The Good Guy (21 page)

Forty-Four

S
itting up in bed, reading Toni Zero’s
Relentless Cancer,
Krait soon forgot his green tea and biscuits.

Her narrative drive was strong, her prose luminous and assured. She understood the necessity of understatement but also the value of hyperbole.

Most of all, he liked the seductive despair, the deeply settled hopelessness, the corrupting bitterness that gave no quarter to any optimist who might wish to debate this dark worldview.

From Zero’s book, the apprentice demon Wormwood could have learned much about turning innocent souls away from the light. And even old Screwtape himself might have picked up a trick or two.

Krait also approved of her anger. The anger remained always subordinate to despair, but she served it up in small doses that were enthrallingly vicious and vindictive.

For a while, he thought she might be the writer of the century, or at least that she would become his favorite above all others.

Gradually, however, she revealed a frustration with the willful ignorance that is an abiding human trait, an indignation at the cruelty that people visit upon one another. She might see the world as hopeless, but she believed it did not have to remain that way.

Worse, she yearned for a world in which promises were kept, in which trust was not betrayed, in which honor mattered, and in which courage inspired courage. Because of this, she finally forfeited Krait’s adoration.

Clearly, the despair on the page was not what she sincerely felt, but was what rough experience or a good professor had convinced her that she
ought
to feel. By contrast, the moments of anger burning in the book were real, but they were neither intense enough nor numerous enough for Krait’s taste.

Touring Paquette’s house the previous evening, he had reviewed the shelves of books in her living room, but he had not seen her Toni Zero novels. The fact that she had consigned them to a closet or had boxed them in the attic suggested that she might have recognized her own lack of conviction in the writing.

Indeed, the ’39 Ford coupe, her collection of novels by other writers, and her decor suggested an annoyingly hopeful heart.

He took her book into the bathroom and dropped it in the toilet. He emptied his bladder. He did not flush, but closed the lid to let the novel marinate.

This act did not harmonize with his penchant for cleanliness, but it was necessary.

In bed again, he found that the thermos had kept the tea warm. The biscuits were tasty.

When he settled down for a two-or three-hour nap, he kept the Glock under the covers with him, and he held the cell phone loosely in his hand.

He would wake in the precise position in which he had gone to sleep, and the phone would remain in his hand. He never dreamed and he was never restless in his slumber. He truly did sleep like the dead.

Forty-Five

W
hile Linda drove the Honda, Tim plugged
his new electric razor in the cigarette lighter, and shaved without benefit of a mirror.

When he finished, he said, “I just can’t stand that feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“Stubble, the way it itches. Clothes so full of sweat and stink you feel you’re in a pot of boiling cabbage—that doesn’t bother me.”

“Maybe it should.”

“Lice, lips so cracked they bleed, prickly heat, that dry gray fungus, the fancy cockroaches they have—give me all that and more if you can spare me stubble itch.”

“Most guys don’t reveal their affection for dry gray fungus on the first date.”

Returning the razor to its travel case, he said, “Most first dates aren’t this long.”

“Fancy cockroaches?”

“You don’t want to know. What is Mrs. Wen-ching like?”

“A petite dynamo. She worked at Cream and Sugar like the rest of the family. She was usually there lunch to early evening. She wasn’t scheduled to work the morning it happened.”

The Wen-ching residence was a sleek Moderne-style home in the hills of Laguna, cantilevered over a canyon.

Queen palms flanked the diamond-cut slate walkway and cast wings of raven-feather shadows on the variegated stone.

Lily Wen-ching answered the doorbell. Fiftyish, with porcelain-smooth skin the color of aged ivory, slender, wearing black silk pants and a matching blouse with a high collar, she stood perhaps five feet tall but had a presence bigger than her weight and height explained.

Speaking before they had a chance to introduce themselves, Lily said, “Is it…Linda? Double espresso, lemon peel on the side?”

“Exactly,” Linda said. “How do you do that, especially after all this time?”

“It was our lives, and such a satisfaction to see people happy with what we provided to them.”

Her voice was mellifluous. She made even common words sound like spoken music.

“You weren’t a regular,” she said to Tim, “and even if you came once in a while, I wouldn’t forget what a giant drank. How do you like your coffee?”

“Black or espresso, or intravenously.”

Smiling at Linda, Lily Wen-ching said, “I would remember him if he had come even a few times.”

Linda said, “He leaves an impression like a sudden silent falling stone.”

“How perfectly put,” Lily said.

Linda made introductions, and then said, “Mrs. Wen-ching—”

“Lily.”

“Thank you. Lily, when I tell you why we’re here, I hope you won’t think I’m crazy. Most people would. I suspect someone is trying to kill me…because I had coffee at the Cream and Sugar.”

The widow’s eyes, as dark and clear as a fresh-brewed Jamaican blend, neither widened nor narrowed. “Yes. The possibility exists.”

Lily Wen-ching led them into a living room with a stepped ceiling one shade lighter than the glazed apricot walls.

Lustrous bronze-colored drapes were gathered at each end of a wall of windows with a view of the purple morning sea and Catalina Island and a sky wrung dry of all but a few tangled scraps of scrim.

Linda and Tim sat facing the view in dark zitan-wood armchairs with red seat cushions and peony medallions in the wide back splats.

Their hostess excused herself without explanation. Her slippered feet made no sound either on the area rugs or on the wood floor.

A red-tailed hawk rose out of the canyon over which the house was suspended, and glided in a widening gyre.

In the living room, a pair of carved-stone chimeras displayed on tall incense stands seemed to watch Tim as he watched the hawk.

Silence of the kind with weight pooled in the house, and Tim felt it would be impolite, even coarse, to disturb the quiet.

So quick that she must have had an espresso machine standing by for service, Lily returned with three double servings in white cups on a red-lacquered tray. She set the tray on a zitan-wood table with recessed legs, elongated brindle joints, and decorative struts.

With her back to the view, she sat on a Luohan bed used as a sofa. Hornless dragons were carved on the back and arms, and a red cushion matched those on the chairs.

After a sip of espresso, she said, “Dear Dr. Avarkian was a regular customer.”

“We chatted a few times on your patio, when we sat at adjacent tables,” Linda remembered.

“Professor at UCI,” Lily told Tim. “He was a regular customer, died young of a heart attack.”

“How young?” Tim asked.

“Forty-six. Three months after the fire.”

“That’s young, all right, but men that young do sometimes have fatal heart attacks.”

“Lovely Evelyn Nakamoto.”

“I knew her, too,” Linda said, leaning forward on her chair. “She had that art gallery on Forest Avenue.”

“Five months after the fire,” Lily said, “visiting Seattle, Evelyn was killed in a crosswalk by a hit-and-run driver.”

“But Seattle,” Tim said, playing devil’s advocate, suggesting that if these deaths were related, they might be expected to have occurred in Laguna Beach or nearby.

“Somebody dies far from home,” Linda said, “it seems less connected to other deaths here. That’s exactly why they might have gone after her in Seattle.”

“Sweet Jenny Nakamoto,” said Lily Wen-ching.

“Evelyn had a daughter, they often had coffee together,” Linda said. “A pretty girl.”

“Yes. Jenny. So sweet, so bright. She was a student at UCLA. Had a little apartment above someone’s garage in Westwood. Someone waited in her apartment, raped her when she came home. Then murdered her.”

“Horrible. I hadn’t heard,” Linda said. “When did it happen?”

“Eight months ago, five months after her mother in Seattle.”

The rich espresso, beautifully brewed, had begun to taste bitter to Tim.

After returning her cup to the lacquered tray, sitting forward on the Luohan bed, hands clasped in her lap, Lily said, “An ugly thing about Jenny’s murder.”

Spotting prey, the circling red-tail plunged into the canyon, leaving the sky hawkless.

Staring at her folded hands, Lily said, “She choked to death on quarters.”

Not sure that he had heard correctly, Tim said, “Quarters?”

As if unable to meet their eyes when recounting this atrocity, Lily continued staring at her hands. “He tied Jenny’s hands behind her back, bound her ankles, held her down on the bed, and forced a roll of quarters down her throat.”

“Oh, God,” Linda said.

Tim felt certain that the last thing Jenny Nakamoto had seen, as her vision blurred with tears, had been the fierce dilated eyes, greedy for light, all light, her light.

“A heart attack, one vehicular manslaughter, one rape-murder,” Tim said. “The police might not see connections, but I think you’re right, Lily.”

She met his eyes. “Not just three. Two more. Nice Mr. Shotsky, the lawyer, and his wife, they came to Cream and Sugar together.”

“I didn’t know them,” Linda said, “but I know the story from the news. He shot her, then committed suicide with the same gun.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Lily Wen-ching. “Mr. Shotsky left a note saying he caught her naked in bed with a man. There was…I’m sorry, but I must say…there was semen in her, the police say didn’t come from her husband. But if Mr. Shotsky could shoot his own wife, why not the man? Why let the man go? Where is the man?”

Tim said, “You ought to be a detective, Lily.”

“I ought to be a wife and mother, but I’m not anymore.”

Although a tremor of emotion marked those words, her porcelain-smooth face and dark eyes remained serene.

Grief might be a thickening agent of the profound silence that pooled in this house, but a stoic acceptance of the adamantine rule of fate gave substance to it, as well.

The stone chimeras had pricked ears, as if listening for the footfalls of the man with gargoyle eyes.

Forty-Six

I
n a field of golden grass, among clusters of black
bamboo, stood cranes with black-stick legs and black necks and black beaks.

Shades of gold defined this six-panel screen in Lily Wen-ching’s living room, the black elements almost calligraphic. Otherwise there were the white feathered bodies of the cranes and their white heads, and a sense of peace.

“To the police,” Lily said, “these five deaths are less than coincidence. One of them told me, ‘There’s no conspiracy, Lily. It’s just life.’ How do they come to think this way—that death is life? That unnatural death and murder are somehow a natural part of life?”

Tim asked, “Have they made any progress in the investigation of your family’s murders?”

“You can’t make progress in a bear hunt if you only follow the tracks of deer. They’re looking for a thief, but there was no thief.”

“No money taken?” Linda asked.

“The fire took it. There wasn’t anything worth stealing. We began each day with just enough in the cash-register drawer to make change. Who kills four people for forty dollars in coins and small bills?”

“Some kill for less. For hate. For envy. For nothing. Just to kill,” Tim said.

“And then they prepare a fire with great care? And lock the door behind them, having timed the fire to start after they’re well gone?”

“The police found a timer…an incendiary device?” Linda asked.

“Such intense heat. Nothing left but a
suggestion
of a device. So they argue among themselves—there was, there wasn’t.”

In the vastness of sky beyond the window, a last fragile skiff of cloud was coming apart and sinking in the high blue.

Lily said, “How do you know someone wants to kill you?”

After glancing at Tim, Linda said, “A man tried to run me down in an alleyway. Later, he took shots at us.”

“Have you gone to the police?”

Tim said, “We have reason to think he may be in law-enforcement somehow, somewhere. We want to know more before we make a move.”

Leaning forward on the sofa, she said, “You have a name?”

“We have a name, but it’s phony. We don’t have his real name.”

“How did you know to come to me, that I have such suspicions?”

“Under this false name, the man was briefly a person of interest in the murders of your family.”

“Roy Kutter.”

“Yes.”

“But he was real. Roy Kutter. They cleared him.”

“Yes,” Linda said, “but that turns out to be a fake identity.”

“Do the police here know that?”

“No,” Tim said. “And I beg you not to go to them with anything we’ve told you. Our lives may depend on your discretion.”

“They wouldn’t listen anyway,” she said. “They think I’m crazy with grief.”

“We know,” Tim said. “We heard you’d gone to them about these other five deaths. And so we came.”

“Grief has not made me crazy,” she assured them. “Grief has made me angry and impatient and determined. I want justice. I want truth.”

“If we’re lucky, we may turn up at least the truth for you,” Tim said. “But justice is even harder to find in this world, these days.”

Rising from the sofa, Lily said, “I pray each night and morning for my lost sweetheart, for my lost boys, and my niece. I’ll pray for the two of you now, as well.”

As he followed the women out of the living room, Tim looked once more at the six-panel screen of graceful cranes and black bamboo. He saw something in it that he had not noticed previously: hidden in the golden grass—a golden, crouching tiger.

Although not sure that it was appropriate, at the front door, he bent to Lily Wen-ching and embraced her.

She must have thought it appropriate, for she stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Earlier, I saw you admire the screen.”

“Yes. And again just now. I like it very much.”

“What do you like—the beauty of the cranes?”

“At first, yes. But now I more like the calm of the cranes in the presence of the tiger.”

“Not everyone sees the tiger,” she said. “But he is there. He is always there.”

In the Honda again, Linda said, “Five more murdered since the fire. For something they didn’t know they knew?”

“Something happened while you were all there one day at the same time. Having coffee at the same time on the patio, at your separate tables.”

“But nothing ever happened on the patio,” she protested. “Nothing remarkable. We had our coffee. A pastry, a sandwich. Had our coffee and read a newspaper and enjoyed the sun—and went home.”

Driving away from the Wen-ching house, Tim said, “The tiger was there, but no one saw.”

When they descended through hills to the coast, she wondered, “What now?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“We only slept two hours. We could find a motel where they don’t raise their eyebrows when you pay in cash.”

“I don’t think I could sleep.”

“Me neither. So…why don’t we go to a coffeehouse with a patio? Let’s sit in the sun on the patio. Maybe enough sun and espresso can melt a memory out of me.”