Hubbel said, “I never got my degree from Cal. She ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Yes.” Leigh’s father petted the dog below him who circled twice, then plopped down directly on his feet. “Studied criminal justice with the help of the G.I. Bill.”
“She never said, Jim.”
“I married her mom in my sophomore year because we were going to have a little girl. I got a steady job. I’m a good deputy. I’d rather be on the street than sitting behind a damn desk anyway. I don’t regret my life, but I wanted Leigh to be safe, to have a skill. I wanted her husband, when she married, to have a good degree.”
“Uh-huh.”
Hubbel smiled. “You don’t get why I’m saddling you with this ancient history.”
“Not really. No.”
“Then she had to go and fall in love with Tom Tinsley.” Hubbel pushed the dog off his feet. In the glimmering twilight, in the distant bursts of light from the park’s lampposts, children screamed and played. Ray wondered if Kat was eavesdropping.
“It went on for years. He used to eat dinner with us. My wife liked him. He seemed like a nice enough kid. But we had issues. Tommy was-nice didn’t make him a good match. He had no direction. No drive. He wanted to be an actor. He would have made a good truck driver, if he had lived. You know he drowned himself?”
“Not the details.” Ray could no longer read his expression, but he heard Hubbel breathe deeply.
“You know, I smoked for thirty years. I miss it every day, even though I know it was making my lungs black and tarry. It was right about then, when I was trying to quit, that I had a little talk with Tom. I couldn’t stand how much I missed smoking. I thought about it every minute, night and day, until my wife sent me packing to the park. That’s when I got the habit of coming here every day,” he said. He laughed humorlessly. “I’m not excusing myself, I was mean as hell for a while. That’s just how it was.”
“He met you here, at the park?”
Hubbel nodded. “It was earlier. A really hot afternoon in the summer. Smog like today. Anyway, he and Leigh had had a dustup. A bad one. He looked miserable. He’d been crying, I don’t know.”
“Puffy eyes?”
“Yeah. She had met you. He was afraid he was going to lose her.”
Ray looked around the park at the pools of light the lamps created, at the extended families still eating barbecue, laughing, some shouting slightly drunkenly. Life at its best, in a way. The best part of Los Angeles, a homey warmth here in this suburban park named for William Penn, the peacemaker. “What did you tell him?”
“It seemed like my chance to get rid of him once and for all. First, I talked to her. Then I told him-” Hubbel smoothed the leg of his corduroy shorts. “Don’t come around my daughter anymore. Told him he was finished.”
“And?”
“She had another man lined up. A better man. She had told him, too, but Tom was crushed. I saw that and I ignored it. You know, I never told my wife any of this. To this day, she doesn’t know what I said to that guy. I don’t know which of you Leigh would have ended up with. She still loved him, I think. I pushed her very hard.”
Ray tried to see Hubbel’s eyes, but could not make them out. The dog made satisfied dreaming sounds, the equivalent of a cat purring.
“Yeah, I told him to fuck off. I told him all about you, Ray. How much she loved you. How you were gonna be a big man. A rich professional. The man could see I was moving him out and Leigh had done the same. All for you, Ray. We believed in you.”
“He died that night,” Ray guessed.
“He folded. Gave up.” Hubbel patted his pocket as if seeking phantom cigarettes.
“Leigh must have felt like she killed him,” Ray said. “You should have told her about this a long time ago. You could have taken some of the burden off her, done something for her I couldn’t.”
“We all better take some responsibility now,” Hubbel said. “I’ll keep pushing law enforcement, but I won’t push ’em down your throat anymore. I can’t say I’m sure you hurt her. I just don’t know. They need to widen the search. You work with them, Ray. You promise me. I’ll let you know if I think of anything else.”
Ray shook his hand. It turned into a bear hug. It felt like they were clinging to each other, because they couldn’t cling to Leigh.
26
K at hovered above the stream, looking down at the black water. So she hadn’t followed them.
Ray flicked a flashlight onto her face.
“Turn that off.”
“What’s that in your hand?”
“A chicken drumstick from the Colonel I picked up en route.”
“Got any more?”
“In the Echo.” They walked back toward the parking lot, down the pathway past the shrill, tired children on the monkey bars, past the flushed faces of the men at the barbecues, and climbed into Kat’s car, which smelled like a restaurant, rolling down the windows to the cool of evening. Ray felt ravenous. He seized a piece of chicken and began to eat.
Kat gave him thirty seconds. Then, “What did he tell you?”
“Two important things,” Ray said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “I want to know exactly what happened between you and your brother the last day of his life. Can you stand to go through it with me?”
She frowned. “Why?”
“It has to do with Leigh. Our marriage. Our problems. Why she left.”
“It was more than six years ago. What could it have to do with your marriage?”
Ray said half to himself, “It must get worse over time. You don’t forget. It grows inside you.”
“What?”
“Guilt. It’s a poison, like doubt.”
“You’re tellin’ me,” Kat said, her voice shaky.
He put a gentle hand on her arm. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”
She started off slowly. “They had an argument. Tom called me, and I finally agreed to meet him for lunch, even though things were really busy at work and I didn’t really have the time to waste. We went to a Tastee-Freez on Pacific Coast Highway.” She paused.
“The day he died?”
“Right. He told me Leigh had broken up with him. Well, you know, I saw it coming. Leigh told me she was getting discontented. She had someone new. That would be you, Ray. People our age, in our late twenties, broke up every day. Women complained in the coffee rooms about their ne’er-do-well boyfriends. They had so many issues. And I, well, at that point I had no boyfriend at all. I was working so hard, trying to find my own way. It just didn’t seem to matter so much. Tom had a hundred girlfriends before Leigh.”
“But nobody after her.” For a moment or two, they both stared into the dark trees.
“He wanted to talk. He had to go over each detail over and over and it didn’t seem to matter what I said, it didn’t help him. I had been invited to go to a party at a coworker’s who lived in a big fancy house in Hollywood. I rarely got invited to do anything social, particularly anything that involved wearing something new and cute, so I was resentful.”
“But he insisted you stay.”
“He said I was the only person he could tell it all to, because I knew Leigh so well. Really, a lot of it was, What did she say about me? How does she really feel? Do you think I could get her back? Those kind of questions. Over and over. He said I owed him because of the time he covered for me when I rolled through the ground-floor window drunk and when the folks asked about it, he told them I had the flu. I owed him for the many times he saved my ass. And that was true.”
“But.”
“He said, Forget the damn party. Come with me to the beach. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go to a party, and I was just-just-thinking of myself and my own concerns, okay? I didn’t want to get involved in this shit between him and Leigh.