Zero to the Bone Read online

  I veered across a short stretch of verdant lawn, rounded the back corner of a massive concrete mausoleum, and ran, out of sight of the others, for the length of the building, intent on reaching the parking lot in time to see if the kind of car he drove matched my expectations. At the far end of the mausoleum a circular fountain sprayed water in long, pulsing arcs, and beyond that stretched the parking lot, studded with cars. I skidded to a stroll. The young man in the black suit hurried across the asphalt and stopped improbably to key the door of a vanilla Hyundai Sonata, a car so plain even suburban dads thought it too conservative. I crouched behind the fountain and maxed out the lens to full telephoto, framing the rear bumper as the Hyundai lurched away.

  At the sound of footsteps behind me I glanced over my shoulder. Sean jogged toward the fountain, his hands swinging free. He’d left the flowers behind. A dozen yards distant he stopped and caught his breath. “If you don’t want to talk, just say so. You don’t have to run away from me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t hear me?”

  I raised the camera and took a quick candid, his hand on his hip, doubt in his eyes.

  “Not since I gave you Christine’s photograph.”

  “I was just calling your name, back there,” he said, ignoring the dig.

  “Didn’t hear you.”

  I kept the camera to my eye, aware that it distanced him, and snapped the shutter on his wry smile. He stepped forward, forcing me to lower the lens when his face blurred the lens, too close to focus.

  “You see something interesting?”

  “Did a second ago.” I turned away from him, toward the parking lot. “Young guy in a black suit, expensive cut, didn’t look like he knew anybody here. You notice him, too?”

  “I was looking at other things, mostly,” he said, looking at me. “You already got the pictures you need? You mind if we take a walk?”

  I capped the lens and slung the Canon over my shoulder, stomach jittery in a way that I’d never before experienced in my many and varied experiences with the law. I always felt uneasy around cops, particularly when they wanted to talk to me. The act of passion we’d committed earlier that week only made it worse and as we stepped away from the fountain the fluttering in my stomach turned to nausea, the result of combining my fear of the I-don’t-think-we-should-see-each-other-again speech with my dread of the I’m-going-to-have-to-arrest-you lecture. “Did you get my messages about Christine’s diary and her so-called therapist, Dr. Rakaan?” I asked, seeking distraction.

  “Yeah. I passed it on,” he said.

  “Passed it on? To who?”

  “To Parker Center,” he said, referring to the administrative center of the Los Angeles Police Department. “They probably shared it with LASD but it’s their case now. Nobody’s contacted you yet?”

  “You’re not working on it?”

  “It’s not like the news business, it’s not like I get the exclusive because a source handed me some evidence.” He pointed us toward an older section of the cemetery, behind the mausoleum, where the funereal style changed from mower-friendly headstones set flush in the grass to the granite rectangles, arcs, and spires of traditional memorials. “Every department works from a certain geographical region. Christine lived in Los Feliz, that’s in the Northeast Station. I work out of North Hollywood. And her remains were recovered by LASD—an entirely different jurisdiction. Right now it’s been kicked over to the big dogs working Robbery Homicide out of Parker Center. You know those guys?”

  “Not personally,” I said.

  “Good thing,” he said, as though he hinted at something else. “Anything that crosses jurisdictional lines, it’s their bone. And when I say big dogs, I mean they growl and I back off. Right now RHD and the Sheriff’s Department are, quote, cooperating, unquote, with each other. I’m just as happy to stay clear of it.”

  “RHD, they also take on high-profile cases, serial killings too, right?”

  He looked at me as though he suspected I knew more than he thought I did. “O. J., Blake, Spector, RHD gets all the big ones. Some guy stabs his wife because she burnt the toast, I get the call.”

  “So what are you doing up here?”

  “It’s a personal thing.” He stared down at his feet as we stepped onto the grass of the old section. “Whenever there’s a funeral in a case that involves me, I go.”

  I knew investigators attended funerals to observe and often videotape the results—hence the guy with the camera in the parked car—but Sean didn’t talk about it like police procedure, like just another part of the job. “The flowers,” I said, momentarily touched by his compassion. “They were for Christine.”

  He paused at a waist-high white marble tombstone set on a pedestal, braced himself against its arched top, and watched me as though carefully preparing what he wished to say.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were on parole?”

  “When did I get a chance to talk to you about anything?” I walked to a granite headstone with a pitched roof, like a little house, and stood behind it, braced like Sean for an argument. “You have my phone number. You want to know anything about me, all you gotta do is call the number.”

  “I’m not the most by-the-book cop in the world,” he said. “I thought I could deal with the tabloid stuff. Sure, somebody might get their boxers in a twist, warn me about compromising an investigation by talking to you about one case or another, but cops and reporters have dated before, and you’re a photographer, not a writer, so you’d be even less of a threat. And North Hollywood, it’s not exactly jam-packed with the kinds of stories Scandal Times likes to print. So what was anybody going to say, in the end? I can deal with rumor and innuendo, done it my whole career. If we don’t talk about cases, nobody could say anything.” His hand shot to the Windsor knotting his tie and pulled it loose so fast and hard he nearly popped the top button. “I hate ties,” he said, angry now, at the tie, at the situation, at me. “I always feel like I’m going to strangle when I wear one. I think I must have been hanged in a past life.”

  When he pulled the tie from his collar I noticed a dark bruise on his throat, and while I was wondering if he’d worn the tie to conceal the bruise I realized that was where my lip had fastened to him the night we’d lost ourselves; I’d marked him.

  “You said something about dating,” I said. “I don’t remember being asked out on a date.”

  “A euphemism.” He stuffed the rolled tie into the side pocket of his sport coat. “Do you know what happens to me if we’re caught dating, or whatever it is you want to call it? It’s against regulations for a cop to be romantically involved with a parolee. Maybe they won’t take my badge for it but they’d punch my ticket to someplace like the Pawn Shop Unit, where I’d spend the rest of my career checking swap meets for stolen watches. They’d slaughter me.”

  “Who said anything about romantic involvement? You don’t even return my phone calls. You think I’m going to let myself get involved with someone doesn’t even have the common decency to call me back? Why are we even talking about this?” I turned and walked away, got as far as the next headstone before I stopped, circled back around to face him. Why didn’t he simply pretend nothing had happened? That would have been the easy way out. To argue about our relationship as though we had one was ridiculous. We’d never appeared together in public. No one saw what happened in the darkroom. To my knowledge, then, no evidence existed of our lovemaking. If all he wanted was to protect his career, he’d stonewall me. Why make himself even more vulnerable by admitting to me the risk he faced? Did he suspect I’d hidden a camera somewhere in the darkroom and filmed our encounter? “Do you think I’m going to blackmail you? Is that what you think?”

  He looked up at me from beneath his brows, eyes screened by the angle, then back down to his hands. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that.”

  “Because as far as I’m concerned, nothing happened.”

  “I’m glad forgetting is so eas
y for you.”

  “Easy?” I wanted to knock him onto his smug behind. “I did not plan what happened in that darkroom. I didn’t set you up. I didn’t even come on to you. The last thing I expected was to be overwhelmed by passion while printing a photograph for a homicide detective. When did I have the chance to say anything to you? It was over before I even knew what hit me. I’m supposed to tell you my entire life history the moment we shake hands hello? Maybe you should have made your intentions clear at the start. Maybe you should have told me the photograph was just a pretext for something else on your late-night agenda.”

  “I didn’t know what was going to happen that night,” he said. “Not consciously.”

  “You’re an ex–undercover vice detective. You’ve lived half your life with your left hand not knowing what your right hand is doing.”

  He drew his head back like a hammer and a surprised laugh shot from him. “Your aim is lethal, you know that?” He spread the lapels to his sport coat, as though baring his heart to a firing squad. “You want to shoot me dead, here I am.”

  “I don’t want to shoot you. I want to know your intentions.”

  “I don’t know what my intentions are.” The sport coat draped shut and he leaned one hand against the tombstone, the other cocked on his hip. “I know how I felt the night I met you. I know that much. And I know how I felt when I learned you were on parole.”

  “What do you want me to say, that I’m sorry I am who I am, that I’ve done what I’ve done?” I stepped away from the headstone, let him look at me head to toe. “I’m not. You can’t pick one part of me, throw away the other. And the fact that you even want to try means you don’t know me.”

  “And you? Do you know anything about me?”

  I walked toward him, the pained and wary expression on his face like the look of an animal with a trap-caught paw. Then I reached out and pushed him, just hard enough to move him off his spot. He laughed, surprised, but he didn’t push me back. “This thing blindsided both of us,” I said. “Maybe we should look at it like just another L.A. moment, nothing more than a late-night traffic accident, a fender-bender, no one seriously hurt, nothing more significant than an exchange of phone numbers and a few minutes lost by the side of the road.”

  The muscles at the hinge of his jaw flexed like something alive beneath the surface of his skin and he nodded, once, obviously unhappy and just as obviously relieved. I resisted the temptation to raise my camera and capture that look on film, instead glanced down at the shoebox-sized marker at my feet. A cursive script carved into granite the name of the person buried below, followed by the dates October 30, 1932–October 31, 1932.

  The poor child had lived a day and died.

  An appropriate epitaph for my relationship with Sean.

  10

  MY PAROLE OFFICER decided Monday morning at seven o’clock was as good a time as any for an unannounced search of my apartment, her stentorian knock startling the Rott into a fit of barking that didn’t stop until I crawled out of bed and creaked open the door. When I complained about the hour she tartly suggested I look at the parole agreement I signed upon release from prison, and then she proceeded to cite the relevant section in the event I’d forgotten. “You, your residence, and property can be searched any time of the day or night—” She glanced over the shoulder of her gray blazer as she attacked my kitchen cabinet, emphasizing the word “any” as though I should be thankful she hadn’t come knocking a couple hours earlier, before continuing, “—with or without a search warrant and with or without cause. While on parole, you must obey the conditions of parole. If you do not obey, you can be—”

  “I know, arrested and returned to prison,” I said. “You mind if I make a cup of coffee while you tear apart my kitchen?”

  “Help yourself.” She turned to face the living room, separated from the kitchen by a waist-high counter. “I see you’ve done your usual crack-up job of interior decorating.” She showed her teeth, midway between a smile and a snarl. She was being funny. Most of what I owned tumbled in and out of fruit crates I’d rescued from the back of the local supermarket, with the exception of a fold-out futon that served as a couch, and tacked to the wall, a museum poster of a Diane Arbus photograph depicting a strange-looking child holding a toy hand grenade. Graves lifted the corner of the futon with the black toe of her stub-heel pump. “I guess I don’t have to waste a lot of time searching in here.” She moved into the bedroom. “I’m sorry about your model, what happened to her,” she called. “What was her name?”

  “Christine,” I called back. I didn’t want to witness her going through my things. I stayed in the kitchen, watched the coffee stream black into the pot. I didn’t have much to search. She banged around in the bathroom cabinet for a few minutes, then walked back into the kitchen and leaned against the counter, arms folded over the size .38 bulge under her left shoulder, her pistol six points bigger than her bra size. I offered to pour her a cup of coffee. She shook her head, and watching my reaction closely, asked, “Did you have any involvement in what happened to her?”

  She had to ask the question. I’d been convicted on charges of manslaughter and I was on parole. It was her job to ask me the question. When I told her that yes, I thought I did have something to do with it, she stilled like a dog on point. “Tell me exactly how you’re involved.”

  “Someone sent me a video of her murder, care of Scandal Times.”

  She nodded, once, her glance charged with authoritative focus.

  “The reporter I work with, he thinks whoever killed her wanted publicity. Why else send a recording to a tabloid? He knew we’d give it front-page treatment.”

  “So would the L.A. Times.”

  “No way. The front page is for national and political news unless a celebrity is involved. And the Times doesn’t offer national coverage. Scandal Times does.”

  “So he sent the video to you.” She shook her head, her lips taut. “That doesn’t mean anything. You said yourself, it made sense to send it to Scandal Times.”

  “But why Christine, except for me?”

  “I see what you’re saying. You don’t think she was a random victim.”

  “What if he chose her because she modeled for me?”

  “You don’t know that, so maybe you should just calm down a little bit.” Graves brushed past me to open the refrigerator door. “When you said you were involved, that’s what you meant?”

  “What else?”

  “In my job, it could be a lot else, trust me.”

  She stooped in front of the refrigerator and rearranged the cartons of milk, juice, and eggs, then dug open the meat and cheese drawers.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Drugs. A lot of parolees, they store them in the fridge.”

  “I’ve just told you one of my models maybe was murdered because of me and now you’re accusing me of using drugs? You know I don’t use drugs.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, steel-gray eyes annoyed.

  “A stick of dynamite, then.” She rattled the drawers shut and stood to peer inside the freezer compartment. “From what I’ve heard, nothing that’s happened so far is your fault. I’m not saying you’re not capable of doing something stupid, but what happened to your model was just bad luck. You can’t hold yourself responsible for it, do you understand? You had nothing to do with the crime, no more than any other victim.”

  “I feel like I victimized Christine just by knowing her.”

  “That’s nonsense. Everybody dies in the end, whether you know them or not.” She pulled a carton of Häagen-Dazs ice cream from the freezer and stared at the label. “I knew I’d find something if I looked hard enough. Chocolate Chocolate Chip. Do you know how addictive this stuff is?”

  I opened the flatware drawer and offered a spoon.

  “Absolutely right. How do I know it’s the real thing unless I give it a taste test.” She set the carton onto the counter and pried off the top. “A homicide detective from N
orth Hollywood called me a couple of days ago, told me a little bit about what happened.”

  “Sean Tyler,” I said.

  “Detective Sean Tyler to you,” she corrected. “The investigation got kicked automatically to Parker Center, so I was wondering why he was bothering to call me, particularly when he asked about your marriage history.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth. That you once had a green-card husband.”

  “He was more than that and you know it.”

  “You still have a perverse attachment to the idea that you were in love with him, that’s what I know.” She dug a spoonful of ice cream from the carton and held it up for inspection. “You knew him for a couple of days, he treated you badly, and then he died. Move on with your life. Anything I should know about your relationship with Detective Tyler?”

  “He liked my photographs,” I said. “But considering my legal problems, that’s about all he likes.”

  “Smart career move.” She slid the spoon into her mouth, held it there for a moment, and when she pulled it free the thing was so clean it could have been pulled from a dishwasher. “This stuff is deadly. Maybe I should confiscate it for your own good.” She grinned, pleased at her joke, and tossed the spoon into the sink. “How much longer she on parole?”

  “Six months, I think.”

  “I know that.” She returned the ice cream into the freezer. “I was repeating what he asked me. Detective Tyler. He wanted to know how much longer you were going to be under direct supervision of the California Department of Corrections.” She strolled to the front door, where she stopped long enough to scratch behind the Rott’s ear. He sat absolutely still beneath her hand, even more intimidated than I was. “Do me a favor. Don’t do anything stupid the next six months, okay? I’ve put a lot of work into keeping you straight, and I’d hate to lose it because you did something dumb.”