

For a moment I was too moved to respond. "I don't want you to--" I caught myself, rephrased. "Do you think it's safe for you to go in to work?"

"Who knows what's safe anymore? Certainly not you prying around. But we no longer have any options."

I said, "You do."

Her mouth opened a little.

I said, "This is hell. And it's going to get worse from here. It makes me sick to think about you having to . . . Maybe we should think about putting you on a flight--"

"You're my husband."

"I haven't been much good on that front lately."

She was angry, indignant. "And, if you want to keep score, I've been a shitty wife in a few obvious ways. But either the vows mean something or they don't. This is a wake-up call, Patrick. For both of us."

I reached for her hand. She squeezed once, impatiently, and let go. I said, "No matter how many years it takes, I will figure out some way to make this up to you."

She managed a faint smile. "Let's just worry about making sure we have those years." She shoved a fall of hair out of her eyes, then looked at the notes around her, as if needing to take refuge in details. "Julianne called. She said she looked into the names you gave her, to no avail. I guess between the cops, the agents, and the press, everything around The Deep End went into information lockdown, so there's nothing on Trista Koan. And Julianne had no more luck than Detective Valentine finding out about Elisabeta--or Deborah Vance or whoever. She was very apologetic, Julianne. She's desperate to be helpful. Did you check out that prefab house in Indio?"

I told her what I'd learned--or hadn't learned--on the trip. "What was so amazing is the level of detail that woman saw to. I mean, the accent, the banana peels. Her performance was amazing."

"Where would you find people to play those roles? I mean, how would you even locate talent like that? Let alone talent willing to work a con?"

As usual, she'd jumped into my stream of thought. "Exactly. Exactly. You'd need an agent. A sleazy agent willing to plug his clients in to cons."

"Would an agent do that?" she asked.

"Not any I've heard of. So I'd imagine if you found one willing to play ball, you'd probably stick with him."

She got it immediately. "Doug Beeman's agent," she said. "That message. On Beeman's cell phone. Asking him why he missed his call time on the set for the shaving-cream commercial."

"Deodorant," I said. "But yes. Roman LaRusso."

Already she was typing. "And what was Doug Beeman's real name?"

"Mikey Peralta."

She paired them, and the search engine threw back its results. Sure enough, a Web site. The LaRusso Agency, in an average neighborhood that the site announced as "Beverly Hills-adjacent." Head shots of various clients formed a row, the photos spinning like slot-machine reels, replacing themselves. From the looks of it, LaRusso repped character actors. Barrel-chested Italian, cigar wedged between stubby fingers. Scowly black woman, curling red nails pronounced against a yellow muumuu. Mikey Peralta, grinning his offset grin. We watched with held breath as the little square head shots flipped and flipped, replenishing themselves. All those cheekbones, all those dimples, all that promise. The precious slideshow seemed an inadvertent commentary on Hollywood itself--dreamers and wannabes tethered to a gambling machine, their faces replaceable, interchangeable. And, as Mikey Peralta had learned, expendable.

I tensed with excitement and pointed. There she was. Her photo flashed up only for a few seconds, but there was no mistaking those doleful eyes, that profound nose.

Ariana said, "That's exactly how I pictured her."

The deck of photos shuffled Elisabeta back into obscurity.

I sat in the dark of the living room, peering out at the street. The front lawn gleamed with sprinkler water. I couldn't make out any vans or photographers or telescopes in the apartment windows across the street. They were still there, hidden in the night, but for a moment I could pretend that everything was as it had always been. I had come down to sit in the armchair and sip a cup of tea, to think about a lesson plan or what I wanted to write next, my wife upstairs in a plumeria bubble bath, on the phone with her mom or reviewing sketches, and I would go up, soon, and make love to her, and then we'd slumber, her arm thrown across my chest, cool beneath the lackluster heating vent, and I'd awaken, find her in the kitchen with bacon on the griddle and a lavender mariposa in her hair.

But then Gable and his compatriots came crashing through the fantasy. I pictured them laboring even at this late hour in the detective bullpen, charts and timelines and photographs spread on desks and pinned to walls, piecing together a story that had already mostly been written. Or maybe they were already speeding up Roscomare with renewed determination and a signed warrant. Those headlights there, touching the artless block of boxwood framing the steps of the apartment across. But no, just a 4Runner, slowing to rubberneck, gaping college faces at the window, taking in The House.