Skies of Ash (38 page)

“How did she sound when you talked with her? Did she seem upset? Had she and Christopher been arguing?”

“She sounded tired,” Maris said. “I asked if he was goin’ on the trip, and she laughed and told me no. She didn’t say that they had been arguin’, but they ain’t really
argued.
No loud shoutin’ or pushin’. Just this quiet…
hate
. Regular people, strangers, ain’t able to tell when they actin’ ugly to each other. Course we can. Her voice changes or she just ignores our callin’. That way, she ain’t gotta pretend that everything is peachy keen.”

“Our daughter is a proud woman,” Randall explained.

“Did you encourage her to leave him?” I asked.

Randall dropped his head.

Maris held out her hands. “Why would we? All we saw was our daughter and our grandbabies bein’ taken care of.”

“Livin’ in a nice house,” he added. “Wearin’ nice clothes and driving nice cars…”

“No marriage is perfect,” she said.

“We thought that she loved him.”

“Cuz he kept his promises—”

“And he gave her everything she ever wanted.”

“
Almost
everything,” Maris whispered. “Juji never felt…
whole
. That’s what she told me.” The woman squinted at the padded wall behind me. “I asked her to tell me what that meant, feeling
whole.
Sounds like some New Age voodoo to me.
Wholeness
. Even she can’t put her finger on it. But she insists that she’s just…
not whole
with him.”

“And what did you say to her?” I asked.

“The last time she mentioned it, I told her to turn off
Dr. Phil
and get her behind back in a church pew. I told her that nothin’ was wrong, that all wives lacked
somethin’
in their marriage. That what she was feelin’ was normal. After Eve ate that apple, this became our lot in life.”

I tapped my pen against my knee, ignoring that familiar internal burn that usually ignited during meals with my mother. “In other words, she needed to get over it.”

Maris squared her shoulders as criticized mothers do. “Truly.”

Annoyed, I leaned forward in my chair. “Tell me: what did you think of—?”

“
Him
?” Randall asked, his lip curled into a sneer.

“No,” I said. “Your daughter.”

Wide-eyed, Maris tried to formulate an answer but couldn’t.

Randall patted his wife’s knee. “Juliet’s very bright.”

That answer jump-started Maris. “She’s talented. She coulda been a doctor if she had tried harder.”

“She’s very charitable. Will give the shirt off her back.”

“She’s prayerful. Devout.”

My hands clenched tighter with each adjective. I didn’t know their daughter personally, but what I did know… Bullshit, more bullshit, and hell no to everything they’d just said about her. There were no receipts that backed up those sweet-sounding declarations. “Mr. and Mrs. Weatherbee, I need the entire truth. The good and the not so good.”

We sat in silence as the couple mulled this over.

Maris slumped inward. “She can start an argument in an empty house.”

“Hard to please,” Randall said as he fiddled with his hat’s brim.

I nodded, envious that Juliet had had a father who had loved her and knew her and had stuck around to know that she was hard to please. A father who now mourned her death.

“Juji can be…
difficult
,” Maris admitted. “She still supports Christopher and sticks by him. When he was flying back and forth to Las Vegas, she took care of the kids and the house without complaint. When he was buying new suits and shoes for himself, she never fussed. She always says, ‘As long as the lights are on and my children have food, he can do what he’—” A sob broke from the old woman’s chest. “I’m talkin’ about her as though she’s sitting in the next room.”

Randall quickly wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

And the old woman cried until she shouted, “Could he have killed her? Did he do this? Cuz he ain’t had to. She was dyin’. My baby was dyin’.”

I offered the tissue packet I had brought along to the old man.

Randall handed several sheets to his wife, then pulled her back into a hug. “It’s just that he ain’t said those things he supposed to say, Detective Norton. He ain’t said, ‘I had nothing to do with this, Pop.’ Or, ‘I loved them and could never hurt them, Pop.’ Not ’til he e-mailed me did he write those things. But he ain’t
said
them yet to my face. If he innocent, why can’t he
say
those things to us?”

Maris dried her tears. “But we ain’t gon’ ask him none of this, and we gon’ keep being there for him, cuz he may just open up to us and tell us
something
. But we know him, what type of man he is. He thinks he knows how to act and what to say, but we can tell yesterday, when we was sittin’ there with him, that there’s somethin’
off
with him.”

Her chin dipped. “She was so unhappy, and we told her to pray over it and not to divorce him. He ain’t ever hit her and he ain’t had different women all over the place and… My baby’s dead. And my li’l Coco, and my Cody, my babies…” She hid her face in the crook of her elbow to weep.

“I ain’t gon’ lie to you, Detective,” Randall said, fighting his own tears. “We seen the autopsy reports, and we read about Juliet having drugs in her system and that there were drugs in the babies’ systems, too. We know that Juliet may have wanted to die—she was in so much pain, physically and mentally. She may have wanted to burn down that house—she truly hated that house. But her babies—” More tears rolled down his cheeks. “She would have never… never… Oh, Father God, help me.” He joined in the weeping, no longer able to speak.

But I knew what he couldn’t say.

Juliet would kill herself. She would even kill Christopher. But she would never murder her children.

RANDALL AND MARIS WEATHERBEE HUGGED ME AS THOUGH I WERE THEIR COUSIN
or next-door neighbor—not the cop investigating the murders of their daughter and grandchildren.

I promised to call them as soon as we made an arrest, then watched them trudge down the corridor. My heart ached for the old couple, and I wanted to ease their suffering right then, wanted to march into Lieutenant Rodriguez’s office and demand an arrest warrant for Christopher Chatman. But I couldn’t—I needed more. Just a little bit more.

Colin and Pepe had abandoned their desks for the evening, leaving me alone with night-shift dicks who had better things to do than sing my song of woe.

My cell phone was stuffed with voice-mail messages. Mom making sure we were still meeting at the funeral home. Syeeda and Lena offering me a bed to sleep in and martinis to drown my sorrows. The fire chief working my home fire—a guy named Kendricks—asking me to call him back. Adonis Thistle telling me that Eli Moss’s alibi had checked out—his supervisor at the airport had confirmed that he had reported to work on the night before the Chatman fire and had not left until well into late Tuesday morning.

Moss didn’t do it.

I texted Mom—
on my way
—then lumbered to the garage and to the Crown Vic.

It was dark out. Freed men hung around the station, trapped in clouds of cigarette smoke and the pull of jail. Across the street, the coin-op Laundromat’s machines were all tumbling—fluff and fold on a Saturday night.

The Inglewood Mortuary was busier than the Laundromat. In the largest parlor, a little Hispanic boy nicknamed Junior lay in a white coffin. Eight days ago, the seven-year-old had caught an Avenues bullet in his chest as he played in his front yard. And tonight it looked like the entire neighborhood had come to the boy’s viewing—from other little buzz-cut boys, also nicknamed Junior, to teens with tattooed wrists and drawn-on eyebrows to bosom-heavy
abuelitas
in rayon dresses and rosary-draped wrists.

I found my mother in the mortuary director’s office. Landscapes, as well as aging shots of Los Angeles in the eighties, the era of Mayor Tom Bradley and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, hung on the walls. Mom stood at a white plaster pedestal, elegant in a poinsettia-colored sweater dress and high-heeled boots. She looked tight as she flipped through a large binder of memorial-book templates. One little tremor from a carelessly slammed door would shatter her and leave her as fine as her daughter’s cremated remains.

I kissed her cool cheek. “You didn’t have to come here.”

She reached to stroke my face but her hand stopped short. “Gregory called me this afternoon, and he told me that…” Tears shimmered in her eyes as she studied my face without touching it. “You feel you have to do this
now
? Divorce him
now
?”

If she had been anyone else, I would’ve said, “Yes, right now. It’s my life, it’s my marriage, it’s my timetable, I’m an adult, I do what I think is best.” But she was my mother, and I backed away from her and into a chair, crumpling myself before my knees crumpled for me. “Mom,” I said, sounding closer to seven years old than thirty-seven. My pulse raced as my gaze flitted from the pedestal to the funeral director’s desk to the heavy drapes.

“You could’ve died today,” she scolded. “Twice. From the fire and from that psychopath. You could’ve died, and yet you kick out the one other person in your life who cares enough to stick around.”

“
Cares
? Did Greg tell you—?”

The office door opened.

A petite woman with honey-brown skin and lilac-colored hair wafted into the office on a scented cloud of magnolias and spearmint gum. She introduced herself as Bobbie Wallerstein, the director of the mortuary. She took a seat behind the desk and said, “The memorial service for Victoria… I believe you asked about New Year’s Eve, eleven in the morning. Correct?”

I nodded and said, “Yes.”

Then, Mom answered the remaining questions:

Yes, the service will take place here at the on-site chapel.

Yes, we will take the urn with us.

Yes, we will sprinkle Victoria’s ashes at various locations around the city.

I wrote the check and handed it to Bobbie Wallerstein, wondering if my bank would call because that handwriting on the check… whose handwriting was that?
Mrs. Norton, someone just wrote a check payable to Inglewood Mortuary. We placed a hold on it and our Fraudulent Activity department will be contacting you soon.

I would explain to that customer-service rep that an ice queen and a fairy with purple hair had watched me write, that I was just weeks away from memorializing my dead sister, days away from watching her ashes ride the wind and drift away from me, forever this time.

And then we were done, and my mother and I walked to the parking lot in silence.

A kiss on my cheek, a “call me in the morning,” and Mom climbed into her Honda.

Once I could no longer see the Accord’s brake lights, I wandered back to my car.

Don’t know why I drove to the Chatman house.

Don’t know why I approached the man who was already standing there.

Christopher Chatman had changed back into his blue tracksuit. He stood on the curb, his gaze trained on the destroyed house.

After five days of sadness, Christmas had returned to Don Mateo Drive. Jewel-colored and decorated Christmas trees twinkled in almost every living room window. But not in the Moss house. And not at the Chatman house, either.

On a Saturday just a week ago, a girl in a soccer uniform had played with her American Girl doll on that porch. A boy, angry and hormonal, sat in the living room with his laptop, typing messages of hate on Internet forums. A woman had opened windows, perhaps to thin out the smell of burned meat from the kitchen. And a man, her husband, their father, had pretended to be… normal.

“They’re tearing it all down,” Chatman marveled. “The only home I’ve ever had.”

“Mr. Chatman,” I said. “I spoke with—”

“I didn’t come here to talk to you. I would prefer to be alone as I mourn, but since we are standing on a public curb…” His nostrils flared. “Since the day you walked into my life, I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. I’ve listened to Ben go on and on about how bright you are. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you two had something going on.”

I flinched. “A murder investigation—that’s what’s going on.”

“Your rings are gone, Detective,” he said with a smirk. “I noticed that earlier today, but thought it rude to mention in front of Detective Taggert. What happened? And did my friend have something to do with it?”

I kept my eyes on the house.

“He hasn’t called you, has he? To apologize for cutting out on you last night?”

I didn’t respond. But no, he had not.

“Marriage is a bitch,” he lamented. “How did yours turn into such a pile of shit?”

I crossed my arms. “My personal life is not—”

“Oh, but it
is
a part of this investigation.” He turned to face me. “Let me guess: All of your life, men have been nothing but dogs to you. Mean, snarling dogs who piss all over your leg and call it love. And now you can no longer separate the personal from the professional. Your bigotry—”

“Bigotry?”

“Yes. Your
bigotry
against me, against my maleness, is nauseating and offensive. And to be honest I’m a little disappointed. Because Ben is right—you
are
smart. I thought you would see beyond the obvious, ignore the low-hanging fruits of this tragedy, but I guess not.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Don’t think he’ll throw it all away for you.”

“Don’t think you’ll win in the end,” I warned. “That you’ll slip away into the night and live forever in beautiful Venezuela, living off the money you’ve stolen from your clients.”

He shook his head. “There you go again. I tried to
save
my family that night. I literally had to be tackled to keep from possibly killing myself to save them. I even called you as soon as I could. Did I hire a defense attorney? No, I didn’t. Do I regret some things? Of course. I especially regret leaving my family that night. And I wish I could’ve given you more names of people who had issues with me, with my wife or my son, but I honestly can’t think of anyone. I did my best, Detective.”