Fortunately, there had been pedestrians who’d seen the accident-not the usual “I heard squealing brakes and shattering glass and turned to look,” but people who’d actually seen Trey Marsellus run from his nanny and dart from between two parallel-parked cars.
As the traffic sergeant said to me, “We’re not going to hold you, but don’t leave town, okay? Not until we’ve closed the official investigation.”
I agreed, walked stiffly out the front door, and went to the hospital. I had an immediate and all-consuming need to apologize to the family.
I hadn’t succeeded. Two very large young black men, with tattoos and exquisitely tailored suits, blocked my way. “The family’s not seeing anyone right now,” one of them said.
At the time, the question Who are these guys? didn’t occur to me. I was mentally numb, except for being fixated on making this right. “I need to talk to them,” I said. “I’m the one who-”
“The family’s not seeing anyone,” he said again, and I broke off, finally realizing they were serious.
CJ, who’d gone to the precinct too late, found me as I was walking back to visitor parking. He was pale and shaken, almost as if he’d been the one to hit a child, but he was immediately supportive. He took me back to his place, where I paced, angry and guilty, saying over and over that the kid had run right in front of me, that the sun was in my eyes, that I couldn’t have stopped.
“I know, baby,” CJ said. Then he asked me to repeat the boy’s name.
“Trey Marsellus,” I said.
“Mmm,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?” I persisted.
“I think you might’ve hit Luke Marsellus’s kid,” he said, pensive.
“Who?” I’d said.
An hour later it was on the news: Rap mogul’s son killed in Wilshire Boulevard accident. I still didn’t get it. The news reports cast him only as a respected music-world figure, not as Marsellus the South Central OG.
I should have known something was really wrong when CJ picked up a pack of cigarettes a friend had left on the coffee table and tapped one out. CJ almost never smoked, so this meant he needed something to do with his hands, which meant he was nervous. Which was bad, because CJ was almost never nervous.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Stupid question, considering.
“Yeah,” he said. He lit the cigarette, exhaled smoke, and said, “Listen, give the family a couple of days, all right? Marsellus is…”
“Is what?”
“He’s kind of heavy.”
“I can’t turn my back on this,” I said.
“I know,” he said, “but I need to think about how best you should approach him.”
As it turned out, CJ never did hit on the right way for me to talk to Marsellus. Something else happened first that changed everything.
Two days later, I was awakened by my phone ringing at ten-fifteen in the morning. I picked up the receiver and found myself talking to the traffic sergeant who’d taken my statement and then kicked me loose. His question was direct and to the point: Had Miss Beauvais, Trey’s au pair, been in touch with me?
No, I said, why would she have been?
I’m just checking in with you, he’d said.
Not seeing any significance, I tried to go back to sleep-I hadn’t been sleeping well at night-but an hour later, CJ was pounding on my door.
“Take it easy, would you,” I said, pushing hair out of my eyes and letting him in.
“Pack up your things,” he said as soon as I’d closed the door behind him. “Not everything, just what you really want.”
“What?” I thought it was a joke, though he seemed genuinely on edge.
“Trey’s nanny is missing. The cops are looking for her. Nobody’s seen her. Pack up just what you need, I’m getting you out of L.A.”
I pulled back. “What are you trying to say?”
CJ ran his hands through his hair. “Just listen to me, Hailey. I didn’t want to scare you the other night, but as soon as you told me Trey Marsellus’s name, I was thinking of something like this. I hoped I was overreacting.”
“Something like what?”
“This happened in New York,” he said. “A mobster’s son was hit by a car, by accident, and not long after that, the neighbor who did it just disappeared.”
I said, “You of all people know that ‘gangsta’ is just a figure of speech. Marsellus isn’t really a gangster.”
“Yes, he is, Hailey.” He paused. “I hear things, and maybe I don’t know for sure what’s rumor and what’s fact, but I meant what I said the other day, when I called Marsellus ‘heavy.’ He’s not a ‘no harm, no foul’ kind of guy. And he and his wife tried for years to conceive before finally having Trey. She hasn’t been pregnant again since. What does that tell you?” He answered his own question: “You took from him the one thing that can’t be replaced.”
My face felt hot. “Don’t you think I feel bad enough-”
“You’re not listening,” he said. I’d never heard CJ sound so frustrated. “Goddammit, what’s it going to take to get through to you? You can feel as bad as humanly possible; it won’t help. You killed this guy’s only son. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix it.”
I said, “But if he’s really the kind of man you say, I think not apologizing and then running away is only going to make it worse.”
“There isn’t a way to make it better.”
“But-”
“No,” he said, taking both my hands in his. “I know what you’re thinking of, all that honor-and-duty bullshit you never really left behind, but that doesn’t apply out here, and it’s going to get you killed. West Point is over, and now L.A. is over for you, too. Pack your things.”
What convinced me that he was right was this: His hands were very slightly shaking. It had been a long time since I’d felt those kind of nerves, so his anxiety served as a kind of external gauge for me, of what I should be feeling but wasn’t.
“Are you sure about this?” I’d said.
“I don’t like it, either, baby,” he’d said quietly. “But this is how it’s gotta be.”
To this day I don’t know if there were any ramifications, criminally, for my leaving town before the traffic division’s investigation was officially closed. It had just been a formality, but the cops took a dim view of people skating when they’d been told to stick around. It was possible that if I was ever picked up on something minor in San Francisco, I’d be shipped back to Los Angeles and charged with some kind of obstruction. It wasn’t the charge that would be problematic, but jail would actually be the easiest place for Marsellus to get at me. Anyone gang-connected could.
CJ would have stayed longer with me in San Francisco, but I hadn’t let him. When we parted, we’d both acted with exaggerated casualness. He’d said, “Look, I’ll come up and visit you soon. I’ll be around so much you’ll be sick of me,” and I’d said, “Sure, I know,” and we’d hugged and then he’d driven away, toward the 101 back home.
In those first weeks, I’d lived with a drab, hollow feeling not unlike how addicts describe their first day without alcohol or a cigarette: Is this what my life’s going to be, from here on out? I’d alternated between that sense of lonely tedium and a stomach-clenching guilt. I’m not sure those feelings ever went away, but they did lessen. In time, I found an adrenaline-junkie job and threw myself into it. I made more money than I needed and stashed it carelessly in a coffee can. I made a few friends and drank with them. Drank without them, too. I met Jack Foreman.
But I still felt restless at times, particularly in early summer, when business at Aries was slowest and San Francisco was shrouded in the kind of weather coastal Californians called June gloom. That was probably why, in the end, I called Serena back and told her I’d take a girl I’d never met to the mountains of inland Mexico.