“He despised fame,” Nina said. “Unusually private type, but if you ask me, some of that was drug-induced paranoia.”
“So it might not be Coyote?”
“It’s Coyote. Has to be. We talk about Coyote, and Britta leaves me a note telling me to head for Donnelly’s if anything happens to her, and something happens to her. Then something happens to Donnelly. That’s what I explained to the homicide detective last night. Not that he appeared to be fully convinced, but he was interested.”
“How’s she doing? Britta Cowan?”
“When I called David Cowan this morning, he said they’ll bring her out of the coma in a couple more days. She’s going to make it. What did she do when she left me that day? How did she know he might try to rob Donnelly? I really need to talk to her.”
Unable to come to any useful conclusions, Nina and Sandy returned to their work. The clock on Paul’s desk ticked. He was out at the handicapped facility in Carmel Valley Village, interviewing the people there, and the phones were blessedly silent.
Nina began doodling names. Britta. Elizabeth Gold. Coyote. Danny. George Hill.
How to prove that Coyote set the fires without implicating Danny, and by further implication, Wish? She got out the autopsy report on Danny and studied it again, reread Wish’s story, thought again about the more than six thousand dollars in Coyote’s account, wondered again how Danny got his “tip.”
Now she started drawing little sketches of the objects surrounding this case-little sketches for little objects. A piece of paper with Twelve Points. A margarita glass. A cat, a concho belt, fire, cowboys, a little kid with his diapers hanging down, a Jeep, Danny’s flute…
She shook her head and tried again. Sandy had come over to get something and was looking at her paper.
“Why do you do that? I’ve seen you do that for every case. What does it do for you?”
“It’s how I think.”
“What about logic?”
“It’s never about logic, Sandy. It’s always about emotion.”
They tapped on their keyboards for a while. The phones rang a few times. Sandy dispensed with calls with her usual mixture of tact and ironhandedness. At lunch, they called an order down to the restaurant. Nina went down to pick up the food and breathe some of the cleansing fog into her lungs. They ate at their desks, communicating, as they often did, in a shorthand that pricked the silence like static.
“Those papers,” Nina would say.
“Done.”
“Did you call…?”
“Called at ten. Weren’t you listening? They say they’ll have the discovery papers couriered over this afternoon.”
“Wish wanted us to bring…”
“I took that stuff over last night.”
Nina asked a question that had been bothering her. “Sandy,” she said, biting into a pepper, “do you need a place to stay, or are you staying with that friend of yours who lives near here?”
“Staying at your place.”
“You are?” Nina struggled for neutrality. Had Paul invited her without saying? How in the world could they have any kind of a life with Sandy on the couch or in his precious den?
“Gotta say, those boys need me.”
Boys? Dustin and Tustin sprang into her mind’s eye. “You’re staying at the house Aunt Helen left me? In Wish’s room?”
“Like I said,” said Sandy. “Rent paid. Furnished. Except for a whole lot of dirty laundry, it’s empty, thanks to you.”
Was she teasing, or criticizing? With Sandy, Nina never knew. “Not for long, if we get our plans in order.”
“I’ve looked over your plans,” Sandy said, “and they remind me of the living room at your house in P.G.”
“It looked pretty neat the day I visited.”
“It would that day, yeah.”
Nina tried to imagine the Boyz confronted by Sandy and her luggage, trotting into their domain and taking over Wish’s private lair, but here was a situation where her imagination faltered. She was sorry to have missed the moment.
Back at the office, amid the group of phone messages was one from Elizabeth Gold. Nina called back immediately.
“I’d like to meet with you,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe I can help. You weren’t the only one at the party under false pretenses. I’m a trained sociologist. That’s why I was taping the party. I’ve been studying the Siesta Court Bunch for two years.”
“What can you tell me?” Nina said.
“I want to play the tape for you. I can come to your office.”
“Not a good idea. I’m tied up.”
“Then… how about tonight at my house? About eight? I’ll make tea.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You better take this one too,” Sandy said, her finger on the hold button on the phone.
Nina picked up the extension she had rigged on her table. “Hello?”
“Hi. It’s me.”
Across an ocean, flying over a continent, only slightly distorted by the thousands of miles between Stockholm, Sweden, and Carmel, California, the voice was almost instantly recognizable. “Hello, Kurt.”
“Nina.”
“It’s good to hear your voice.” Was it? She couldn’t tell how she felt. Kurt, so much part of her past, father of her only child, lived too far from her to do more than dance along the edges of her consciousness now and then.
“Same,” he said. “Listen, Nina. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but Bob… he’s impulsive. Like his mother.”
“Like his father,” she said, kidding, as Kurt had been, but wondering what he meant. “He’s okay?”
“Fine. I mean, he was fine last night when I saw him last.”
“What’s going on?”
“I told him to call you, but he said he just gets a recording. He wouldn’t leave a message. He’s on a kick.”
“Kurt, I’m trying to follow here.”
“Well, there’s news,” he said, an understatement, as it turned out.
When she hung up, Nina turned to Sandy and said, “Bob’s getting into the Monterey airport at three. I’m going to pick him up.”
“You want me to go?” She didn’t seem surprised.
“No. You have to get our motions over to the court by five.”
“How do you sign them, if you’re not here?”
Nina grabbed several sheets of pleading paper and signed them about halfway down. “You’re so good I’m going to assume you can transcribe the motions perfectly, proof them, and make them end right above the signatures on the papers.” She was signing proof-of-service forms as she spoke. “If Paul calls… don’t tell him about Bob, Sandy.”
“You sure?”
“I’m… kind of behind with this,” Nina said.
“Ooookay.”
Sandy did not say, this is what you get for not dealing with what is really happening in your life, and, for that, Nina was grateful. Nina lingered at the door for a while, issuing instructions that Sandy took in good spirit, then finally went out to the street to locate the Bronco, which had a ticket, as usual. She stuffed it into the glove box with all the others. Another thing she could not tell Paul was that she couldn’t stay in Carmel forever. The boot would get her for sure.
She drove through light afternoon traffic to Highway 68. She took the airport exit. A million questions rose in her throat. She tamped them down.
The sight of Bob waiting on the curb, as battered as his duffels, looking insecure and uncertain of his welcome, tore through all questions and doubts. Jumping from the Bronco, she grabbed him and hugged him tight. “Oh, honey!” she said.
He said nothing, just clung to her.
With no other option, she took him directly to Paul’s condo. In the car, they didn’t talk much. Bob was exhausted and incoherent. At his age, fourteen, incoherence was the norm. She had forgotten how difficult it was to pierce the haze of adolescence, but the trip reminded her immediately. Mom did not ask probing questions. Mom awaited moments of revelation. Since a fourteen- year-old boy did not understand himself, he had few such moments. Plus, he did not wish to subject himself to Mom’s judgment.
She reached over and ran her hand through his spiky hair instead.
At the condo, she helped him unload his duffel and the case with his bass in it. He couldn’t sleep on the couch in the living room; the television had its corner in that room, and the area opened up to the dining and kitchen areas. They would all go crazy with a teenager installed on the couch there.
Bob would have to set up shop in Paul’s high-tech study.
While she pushed books around on shelves to make room for a few of Bob’s things, and pulled out the sofa bed, he showered.
She found extra bedding in the hall closet, and put it on the sofa in the study along with a few throws Paul had accumulated over the years, one saying 49ers, another saying R U Experienced?
Bob came in, rubbing his hair with a towel, trailed by Hitchcock. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor near the couch. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too,” he said. He tossed the wet towel onto a desk full of papers. Nina got up to remove it. Paul would not want his papers runny and moist. Seeing the sofa with its fresh sheets, Bob crawled inside, pulling the sheet up to his neck. “I’m so tired,” he said.
“It’s a long trip from Sweden to the West Coast,” Nina said. “How long have you been traveling?”
“Forever. Honest, Mom, I lost track. I don’t even know what day it is.”
