'The cops had no luck with the former, and I'm having trouble with the latter.'
She said, 'Neither of you has a degree in investigative journalism from Columbia.'
Marcello said, 'Neither do you.'
Julianne shrugged. 'Columbia, Chico State, whatever.'
Sitting, I jotted down, Elisabeta, aka Deborah B. Vance and Trista Koan--The Deep End.
Julianne took up the slip of paper and said, 'If I can't get a bead on them myself, I still have good contacts at the papers.'
'I should go,' I said. 'I've got . . . you know, a lot I have to figure out. Thank you. For the whole thing. The job. Getting me back on my feet. It was a good time for me.'
Beyond the lounge, doors opened and closed, the buzz of students growing louder.
'I should go,' I said again. But I was still sitting there.
'What's wrong?' Marcello asked.
I took a deep breath.
He followed my gaze to the door. 'Scared?'
'Little bit.'
'Wanna go out like a man?'
I said, 'Yeah.'
Marcello cleared his throat. 'A NEW BEGINNING . . .'
I got to my feet.
'A MAN ALONE . . .'
I walked to the door.
'AND NOW HE WILL LEARN THAT NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME.'
The hall was alive with motion and noise. When I stepped out, the nearby students froze. The reaction rippled outward, faces turning in wave after wave, hands and mouths pausing midmotion, until the corridor was so silent I could hear the squeak of a sneaker against tile, a BlackBerry chiming in someone's pocket, a single cough. As I stepped forward, the nearest clique parted, drawing back and gaping anew.
My voice sounded gruff, preternaturally low. ' 'Scuse me . . . 'scuse me.'
The kids farthest away were up on tiptoes. A professor leaned out the door of her classroom. A few students snapped pictures of me with their cell phones.
I forged my way through. A conversation burst from the opening elevator doors, gratingly loud in the strained silence, and then two girls stepped out, took stock of the scene, and ducked giggling behind their hands. I passed them stoically, dead man walking.
The elevator had gone, leaving me to confront blank metal doors. I pushed the button, pushed it again. Glanced nervously across the sea of faces. Way down the hall, Diondre stood on a chair he'd pulled from a classroom. I raised a hand in silent farewell, and he smiled sadly and tapped his chest with a fist.
Mercifully, the elevator arrived, and I vanished into it.
Chapter 40
Muted by a coating of dust, the crime-scene tape fluttered across the door. The knob hung a little crooked, broken from the forced entry, and it came off in my hand. I pushed the door open, ducked under the tape, and stepped into the lonely little prefab house I still thought of as Elisabeta's.
The emptiness was startling. Most of the furniture had been cleared out. No bowl of cashews, no banana peels, no porcelain cats and wicker bookshelf. The coffee table stood on end. How clean the place had been. I'd taken it as a reflection of Elisabeta's quiet dignity, never guessing that the furniture had no dust because it had probably just been rented. Another misassumption I'd been primed to make.
I'd been hustled like a rube in a Chicago pool hall.
I crouched, my face burning, fingertips set down on the thread-bare carpet for balance. It wasn't embarrassment, but shame. Shame at my transparency, at how common my hopes and needs must have seemed to this cast of players. At how common they had proven me to be.
With noble indignation, Elisabeta had crossed this very floor to her granddaughter's bedroom. I pictured her, that grave face taut with grief, that hand resting on the knob of the closed door. You come see this beautiful child. I will wake her. You come see and tell me how I am to explain her this is her story.
And me, the concerned fool: No, please. Please don't disturb her. Let her sleep.
I followed Elisabeta's path, opened the door.
A coat closet.
Two wire hangers and a trash bin into which Elisabeta's snow globes had been dumped. They lay cracked and dribbling, price tags still affixed to the bottoms. Props. Beneath them the school photo of the little girl with the frizzy brown hair. The frame had cracked. I raised it, sweeping off the pebbles of broken glass. The picture was thin and came out easily. Not a photograph, but a color copy.
It had come packaged with the frame.
A chill crept along my scalp, down the back of my neck. I dropped the frame into the trash again.
When I stepped back outside, the wind whipped up clouds of dust and snapped my pants at my shins. I walked the front of the house, finally finding what I'd been hoping for: a hole in the hard dirt of a flower bed where a rental sign had been staked. Driving slowly around the housing loop, I called the numbers on various signs hammered into front lawns until I tracked down the right Realtor who also represented Elisabeta's house. When I told her I was interested in the property but curious about the crime-scene tape, she'd been only too eager to reiterate what she'd already told the cops and, from the sound of it, everyone else: It had been a one-month rental paid by money order, the transaction conducted by mail. She'd never seen a soul, and no one had even bothered to come back to collect the balance on the security deposit. Of course, she'd never imagined . . .
Nothing linked that house to me except my word and my memory, both of which were of questionable merit.
Elisabeta was my only breathing connection to the men who had killed Keith and framed me. She alone could corroborate my story, or at least a key part of it, which would go a long way toward clearing my name. She was also at grave risk. Valentine had been unable to locate her, and I doubted that Robbery-Homicide was knocking themselves out to do better.
I thought about jail, about prison, the movies I'd seen and the horror stories I'd heard. That tattooed inmate I'd passed in the corridor at the Parker Center, how the metal chains seemed barely to contain his muscles, how I'd flinched away, a pebble before a crashing wave. What could a man like that, unbound, do to a man like me?
If I couldn't find Elisabeta myself, she'd wind up like Doug Beeman.
And, chances were, so would I.
* * *
I vaulted over our rear fence, one foot on the greenhouse roof, and then down onto the overturned terra- cotta pot and the soft mulch of the ground. A reversal of the leap the intruder had made when I'd discovered him on the back lawn. I'd left my car up the street behind our house so I could come and go unmolested by the media stragglers out front. Since I didn't carry a key for the back door, I circled toward the garage. When I yanked open the side gate, I nearly collided with someone crouched by the trash cans. He and I both let out startled yells. He fell over himself running away, and only then did I see the camera swinging at his side.
Leaning against the house, I caught my breath in the grainy dusk.
Ariana was sitting cross-legged on a spot of cleared kitchen floor, notes fanned in a half circle around her. We hugged for a long time, my face bent to the top of her head, her hands gripping and regripping my back as if she were taking my measure. I breathed her in, thinking how for six weeks I could have done this whenever I wanted and yet for six weeks I hadn't done it once.
I followed her to her workstation--she was always most productive spread out on the floor--and we sat. The ubiquitous fake cigarette pack sat beside her laptop, and a sturdy Ethernet cord trailed to the modem she'd moved into the kitchen; wireless Internet couldn't work with the jammer on. She clicked through a few e-mails. 'I was on the phone with lawyers all day,' she said. 'Referrals and referrals from referrals.'
'And?'
'Referrals from referrals from referrals. Okay, I'll stop. The bottom line is that to get anyone worth having, we're gonna need at least a hundred grand for a retainer in case the arrest happens. Which, based on courthouse scuttlebutt that most of them were too happy to impart, seems to be more of a when than an if.' She watched this
