Rage

“Can’t wait to close this one. When I’m finished, Dwayne’s taking me to Fiji.”

“Aloha.”

“You should get some sunshine yourself, Milo.”

“I don’t tan.”

“Right here’s fine, big guy.”

Milo rolled to a stop behind a white-box apartment complex backed by parking slots. Stepping out, Kramer set the poodle down, leaned into his window, touched his shoulder. “The brassogracy treating you okay?”

“They leave me alone,” he said.

“That’s a brand of okay.”

“That’s a brand of nirvana.”

***

“What do you think?” he asked me as we exited the alley and drove west on Gregory Drive.

“She did a competent job, didn’t dig very deep.”

“What about that comment: the family living under a cloud?”

“Sounds like reality.”

He grunted. “Let’s find Lara’s other surviving relative. See what her reality is.”

CHAPTER 18

Nina Balquin was listed on Bluebell Avenue in North Hollywood.

Not far from the site of her daughter’s suicide. Or the Buy-Rite mall, or the park where her granddaughter had been taken to be murdered.

A short drive, also, to the Daneys’ house in Van Nuys.

But for Barnett Malley’s escape to rural solitude, the case had tossed a narrow net.

Milo got the number, spoke briefly, finished with, “Thanks, ma’am, will do.”

“Off we go,” he said. “She’s surprised that I want to talk to her about Barnett, not upset. Just the opposite, she’s lonely as hell.”

“You picked that up in a thirty-second conversation?”

“I didn’t pick up anything,” he said. “She came right out with it. ‘I’m a lonely woman, Lieutenant. Any company would be welcome.’ ”

***

The house was a cantaloupe orange one-story ranch on a bright, hot street. The lawn was green pebbles. A garden hose coiled loosely near the front steps, maybe for watering the elephant’s ears that covered half the front wall. This sisal doormat read DJB over a heraldic crest. The bell chimed do-re-mi.

The woman who opened the door was petite, of indeterminate middle age, with narrow blue eyes and a glossy tension around the cheekbones that trumpeted the virtues of surgical steel. She wore a fitted orange crepe blouse over black leggings and red Chinatown slippers embroidered with dragons. Her brown hair was snipped boy-short with feathery sideburns that curled forward. Her right hand gripped a remote control. A cigarette in her left dribbled smoke that trailed downward and dissolved before it reached her knee.

She tucked the remote under her arm. “Lieutenant? That didn’t take long. I’m Nina.” Her mouth smiled but the surrounding glassy skin didn’t cooperate and the expression was robbed of emotional content.

The house had no entry foyer and we stepped directly into a paneled room topped by a slanted beamed ceiling. All the wood was pickled oak, yellowed by decades. The carpet was rust plush flecked with blue, the furniture beige, tightly upholstered and newish, as if it had been plucked intact from a showroom. A paneled wet bar housed glasses and bottles and a flat-screen TV sat on the brown tile counter. The set was on. Courtroom dispute, the sound muted- people mouthing aggression; a bald, scowling judge wielding a gavel in a way that couldn’t escape Freudian theory.

Nina Balquin said, “Love that stuff, it’s nice to see idiots get what they’ve got coming.” Aiming her remote, she switched off. “Drinks, gentlemen?”

“No, thanks.”

“It got kind of warm outside.”

“We’re fine, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m having.” She walked to the bar and poured herself something clear from a chrome pitcher. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

Milo and I sat on one of the beige sofas. The fabric was coarse and pebbly and I felt the bumps against the backs of my legs. Nina Balquin spent a long time adding ice to her drink. I noticed a tremor in her hands. Milo was taking in the room and I did the same.

A few family photos hung lopsided on a rear wall, too distant to make out. Sliding glass doors exposed a small rectangular swimming pool. Clumps of leaves and grit floated on greenish water. Rims of concrete decking too narrow for seating comprised the rest of the backyard.

Walk out, get wet, come back in.

Nina Balquin settled perpendicular to us and sipped her drink. “I know, it’s a mess, I don’t swim. Never used Barnett for the pool. Maybe I should’ve. He could’ve been good for one thing.” She drank some more.

Milo said, “You’re not fond of Barnett.”

“Can’t stand his guts. Because of how he treated Lara. And me. Why are you asking about him?”

“How he treated Lara before Kristal’s murder or after?”

At the mention of her granddaughter, Balquin flinched. “You ask, I answer? Fine, but just tell me one thing: Is the bastard in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s possible.”

Balquin nodded. “The answer is he was rotten to Lara before and after. She met him at a rodeo- can you believe that? She went to good schools, her father was a dentist. The plan was she was supposed to go to the U. But her grades went to hell in high school. Still, there was Plan Two, Valley College. So what does she do after graduating? Gets a job at a dude ranch in Ojai and meets Cowboy Buckaroo and the next thing I know she’s calling to inform me they’re married.”

She gulped her drink, swished liquid in her mouth, swallowed, stuck out her tongue. “Lara was eighteen, he was twenty-four. She watches him rope horses or doggies or whatever they rope and suddenly the two of them are at some tacky little drive-through chapel in Vegas. Her father could’ve… killed them.” She smiled uneasily. “To use an expression.”

Milo said, “Can’t blame him for being upset.”

“Ralph was furious. Who wouldn’t be? But he never said a thing to Lara, kept it all inside. A year later he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and four months after that he was gone.” She glanced back at the dirty pool. “Excuse me, not gone. Dead. At the time he was diagnosed we were in escrow on another house, Encino, south of the boulevard, gorgeous, huge. Thank God Ralph had decent life insurance.”

“Does Lara have siblings?” I said, still trying to make out the photos.

“My oldest, Mark, is a C.P.A. up in Los Gatos, used to be comptroller for a dot-com, he’s doing fantastic as an independent consultant. Sandy, the baby, is in grad school at the University of Minnesota. Sociology. It’s kind of endless for her- school; she already has one master’s. But she never gave me a lick of trouble.”

She took an ice cube in her mouth, sloshed it, crushed it. “Lara was the wild one. It’s only now I’m able to get in touch with how pissed-off I am at her.”

“For marrying Barnett?”

“For that, for everything- for killing herself.” Her hand began to shake and she placed her rattling glass on an end table. “My therapist told me suicide’s the ultimate aggressive act. Lara didn’t need to do