'News travels fast around here,' I noted.
'Are you done?' asked Karen.
'I'm done. Thanks, Chet. I'll be careful with this.'
'Good of you to visit,' he said. 'I'm sorry we lost you.'
Karen had already pushed through the door ahead of me when Chet quietly called me back inside. He gave me that odd look again, as if I were a specimen under his microscope. 'That was perceptive of you to remember the Eye misspells simple words, and to mention the similarity to Dostoyevski.'
I waited, wheels turning inside my head, wondering what I'd done. 'Thanks.'
'But nowhere, in any of our crime scenes, did he write the word ignorance — correctly or not.'
I could see ignorace on Amber's wall, clearly, as my mind streaked for the nearest plausible excuse. Even as I stood there, slack-jawed, probably, I saw a way to employ my befuddlement It was a superb lie, delivered with humility and aplomb. 'I write and edit hours a day,' I said with a minor smile. 'I must have mistaken my ignorance for his.'
Chester continued to study me hard for a moment, then smiled. 'Well,' he said, 'we all certainly have enough of that go around.'
For the next hour, I interviewed Erik Wald and Dan Winters to get Citizens' Task Force's information. The formulation of this force, I saw, was clearly a promotional move on Winters's part, a way of enlisting not only public support for the case but of enlisting votes in the next election-still two years away. I tried to remain uncynical. It was also, I understood, some kind of atonement-overatonement perhaps-for the fact that the department had taken so long to connect the Fernandez and Ellison killings. Still, the task force was theoretically a good idea, if it brought results. I personally thought the T-shirts and caps a bit much. Wald seemed almost to glow in his moment; he was sincere, glib, earnest, arrogant. I was reminded again that Erik was an outsider here and that no amount of infiltration of this department would ever render him a sworn officer. But for now, Wald would have heavy coverage, and his Task Force had already produced a potentially huge piece of evidence-the video and resultant photograph. Carla Dance dispatched a photographer who shot Wald during the last few minutes of our conversation. Before the shoot started, Erik brushed his hand through his curly hair and loosened his necktie.
'Hurry up,' he told the photographer. 'I need to get to work.'
The last thing I did before heading home to write the article was make a quick stop by Sorrento's up in the Orange hills.
Brent Sides was indeed tending bar. He was tall and tanned, with a swatch of thick blond hair, and eyebrows sun-bleached to white, which hovered over his blue eyes like frosted comets. But in spite of his tan, he blushed deeply when I introduced myself as Grace Wilson's father.
'I like your books,' he managed. 'And the article today about the killings. The waitresses here are all freaking out.'
I watched him drying glasses with a clean white towel before I spoke again. When I did, it was to tell him that Grace was in some very deep trouble with some very unfriendly men. He did not seem surprised by this.
I asked him about his whereabouts on the night of July 3, and he said he had been with Grace-first dinner, then the movies, then drinks. He took her back to her place, late.
'How old are you?'
'Twenty-three.'
He blushed again and looked away.
'Do you love her?'
He nodded. 'We've never been to bed, if that's what you mean, but I love her.'
A cocktail waitress ordered a round of drinks, and Sid was relieved to be away from my prying eyes while he made them, set them on the counter, and recorded his action onto keyboard. He eased back my way when the waitress swung away from the service bar, tray loaded.
'Have you seen these men?' he asked. 'The ones who are after her?'
'No. You?'
'Yeah. They look heavy. I've got some friends, though
'That's not the point, Brent. Describe them.'
He did, and his portraits were very close to those of Grace: one fat man with big ears and one slender young man with close-cropped hair and sunglasses.
I was quiet while he wiped the counter, apparently deep in thought.
'I'd never hurt her,' he said finally.
'You'd do just about anything for her.'
He nodded.
'Would you lie?'
'Probably. If she asked me to.'
I suddenly liked Brent Sides for his guilelessness, his boy’s shyness regarding my daughter, his obvious affection for her.
'Please ask her to call me,' he said.
'I'll do that.'
I paid up, shook Sides's cool, moist bartender's hand, and stepped back out into the heat of the afternoon.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Neither Isabella nor Grace was at home when I got there. Instead, there was a note on my pillow:
Dear Russ,
I'm sorry but I can't be here alone. I fell in the bathroom after the maid left. Not hurt, but it scared me. Grace was gone. Mom and Dad came and got me up and are taking me to their place. I wanted so badly to be your baby, not your infant. I miss you already.
Love, Your Isabella
For a while, I stood there in our upstairs bedroom, listening to the roar of Isabella's absence. The sun was lowering over the hills, and through the picture window came a clear, fierce light that splashed across the carpet, hung against the far wall, angled over the lower corner of our bed. So much was missing: Isabella's wheelchair-a contraption that I'd despised at first, then grown to regard with some sort of odd affection as it came to be more and more a part of her; the bottles of pills that always cluttered her nightstand; the cane, upright on its four-toed foot, always waiting nearby for her; Isabella's journal, catalogs, cookbooks, novels, and travel books that were always strewn across the bed; even her favorite blanket.
Now they were gone and the place-our place-was as forbiddingly neat as a motel room. A terrifying, urgent loneliness hit me then as I had a vision-not my first-of what this house and this life would be like without Isabella in them. A voice inside reminded me that the liquor cabinet was just downstairs. But I didn't move. I stood there in that unmerciful sunlight, drenched in a world without my wife.
I looked around the room, wondering whether the truest and simplest measure of a person is in what they love, whether a life is, most basically, a time to discover what those things and who those people are. And here was so much of what Isabella had found to love: the crystal hummingbird dangling on a string just inside the window; the cheap cut-glass figure of an Aztec warrior we'd gotten in Mexico and that now stood guard on the TV; her piano, which sat against the far wall in all its burnished, pampered beauty; her books of Neruda and Stevens and Moore; her hundreds of music tapes-everything from Handel to the sound track of 'Twin Peaks.' There it all was, illuminated by the sun but enlightened and made precious by Isabella's love.
And as I stood in front of her piano-her deafeningly silent instrument-and looked at the pictures framed and displayed there, I realized for the first time that of everything Isabella loved in this life, she loved me the most. There were pictures as we said our vows, as we climbed into the limo, cut the cake, waltzed the first dance. I'd looked at all these in passing a thousand times-every day, probably-and they'd always struck me as nice but common, charming in a ritual, almost institutionalized way. After all, didn't every married couple have a bunch of shots like these? But then, that day, standing in our room alone saw and really understood with absolute chilling
