Chapter 44
The phone number sourced to a ground-floor apartment in San Fernando that backed on a French-dip stand and a mechanic's shop with grease puddles and weeds overtaking its cracked-up asphalt. The stale air made my shirt itch, no small feat since I was wearing one of Alejandro's comfortable Dri-FITs, excavated from Induma's coat closet. The heat of the pavement came up through the soles of my sneakers, and a street crew's mess up the block wafted over tar-bitter air.
The numbers had long fallen off the door, but their echo remained in the less-faded paint beneath where they'd been nailed. An air conditioner, hung out the window, dripped water and banged away like a jalopy. Competing for dominance, a TV blared-some scripted argument between talk-show participants, their voices fuzzed with static at the edges. I knocked.
A voice, less irritated than run-down, bellowed, 'I'm coming, I'm coming.'
A squat woman in her fifties opened the door, drying her hands on a stained apron, cinched unflatteringly between the bulges of her midsection. She wasn't obese, but thick, spreading with age. Her unwieldy breasts had descended to rest against her stomach. She glanced up at my face and stiffened, her hands freezing in the swirl of fabric.
She flung one of them up to shove ineffectively at her bangs, pasted to her sweaty forehead. Her hair was thinning, so I could see a shine of scalp at her crown. Behind her a dirty skillet sat on a stovetop, and the place reeked of bacon grease. A rainbow-bead curtain, still undulating from her movement, blocked a doorway to her right.
'Oh, sorry,' she said. 'I was expecting someone else.' A patch of eczema had claimed her elbow and made headway up the back of her forearm. She scratched at the white, flaking skin, her nails giving off a sound that made my spine arch.
'Sorry to startle you.'
'I wasn't startled.' She emitted a nervous laugh. There was something familiar in her eyes-not their shape but the way they creased with her forced, semiaggressive grin.
'Ms. Landreth?'
Her nod reminded me of a squirrel frantically shelling peanuts. 'How did you find me?'
'Through your aunt.'
'Harriet?' Her eyes moistened. 'You saw Harriet?'
'I did. Look, I understand why you're scared-'
'I'm not scared. Why should I be scared?'
'You've moved around a lot. You're hard to find.'
'What are you, the Census Bureau?' She glanced behind me, checking for others. 'What do you want?'
'I want to know about Jane and Gracie Everett. Do you remember them?'
'Of course I remember.' Her hands found a tuft of hair and pulled it around to her temple. She started searching out and breaking off split ends, a repetitive, simian tic. Her hair wasn't long enough for her to see easily, and her pupils were strained so hard to the side it looked painful. The soft flesh of her arms jiggled with the motion. I wondered if she was on speed. 'It was an awful thing. The kind of thing you don't forget.'
I studied the face, looking to recapture that flash of familiarity, but it was gone. One of my friends from night school in Oregon had a baby whom she brought into lecture the next month to show off. I recall how the baby burbled and took on his mother's features for an instant before they vanished back into generic babyness. I found myself straining now to reclaim that same type of satisfying deja vu.
'You saw the bodies being dumped?' I asked.
'Yeah. I was walking my dog. They pulled over up the street. Didn't see me. It was a dirt lot. I saw two guys. They looked Mexican. Central American, maybe. Anyway, I went home and called the cops.'
It sounded rehearsed-all the requisite beats, well ordered, as if she'd been running over them in her head for years.
'And you saw Jane out by some trailers several months before?'
But she wasn't biting. 'A month or so before.' Her eyes ticked to me, then back to her hair. It was as though she was afraid to look directly at me. 'Look, who are you? Why are you asking me questions? Can I see a badge or something?'
'I don't have a badge.'
'Well, then,' she said, and shut the door.
I heard the beads rustle, and a moment later I sensed a slight swivel of the closed Venetian blinds in the window to my right. I could not afford to wait around and have her call someone. Seeing no other choice, I started down the walk, the hot breeze lofting the smell of tar into my face. I could feel her stare penetrating my back.
Halfway down the walk, it hit me. Her startled reaction, the creases at the eyes, her high-pitched nervousness and reluctance to look me in the face-she'd recognized me right away. And was terrified I'd recognize her.
Isabel McBride. Bob's Big Boy. Off shift at 1:00 A.M.
My head bowed, just slightly, and I took a half step to my right, firming my balance. Seventeen years of assumptions, unraveling. Still, I could feel the eyes behind me, hidden by those Venetian blinds, boring into my back.
I turned. The blinds swiveled again, forming an impenetrable sheet, a child covering his eyes to hide. I rang the bell. There was no answer, just a dread-filled wait, augmented with continued talk-show broiling. I rang again. Waited. Rang again.
Finally the door opened. Jerkily.
'Isabel,' I said.
Despite the deadening heat, she was shaking. 'Nick.'
I said, 'Please talk to me.'
Tears sprang up out of nowhere. Just two, spilling over the brinks of her eyes, sliding in straight tracks down her ruddy face. She jerked her head in a nod.
I followed her into the grease-tinged air, through the chattering rainbow-bead curtain. On the squawking TV, Jerry Springer reclaimed his microphone from an overzealous audience member. Across the bottom of the screen, today's caption: ARE YOU MY BABY'S DADDY? Isabel-or Tris- struck the power button as she passed, and we sat on unmatched couches shoved together to form a makeshift sectional. The post-Springer silence seemed so daunting as to be majestic. Through a doorway I could see a suitcase open on the bedroom floor, the clothes she'd started to throw inside.
I said, 'Are you Isabel or Tris?'
'Tris. I'm Tris. Patricia.' She was back to her hair, eyes crammed to the side, snapping off dry split ends and flicking them to the floor.
I'd rehearsed the tainted fantasy so often in my head since that night. Who knows how many times I'd reinvented Isabel McBride? Added an extra inch or three to her bust, imagined some trick of the tongue, conflated the firm hump of her ass with that of a model, a fling, some woman on the street? Everything possible to make her attractive enough to justify my slipping out that night and leaving Frank open.
She seemed to sense my thoughts. 'Gravity takes over,' she said defensively. 'You lie down, your tits are in your armpits. You'll see. Wait till you hit forty, fifty. Men hide it better, but it's no prettier.'
'It's dangerous right now.'
She nodded jerkily. 'I figured it might get that way. I've been careful.' She snorted, nodded at me. 'Not careful enough, I see.'
'Will you tell me what happened?' I asked. 'The real story?'
She looked away, her chin trembling. 'You don't want the real story.'
We sat in the silence a moment, and then I said, 'You were hired to seduce me? To lure me out of the house?'
'I didn't know that was what it was for. I didn't know why. Money was tight, and I had a girl to raise. You weren't half bad-looking, so I said what the hell. Paid better than waitressing. They had me do things. I didn't know.'
'You didn't ask.'
