There was no car at the address given for Mr. LaTiara. The apartment building was red and cream stucco, tall for L.A., three floors. I sat there patiently, remembering Mum’s kisses, fearing the iron bars of California justice.
At twelve fifteen Jessa stumbled out of the arched entrance to Hector’s building. She was wearing a pale green dress that didn’t seem done up right. She looked confused standing there on the concrete path to the first-floor entrance of the building.
Another problem I have is that I don’t have enough respect for women. I’m not saying that I don’t try to be civil by opening doors and keeping my eyes in check. The problem is that I don’t fear women enough.
Seeing Jessa, I jumped out of my car and made it across the 143
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street before considering what her presence there might have meant. She was turning in a slow circle, looking up as if the sun had robbed her of her senses.
“Jessa, what are you doing here?” I asked, coming up to her.
At first she didn’t respond. Then she looked me in the eye.
After a moment, I think she recognized me. I thought she was going to tell me something, but then she screamed and socked me in the jaw.
Then next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the lawn.
I sat up, befuddled. Jessa was screaming again but she was also running. I watched her go down the street at a good clip and wondered what I should do.
I decided that going back to my car would be a mistake. If anyone saw me, they might get the license plate, and then the police would have my name and Jessa’s face at least. I couldn’t walk down the street — I just couldn’t. And so I decided that going into the red building was my best choice.
It might not have been a good decision, but I was a little shaken by Jessa’s sucker punch.
Once inside the entrance of the building, I was presented with two choices. To the left was a circular stairway that led to the apartments above, and straight ahead was the doorway to the first-floor abode.
Another easy choice. The door to the first-floor apartment was open.
I walked in gingerly. If there was someone there, I didn’t want to scare them.
The foyer was a small room in its own right. Salmon pink walls and a dark wood chair with an ivory white cushion in the seat. The carpet was a yellow background supporting dozens of woven red roses. There was a telephone on the floor, mark-144
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ing a place where a stand should have been, I imagined. And there was a portrait of a white woman on a horse. The woman and horse were on a path in front of a white fence. In the distance was an apple orchard, beyond that a mountain range.
I remember much more about that foyer. I remember the baseboard around the floor and the yellow-and-red light fix-ture on the ceiling. I could spend a great deal of time on the dimensions of the room and the odd shape of it . . . but that’s because of what happened in the next room, the room I should never have entered.
It was a den of some sort: half office, half study. It was dark.
There was a desk behind which were closed drapes. There was a high-backed office chair, and sitting on it was Hector LaTiara, the man who had come to me looking for a French dictionary, the man Useless was so frightened of.
He was wearing a vanilla-colored jacket and a white shirt, both of which were bad choices because of his throat being slashed open. Thick, gelatinous blood had flowed, lavalike, down the fair material. An arc of blood had sprayed across the papers on his desk.
One of his eyes was wide with fright, the other half closed.
His lips, even in his last moments, curled into a superior sneer, as if he were trying to convey to his murderer that he had been through worse than this.
I was mesmerized by the brutality and the blood. My gorge rose, but I wouldn’t turn away. My body shook, but I wouldn’t take a step. A voice in the back of my mind was screaming,
“Run! Run! Run!” But I stayed in place, gawking at the para-digm of murder.
My breathing had become very shallow. I was almost panting, with very little oxygen getting to my brain. So I put my 145
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hands on my knees and squatted down like a sprinter after a hard-run race. It worked. I took in deeper breaths, and the paralysis began to lift.
But bending over, I put myself closer to the corpse.
His left hand held a broken pencil. He’d probably snapped it when he first felt the razor on his throat. There was blood on the pencil and all over both hands. You could see that he’d grabbed for the wound without releasing what he held. Then, as he died, the hands came back down to the note he’d been writing:
Martin Friar, UEC, 2750.00
“Mr. LaTiara?” a frail voice called.
How I moved so swiftly behind the maroon drapes I cannot say. All I know is that one moment I was frozen in awe, reading the upside-down note, and the next I was behind the thick fabric. There was a tiny tear through which I could see the room beyond the dead man’s chair.
“Mr. LaTiara?”
And then, long moments later, a small and ancient white woman doddered in. She had the blue hair of an old woman and a face that would have fit on the smallest of animals.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, and I was convinced, absolutely, that she would fall down dead from fright.
