Zero to the Bone Page 5

  I understood then that I’d been tricked into this meeting for reasons mystifying enough to hook me into staying. I suspected it would turn into an ambush, some recounting of his grievances against me. Not that I feared him. When he turned into the light, heading for the kitchen cabinet where he stored the coffee mugs, I noticed his barrel chest now slumped toward his waist and what remained of his hair grew in sparse gray tufts around the balded crown of his head. He was too old to fear. I was more concerned with what might happen to my heart if I turned him down and walked out the door. He was my father; even though we had thirty years of sometimes violent history behind us, to refuse a simple request to talk would be heartless. I’d listen to what he wanted to say and then I’d leave. I didn’t have to talk if I didn’t want to.

  When I sat at the table, the Rott settling next to me on the floor, I realized it was the same chair I’d been assigned as a child, that I’d unconsciously reverted to my traditional place in the family. I’d always been the appeaser, the only one in the family who, when I sensed it coming, could sometimes calm the beast in my pop. I’d stroke his arm, telling him what a good poppa he was, until he calmed, or didn’t. I’d been so terrified of him as a child that I’d changed myself to fit his ideas of how I should act, think, and dress, in hopes that by appeasing him he wouldn’t hurt me. I took to styling myself like a girly girl, blonde hair flipped at the shoulder or worn in pigtails, fuzzy sweaters and knee-length skirts, open-toed pumps, toenails buffed like paint on a Corvette. Maybe I even wanted Pop to love me. I still don’t have that too clear. Looking back, I think he might have loved me more than his other children—not that he loved any of us much—and so when at last I snapped, rebelling violently against him and the false image of myself we’d created, he’d all but disowned me. While Pop fiddled with the coffee, I thought about taking his chair, his place at the table, but decided it was a spiteful impulse I’d best ignore.

  “Cassie and me, we had quite the time, didn’t we Cass?” He looked over his shoulder at his granddaughter, who stood in the kitchen doorway, uncertain whether her presence at the table would help or hinder the conversation. “She didn’t even tell me she was coming last night until just past eleven. Then she gets here and tells me you didn’t know she was going, that she took your dog and wrote you some note.” Pop set a cup of coffee onto the Formica tabletop in front of me and sat, facing the entrance to the kitchen. “Time was, a child of mine pulled a stunt like that.”

  “If you ever hurt Cassie, give her a black eye or a split lip, I’ll break your leg with a baseball bat.”

  It had to be said, and it didn’t make much sense to delay saying it.

  He stared at me, wrinkled skin hooding the expression from his eyes, and I counted, one-two-three, waiting for the familiar signs of his transformation from man to beast: the baleful glare, the flush of blood and sweat across his brow, the clenched jerking of his muscles signaling the moment before scales broke through the skin covering his face and he flung a mug of scalding coffee at my head.

  But it didn’t happen. He just shrugged and smiled.

  “Still the hard-ass, I see,” he said.

  I stared at him, waiting.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of you. You want to break my leg, fine, just don’t forget who taught you how to swing the bat.”

  Had he thrown his coffee at me, I would have ducked and flipped the table on him, but I didn’t see the compliment coming and it caught me flush in the face. “You did,” I said. He’d taught me how to throw and catch too, didn’t even seem to notice I was a girl until my T-shirts began to strain against what would develop into an unspectacular set of breasts. He’d been the first to insist I put on a bra and stop acting like a tomboy, then whipped me like a boy when I rebelled.

  “I been following your work in the papers.” He pulled a copy of Scandal Times from the chair next to him. “You gotta be persevering to do the kinda work you do.”

  I nodded.

  “You really stand up for yourself, I’ll say that much. Sure, you let things get away from you there for a while, got into a little trouble, but strong character showed you through, and you set yourself right.” He sipped at his coffee, eyes cagey above the rim of the mug. “I’m no friend of the law’s. Never have been. Somebody hits you, you hit them back. That’s what I always taught you to do. Doesn’t matter if you get in trouble. You do it because you gotta stand up for yourself. You weren’t out there robbing banks like your sister.” He looked up at Cassie, standing in the doorway, his expression anxious. “Sorry Cass, don’t mean to speak bad about your mom.”

  “It’s okay, Gramps,” she said. “I know my mom was a lying, thieving bitch.”

  “Well now, that’s a little harsh,” he said, genuinely shocked. “I look at your beautiful face and I see your mom did at least one thing right. And you shouldn’t swear like that. It’s undignified.”

  “Okay, Gramps,” she said.

  Where she found her patience with him I had no idea, just as his seeming blindness to her Goth-girl rebelliousness perplexed me. Had I attempted a style like that as a teenager, he would have thrashed me.

  “We all get our heads screwed on backwards every now and then, you, your mom, even your aunt here, that’s the chief thing to remember.” His face split with a sudden laugh and he said, “Hell, sometimes I get my head screwed up my ass, pardon the French. That’s what happened between me and Mary here.”

  Mary Baker, my birth name.

  “You mean Nina,” Cassie said. “She likes to be called Nina now.”

  Pop pulled at his face, the subject of my name change still a source of confusion and irritation to him. “She can call herself any damn thing she wants, no skin off my back. Thing is, before, I was wrong. I took it too personal. Thought she was rebelling against me personally, when she was rebelling against everything in the whole damn world, maybe mostly herself.”

  “I’m not the one needs to hear this,” Cassie said.

  When Pop shifted in his chair to face me I knew this was in no way spontaneous, that the two of them had talked about this moment some time before, either on the phone or the night before, in person. “I never shoulda turned my back on you like I did, after you got arrested that first time.” He sighed so heavily the table shifted, and the sound of that sigh had more sadness in it than anything he’d ever said to me. “Sure, you did some things no father would be proud of, but I raised enough hell when I was young that I shoulda known you were going to raise your share of it, too. But I didn’t see it coming, that’s why it shocked me so much. You were always a willful little girl, but I thought you’d settled down, didn’t understand you’d just delayed your hell-raising. So when you started to do those things you did, it was like somebody punched me, and so I did what I always do when someone hits me. I lost my temper and I hit back every way I knew how.”

  “You always were good at losing your temper,” I said.

  “That was wrong of me.” He pulled again at his face. “I don’t regret being tough with you, don’t get me wrong there, I don’t regret giving you a little needed discipline. But those times I got mad at you and went a little too far, I’m sorry about that. My temper, you’re right, that’s never been one of my best qualities. But I guess you know a little about that yourself. I guess you know what it’s like to lose your temper, do things you regret later.”

  “It’s true, I lose my temper,” I admitted. “But most of the things I’ve done needed doing and I don’t regret them.”

  “You think you woulda been able to do those things you say needed doing if I’d coddled you your whole life?”

  I flinched when the cell phone went off in my pocket and yanked the thing out by the antenna. Frank’s name flashed on the display. I didn’t want to answer Pop’s question because once I started, it would take me six weeks to finish. Let him think I was rude, that I thought the call more important than our conversation. What did he want me to say? That it was okay? That I forgave him? I d
idn’t. I took the call. Some hiker had found a woman’s body in one of the canyons north of Malibu, Frank said, the connection breaking up as he drove in and out of coverage. He was checking it out, wanted photo backup. Could I make it? I told him I could and disconnected the call.

  Pop watched me carefully, both curious and, it seemed, a little afraid.

  “I don’t hate you as much as I used to,” I said. “Don’t feel the need for it.”

  Pop smiled like I’d just kissed him.

  “Well, I guess that’s a start,” he said.

  5

  THE SUN HUNG white-hot in the scalded blue sky as we climbed the coastal canyons toward Malibu, the Metro’s hamster-powered engine whining on all four treadmills at each rise in the road. Cassie fiddled with the radio while I drove, the signal for college station KXLU fading to static as we wound deeper into the canyons, her bitten fingernails purple on the dial. We didn’t speak for miles, but I knew by her dreamy smile she was pleased with herself, her small hands resting on the Rott’s massive neck, lost in her own world. I hadn’t wanted to take her with me on this assignment, but she was scheduled to fly back to Phoenix early that evening. She had set me up cleverly, I thought, tricking me into the house to get the Rott. I didn’t want to lecture or yell at her, but I didn’t want her to think I was unaware of her manipulations. “I understand why you wanted to see your biological grandfather,” I said. “I understand everybody wants to know something about the family they come from, but why did you have to take my dog?”

  “Because if I took the dog, you’d come and get me,” she said.

  “I would have come to get you. I love my dog but I love you, too.”

  She worked a purple fingernail between her teeth while she thought about that. “No way you would have come inside the house. The only way to get you inside was the dog.”

  We crested the ridge at Mulholland Highway, the first breath of cool ocean air brushing our faces. Cassie didn’t seem the type to want to promote peace in the family, but then, she had so little family left, maybe she thought it a good idea to get us together again, not understanding that if I was going to bury the hatchet with Pop, I’d be just as likely to bury it in his head. Past Mulholland the road traced the ridge line, the horizon opening to vistas of the coast loping north toward Point Dume, the white-tufted waves in the distant ocean like chalk marks on a vast, blue board. For a few moments, I felt good about myself, about being alive in the world amid so much natural beauty, but then I spotted the patrol car blocking access to Edison Road and the hiking trail leading into the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. I braked hard and swept to the side of the road, muscles tensed to confront a familiar tableau, dead body in the mountain brush, a staple of Scandal Times’s incisive, hard-hitting news coverage, a story I’d photographed a half dozen times in the past year. Though we rarely got close enough to photograph the body, I always disliked the assignment. What we found this time might not turn out to be the anonymous victim of an act of murderous rage but someone I knew, someone I’d worked and dined with and whose face graced some of the best photographs I’d ever taken. I usually felt detached when called upon to photograph victims but this time I felt angry.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Cassie asked.

  “I have to do a quick job,” I said. “Do me a favor and stay in the car, watch the dog for me.”

  “What’s to shoot out here?” Her purple lips carved a mischievous smile. “You get a report Mark Wahlberg is skinny-dipping? I’d see that.”

  “You’ll stay near the car.” I pulled my camera bag from the backseat and took a moment to stroke the Rott’s head. “It’s a body-in-the-hills story. I need to grab a shot of some eyewitness, shouldn’t take me more than thirty minutes. Take Baby for a walk if you like, but don’t go far or we’ll miss your flight.”

  As I walked away from the car, it occurred to me that my niece might very well intend to miss her flight. She had already proved herself to be a master of manipulation. She might take the Rott for a walk and lose track of time or deliberately lose herself in the hills, returning too late to make her flight to Phoenix. I glanced back as I strode toward the entrance to Edison Road. She stood beside the loaner car, her hand on the dog’s head, watching me go. I rounded the corner, certain she was bolting into the brush the moment I disappeared from view.

  “Sorry, area’s closed for the afternoon,” the sheriff deputy said when I approached the patrol car.

  I flashed my press badge.

  “It’s even more closed to the press.” He pointed across the road. “You can get some good hiking that way. I heard there’s a trail over there that’ll take you all the way to the beach.”

  Or to hell. It was his polite way to tell me to get lost. I spotted Frank’s Honda tucked into the brush up the road. I thanked the deputy for his help and flipped open my cell phone while I walked. When the call connected, Frank told me he was interviewing an eyewitness and directed me to take the footpath beside the car; I could find him in the meadow over the hill. Frank needed to lose about twenty pounds to be considered merely overweight and wasn’t capable of running any distance greater than to the bathroom without losing his breath, but he always showed remarkable endurance when pursuing a story. I wasn’t surprised to find that the switchback trail carved a steep incline into the hill, leading to the top of a ridge that dropped to a meadow studded with wildflowers and fringed in oak.

  Frank stood just beyond the tufted shadow of the nearest tree, the eyewitness’s face in the sun. Like a television news reporter, Frank always knew where the camera would be positioned and staged his interviews accordingly. I selected the digital camera from my bag and snapped off a sequence of telephoto shots. The eyewitness looked legit enough through the lens, a late-thirties nature boy whose neatly trimmed black beard, ruddy complexion, and green-on-green hiking attire gave him the appearance of an aspiring park ranger. Scandal Times didn’t generally run large photographs of noncelebrities; at most, his candid would be boxed in miniature within a larger photograph of the crime scene to establish that we weren’t making it all up.

  Frank greeted me in mock surprise as I kicked down the hill and turned to ask the eyewitness if he minded having his photograph taken, conveniently failing to mention that I’d snapped a dozen images from the ridge above. I didn’t ask Frank what he’d been told. I didn’t want to know just then. I wanted to do my job. I directed the eyewitness to stand on the slope and stretch out his arm as though pointing at the body in the brush, a style of shot favored by Scandal Times that has grown no less hokey since it began to appear regularly in the tabloids of the 1930s.

  I took the shot and bagged the camera.

  “Just one question,” I said. “The body, did she have any tattoos?”

  “Did she ever.” He tapped his shoulder. “She had a tattoo of that old cartoon character, Betty Boop, right there. Just what I told your colleague. She must have been a beautiful girl, I’ll tell you, the sight of her lying there, it brings you to tears. A helluva shame.” He scratched his throat at the beard line, started to ask something, stopped himself, then went ahead and asked anyway. “You mind me asking how you knew about the tattoo? Is this some kind of serial thing?”

  A shout from the ridge turned me to the sight of the Rott galloping down the hillside, Cassie carefully stepping down the trail as though she’d never walked off-pavement before. I veered away from the eyewitness and snapped my fingers at the Rott, following with a sharp, pointed gesture at the ground, but the dog was too excited and moving too fast to obey at first, running past me before bringing his bulk under control in a holding pattern, his truncated tail wagging him in circles. I gave him a few strokes along his flanks and told him to sit. He did. Cassie approached slowly, uncertain of her footing on the uneven ground.

  “I thought I told you to stay near the car,” I said.

  “Don’t blame me.” She pointed at the dog. “I’m just following him. He got away from me when I was trying
to put the leash on him.” She held up the leash, rolled in her hand, as evidence.

  I wanted to ask why I hadn’t heard her calling him until the last moment, or point out that it was just as likely that she’d led the Rott over the ridge and then unleashed him, knowing he’d run straight to me with little encouragement, but such concerns seemed petty under the circumstances. Cassie peered around the meadow and focused for a moment on Frank, who asked a few meaningless wrap-up questions to the eyewitness. “Where’s the body?” she asked. “Anywhere close?”

  “Do you know who the body is?” I asked.

  She shook her head, purple-limned eyes gleaming.

  “Christine,” I said. “This is why she didn’t show at the gallery last night. Somebody raped her, strangled her, dumped her like trash.”

  Cassie blinked, shielded her eyes from the sun, asked, “Christine?”

  “Sorry, I gotta go.” I strode toward a grove of oaks at the edge of the meadow, heeling the Rott to my side. I’d delivered the news to Cassie too brutally, but I knew no other way to talk about acts of brutality. Despite my rage I worried about her, how she’d handle the death of a woman she’d taken as a role model, like Nephthys, cool and sexy and all screw-the-world attitude. The oak grove spread from the meadow up the flanks of the ridge, the sweet, woody scent not enough to soothe me. Not nearly enough. I walked deep into the screen of trees and picked up a weathered branch as thick as a table leg. The Rott, sensing my temper, scouted the grove far to my right. I stepped up to an oak split by lightning, its bark charred black, and slammed the limb against the stump, the contact jarring me to the bone. And then I lost myself to my rage, flailing at the tree as though I battled a circle of demons, my face flushed as I struck again and again, the tears steaming from my eyes as though vented from a superheated core. When I slipped to my knees, muscles trembling with exhaustion, I realized I was done, the rage burned clear. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and the tears from my cheeks, then glanced at my hands, black with soot, my face now streaked with ash, the ancient mark of someone in mourning. I was feeling eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth just then.