Hailey's War

“I know,” he said, “but I need to think about how best you should approach him.”

As it turned out, CJ never did hit on the right way for me to talk to Marsellus. Something else happened first that changed everything.

Two days later, I was awakened by my phone ringing at ten-fifteen in the morning. I picked up the receiver and found myself talking to the traffic sergeant who’d taken my statement and then kicked me loose. His question was direct and to the point: Had Miss Beauvais, Trey’s au pair, been in touch with me?

No, I said, why would she have been?

I’m just checking in with you, he’d said.

Not seeing any significance, I tried to go back to sleep-I hadn’t been sleeping well at night-but an hour later, CJ was pounding on my door.

“Take it easy, would you,” I said, pushing hair out of my eyes and letting him in.

“Pack up your things,” he said as soon as I’d closed the door behind him. “Not everything, just what you really want.”

“What?” I thought it was a joke, though he seemed genuinely on edge.

“Trey’s nanny is missing. The cops are looking for her. Nobody’s seen her. Pack up just what you need, I’m getting you out of L.A.”

I pulled back. “What are you trying to say?”

CJ ran his hands through his hair. “Just listen to me, Hailey. I didn’t want to scare you the other night, but as soon as you told me Trey Marsellus’s name, I was thinking of something like this. I hoped I was overreacting.”

“Something like what?”

“This happened in New York,” he said. “A mobster’s son was hit by a car, by accident, and not long after that, the neighbor who did it just disappeared.”

I said, “You of all people know that ‘gangsta’ is just a figure of speech. Marsellus isn’t really a gangster.”

“Yes, he is, Hailey.” He paused. “I hear things, and maybe I don’t know for sure what’s rumor and what’s fact, but I meant what I said the other day, when I called Marsellus ‘heavy.’ He’s not a ‘no harm, no foul’ kind of guy. And he and his wife tried for years to conceive before finally having Trey. She hasn’t been pregnant again since. What does that tell you?” He answered his own question: “You took from him the one thing that can’t be replaced.”

My face felt hot. “Don’t you think I feel bad enough-”

“You’re not listening,” he said. I’d never heard CJ sound so frustrated. “Goddammit, what’s it going to take to get through to you? You can feel as bad as humanly possible; it won’t help. You killed this guy’s only son. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix it.”

I said, “But if he’s really the kind of man you say, I think not apologizing and then running away is only going to make it worse.”

“There isn’t a way to make it better.”

“But-”

“No,” he said, taking both my hands in his. “I know what you’re thinking of, all that honor-and-duty bullshit you never really left behind, but that doesn’t apply out here, and it’s going to get you killed. West Point is over, and now L.A. is over for you, too. Pack your things.”

What convinced me that he was right was this: His hands were very slightly shaking. It had been a long time since I’d felt those kind of nerves, so his anxiety served as a kind of external gauge for me, of what I should be feeling but wasn’t.

“Are you sure about this?” I’d said.

“I don’t like it, either, baby,” he’d said quietly. “But this is how it’s gotta be.”

To this day I don’t know if there were any ramifications, criminally, for my leaving town before the traffic division’s investigation was officially closed. It had just been a formality, but the cops took a dim view of people skating when they’d been told to stick around. It was possible that if I was ever picked up on something minor in San Francisco, I’d be shipped back to Los Angeles and charged with some kind of obstruction. It wasn’t the charge that would be problematic, but jail would actually be the easiest place for Marsellus to get at me. Anyone gang-connected could.

CJ would have stayed longer with me in San Francisco, but I hadn’t let him. When we parted, we’d both acted with exaggerated casualness. He’d said, “Look, I’ll come up and visit you soon. I’ll be around so much you’ll be sick of me,” and I’d said, “Sure, I know,” and we’d hugged and then he’d driven away, toward the 101 back home.

In those first weeks, I’d lived with a drab, hollow feeling not unlike how addicts describe their first day without alcohol or a cigarette: Is this what my life’s going to be, from here on out? I’d alternated between that sense of lonely tedium and a stomach-clenching guilt. I’m not sure those feelings ever went away, but they did lessen. In time, I found an adrenaline-junkie job and threw myself into it. I made more money than I needed and stashed it carelessly in a coffee can. I made a few friends and drank with them. Drank without them, too. I met Jack Foreman.

But I still felt restless at times, particularly in early summer, when business at Aries was slowest and San Francisco was shrouded in the kind of weather coastal Californians called June gloom. That was probably why, in the end, I called Serena back and told her I’d take a girl I’d never met to the mountains of inland Mexico.

seven

Several days later, sometime after nine in the evening, I was parked in front of a house in a working-class section of Oakland. It was an inexpensively well-kept place, with a small trimmed lawn, and no weeds between the stepping-stones that led to the house. There was a geranium by the front door, blooming red. This was where Nidia Hernandez was staying with friends.

Shay had looked pretty sour when I told him I was taking nearly two weeks off, but there was nothing he could do. I was an independent contractor; I worked, or not, at both my will and his. He could have fired me just as easily.

That afternoon, packing had been quick and easy. Hot-weather clothes, one heavy jacket for the evenings. A recently purchased guidebook to Mexico. A bottle of Bacardi and several minis of Finlandia, tucked protectively between layers of clothing. The little care package Serena had sent to me-a sheaf of twenties and fifties, the promised expense money, and a handful of Benzedrines wrapped in foil, to help me stay alert on the road. The rest of my pay would wait until I was on my way back up north; Serena and I had arranged that I’d stop at her place and we’d settle up then.

Finally I’d cleaned and oiled the Airweight, which was now taped under the front seat of the car I’d rented. I didn’t expect any trouble in Mexico. I was just being careful.

A young man with a peach-fuzz mustache answered the door when I knocked. “Are you Hailey?” he said.

“I’m in the right place, then.”

“Yeah, hello, yeah,” he said, and moved aside. I stepped into a narrow entryway of brown-checked linoleum, and the boy called to someone farther back in the house in Spanish so rapid I didn’t catch much of it, except for Nidia’s name.

A middle-aged woman came around the corner into the entryway. She was thin, with red-tinted hair pinned up on her head.

“Is it her?” she said in a gently accented voice. “Oh, please come in. My name is Herlinda.”

“Hailey,” I said.

“Come into the kitchen.”

I followed her. The floorboards felt slightly warped under my feet, and the house smelled of many, many meals cooked there. We rounded a corner, and I got my first look at Nidia Hernandez.

She was sitting in a chair slightly pushed back from the kitchen table, two scuffed suitcases at her feet. I could see where she’d draw unwanted masculine attention. Her hair was cinnamon-colored, in curls weighed down into near-straightness by their length. Her eyes were green-brown, and she had a heart-shaped face. She wasn’t very