I finished my beer and walked the few yards back to the hotel. As I headed through the reception I heard someone call my name. I turned, slowly.
The fresh-faced young guy at the desk was holding up a piece of paper. 'There's a message for you.'
That sounded unlikely. Nobody knew where I was. The few people whose contact I might have welcomed would have called me on the cell phone. I walked over to the desk, feeling as if I had a target on my back.
I took the piece of paper, thanked him, and turned away. When I opened it I saw the following message:
'This lady might be able to help you. If she wants to.'
There was a phone number for this unnamed woman, and the name of the person who'd left me the message. Muriel Dupree.
— «» — «» — «»—
A phone call, a visit to the web and a fast shower and then I went back downstairs and hailed a cab from outside the hotel. It took a while to find someone who was prepared to take me as far as I needed to go, which was over the Bay and then some, and then, it turned out, a good way more. The one I wound up with was intent on exacting a bonus through my providing an audience for a long series of diatribes. Luckily he was too wrapped up in his own dialectic for me to have to play a speaking role. I grunted and said 'Right,' and watched out of the window as city and then suburbs passed me by.
The phone call I'd made had been to social services, hoping to speak to Mrs Dupree. This turned out to be as vain a hope as it sounds. I'd have been better off trying to go back in time. The web had told me the telephone number belonged to a Mrs Campbell, and also where she lived. It's one of the things I know how to do. I didn't know who this person was, or what Muriel thought she might have to say to me, but experience told me you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming. I do know what I'm talking about. Bobby and I met while working for the CIA.
Eventually the guy in front stopped talking and started glancing at a map. We pulled further and further from through routes and eventually hit some straggled blocks of residential streets. The neighbourhood was white semi rundown, no realtor's dream. We went back and forth through it for a little bit before I took hold of the map and guided us in. We stopped halfway up a street of small wooden houses each on their own very little plot.
I got out and paid. There was no one around.
'If you're looking to party, you've come to the wrong place,' the driver said, and then took off up the street.
I waited until he was out of sight, and then walked fifty yards back the way we'd come, having deliberately told him not quite the right address. Two turnings away was the road I actually wanted, and three minutes along it was the house I had come to visit.
I walked up a short path and two steps onto a porch area. It had been well painted in white, a few years before. It would soon need doing again. I looked for a bell and found none, so rapped on the door instead. I had no real doubt that the woman would be home.
After a few minutes I heard a sound behind the door, and then it was opened. In the shadows beyond was a small figure.
'Mrs Campbell?' I asked.
She said nothing, but slowly reached to the screen door and pushed it slightly ajar. Through the gap I saw a woman in her seventies, with hair that was still looked after, but a face that was grey and pouched; and also seemed to be in shock. She looked me in the eyes, then up and down, and then in the eyes again.
'My God,' she said, eventually, still staring. 'So it was true.'
6
When the phone rang Nina was on her so-called deck. Theoretically she was out there thinking; if the truth be told, she was asleep. Back at the field office you couldn't hear yourself think for the sound of men storming up and down, barking into phones, being brisk and professional. One of the big things about being a man, she'd noted, was that being good, doing the work, wasn't enough. It had to be generally acknowledged that here you were, damn well seeing to business. She found her deck much better for head work, better too than the rest of the house. She ought to move, she knew. Especially after things had gone wrong with John, the house felt awkward and tired of her and wanting in almost every regard. It was in the Malibu hills, which was great, but she could only afford to rent it because it was falling apart. The polished concrete of the living room floor was cracked across the middle, wide enough to slip three fingers down. The swimming pool had been melted in a bush fire long before she moved in. One good shake and the deck would end up in the Pacific; two shakes, and the house would follow. For some reason, the prospect had never unduly disquieted her. Some people smoked. Nina sat out on her deck.
She had spent the rest of the day on the streets and in offices, on the phones, sifting through non-information and being briefed on results from a slew of forensic investigations. None had turned up anything useful. The pyjamas had been nailed to Wal-Mart, never a happy thing when you're trying to trace an object's history. The disk out of the woman's mouth was still in analysis; a photo of her face was now being shown around town by detectives and patrol division. It could be forever before they got a match. A woman, once attractive, now dead. Lots of those.
She got back to the house to find a message on the machine. She jabbed the button, thinking it might be Zandt with a more constructive response to her message. Instead it had been Meredith, an old college friend, agreeing that yes, it was time they met up and had dinner and a good long chat. Nina didn't remember the matter being discussed, but she supposed it was time. It had been a year at least since her loose, small group of old friends had gotten together. Merry lived in the Valley and had acquired a husband and three young children, apparently effortlessly, as if by winning a weekly competition. She now cared a great deal about things Nina found either trivial or incomprehensible or simply irrelevant, and her hairstyle was becoming more and more irrevocable. Soon it would be impossible to look at the face beneath it and remember the times Nina had sprawled laughing next to her as she threw up in a variety of toilets in vague parties held in various professors' tiny, book-strewn homes. That girl had gone away somewhere, answering the call of happy hour in some far-away and long-ago bar, and had sent grown-up-mom Meredith Jackson to take her meetings instead. This woman was likely just as baffled by Nina's current incarnation, which kept looking like a woman without seeming to understand what the job entailed. Nina knew she ought to keep the friendship going, but often wondered why either of them bothered. Maybe Meredith liked knowing an FBI agent. Maybe Nina liked to believe she still had some kind of connection to real life, that on the other side of the ring of murderers and desks and men in suits and late nights that surrounded her, there was someone who wanted nothing more from Nina than gossip, affirmation, and a smile.
She hadn't been able to face making the call, and so went to think instead. She wound up wondering how much difference there had been between Merry, or herself, and the young woman who had been found in The Knights that morning; how much alteration in a life it would take to wind up dead in a motel, impregnated with the cigarette smoke of men who had come to document your final moments, your deaf ears party to much rambling discussion of recent sporting events and at least one observation regarding your tits. John Zandt — who had been a homicide cop in the city before the Delivery Boy had taken his daughter — had long ago observed to her how fast a teenager's life can go from A to B in Hollywood; then from B to Z, then the easy flip from Z to a Jane Doe toe tag. They don't know how fast and easy it's going to be. It's not years, it's months. It can be weeks. It can be virtually overnight. You start the evening somebody's much loved and pampered child, nicely lit; you see in the next grimy morning stripped of everything you hadn't yet learned to value about yourself. You think you're the star, but instead you're just cannon fodder waiting in line to have promises broken by friends, lovers and fate.