“But that’s illegal,” Nina said, leaning forward.
She felt like getting into it with Crockett. But before she could, he said casually, “And as I said, he told his roommates he was going up Robles Ridge. That conversation took place about three hours before the first 911 call about the fire. He and the other young man headed up there. Two people, like the witness saw before. Happens sometimes that during the course of a felony one of the perpetrators gets hurt. Makes even a lawyer think, doesn’t it?”
“I just hate to see you wasting time and taxpayer money, Mr. Crockett.” But she was shaken.
“You have a card to give me, Ms. Reilly? Where’s your office?”
While Nina was trying to figure out how to respond to this, Crockett’s phone buzzed, and Crockett raised a hand and picked it up. Hanging up, he told them, “The autopsy should be completed by three this afternoon. I told the coroner’s office you could go in and attempt an ID. If you promise me you’ll call me right after and let me know how it went.”
“You got it,” Paul said. They got up to leave.
“You do have a card?” Crockett said, standing up with them, his impassive face looking down at Nina.
She gave him the poker face right back. “Not on me,” she said. “Call Mr. van Wagoner if you need to get in touch with me.”
“Good to see you again, Paul,” Crockett said, and the two men shook hands. “I’ll be waiting to hear.”
She had been rendered invisible. She slunk into the passenger seat of Paul’s Mustang and they cruised out of the parking lot. She was thinking, when an attorney has no office and no card, no staff and no clients, maybe she’d better not announce that she’s an attorney.
But then, what was she?
“What’s the sound of a lawyer falling in the forest?” she asked Paul. “If there’s no one there to hear it?”
Paul neatly turned north onto the on-ramp to Highway 1.
“It sounds like a long argument slowly dying out,” he said.
Nina laughed.
“So where’s your aunt Helen’s place?”
“Not far. Over the hill, just past the Pebble Beach turnoff.”
“Maybe he’ll be there,” Paul said, as if to himself. Cypresses and pines pressed against the highway. They turned onto 68 and wound through the views of golf courses and ocean, the fog bank ragged off the distant horizon, like cotton batting leaking from the edge of a faded blue quilt.
3
N INA AND PAUL BUMPED ONTO THE cracked asphalt driveway of the wooden bungalow in Pacific Grove on Pine Avenue. Aunt Helen had died years earlier and left the place to Nina, and the welcome mat in front and the rhododendron bushes on either side of the entryway dated from Aunt Helen’s time, along with one of the few pines left on Pine, an eighty-foot listing Norfolk pine that someday soon would fall on the neighbors’ roof and bankrupt Nina. But she couldn’t bear to cut it down yet.
Pacific Grove lay at the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, jutting right out into the Pacific, and never got hot. The sea breeze produced clean, tangy air.
Through the open shutters Nina could see someone walking back and forth, and her heart gave a lurch: Wish? Or one of the roommates?
To herself she called the twins who had originally leased the house from her the Boyz in the Hood. Dustin and Tustin Quinn both studied computer science at the California State University at the old Fort Ord and no doubt had a promising future, but after all, what she cared about was the present, and when they had come to Paul’s condo to talk to Nina about the rental ad, she had almost turned them down. She didn’t want a couple of scruffy male students, she wanted a sweet lady who looked like Aunt Helen, would cultivate an herb garden, and scrub the floor each morning in the predawn.
Unfortunately, only students wanted to rent the place. Built in the twenties, the whole house was heated by a single wall fixture in the living room. The stove had been old in Aunt Helen’s time, and there were no hookups for a washer or dryer. You had to cart the dirty clothes to the Washeteria in town. Apparently, elderly gardening ladies chose to live in more modern digs because none applied.
The Boyz had rented the place in May, hoping to stay through the summer and possibly fall. In early June Wish had moved in with them for the summer. Nina had suggested it, knowing the twins would welcome the help with the rent. Wish seemed to like them.
One of the Boyz now trotted out to meet them, shirtless, wearing baggy shorts and fat-tongued athletic shoes, no socks, a backward baseball hat on his head, a bottle of Gatorade in his hand. “My tenant,” Nina told Paul as he slammed the front door.
“Hey.” The young man nodded to them and blocked their way. He was stocky, buzz cut, and earnest, with a round pink face and round mouth. “How’s it going, Nina? Dus is just finishing up the sweeping. We wanted to clean up before you got here.”
So Dusty was dusting. “Hi, Tustin,” she said. “This is Paul van Wagoner.”
“Good to meet you. Any word about Wish?”
“No sign of him.” The fast swish of a broom mixed with the yelp of Eminem’s 2002 CD drifted through the open window. When Nina had lived there, right after Aunt Helen had passed on, it had been sea lions yelping from the kelp beds a few hundred yards off that she heard, but new millennia bring new kinds of song.
She had rented the house out ever since, and now she saw with landlord’s angst that the white paint was faded and peeling in places, and the roof was minus some shingles. “We’re sorry to raise up a storm if he’s just gone home to Tahoe or something…” Tustin was saying.
“No, you did right to call,” Paul said. “He hasn’t been home. We talked to his mother.”
Tustin really wanted to get the story out, or else he was delaying their entry while Dustin madly cleaned up, Nina couldn’t decide which. He launched into it, standing right there in the yard with the white picket fence.
“I don’t even want to think about him and that fire. We were watching TV when his buddy showed up. Gave him a beer, invited him to dinner. Danny is his name. He was dressed like he was posted on a mission to Iraq or something. He takes Wish aside to tell him something he doesn’t want us to hear, then he says to Wish, ‘Man, you want in or not? You wanna be broke forever?’
“Well, at the mention of money, Wish’s eyes lit up. I have to admit Dus and I wanted to know what was going on, but Danny and Wish went into his room. I heard him ask Wish, ‘You still got your camera?’ Wish said ‘Yeah, but I gotta go to Tahoe tomorrow. I don’t think this is such a good idea.’ He was reluctant, you know?”
“Wait a minute,” Paul said, holding up a hand to slow him down. “What’s not a good idea?”
Tustin shrugged. “Who knows? They shut the door. All I know is, he was pushing Wish to go somewhere. Told him he could be home that night-this was Tuesday-in plenty of time to pack for Tahoe.
“We could hear them arguing. Wish wasn’t up for it. And then Danny’s voice, loud, insisting, talking some more about money. He had an accusatory tone, like, ‘You turned on me, man, you’re such a wuss.’ Then it would get quiet in there, like they were whispering.
“My brother and I went into the living room and sat down to watch the baseball game on TV and eat our pot pies. Wish and Danny came out, and Wish acted embarrassed. He had his backpack and we said, like, where you headed, man? He just shook his head, but when Danny went into the can Wish motioned to me to come into the kitchen and said, ‘Listen. I’m going to Robles Ridge. Okay? Just in case anything happens.’
“‘What’s going to happen?’ I said, but he just shook his head.”
Dustin finally appeared at the front door. He gave some signal to his brother, who said, “We can go in now.” They mounted the three steps to the welcome mat. Dustin, in scruffy cutoffs and bare feet, held the screen open for them. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Inside, to Nina’s relief, aside from scuffs on the hardwood, dirty fingerprints around the light switches, and overlooked dustballs in the corners, the main room looked okay. However, closed doors to the two bedrooms beckoned. She resolved to have a look before they left. She sat down on the sprung couch with Paul.
Dustin, who acted the householder while his brother did duty as the greeter, went into the kitchen and she heard the fridge door open. In a minute he came back with Gatorade for all. Nina was hungry. Gatorade would do. She unscrewed the top.
“So what’s the news?” Dustin said, getting right to it after the introductions.
“No news,” Paul said. The Boyz looked at each other and shook their heads.
“Tustin was telling us about Danny’s visit,” Nina said. “Go ahead. But maybe you could turn down the music?”
Dustin went over to the stereo and Eminem stopped cleaning out his closet and dissing his mama over Dr. Dre’s menacing arrangement. She thought of Bob’s complaints when she made him clean out
“Yeah. So. Where was I? Right, Wish says, ‘Robles Ridge, just in case.’ ”
Dustin broke in, “So Tus says, ‘You better tell us more than that,’ just as this loser Danny came back into the kitchen, and this made Danny bullshit.”
“Told us to fuck off,” Tustin added, “only he was less polite.”
“What a poser,” Dustin said.
“Drugs?” Paul asked.
“He didn’t stagger or laugh a lot or smell funny and his pupils were normal-sized.”
“We looked,” Tustin added.
“I could see Danny and Wish went way back. At one point Danny was going on like, ‘See, the whole cop-school thing, that’s to prove you’re not afraid. But you are, aren’t you, Willis?’
“And then they left.” Dustin took a long swig of Gatorade. A few pounds heavier than his brother, he had apple cheeks and a more innocent air. Nina could see the Boyz in a few years in identical suits, staring at computer screens through identical glasses, juggling mortgages and families, saving consumer capitalism.
The Boyz came from Rhodes, Iowa. She wondered where they would end up.
Paul had been taking notes. He took over. “Describe what they were wearing.”
“Danny had on a camouflage jacket, like I said,” Tustin replied. “Jeans. He wore the shirt buttoned up, and I had the impression he had a lot of stuff in his pockets. I asked him if he was Army, but he said he got the jacket up at the Moss Landing military-surplus store. I didn’t really think he was even ex-military, not with the ponytail.”
“Shoes?”
“Sorry, I never noticed. Wish was wearing his Doc Martens, I remember that. The only reason I noticed Wish’s boots was he talked about buying them, how expensive they were. He thought about it for a long time…”
“What else did Danny wear?”
The twins looked at each other and shrugged. “I think the T-shirt under the jacket was white. I could see the neck part,” Tustin said.
“What did his teeth look like?”
