“So I’m curious why Ed Granby would have contacted you about this case a day before the body was found.” I get to a point he never thought I’d make. “How would he have known about something that hadn’t happened yet?”
“I think there was concern because the boys were missing.”
“Boys? As in more than one?”
“I don’t remember except there was a concern.” He raises his voice like a weapon he might strike me with.
“I suspect the reason Granby chatted with you was to make sure there would be no concern if and when something unfortunate was discovered. And it was about to be,” I reply bluntly. “Coincidentally, the very next day.”
“I would appreciate your not calling me again about this!”
“It won’t be me who calls you next, Dr. Geist.”
In 3-D and high-resolution my former colleague’s deliberate deception couldn’t be more apparent. I’m looking inside the bathroom, with its traditional old-style décor, at the open doorway now, peering in, getting the perspective from the outside in as if I’ve just arrived and haven’t been here before. Then I move inside again.
The black lid of the white toilet is down, as if someone might have been sitting on it, and on the black-and-white tile floor in front of it a plush white mat is indented by large sneakers that were approximately an eleven or twelve in a men’s size. I imagine a male, probably a young one, perched on the toilet lid with his big sneakered feet resting on the mat while Gabriela was taking her ritualistic bath, and that’s consistent with the diary Benton went through on fifteen-year-old Martin Lagos’s computer disk, pages of it displayed on the data table.
She smears that gross chalky white shit all over her face & calls me over & over again. “Martin! MARTIN!” Until I come in & find her staring at me the fucking scary way she stares when she’s in her sick mood, don’t know how to describe it & I shouldn’t have to & I don’t know why I’d go in there. I hate myself so bad for going in there but she’d yell & so I’d go. I hate it, hate it!
HATE! I feel hate & I don’t want to. But that’s what human nature of people does to you after you start out relatively okay & then people do things to bring you down. I know for the rest of my life I’m going to see her white face as white as a clown face or the Joker surrounded by flames & steam that smells like the shit she rubs all over me when I have a cold & I remember it started like that when I was six & in bed & she’d come in & I’d want to die. It’s what I think of each time I walk in & she’s screaming at me. “Martin, come here! Come sit down & talk to your mother!”
The small flames were votive candles that after Gabriela’s death were arranged on the edge of the tub and it couldn’t have escaped Dr. Geist’s attention they were streaked with spilled wax, two of them chipped and cracked, and a spatter of pinpoint waxy droplets were on the floor and floating on top of the water. I’m seeing them clearly in the photographs Lucy stitched together and projected onto the curved wall and it’s obvious that at some point the candles were knocked over. They fell on tile and into the tub and the liquid wax hardened unevenly, and then someone rearranged the candles, spacing them just right like everything else.
I observe big white towels perfectly folded on racks and small, elaborately framed paintings perfectly straight on a gray stone wall, a robe hanging neatly from a hook next to the glass shower stall. On a washcloth spread open on the counter by the sink are a jar of white-tea face mask with a price tag from the spa store called Octopus, and next to it a bottle of eucalyptus body oil that would have permeated the humid air with the sharp, pungent aroma of a vapor rub. Items were tidied up to set the scene, to tell the story that Dr. Geist wanted told, which was of Gabriela applying her mask and pouring aromatic oil into her bath before having the misfortune of suffering some episode that caused her to lose consciousness and drown.
While my former deputy chief was clever and competent, he wasn’t flawless in his execution. Thank God most amoral people aren’t, especially ones with no personal investment in what they’re lying about. He didn’t care what happened to Gabriela Lagos. As far as he was concerned he had nothing to do with it and in his lofty learned way he could argue the case a number of ways and almost believe his conclusions.
Dr. Geist cared only about himself and probably assumed ASAC Granby’s interest was to avoid creating a sensation about her death because people over him in the Department of Justice, the attorney general’s office, and who knows how far up it went were worried about any political fallout. The presidential election was three months off and no point in casting a smutty shadow on the White House, where Gabriela Lagos was well known for pulling together exhibits and acquiring fine art for the First Family. It didn’t matter. Dr. Geist would have been more than happy to comply if in his mind it did no real harm and there was some benefit for him.
What I couldn’t see in printed-out photographs I reviewed at the time were the perspectives of the two people who might have been together in that bathroom before everything went so horribly wrong. I need the PIT for that. Had Martin been sitting on the closed toilet lid with his large feet resting solidly on the mat he would have been looking directly at his mother’s stark-white face while she looked directly at herself in the large mirror on the wall next to him. He mentions it in his diary, an electronic document that Benton believes is genuine in what it implies.
She looks at both of us in a mirror & no matter how much I don’t want to I watch her watching both of us & I want both of us dead. How did everything get this fucked up? It’s so bad for me right now (not that it’s ever good)…but I finally told Daniel, my best friend ever.
I’m tortured by thinking I shouldn’t have but I told him the entire fucking story going back as far as I remember. We were drinking beer in his basement & I was upset because of what the shit at home is causing with my grades & everybody hates me. I don’t know what the hell’s happened, it’s like I was okay & then I hit this wall. SLAM! I feel people looking at me like I’m a freak & I’ve finally figured out existence is nothing but a punishment & what the hell do I have to look forward to?
At least he didn’t call me sick cuz he says it’s her fucking fault & if I keep putting up with it he won’t have anything to do with me anymore. He says I need to record it cuz he needs “evidence” or he won’t believe me. So that’s what I have to do, hook up the spy camera & after he’s convinced he’ll fix “the bitch” & I felt nothing when he said it. I HATE her & that’s the truth & if he leaves I’ll be so lonely w/o a friend. I plan to go to Radio Shack tomorrow & get one of those spy video recorders & I need to get money out of the safe w/o her knowing…
42
I move pages of the diary, spreading them with my index fingers to make them bigger, sliding them closer to Benton, who has just walked in after spending the past few hours in Lucy’s lab. He seats himself nearby in a black mesh chair and I give him the gist of my conversation with Dr. Geist. Then I summarize.
“Martin Lagos didn’t leave the shoe glove prints along the railroad tracks. He couldn’t have killed his mother and you might be right that he’s dead and has been since he disappeared and supposedly jumped from the Fourteenth Street Bridge.”