T he morning presentation wowed them. After Ray and Denise offered up their goodies and Martin wheeled out the rest of the irresistible feast, the museum people stopped just short of signing the deal on the spot. Ray ignored Martin privately while putting on an attentive face. Afterward, Martin flew through the office making more noise than usual, playing up how normal everything was. The rest of their coworkers cowered and ran away when they saw him coming.
“You have a phone call,” Suzanne said to Ray when the meeting finally broke up, “on hold.”
Back in his own office, he picked up the phone. “Yes?” He spent most of the next hour coddling Achilles Antoniou, who had a million questions and doubts.
Once he hung up, consumed with the voices he had heard on the tape from the house in Norwalk, while he should have been noting changes that had been suggested during the meeting, he thought about weapons. He sketched the knife his mother kept sharp. He drew a gun going off. Now this was confidence. This was power. You could destroy somebody like Martin, who was a plague on the world, in an instant.
He drew a noose.
Twenty-eight miles from her office in Santa Monica brought Kat to the house on the eastern edge of Torrance near the 110. She noted the mileage in her book, then stepped out into the blazing afternoon. The moment she closed her car door behind her, her ears reeled from the freeway roar and she imagined filthy, invisible particles rushing on the wind, forcing their way into her lungs.
After taking photographs, she walked around the house for a closer inspection. Mildew on the window ledges. A thirty-year-old-roof that had seen too much sun, too much rain, and no repair, ever. No sprinklers and a scarred, scorched lawn showing recent signs of visiting dogs. A one-car garage that probably started out as a shed, and still looked it. This was a neighborhood in transition, as it had been since the day it was jerry-rigged into existence. Nobody wanted to live here, so close to the freeway. They chose this place because houses here, in the under-a-half-million-dollar range, remained affordable to people who had sold other houses in scarier areas of L.A.
She got out her disto, shot it around the perimeters, and wrote down her measurements in a thick notebook that worked both as a record and as a useful reference.
She made one last stop for the day in Gardena, this time to act as second to her boss on a particularly contentious evaluation. Feeling bedraggled, finding the water in her bottle had reached an unsavory warmth, she drove north on the 405 back to the office, cranking up the a/c.
But the always feeble a/c in her Echo had crapped out. Was the whole system, the whole interlacing network of televisions and freeways and air-conditioning systems going down? Was this the end of the world? The traffic reporter sounded cool enough, maintaining that chipper air of a guy with bad news, but hey, folks, not so bad this time. He told of a four-car accident on the 405 near Rosecrans with minor injuries, “everybody on the shoulder, CHP in attendance,” then broke for a cheerful advertising ditty. Jaws clenched, hands glued to the steering wheel, radios spewing poor advice, everyone kept their windows up and their air-conditioning blowing.
The ordinary twelve-mile-an-hour afternoon traffic, worsened by the action just north of her, got hellishly worse because someone as stressed out as she was but less resilient chose that moment to have a heart attack or stroke or something. She breathed in and out and reminded herself about wisdom and compassion, and her own stress eased. Three highway patrol cars in front of her began their halting, swerving dance that was designed to slow traffic even more. They stopped about three hundred feet ahead of her and everyone else on the freeway stopped, too. Minutes later, a helicopter punched through the smog and landed on the road in a whirl of dust.
While she watched for the poor soul to get airlifted, windows open to the smoggy oven, Kat was reminded of the fierce summer days of her childhood in Whittier. The highway patrol cleared them for takeoff at last. Traffic, now permanently logjammed, snailed along. Defiant, she pulled her shirt off. The man on the left of her stared at her expensive push-up bra and gave her a thumbs-up before dropping back in the next lane.
The woman now on her left, driving an AWD Audi two-door, who also perhaps lacked freon or whatever the current additive was, hair neatly secured by a clip, in a blouse so soaked it left nothing to the imagination, was inspired. Catching Kat’s eye, the Audi woman pulled her shirt off, revealing a modest gray sports bra. Fuck ’em if they can’t accept a hot woman, they tacitly agreed, giving each other respectful nods.
Traffic slogged along. The two misfit women in fact drew very little attention from the people locked inside their atmosphere-controlled, tinted-windowed vehicles.
Why did Kat love Los Angeles? Because the spicy salt waves of the Pacific rolled in over the town, washing away all sin, cleansing and hopeful? Or was it just plain stubbornness? Miserere, but I’ll take life anyhow, she told herself, and popped Andrea Bocelli into the CD player.
Kat called her home phone for messages. Nothing from Leigh. She called information and had them dial Ray Jackson’s house. No answer there, either. Grimly purposeful, she called his office, but was told he was on a conference call and couldn’t be disturbed.
Frustrated, Kat decided to drive to Topanga to meet this mystery man Leigh had married, right after she made her last check-in at work.
Did Leigh miss her? Leigh had never made friends easily. Kat remembered opening the front door of the Franklin Street house one day and finding a sack and a card that said, “To my amiga.” Inside was a tiny framed painting of two little girls, standing at the shoreline, backs to the camera.
Leigh gave presents like that, things she worked on in secret, never on birthdays or at Christmas.
Was there a right moment back then for Kat to change history instead of just letting wrong things happen?
After leaving college, Tom had discovered the lovely work prospects available to a political science major. He worked for a year at a ketchup factory. Coming home for months slathered in the sauce, looking like a murder victim or perpetrator, he finally quit, then operated a forklift at a container company. Evenings and weekends, he dabbled in community theater, using his muscular young maleness to earn him many supporting roles.
As he got better, he got a couple of big parts and found an agent, who, one fine day, finagled him a part in a movie. Kat dragged Leigh along to see him, dressed in a red jacket, hold a door open for Dennis Quaid, speaking an actual line: “Right here, sir!” They giggled and teased him all night about landing a major motion picture and what a fine actor he had become. “Right here, sir!” they said, and “Right here! Sir!” until all three of them were incoherent with their own idiocy. Leigh thought it was hilarious that he had been bitten by the movie bug.
He got parts in some big plays and some fair write-ups in the Times and then one night-
Kat was barely twenty-six and a half, Leigh twenty-six, and Tom twenty-five. He came out of a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers at the Ahmanson, grinning, gathering up the bundle of flowers someone handed him. While they waited for him, he cheerfully signed a few autographs, flirting and kind to his fans, and Leigh hung back with a funny look on her face.
“Uh-oh,” Kat said, watching her friend.
“Have you ever looked at your brother, really?”
“Not the way you’re looking at him.”
“He’s turned into-”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“He’s beautiful.”
So Leigh and Tommy finally got together. They had known each other for so long as kids-Tommy, Kat’s silly kid brother-that their relationship blasted off fast. They double-dated with Kat and her then boyfriend, and she spent as much time as always with the two of them. After two months of increasing heat Leigh moved into Tom’s bachelor domain on Balboa Island in Newport.
Of course, there was a problem. Leigh’s father, James Hubbel, didn’t like Tommy. Vain and poor, he called actors in general. Not marriage material, he would advise Leigh in private, away from Tom.
“I do it for fun,” Tom said once at a family dinner with the Hubbels, oblivious to Mr. Hubbel at the head of the table, shaking his head with dismay. “What I really want is to go to Fiji or the Marquesas, find some peaceful spot, and set up a farm.”
“How practical,” Mr. Hubbel said. He was smiling, not in a good way.
Tom said, “No, Jim”-another provocation-“I’ve looked into this. You pay the government to lease lagoon space, hire a guy who knows how to seed the oysters, and you’ve got pearls. A whole world market. Or you could grow vanilla beans.”
For a long time, Leigh thought Tom said these things to be provocative, and only as time went along did she pick up that, yes, he meant every word.
“What if I don’t want to go to live on an island?” Leigh and Tom were swinging on the front porch glider at his apartment house on Balboa. They had just finished eating barbecue, and were preparing themselves for a walk on the beach by drinking beer. Kat sat on the steps painting her toenails.
Tom kissed Leigh, then nuzzled her hair, saying, “That’s okay. There’s always a plan B.”
“What is it?”
“No idea. Whatever you want.”
“You don’t even have a savings account.”
“Money goes and flows too fast these days.” He waved toward the glowing sunset. “We’re doing all right, aren’t we?”
But they weren’t. Leigh tired of the parties and Tom’s erratic, and to her, aimless existence. Between jobs, between auditions, he played volleyball on the beach or visited with his buddies while she slogged away, installing cabinets on construction jobs, the only steady paycheck.
Leigh confided in Kat, “I can’t stand the way he just hangs around! He offered to get a real job the other day, but I know how that would go. He’d hate me in the end.”
“He wouldn’t,” Kat had replied. “Oh, Leigh, I wish you had never hooked up with him. He’s so crazy about you. He’ll do anything you want, just so he has you.”
“I don’t think Tommy knows what it means to be grown up,” Leigh had said, screwing in some private final screw.
“You liked that about him.”
“I turn thirty next month,” she said.
Then she had met Ray Jackson. Leigh moved back to her folks’ house and dated both of them for a month. She told Kat she was breaking up with Tom before she told Tom. “Ray’s solid, creative, smart, driven. He’s like me. We’re both productive people. Creative.”
“You said that as if Tommy isn’t?”
Leigh flung a look at her full of heartache, angst, and decision. “Tom’s adorable, but he doesn’t care enough about what really matters. He’s not for me. Ray’s serious about life and so am I.”
“Tom loves you!”
“So does Ray.”
“But-” But what could Kat say? “Don’t hurt him.”
But the talk-or argument, whatever you wanted to call it-didn’t go well. Leigh told Kat some of the things she had to say when Tommy wouldn’t understand. They were cruel things, Kat thought.
Kat worried, but she thought her brother would move on to another pretty girl as he always had in the past.
But Tom did not.
Acting like a man who had been hit by a truck and left to die on the road, Tom begged Leigh to come back to him and staged progressively more desperate scenes until Leigh demanded that he go permanently away.
And so he did. Leigh and Kat had a fight the next day. Things were said, more cruel things, this time brought on by grief and guilt.
And Kat thought, I have to stop now, stop thinking anymore about Tommy, about what I did to Tommy.
She dropped off her notes at the office and got back on the freeway, heading north now, embracing the rush hour like a penance.
Almost thirty minutes after Kat had arrived at the Jackson house in Topanga Canyon, at about five-thirty, a Porsche Boxster drove up, blue, waxed, carapace gleaming like a huge tropical beetle’s in the sun, windows shadowy. Rather than pull into the garage, the car pulled up beside Kat’s. A man got out.
Tall, taut. Probably six feet two. Dark, groomed, no recession marring a noble brow.
These fine details etched themselves on her mind. A veteran dater, she noticed his clothes, faded jeans topped with a designer shirt, quite formal, silk.
And wow. Very good-looking behind the shades. He and Leigh would make a pretty pair. Kat was disappointed to see that he was alone.
Ray Jackson did not appear happy. He stood by her car like a highway patrolman getting ready to ask for her license. She rolled her window down.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Hi. I’m-uh-an old friend of Leigh’s.”
“You are?” He considered her, but not for long. The heat made his silk shirt wilt. “Oh, yeah, the one that’s been calling. And calling.”
“But you never answer.”
“We have caller ID. I answer calls from people I know. It’s hot. You should come in.” He turned abruptly, heading for the front door.
She rolled up her window, adjusted a silver shade over the dashboard to fend off the fading sun, and followed him.
They introduced themselves, and she walked behind him through the security routine into the marble entryway.
She looked around. “Will she be home soon?”
“That would be nice,” Jackson said. He took off the sunglasses, folded them carefully, placed them on the polished table. “You should have mentioned you’d be stopping by.”
“I tried to. I would have, if you had ever answered your phone.” He waited for her next move, and she really didn’t have one.
“I knew Leigh for years,” she said. She didn’t say, You stole her from my brother. Did Ray Jackson know that? Maybe not.
“Apparently not so much recently.”
“No.”
“Why have you been calling? Why are you here at my house all of a sudden?”
She felt herself blushing and did not have an easy answer. “My sister saw an article about a project you’re working on and we got to wondering about Leigh. I just want to see her. Am I completely out of luck tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Too bad.”
“I’m sorry.” He was relaxing a little.
“Can I leave her a note?”
“If you want.”
“I just wanted to get it over with. Jacki talks me into these things-”
“Get what over with?”
Startled, she realized she had spoken out loud. “Seeing Leigh. We have old business between us. I decided to deal with it in an adult fashion, by confronting my demons.”
“You calling my wife a demon?”
“What? Oh.” Of course he was teasing, although he didn’t look especially amused.
“What is it?” Jackson tilted window blinds on the main wall that overlooked the Pacific Ocean so that the raging sunset didn’t make it impossible to see. “Your business with Leigh?”
“Unfinished business?”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“It’s complicated.” But she always tired of discretion fast. Blurting was her style. Another Buddhist precept said: Guard your mouth. No idle talk.
“We were best friends.”
“She mentioned you,” he said. A halo of orange-gold sunset silhouetted him between the blind’s slats.
“She did?”
“Said sometimes you’re too close to someone to stay friends. What do you think she meant by that?”
“She knew I thought I was fat and that I stuck a finger down my throat if I ate too much for a while when I was fifteen,” Kat said, rattled. “I knew she fed the dog her oatmeal in the morning even though it gave him the runs, which made her parents insane. Her mom was really house proud.” She set her bag down on the marble demi-lune table, trying to imagine Leigh living like this, so pristinely. The Leigh she knew flung things and thrived on creative disorder.
“I don’t think you’re fat,” he said.
“Uh, thanks,” she said. He didn’t flirt exactly, but all this guy had to do was flash that straight line of perfect orthodontia and any girl might feel the wind unbuttoning her blouse. She slumped, letting her chest cave in just slightly, not wanting to give him-or herself-any ideas.
“So you’re Kat. Leigh told me you’d dropped out of her life,” he said. “She told me she missed you. Called you her dark secret. What do you think she meant, saying that?”
“No idea,” Kat lied.
“How long since you last spoke with her?”
“Six years.”
“That’s a long time. Nothing more recent?”
“No.” She couldn’t tell if he looked relieved or disappointed.
“That’s how long we’ve been together,” he went on. He moved toward a wall, then pushed a button. A mahogany panel lifted, revealing a mirrored bar.
“Nice,” Kat said. “Modern. I heard about you, before Leigh and I lost touch.”
“Really? What?”
She didn’t want to talk about Tom. She never liked talking about Tom. She liked holding him close to her heart. “Leigh was just getting to know you, in love.” It came out sounding accusatory, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He nodded. “I fell hard for her, too,” he said. “Listen, I’m thirsty. Long commute. Can I get you anything?”
“Got anything diet?”
She followed him to the stainless-steel kitchen, to the fridge with its massive doors. He held up some cans and she chose one.
While he filled a tall glass with ice and poured her drink, Kat let her eyes case the great room beyond. No sign of Leigh. The decor did not suggest a woman lived here. She took the glass he offered her.
“When did you meet Leigh?” Ray asked.
“She lived across from me in Whittier when we were growing up. We stuck together all through high school, and for years after college. Leigh was a kick, one of those people who say unpredictable things, plus she didn’t give a damn about current fads. She liked comics, and so did I. She liked fantasy rags, ditto. She liked me because-because”-she paused-“my family appeared normal, maybe. I had a sister and brother, and she had neither. Maybe she was a little lonely, stuck with doting parents.”
“You lived in Whittier? Where?”
“Near uptown, not far from Penn Park. Franklin Street? We spent all our time hanging around at the park, learning to braid lanyards out of plastic strands and tease the boys. Leigh called that hill where all the young lovers went ‘Smoochers’ Hill.’”
He nodded. “I lived in East Whittier, once when I was young and then later, from the time I was twelve until I graduated from high school. My mother still lives there. You know I met Leigh at the shopping center in East Whittier? Whitwood?”
“Eating ice cream, no doubt.” Without being fully aware of it, Kat had sat down on the white sectional that faced an expensive hill view darkening as night came on. Ray Jackson sat down opposite her, nursing his own iced soda.
“I lived in a two-story frame house, nothing fancy,” Kat said. “Leigh lived in a huge Spanish mansion across the street. Her father was a policeman.”
“He still is.”
Talking about the Hubbels led them into talking about good old Whittier, California. Ray had gone to the same big high school as Kat, Leigh, and Tom, but he was three years older than Leigh. Well, Jacki would approve, Kat thought, looking around. Ray Jackson had also gotten the hell out of Whittier. He could probably see all the way across the hills and into her cramped place in Hermosa Beach through those wide windows.
He seemed nice enough, although the look in his eyes was not exactly friendly. He was polite, too curious to throw her out, although she sensed that she should keep this visit short.
Leigh was not here and wouldn’t be coming home tonight, that was clear. As for the rest of it, it was none of Kat’s business. She was beginning to suspect that Leigh had pulled another Leigh, dumped this nice guy and went off with another one. No mystery there.
“So, I ask again, what got you here today? I mean, it’s been years, so you say.”
Kat trotted out her excuse, explained about Leigh’s unpaid receptionist. “Unless Leigh wants to close up shop, you better pay that young lady.”
He appeared relieved. “Sure, of course. Leigh’s taking a little time off. She must have lost track.”
“The girl said that’s not like her.” But Kat remembered, in fact, how Leigh abandoned things. How she abandoned people.
The room was getting darker, but he didn’t turn on any lights. He asked her about her work, where she lived, where she’d gone to college. Kat found herself admitting she lived alone and met men on the Internet. She knew she told too many people about these things in her life; she knew she did it so that she would appear bold and self-possessed.
Men often reacted to these bald-faced admissions like wasps, swarming in close. Ray Jackson moved slightly closer, then drew back.
So, he had become aware of the charged atmosphere and had the sense to avoid it.
She knew from bitter experience that animal attraction between two strangers did not mean a man didn’t love his wife and wouldn’t continue to love her. Closing her eyes for one brief moment, she wished again she had better control over her body and her thoughts.
She stood up, took her pen out of her bag, dashed a note off to Leigh, basically just begging her to call, then she shook Ray Jackson’s hand, made excuses, mumbled some more nonsense, and fled.