He walked on. By late morning he had been in Griffith Park, at the place where Elyse's body had been found. There was nothing to mark the space, though for a while there had been flowers and he found the remains of a broken glass jar. He stood there for a long time, looking out over the hazy city, at the places where a million people worked and slept and lied, turning rank in the urban field.
It was soon after this that he first went into a bar. And, a little later, into another. He kept walking in between and afterward, but more slowly, feeling his sense of purpose bag around the seams. He had walked these routes many times. All they had brought him was blood and breakage. He could still hear the voices that had propelled him to his feet when Nina left, the cries of the missing — but obscured by daylight and rationality they were too faint to lead him anywhere. His shirt became untucked, and when he passed other pedestrians he was aware of their scrutiny. It's claimed that you can tell the police, especially a policeman, by his eyes, a gaze that measures and assays, that judges from a position of suspicion and strength. Zandt wondered if you could also tell someone who was not a cop any more, by the look of emasculation, of having turned away. He had known this city once, known it from inside. He had walked the streets as one to whom the residents turned in times of chaos. A part of the immune system. Now he lived without this sanction. He was no longer identified, was without fame or its equivalent in function. He was just a man on the street in a city where very few people walk — and where those who did regarded him with caution. It was a habitat as real as any steppe or shaded valley, no more different to the countryside than Death Valley was to Vermont, or Kansas to the bottom of the sea. The only distinction was in the people, the smog-stained and battle-weary. All the people.
By late afternoon he had stood, weaving slightly now, by the side of a side road in Laurel Canyon. The bushes that had once grown there had been uprooted and replaced with a stretch of pavement perhaps a couple of feet longer than Annette's body. By now he was quite drunk, but not so that he didn't spot the person watching him from the safety of the nice house across the road.
Within a few minutes a man emerged from the house. He was wearing jogging pants, a pale grey vest. He looked very healthy.
'Can I help you?'
'No,' Zandt said. He tried a smile, but the man wasn't having any of it. Had Zandt seen the result of his attempt, he probably wouldn't have blamed him.
The man sniffed. 'Are you drunk?'
'I'm just standing here a moment. Go back inside. I'll be gone soon.'
'What is it, anyway?' The man turned slightly, revealing that he was holding a phone in the hand behind his back.
Zandt looked at him. 'What?'
'That pavement thing. Why's it there? It's useless.'
'Somebody died there. Or was found there, dead.'
The man's face became more open. 'You knew them?'
'Not until she was dead.'
'So what do you care? What was she — a working girl?'
Zandt's throat constricted. Death's sliding scale, as if whores and addicts and young black men were little more than unwanted pets, as if they had never run laughing to the return of a parent, or said a first
word, or spent long nights wondering what their stocking would hold.
The man took a hurried step back. 'I'll call the cops,' he warned.
'They'd be too late. Maybe you'd rate one more slab of pavement, but I wouldn't bet on it.'
Zandt turned and walked away, leaving the man no different and no wiser.
When he finally reached Beverly Boulevard he went past the Hard Rock Cafe, tucking in his shirt and straightening his jacket, pulling his shoulders back. He walked into the Ma Maison hotel without incident, steered right and straight to the gents in the bar. A splash of water and no one but a barman could tell he didn't belong. He went back out into the bar and sat at a low table where he could see the street. After the miles of walking, the softness of the couch made him feel like he was sitting on a cloud. A pleasant young man promised to bring him a drink.
While he waited, Zandt looked out at the road where Josie Ferris had disappeared. It was not quite the last scene that related to the crimes, but he was unwilling to go and stand by the school Karen had attended, or outside the house where his family had once lived. And there was no point going back to that other, final place. It was a place he had created. Though it had a bearing, it couldn't help him now. It had not helped him then. Standing above the dead body of the man he had killed had done nothing but prove the fineness of the distinctions we turn into laws.
Jennifer had known what he had done. He told her, two days later, when the sweater had arrived. It had not been the death of them, not at first. She'd understood his actions, condoned everything except the mistake. They tried to hold it together. They failed. His position had been untenable. Either he bore the horror of Karen's disappearance and remained strong for his wife, while feeling like he was going to break apart into small sharp pieces: or he could reveal the pain he was in. When he did so he lost the male claim to strength without gaining any foothold on the high ground of revealed trauma that was the preserve of women. It was her job to express the outrage; it was his to withstand it.
He decided he could no longer pretend to be a policeman at around the same time that she decided to go back to her parents. Someone had stolen their golden egg, and the goose that laid it had died.
Now, when he looked back, he believed he had been most in the wrong. It was his rigidity that had enabled the fault lines to form. She would have let him be weak for a spell. Women are often wiser when it comes to understanding which rules can be allowed to bend. Relationships require flexibility, particularly in times of high stress, those periods when they feel like a desperate pact against a world of unbearable darkness. Strong pairings will fight to retain an equilibrium, regardless of short-term changes in balance. Though it was a double-edged consolation, this realization had enabled him to stay alive. Sometimes the key to regaining one's life is looking back at a terrible situation and realizing that you were partly to blame. Before you see this, you feel wronged, hurt — and cannot find any peace. But 'It's unfair' is the cry of a child, of someone who does not realize that causal relationships act in two directions. When you come to understand that you were also at fault, the pain slowly fades away. Once you realize that you made your own bed, it becomes easier to lie in it, however hard and soiled it may be.
When his Budweiser arrived he nursed it a while, ostensibly looking out of the window. In reality he was, as he had been all day, trying to see a set of facts differently. In a crime where there was no evidence to speak of, the best you could do was try new ways of fitting the information together. Most crimes, in their essence, boiled down to a single sentence. Fingerprints and an affair and a hastily concealed knife and debts and an exploded alibi; these were the business of the courts, requisites for tidying away. The true crime, in all its glory, boiled down to this: people killed each other. Husbands killed their wives. Women killed their menfolk, too, and parents their children, and children their parents, and strangers other strangers. People took things they didn't own. People set fire to places, for money, or because there were people inside. When each manifestation had been tucked away into its judicial drawer, the truth still remained at large. You could take any two people and put the word 'killed' between them.
Zandt had been able to make no headway in trying to work out what The Upright Man might want from his victims. Why they were being punished. Had they failed him by not loving him, not responding to his advances? Had they been too frightened, or not frightened enough? Had they failed by breaking, by not showing some of the strength he looked for and wished to steal?