The woman who opened the door was petite, of indeterminate middle age, with narrow blue eyes and a glossy tension around the cheekbones that trumpeted the virtues of surgical steel. She wore a fitted orange crepe blouse over black leggings and red Chinatown slippers embroidered with dragons. Her brown hair was snipped boy-short with feathery sideburns that curled forward. Her right hand gripped a remote control. A cigarette in her left dribbled smoke that trailed downward and dissolved before it reached her knee.
She tucked the remote under her arm. “Lieutenant? That didn’t take long. I’m Nina.” Her mouth smiled but the surrounding glassy skin didn’t cooperate and the expression was robbed of emotional content.
The house had no entry foyer and we stepped directly into a paneled room topped by a slanted beamed ceiling. All the wood was pickled oak, yellowed by decades. The carpet was rust plush flecked with blue, the furniture beige, tightly upholstered and newish, as if it had been plucked intact from a showroom. A paneled wet bar housed glasses and bottles and a flat-screen TV sat on the brown tile counter. The set was on. Courtroom dispute, the sound muted- people mouthing aggression; a bald, scowling judge wielding a gavel in a way that couldn’t escape Freudian theory.
Nina Balquin said, “Love that stuff, it’s nice to see idiots get what they’ve got coming.” Aiming her remote, she switched off. “Drinks, gentlemen?”
“No, thanks.”
“It got kind of warm outside.”
“We’re fine, ma’am.”
“Well, I’m having.” She walked to the bar and poured herself something clear from a chrome pitcher. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Milo and I sat on one of the beige sofas. The fabric was coarse and pebbly and I felt the bumps against the backs of my legs. Nina Balquin spent a long time adding ice to her drink. I noticed a tremor in her hands. Milo was taking in the room and I did the same.
A few family photos hung lopsided on a rear wall, too distant to make out. Sliding glass doors exposed a small rectangular swimming pool. Clumps of leaves and grit floated on greenish water. Rims of concrete decking too narrow for seating comprised the rest of the backyard.
Walk out, get wet, come back in.
Nina Balquin settled perpendicular to us and sipped her drink. “I know, it’s a mess, I don’t swim. Never used Barnett for the pool. Maybe I should’ve. He could’ve been good for one thing.” She drank some more.
Milo said, “You’re not fond of Barnett.”
“Can’t stand his guts. Because of how he treated Lara. And me. Why are you asking about him?”
“How he treated Lara before Kristal’s murder or after?”
At the mention of her granddaughter, Balquin flinched. “You ask, I answer? Fine, but just tell me one thing: Is the bastard in some kind of trouble?”
“It’s possible.”
Balquin nodded. “The answer is he was rotten to Lara before and after. She met him at a rodeo- can you believe that? She went to good schools, her father was a dentist. The plan was she was supposed to go to the U. But her grades went to hell in high school. Still, there was Plan Two, Valley College. So what does she do after graduating? Gets a job at a dude ranch in Ojai and meets Cowboy Buckaroo and the next thing I know she’s calling to inform me they’re married.”
She gulped her drink, swished liquid in her mouth, swallowed, stuck out her tongue. “Lara was eighteen, he was twenty-four. She watches him rope horses or doggies or whatever they rope and suddenly the two of them are at some tacky little drive-through chapel in Vegas. Her father could’ve… killed them.” She smiled uneasily. “To use an expression.”
Milo said, “Can’t blame him for being upset.”
“Ralph was furious. Who wouldn’t be? But he never said a thing to Lara, kept it all inside. A year later he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and four months after that he was gone.” She glanced back at the dirty pool. “Excuse me, not gone. Dead. At the time he was diagnosed we were in escrow on another house, Encino, south of the boulevard, gorgeous, huge. Thank God Ralph had decent life insurance.”
“Does Lara have siblings?” I said, still trying to make out the photos.
“My oldest, Mark, is a C.P.A. up in Los Gatos, used to be comptroller for a dot-com, he’s doing fantastic as an independent consultant. Sandy, the baby, is in grad school at the University of Minnesota. Sociology. It’s kind of endless for her- school; she already has one master’s. But she never gave me a lick of trouble.”
She took an ice cube in her mouth, sloshed it, crushed it. “Lara was the wild one. It’s only now I’m able to get in touch with how pissed-off I am at her.”
“For marrying Barnett?”
“For that, for everything- for killing herself.” Her hand began to shake and she placed her rattling glass on an end table. “My therapist told me suicide’s the ultimate aggressive act. Lara didn’t need to do that, she really didn’t. She could have talked to someone. I told her to talk to someone.”
“Get some therapy,” said Milo.
“I’m a big fan of therapy.” She picked up the glass. “Therapy and Tanqueray and tonic and Prozac.”
I said, “So Lara was the rebellious one.”
“Even when she was little, you’d tell her black, she’d say white. In high school, she got in with a bad crowd- that’s what messed up her grades. Of the three, she was the smartest, all she had to do was a little work. Instead, she marries him. Vegas, for God’s sake. It was like a bad movie. He was- have you ever seen his teeth?”
During the few seconds Malley had faced us, he had never opened his mouth.
Milo said, “Not in good shape?”
“Trailer trash teeth,” said Nina Balquin. “You can imagine what Ralph thought of that.” Illustrating the contrast, she flashed a full set of porcelain jackets. “He was lowlife, didn’t have a family.”
“No family at all?”
“Every time I asked him about where he grew up, who his parents were, he changed the subject. I mean, here was this new person in our lives, doesn’t it seem reasonable to ask? Forget it. Strong and silent. Except he wasn’t strong enough to make a decent living.”
She drained her glass, steadied one hand with the other. “We’re an educated, sophisticated family- I have a degree in design and my husband was one of the best endodontists in the Valley. So who walks in? The Beverly Hillbilly.”
“Lara met him at a dude ranch,” said Milo.
“Lara’s earth-shattering summer job.” Balquin grimaced. “Here she never made up her bed, but there she could clean rooms for minimum wage. She claimed she wanted to earn her own money so she could buy a more expensive car than Ralph wanted to get for her.”
“Claimed?”
“She quit after two weeks to run off to Vegas with him. Never got any kind of car until we bought her a used Taurus. She was just rebelling by going to Ojai, like every other time.”
“You said Barnett was working some kind of traveling rodeo?”
“For all I know he put stars in my daughter’s eyes with rope tricks. I’m allergic to horses… out of the blue she’s married, informing me she wants lots of babies. Not just babies, lots of babies. I said who’s going to pay for all those babies, and she had a ready answer. Cowboy Buckaroo was putting away his chaps and spurs, whatever, and getting himself a real job.”
Balquin snorted. “Like I was supposed to stand and applaud. What was this great career? Working for a pool-cleaning service.”
I said, “They were married a while before they had Kristal.”