Never Fear (35 page)

An usher passed me and I reached out and touched his arm.

“Where are the dressing rooms?” I asked.

“Back into the lobby and to the left.”

I looked at the crush of people heading for the exits.

“Can I reach them from the stage?”

He started to shake his head and I showed him my badge.

“Back of stage left.” He pointed.

I waited for people to pass, then rushed down the aisle and up the steps to the stage. As I started to cross the make-believe world of the living room, I heard my father's voice jump from the past.

Where is she? Where'd you put her
?

I tried to push it away but the memories came regardless of how much I tried to stop them.

Bitch,
he yelled.
Where's my little girl
?

A lamp was smashed, a chair leg snapped and then the dull sound of my mother's small frame hitting the wall
.

“Can I help you?”

A stage manager was standing a few feet from me, a headset around his neck. The lights had dimmed so that the set appeared to be in twilight.

“Dressing rooms,” I said.

He pointed toward the back and I rushed through the darkened wings into a bright, wide hallway that curved behind the stage. The sound of a heavy door opening somewhere was followed by laughter. I heard footsteps that sounded like someone running.

The two actors I had seen taking a curtain call came around the corner laughing and I passed them in a full run. Around the turn the scene and costume shops were on the left. Twenty feet farther on, two doors on the right were marked DRESSING ROOMS.

I stepped up to the first door and pulled it open. An actress was standing in the center of the room buttoning her blouse. She turned and looked at me, holding a hand over her chest.

I stepped back out and over to the second door. As I reached for it, a stagehand dropped a ladder at the end of the hallway by the exit, then walked out of sight. I looked back at the door for a moment, letting my hand slip down to the Glock. My fingers closed briefly on the handle, then I released it and pulled open the door and stepped inside.

The scent of makeup, sweat, and cigarettes hung in the air. A row of dressing tables ran along the right side of the room. The clothes I'd seen my father wearing on stage were draped over a chair. From the back of the room came the sound of a shower. I crossed the room to a closed door that led to the sound of the shower.

I pulled open the door but didn't go in. The room was L-shaped. The sound of the shower was coming from around the corner in the back.

“Step out,” I said.

The water continued to flow.

“Thomas Manning.”

There was no change. I listened for the sound of the water's flow being interrupted by a hand or arm passing across it, but it was steady. I stepped onto the tile floor and walked past the sinks and stalls to the far corner. The shower was empty, just a stream of water pouring onto the white tiles and swirling down the drain.

“No,” I whispered, rushing back out. I couldn't have missed him; it had only been a matter of minutes.

As I passed the dressing table where my father's costume was draped over the back of a chair, I stopped. On the table next to a makeup kit was my father's driver's license from New York and a small envelope with my name written on it in graceful, old-fashioned penmanship. I picked it up and opened it. A thick gold wedding ring slipped out into the palm of my hand. I remembered it. I knew the cool feel of it as his hand closed around my thin, five-year-old wrist or touched the side of my face. I remembered the small crescent bruise it left on my mother's skin again and again. My hand began to tremble and I set the ring down.

Also in the envelope was a small folded note card like you would use if sending flowers. I pulled it out and opened it.

I'm sorry
, my father had written.

I put the driver's license, ring, and note into my pocket and rushed out of the dressing room and into the hallway. A light had been turned off at the far end. A small red exit sign glowed in the darkness.

I took a cautious step, listening for any sound that might reveal where he had gone. Nothing. I crossed the darkness at the end of the hallway at a run. The latch of the door hit my hip heavily, but the door gave way and I tumbled out into the dull gray coastal light. Before I could turn, I saw movement on my left. I tried to swing toward it, but a hand caught my arm, and another came toward my face, and I tried to spin away from the blow.

“Don't—” I started to say.

The hand gently touched my neck. “Alex.”

I stared into his face for a moment before I fully realized it was Harrison.

“He didn't come this way?” I asked.

Harrison shook his head.

“He's going out the front door with the crowd,” I said, already moving back toward the exit I had just come out.

Harrison raced down the alley to the theater's entrance as I stepped back into the hallway and ran past the dressing rooms and the stage, all the way to the far end. At the entrance to the lobby I flung open the door and stepped in.

Several hundred people filled the space from wall to wall, wineglasses in their hands, their voices engaged in as many different conversations. I tried to work through the crush of people but they were packed in tight. Some laughter erupted somewhere, then a short burst of applause. I scanned the faces closest to me, then across the lobby, and saw a figure moving and stopping, moving and stopping, as if he were shaking hands.

Someone in the crowd yelled “Brooks” and the figure turned and looked in my direction. For a moment all that was visible were pieces of a face, a flick of dark hair, a flash of a smile as he shook a hand. And then he stepped into view as if he'd known all along right where I was standing.

He reached up and removed the glasses he was wearing, looked at me, and for just an instant the hundreds of voices in the room seemed to fall silent. He reached up and rubbed his eyes, then slipped the glasses back on. The voices in the room returned and then he vanished into the crowd.

I pulled out my badge and held it out, shouting “Police” to try to clear a path, but only half the people in my way heard my voice. An elbow hit my rib and I stumbled to one knee, gasping for air as the pain gripped my chest.

A hand reached down and pulled me to my feet. It was Harrison.

“Did you see him?” I asked when I got enough air into my lungs to speak.

“No.”

“He was moving toward the door,” I shouted over the hundreds of voices.

Harrison looked at me and shook his head. “I just came from the door.”

We looked at each other for a moment, then Harrison reached out and put his arm around my shoulder to protect my broken ribs. He began moving through the crowd, forcing people out of the way with his free hand until we stepped through the doors of the theater and were standing outside.

Forty or fifty people had spilled out onto the sidewalk with their glasses of wine. On the edge of the crowd near the street I saw movement and rushed toward it. The figure was moving toward a parked car, a baseball cap now covering his head. As he reached into his pocket for keys I took hold of his arm and spun him around. The man looked at me in surprise and took a step away.

“I'm sorr—” I started to say, then ran into the street and looked up and down the length of Venice Boulevard. The street had emptied of beach traffic, only a few cars were moving east or west. I studied the faces in the cars and followed the movement of each pedestrian on the sidewalk but all I saw were strangers.

“He's gone,” Harrison said.

My father had vanished into a gray, colorless dusk.

48

We looked for my father in the fading light of Venice until darkness took hold. We searched through the crowd again, the theater itself, and all the surrounding streets, but found nothing. He had stepped back in and then out of my life, leaving behind a two-word note, a gold wedding band, and memories I could no longer hide from.

No physical evidence existed directly connecting my father to the River Killer murders. That Hazzard had spent eighteen years tracking him would be of little use in a justice system—even one as tarnished as this. But the cop inside me knew, just as the little girl in the blue dress did, that no other evidence was needed to know the truth of what my father had done on the banks of L.A.'s river of cement.

He was mine now. Every new name, new role, new city he adopted, every time he stepped out of his shadow existence, I would have to be there to shine a light on it. If I failed, whoever he touched or harmed, whoever he said “I'm sorry” to, was my responsibility. Until the day he dies, this would be how I would care for him. It's what children do for parents; it's part of the bargain that is struck every time a new life enters this world. The roles eventually reverse.

No actor named Brooks, or Powell, or Fisk, or even Manning appeared in Denver. In the weeks that followed I would search another city, and then another after that, and on and on because that's what you do for family. You never give up on them.

The following morning I signed the papers and legally became responsible for the remains of my half brother John Manning. In the days before the funeral I would go through his apartment and meet the man I never knew. The solitary life he led was a strange reflection of our father's isolation. His relationship with Dana Courson was only a little over a month old. If friends other than her existed in his life, he left no physical evidence of their presence. He had a library card, but I couldn't tell what he liked to read. If he had hobbies, he had either kept them secret or never had a chance to share them with anyone.

The few scraps of information I was able to piece together about his past suggested that he was seven years old when our father left his mother. If our father gave him the things I had longed for as a child but never received, no record exists. I don't know if they were a happy family. I don't know if our father was violent with him. I don't know what memories were held silently in his heart.

What I do know is that three months after my brother's seventh birthday, his father walked out of the house and never returned. Six months later the first River Killing took place.

How long John was aware that he had a half sister would also remain a secret. My phone number was written in his book, but his bills showed it had never been dialed. What I did know was that in a moment of fear, I was the person he thought of, and the last person he would ever reach out to.

On a sunny morning with a sky so blue it could have been drawn with a crayon, he was buried on the side of a hill in Forrest Lawn, just yards from the grave of the man who wrote
The Wizard of Oz
.

Lacy, Harrison, Chavez, and Traver stood with me as he was laid to rest. A priest spoke of the things he may have loved, and how he might have laughed, and as he did I thought that in the years to come, when asked if I had a brother, I would recite those imagined details as if I had known him.

As we walked away from the freshly turned earth, I paused and scanned the surrounding area for a lone figure. My father wasn't there. As I drove away I looked again, thinking I might have missed a place of concealment, but I hadn't. But it was what I did now. I would always be looking.

Both Cross's and Hazzard's deaths would be ruled suicides by the county coroner. The SWAT officers who killed the Western Union clerk Hector Lopez were found to have acted in accordance with justifiable use of force. No record would ever officially list Cross as a suspect in the deaths of Victoria Fisher, Dana Courson, Detective Williams, and John Manning.

The record would show my brother's death was the result of a self-inflicted gunshot. The murders of Detective Williams, Victoria Fisher, Dana Courson, Jenny Roberts, and Alice Lundholm remained officially unsolved, the paperwork sinking deeper and deeper into the endless records in City Hall.

The drive back to my house after the funeral took a little over twenty minutes. I had nearly forgotten until I pulled back onto Mariposa that much of my neighborhood had been reduced to ashes. People I had known for twenty years were sifting through rubble for family treasures or the odd trinket that now took on the importance of lost memories.

At the end of the block a white sedan I recognized as a rental car was parked in front of my house. Turning up the driveway, I saw my mother sitting on the front steps. It had been nearly two years since I had seen her, the distance between us now equal to the years of silence. She was dressed in elegant slacks, a matching blouse, as if we still lived in a time when getting on a plane was stylish.

“My God,” she whispered as I stepped up to her and gave her a hug. “What happened here? Are you all right?”

I sat down on the step and looked over what was left of the neighborhood.

“If you don't want to tell me, I'll understand,” my mother said.

“I found . . .” I started to say, but let it go. “I remembered what our secret was,” I said.

My mother stared at me, then shook her head.

“I can't imagine what you're talking—” she began to say, then stopped.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then looked out toward the blackened hills, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

“You found your father?” she whispered.

Overhead a pair of crows spun and dipped in the blue sky, playing a game of chance to see which one could fall farthest without touching the ground. I took hold of my mother's hand and tried to imagine an answer to such a question.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the assistance and support of David Highfill, Sarah Landis, and Elaine Koster.