'Then why haven't you talked to her for, like, nine hundred years?'
'Because of a bunch of shit I got into when I was younger.'
She stared at me curiously for a moment, then flopped down on her stomach in front of a Scrabble board and a two-volume dictionary. A few tournament certificates and ribbons were tacked over her desk.
I stayed in the doorway. 'You're a Scrabble champ? That's pretty cool.'
'Cool. Yeah. I have to beat the boys away with my thesaurus.' She glanced back at me over a shoulder. 'Look, why don't you just get out of here?'
When I got downstairs, Callie was doing the dishes. I cleared my throat, but she didn't turn around.
'Do you know what company Frank was in?' I asked. 'In Vietnam?'
She kept scrubbing. 'Frank didn't talk much about the war. You know that.'
'Do you have anything that would say where he served?'
'Yeah, Nicky, I keep his obit framed in the powder room.' The pan hit the counter with a clank, but then her shoulders lowered and she relented. 'I believe it's on his headstone.'
'Where… where is that?' I was ashamed not to know.
She caught the hitch in my voice and turned. 'The veterans' cemetery. Wilshire and Sepulveda.'
Above the breakfast nook hung a wedding picture of Callie and Steve, Emily scowling from the side in a dark blue velvet dress. So much of Callie's life I had missed. What had I been doing the day my mom had gotten remarried?
Like his daughter, Steve had seemed a bit tentative in the house, a touch formal. Six months he'd lived here. It wasn't easy transitioning into a new place, feeling like a guest in your own home. I thought about that shoulder holster on the chair upstairs. It struck me how tall Frank was, or how tall he always seemed. 'What's Steve do?'
'He's a cop.' She added, defensively, 'He's a wonderful man.'
'I expect so. You wouldn't marry a man who wasn't.'
We looked at each other a moment, awkwardly. She'd rebuilt a life, just as I had. Though I was happy for her, seeing her brought back the ache I'd tried for years not to feel. We were no longer who we'd been when we'd known each other. The old cues, the connections, our stupid inside jokes- they weren't there when I reached for them. I could see in her face that she felt it, too. That hollowness.
She said, 'We were so close, Nicky.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'We really were.'
As I passed, she took my arm, stopped me. She said, 'I'm ready to listen now. I want you to know that.'
'Listen to what?'
'Why you really ran away.'
I thought about the photomat slip in my pocket and the key in my shoe.
She said, 'What?'
I shook my head.
'How about the short version?' She let go of my arm. 'Do you owe me anything?' She asked it not passive- aggressively but with genuine curiosity.
My chest cramped; my throat was dry. It was as if my body was rebelling so I wouldn't be able to get the words out. 'The night I left, they came and arrested me,' I said. 'For Frank's murder.'
'They did what to you?' She was instantly, protectively furious.
'They booked me into MDC. Have your husband check the records.'
'You should have talked to me, Nicky.' She looked crushed. 'We could've gotten you a lawyer. There would've been no case. No case'
'They'd manufactured one, including my prints on the gun.'
'Everyone knew you picked up the gun. They couldn't make anything of that.'
'After what happened to Frank, I was willing to believe they could do a lot of things. And I wasn't gonna trust the assholes with badges to handle it on the up-and-up.'
We both turned at a movement in the doorway. Steve standing, holding his dirty plate. His stare was the first coplike thing I'd noticed about him.
I nodded at her, then at Steve. 'Thanks for letting me look at those pictures.'
I walked out, but Steve barely moved, so I had to brush past him. My footsteps knocked the tiles of the foyer, and then I swung the door closed behind me and hurried down the walk and to my truck, hidden around the corner.
I walked among the thousands of headstones, the perfect rows fanning by like plowed furrows seen from a moving car. The photomat slip remained safely in my pocket. A few more hours before I could pick up the roll of mystery film. I told myself that's where my uneasiness was coming from.
The grounds administrator had pointed me to the general area, but it was difficult to keep my bearings among the identical Department of Defense grave markers. Traffic on Wilshire and the 405 was distant enough to recall the ocean, a white-noise accompaniment to the grassy swells and shade offered by venerable trees. It would have been peaceful were it not for all the dead.
I nearly walked past Frank's gravestone. I hadn't expected it to be any different from all the others, but I also somehow had. No wreath, no flowers. Just his name, indented in a plug of marble. My chest tightened, and I realized I was breathing hard. Fumbling out a notepad, I jotted down the information I needed. Company C, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, United States Army. Vietnam.
Slapping the notepad closed, I turned swiftly to go, almost striking an old man making his fragile way up the row of graves. His cheeks were hollow, his jaw pronounced and skeletal, and he wore an ancient cloth hat weighed down with military pins. He looked into my face, then glanced past me at the headstone and shook his head, his lips bunching. 'Them boys caught a lotta shit they didn't deserve,' he said.
He winked jauntily and continued up the row. I was staring at the grass, and then it got blurry, and I forced my eyes back up to the date of birth, the date of death, the name stamped in block letters on the cold white marble.
Chapter 16
I sat in my car in the sweltering Valley heat, the photo package in my lap. The cheery yellow envelope featured sample photos of a hot-air balloon and a golden retriever shuddering off sprinkler water. But I wasn't looking at the samples. I was looking at the one slot on the front form that had been filled out, the handwritten block letters that spelled out NICK HORRIGAN.
Breaking the gummy seal, I extracted the inner envelope. I ran my thumb under the flap, hesitant to lift it. What if it contained pictures of a mangled corpse? Someone being shot? A child being molested? I hadn't considered a frame-up. Charlie probably hadn't either. My heart thudding, I glanced around the parking lot but didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
Bracing myself, I tugged the set of pictures from the envelope. Whatever I was expecting, it was nothing compared to the jolt I got from looking at my own face.
A zoom-lens close-up of me walking down the street, hands shoved in my pockets.
I jerked my head around, craning to take in the full parking lot. The mother loading groceries, the kids angling in on tacos outside the comic-book store, the businessman at the meter-all of a sudden, no one was outside suspicion. It wasn't until I looked back at the photo that I saw that it captured me passing in front of Charlie's house. The picture had been taken from a good distance. Although it was blurred at the edge of the frame, I could make out a sliver of the Dumpster that the photographer had hidden behind. A second shot showed me ducking the crime-scene tape into the garage. Then there I was, coming back out with a rucksack hanging heavily off my shoulder.
With shaking hands I flipped to the next picture.
A nighttime shot of the Sherman Oaks post office, no more than ten blocks from here. The flash illuminated the Magnolia Boulevard address painted on the beige wall.
The burn in my chest alerted me that I'd been holding my breath. I shook my left Puma, felt the rattle of the
