A figure appears in my doorway. A woman with thick eyebrows, a high waist, hair that seems deliberately plain. One of the LAPD detectives.
“Got a minute?” she says, and introduces herself as Alicia Ruiz. She’s carrying a notebook, but she doesn’t uncap her pen as she sits down. “I hear you know Greg Shaw Ferguson?”
“We lived together.” I hate the squeak in my voice.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“At the Gala.”
Her brows knit. “Before that?”
“Sometime in late February.” Greg came then to pick up a few boxes he’d left in our garage. Summer clothes, books. I tell Ruiz this. She doesn’t write it down. She glances over her shoulder, leans in. Her brown eyes are warm. She wants me to trust her.
“You ever feel threatened by him?” she asks.
“God, no.”
“Did you ever threaten him?”
“Of course not.”
She opens her notebook, uncaps the pen, and scribbles something. Even with her gaze averted, there’s that deep absorbency about her, soaking me in. Me, the angry ex. The angry ex? I was the doormat ex.
“Where do you think Kim Lord is?”
I don’t like this. It’s a speculative question. Jay Eastman taught me to ask speculative questions if I thought my source was lying. Listen to the story, then ask something to try to get an opinion out of the witness. Opinions need justifications. Justifications lead back to facts.
“I have no idea. Am I supposed to guess? I last saw her leaving the museum on Wednesday.”
She notes this. “What time?”
“Late morning? I saw her from the stairway when I was going down to the mailroom.” I point toward the view, but Detective Ruiz is focused hard on me. I fumble to describe that little jump Kim had done, as if something had bitten her. “She looked like she was in a hurry,” I say.
The detective nods, waiting. What else does she want me to say?
“She was going fast.” I’m starting to sweat.
There’s a clattering noise in the kitchenette near my office.
Detective Ruiz’s attention suddenly breaks. She taps her pen against her notebook and rises. “Thank you for your time, miss,” she says.
“I really hope you find her,” I say. Only when she leaves do I realize that my face is sore from holding the same fake, worried expression.
My phone rings, Yegina’s extension. “That guy you thought was a stalker? He’s a private investigator, working for J. Ro,” she says.
“What? How’d you find out so fast?”
“He wants to interview me.” She sounds reluctantly intrigued.
“You?” Why am I surprised? “I just got interviewed by the LAPD.”
“About what?”
My phone blinks with a second call.
“Nothing, really. I’ll phone you back,” I say, and click over to the other line.
“How much time can you get off for lunch?” says a deep voice. Kevin, the reporter from the Gala last night. It surprises me when my stomach flutters.
“Can’t,” I say. Development needs me to copyedit some fund-raising manual.
“Thirty minutes?” says Kevin. “I want to show you something.”
“You can’t get anywhere in L.A. in thirty minutes.”
He asks if I know the order in which Kim Lord’s paintings were made. Which one was last.
“The big still life. Why?”
“It could make a difference in finding her.”
“You should tell the police, then.”
“They don’t have time to hear speculation. It’s just a theory for a story, but I need your help. Please. I’ll bring burritos.”
I am not so different from you, I tell the departed Detective Ruiz and her curiosity, which coats my office like fingerprint dust, making even my stacked catalogs, my scuffed gym bag, the little Zen garden on my windowsill gleam with possible evidence. If Detective Ruiz suspects Greg, then she suspects me, at least as an outside player in whatever drama has ripped Kim Lord from her presently successful life. Detective Ruiz suspects, so she watches and waits.
I can watch, too, I think as I turn the pages of the Rocque’s new membership brochure, letting the errors appear, as they always do, as tiny breaks in the patterns of punctuation, sentence, style. Copyediting bores most people to tears. This is why—before I got hired—the Rocque printed ten thousand copies of a gallery guide for a show before anyone caught the missing l in its title, Public Offerings. This is also why the Rocque hired me, even with no museum experience. I was the only candidate who aced their copyediting test.
Detective Ruiz watches me, Maggie Richter, known ex-girlfriend, but part of her dismisses me because I am female. Most violent perpetrators are male. Most killers of women are family members or intimate partners. The police went after Nikki Bolio’s ex-boyfriend first, but he had a solid alibi, and evidence to arrest anyone else was insufficient. Local witnesses clammed up. Jay Eastman and I might have helped the case, except that Jay destroyed Nikki’s tapes. He said he was doing it out of principle. He did not approve of the way that Vermont law coerced journalists into testifying in criminal cases. When he did speak to the cops, he left my name out of his statements. You’re my assistant, he said. That’s the only responsibility you have in this. All right? It wasn’t all right. I couldn’t sleep for fear of a break-in, so I moved in with my parents and then across the world.
Nikki appears often in my dreams: sitting on a bench by Lake Champlain, her arms folded, legs sprawled out in pale-blue skintight jeans. She sees me approach and buckles as if someone just kicked her lightly in the stomach. Then I’m right beside her, and she is looking over at me: long-jawed, slightly dopey, acne pitted, and solemn. Nikki is the type who hangs at the back of a room, the corner of a party, her blond hair thin and limp, pulled back hard in a barrette because she thinks it makes her eyes look exotic. She risks brown eyeliner. She keeps a small assortment of cheap jewelry but rarely wears it because she is embarrassed at longing to be beautiful. Vermont’s long winter makes her skin lunar and her bones achy, but Nikki doesn’t believe she can move elsewhere. Only women who seek their own importance leave her circle of family and friends. She is no one until she dates Keith, and then she is his, a figure at the center of a circle of new cars, huge TVs, and a four-hundred-dollar leather jacket for her birthday that makes her feel tough and as sexy as a Hollywood movie. Then Keith dumps her and she is no one again—until I find her and ask her to tell me her story.
In my dreams, we sit side by side, staring at the lake and its islands. Nikki opens her mouth and says Maggie, wait.
But she never says anything else.
At noon I am standing outside the Rocque when Kevin pulls up in a blue convertible. He has shed his tweed and pipe for a dark T-shirt and jeans, but he somehow retains the earnestness of an overgrown student. After several tries, he squeezes into an illegal spot beside a hydrant and waves to me. It’s the only open space on the whole street. The line for Still Lives has been steady all day, from older men in biker jackets to pretty bankers in pressed suits on lunch break, all checking out their shadowy reflections in the Rocque’s glass entrance as they wait for their timed entry.
I smell fresh leather as I climb into the car.
“You’re living the dream,” I say.
“I know, I know. I got a little spendy with the rental,” he retorts. “But it’s thirty degrees today in New York.” He squeezes into the traffic behind a massive tour bus, and we follow the avenue past the new concert hall, its silvery billows catching the light, and under the jacaranda trees losing their sticky purple-blue flowers.
“How far are we going?” I ask, surprised when he cruises over the freeway to the end of the avenue, where it meets the start of Sunset Boulevard.
“How much L.A. history do you know?”
“Once upon a time, everything was orange groves,” I say. “And some other stuff.”