Low Life (19 page)

After a moment’s thought Simon decided he knew exactly where she was – and he wanted to go there anyway. There was a trunk he wanted to pry open.

The Volvo was gone. Maybe the police had taken it. Maybe they had gotten a warrant and taken it and were now searching it. Maybe they’d already searched it and had found
Jeremy Shackleford’s body in the trunk – his bones, anyway.

He shook his head at that thought. He didn’t think that was it.

If the police had the car, and if Zurasky or someone working for him had planted Shackleford’s body in its trunk, he wouldn’t still be standing here. There’d be a dozen cops on
him by now. Instead there were none. Someone else had the car.

Who?

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead just above his left eyebrow. It throbbed with pain. He exhaled. After a moment he opened his eyes again, decided he couldn’t worry about that
right now, and turned toward the back alley. He had locked the door last night when he left – creature of habit that he was – and had to break in.

He jumped up, grabbing for the ladder, but missed. He looked around for something to stand on. A broken cinder block leaned against the wall ten feet away. That might give him
just enough added height. He grabbed it and set it beneath the ladder, stood atop it, and jumped again.

This time he managed to wrap a fist around the rusted fire-escape ladder and pull it down. Rust flakes fell around and on him. The third rung from the bottom fell right off the rusted ladder and
onto the ground. He brushed himself down and then climbed the ladder, glad he’d only lived on the second floor.

He pushed the dead ficus on his fire escape aside with a dull-polished, scuff-toed shoe and climbed in through the bathroom window, trying to be as quiet as possible in case someone was here.
How strange – having to break into his own apartment, having to worry about someone else lurking here.

His stomach felt tight. His head throbbed.

The apartment was hollow, a husk, a cocoon from which the moth had emerged. You could hear the dull hum of silence like tinnitus in your ear. Simon walked through this, feeling a slight droop as
the floorboards gave beneath his weight.

As soon as he walked into the living room he saw it. The Mason jar sat atop the coffee table, Francine swimming inside.

He walked to the coffee table and picked up the jar. When he did he noticed something else: the picture of Shackleford and Samantha he had stolen was missing.

He strapped Francine into the passenger’s seat and started the car. The black Cadillac was nowhere to be seen – when he’d walked back to the Saab in Pasadena,
it had been gone. It bothered him that the guy had found him at that rat-hole motel in Hollywood. He knew he hadn’t been followed there. He thought he knew he hadn’t been followed
there. But just lately he didn’t know he knew anything.

No – two plus two still equaled four, and four plus four still equaled eight, and eight plus eight sixteen.

Some things could be depended upon.

Simon put the car into gear.

He would drop Francine off at the house in Pasadena and then figure out what his next move would be. Right now he didn’t know what direction to turn in, what lead to follow. What he saw
before him was a tangle, and no visible end piece with which to work.

He was on Virgil, heading toward Silver Lake Boulevard, when the black Cadillac swept out of a side street and started tailing him again.

That’s when he became certain his car had a transponder attached to it someplace. It should have been obvious to him this morning. It would have been if he were capable of thinking
clearly. He needed to be able to think clearly. He needed to stop letting his emotions overwhelm him – the fear and the paranoia and the confusion. He needed to look at these events like a
math problem. Instead he was letting each moment overwhelm him and acting on instinct and instinct wasn’t—

He needed to lose the guy in the Cadillac and then pull into a parking lot or something and find the transponder on his car. The guy was tracking him for someone. He wasn’t going to make a
move; he would just continue to follow. And since Simon didn’t know why, he didn’t want it done. It didn’t matter so much this morning – he’d just been going to take a
shower, and the guy knew where Shackleford’s house was already – but it would matter once he dropped off Francine and got to work on figuring this out. He didn’t want anybody
following him then.

Instead of continuing on toward home – toward Pasadena – he swung right onto Beverly Boulevard, made another right onto Rampart, and tried to lose the guy by turning randomly on a
series of side streets just north of MacArthur Park. Unfortunately the guy didn’t seem to care that Simon knew he was being followed – he tailed close – and with traffic Simon
found it impossible to get enough distance between him and the Cadillac to lose it.

Fine, then, if this guy wanted him so badly, Simon would make himself available. He was tired of being followed.

He led the Cadillac into a blind alley off Figueroa and slammed down on the brakes, screeching to a stop. Then he swung the driver’s side door open and stepped outside.

‘What do you want with me?’ he said as he walked toward the Cadillac. ‘What is it? I’m here. I’m right here. What the fuck do you want!?’

The jockey in the driver’s seat looked left and then right, seemingly in a panic. It was hard to be sure, his eyes were impossible to see through the black lenses of his sunglasses, but
his movements made it look to Simon like he was in a panic, squirming in his seat.

And then the guy put the Cadillac into reverse and screeched backwards down the alleyway. His left front fender banged against a brick wall and he lost a side-view mirror, and then he screeched
into the street. A car horn blared. Brakes squealed. Metal crunched and the Cadillac spun in a half circle.

The car that hit it was a yellow Gremlin, and after a moment a heavy-set Hispanic woman stepped from it and started storming toward the jockey saying, ‘You stupid motherfucker. What the
fuck do you think you’re fucking doing!? I’m gonna call my husband, he’s gonna kick your fucking—’

The jockey put the Cadillac into gear and it roared away.

‘Where the fuck do you think you’re—’

She threw her cell phone at the car and it bounced off the back window and then shattered against the asphalt.

‘Fuck!’ she said.

It was tucked under the right-front wheel well, a simple black box with a red light on one end. It blinked steadily. Simon threw it to the ground and then stepped into the car.
He started the engine and was backing out of the alley when he realized that Francine was missing. The seatbelt was still snapped into place but there was no Mason jar there under the strap.

He stepped out of the car, looked around, and saw no one. The alleyway was empty.

The jar was sitting on the coffee table when he walked back into the apartment on Wilshire.

Instead of driving back to the house to drop off Francine he drove directly to the Pasadena College of the Arts. He had wasted enough of his day chasing Francine around and he
wanted to get Kate Wilhelm’s address so he could pay her a visit. She knew something and he wanted to get it out of her. She knew something about his past and how it was connected with Jeremy
Shackleford – something he couldn’t remember. And he was becoming more and more certain that everything revolved around that something. He couldn’t see it but he knew it was there
the same way scientists knew of a planet they couldn’t see: by its gravitational effect on everything around it that they
could
see. Everything seemed to revolve around this invisible
part of his past. His past and Jeremy Shackleford’s.

He walked through the parking lot, carrying Francine, and thinking about that. Something had happened last May and he couldn’t remember it. Kate knew what it was, and who he was. She had
called him Simon and she knew he couldn’t remember last May. That had to be where he was connected with Shackleford, the point at which their paths had first crossed. Samantha had said that
Jeremy’d had an accident last year. She didn’t say it had been in May but Simon now knew it had been. It had to have been.

He was digging through desk drawers, pulling out stacks of papers and flipping through them, looking for Kate’s information, when Howard Ullman knocked on the office door
and then pushed his way in without waiting for a response.

‘I thought I heard you in here.’

‘Hi.’

‘Samantha’s been in a panic. She called four times to see if you’d come in to work. The cops have had her at the station all morning, asking her questions she doesn’t
know the answers to. You missed your algebra class. What the hell is going on?’

‘I’m in the middle of something. Can this wait?’

‘You’re in the middle of something?’

‘Yes.’

‘A nervous breakdown perhaps?’

‘I can’t explain it.’

‘Does it involve Kate Wilhelm?’

Simon looked up and really examined Ullman’s face for the first time since he’d walked in. He was unshaven. His lips were chapped and there was a bloody scab on the bottom one where
he had scraped away at the dead skin with his teeth. His eyes were marijuana-reddened but sharp with intelligence and perception and Simon didn’t like the shine they had at all.

‘Why – ’ he licked his lips – ‘what makes you think that?’

‘I can’t think of what else it might be.’

‘But what would it have to do with Kate Wilhelm?’

Ullman was quiet for a minute. He ran his tongue over his teeth, sucked at something stuck behind his eyetooth, swallowed.

‘You’ve not been yourself,’ he said finally. ‘You need to get help. I don’t think you can save your job at this point. Carol has it in for you – and at this
point I’m way past defending your behavior. But you might – just maybe – be able to save your marriage. Samantha loves you. She’s put up with more than any woman in her
right mind would. You’re lucky for that. But I don’t think she’s gonna put up with much more, Jeremy. In fact, I won’t let her. If you fuck up again, I’ll have to rip
out your heart.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t want Samantha to have to watch you fall apart.’

Ullman left without answering any of his questions.

He continued digging through paperwork for another twenty minutes but mostly what he found were absences. He didn’t have a Wilhelm in any of his classes, for instance. No Kate or Kathryn
or Kathy or Katrina – no Wilhelm at all. But while he looked for Kate’s information, he also hoped to find something else that might be useful. He knew more now than when he’d
first searched the office, so maybe now something that meant nothing then would be of significance. He found no reference to himself. He found no reference to Zurasky. He found one reference to
Kate – if it was the same Kate, and he thought it was – the beginning of a letter addressed to her that had been crumpled and shoved into a desk drawer unfinished.

That was the whole thing. It was written on a sheet of yellow paper in blue ink. There was a coffee stain on the bottom right-hand side, and the word

was scrawled in big letters across the two paragraphs.

He folded it up and slipped it into a pocket. Then he grabbed Francine from the top of the desk and headed toward his car in the parking lot.

As he reached the Saab and unlocked the car door he realized his hands were empty. He was almost certain he’d grabbed Francine from the desk before walking out of the
office – almost. He could close his eyes and remember the way he’d reached across the desk, the way his hip had bumped a stack of papers and knocked it down, the way the papers spread
across the floor like a fanned deck of cards, the feel of the cool glass against his fingertips hard and smooth – and yet his hands were empty.

The jar wasn’t in the office.

He knew he was wasting time, but he couldn’t stop himself.

He parked the car on the south side of Wilshire, in front of the Korean barbecue joint, and jogged across the street toward the Filboyd Apartments, dodging a smattering of cars as he went.

The man in the Cadillac, the jockey, was parked on the north side of the street, in front of his building, watching him through the black lenses of his sunglasses. Had he known Simon was going
to come back here or had it been a lucky guess? Had he taken the jar knowing that Simon would—

Maybe he was being followed by more than one person. He couldn’t see the jockey’s eyes. He was pretending to examine the backs of his fingers, nibbling at bloody hangnails there, but
Simon knew the man was really watching him.

He pushed his way through the front doors before he remembered he had no key to get in, pushed his way back out, and walked around the corner of the building toward the fire escape in back. As
he walked up the sidewalk toward the alleyway he saw Helmut Müller. The man was walking toward him, looking down at his feet, making small steps and watching the sidewalk like if he
didn’t stay focused he’d forget what he was doing. Maybe he would. Death was a pretty good excuse for a bad memory. When he heard Simon’s footsteps he looked up at him.

‘Well, take him,’ Müller said, then looked past Simon’s shoulder and nodded.

Simon looked behind him, saw nothing. Then he walked past Müller without a word and into the alley.

The Mason jar was resting on the coffee table and Francine was swimming inside it. He picked it up and started back to the bathroom. The man in the Cadillac was out on Wilshire
right now, probably putting another transponder under one of his wheel wells. He’d had enough of that son of a bitch.