There’s a pressure on my shoulder. I jump and yelp.
A familiar voice says my name. I am turning to look now, and my first impression of Greg is of the weird radiance in his eyes, the look people get when they stare into an aquarium. He’s here. It’s him. My body doesn’t know whether to recoil or throw itself against him, but he’s already reaching for me. The moment we collide, it’s worse. Greg is putting his arms around my back, but there are too many of them, stringy and tight, and his mouth feels like it’s suctioning my hair. Is he kissing me? I freeze, letting it happen, but my insides knot. New heat bakes the backs of my bare legs. The Los Angeles sun is climbing the sky.
Greg murmurs into my scalp something about being sorry and forever, and I let him, because awful as this is, I know it will be harder to look him in the face. Finally he releases me and we just stand there, my eyes on his scuffed blue shoes.
I don’t know what I imagined this reunion to be like, but it wasn’t this awful squeeze and then me, taking a big step back, digging in my purse and holding up the flash drive. “She was taking pictures of Brent Patrick’s wife,” I say, finally meeting Greg’s eyes. “Do you know why? We need to give this to the police.”
“Brent Patrick’s wife?” Greg staggers sideways, as if seeing the flash drive has knocked him off-balance.
We’re attracting attention now, no doubt because I mentioned the police. A blanket hatches and a woman sits up, eying us warily, her blond hair hanging in her face. She could be our age or she could be forty-five. Others are stirring.
“Let’s get you something to eat,” I say, tucking the drive back in my purse and steering Greg toward the stairs.
He follows without protest, still unsteady on his feet. He totters and grips the rail as we take the long flights down to Grand Central Market, a block-length edifice broken by columns and porticos. The dark caverns inside are crowded with food stalls and merchandise, lit overhead by neon signs. Outside, I spy a few empty tables at a small, dirty patio. They border the counter of Tropical Time, Yegina’s favorite establishment, a long silver wall with black spouts and colorful placards advertising dozens of juices: papaya, boysenberry, apple, mango, cherry, coconut. All can be ordered separately or combined. I have stood beside Yegina many times, simultaneously overwhelmed by Tropical Time’s lavish offerings and doubting that any of it can be true. “You thirsty?” I say to Greg, because I have already switched into mothering mode.
He is still descending carefully, frowning and shaking his head, as if trying to loosen a memory. “How did you find out it was his wife?” he asks me.
Egg sandwiches and juices procured, we find a perch at a patio table so caked with street grit that we have to hold our breakfast above it, hovering like we might bolt. Our conversation is jumpy and disordered, too, interrupted by trucks rumbling by. First topic: Brent Patrick’s wife’s appearance on the flash drive. Greg blanches as I explain that I spotted her photo on Brent’s desk, that she has been in an institution for months for her illness.
“Jesus,” he says. “Why didn’t Kim say? She could have told me that’s why she was meeting him.”
“Brent’s just disappeared,” I say. “He went on ‘vacation.’”
“Jesus,” Greg says again. A pigeon flutters heavily down for a halfeaten piece of pizza near us, its iridescent body lunging. “And they still haven’t gone after him?”
I lose my appetite as Greg starts harping on the investigation and all the new information that makes no sense to him. The medical examination added several new wrinkles to the case: Not only did the body’s state of decomposition shift the time of death to Friday, but it appeared that Kim had struggled in some confined space—some kind of wooden box—for hours or perhaps days before she perished. Splinters of wood were found beneath her bloody, cracked fingernails. And preliminary toxicology on a couple of tiny wounds in her waist suggested that her murderer had injected her with a tranquilizer.
I set my sandwich down on the dirty table and drop my napkin over it. “What kind of tranquilizer?
“Too early to know. They had a huge list, but it’s not like I recognized any of them. Amberbarbital sodium. Nembutal. Sodium therpenal. Pentobarbituate something.” He drops his own sandwich on top of mine.
“Those don’t all sound like drug names.”
Greg shakes his head. “I had a hard time listening to Cherie,” he confesses, and then tells me how unnerving it was to be riding in her car, outside in the open air, to see sunlight and billboards and molting palm trees, all while hearing the grisly facts of Kim’s examination. “My mind kept blinking in and out. Finally I just told her to stop.” Now he hunches over our pile of uneaten food. “How could someone … hate her so much?” he mumbles, and then his whole body starts quaking with silent sobs.
I don’t comfort him. I let the gap of air between us stay open. In the mounting heat of the day, I feel a cool energy thread through me. Anyone watching would think I am delivering bad news or breaking up with the man weeping beside me. Anyone watching would pity him, and wonder at the young woman sitting immobile nearby, shadows under both of their eyes.
But I’m not actually here. I’m not seeing Greg’s pain. My mind is traveling too fast over all the facts. A blow to the head. A tranquilizer. A coffin. So many stages to kill her. Not an expert, then. Or maybe someone who couldn’t kill her all at once. My concentration separates me from Greg, from everything around me: the grind and dust of traffic; the ugly, insistent birds; the eggy smell of the barely touched sandwiches. I have to know who did this. I’ve spent too much time on the what. I recall Jay Eastman’s words again: Never look for the what. Find the who. Who gets hurt. Who gains. Whose life will never be the same.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “About the baby, too.”
Greg’s head whips up. His face flashes with surprise, then fresh grief.
“What happened with you two on Tuesday?” I press him. “Were you fighting about Brent Patrick?”
Greg looks toward one of the stunted trees beside us, also grayed with soot. Without meeting my eyes, he tells me that on Tuesday Kim flipped out after her positive pregnancy test and wanted time to herself. “I thought she meant time with him.”
“You thought they were having an affair?”
“I didn’t know,” he says. “She insisted she was working on a show idea with him. About mentally ill women. It fits that she’d take a picture of his wife.”
It does fit. It also fits that Kim was ultra-private about her artistic process, but that she wasn’t sleeping with Brent. So what is Brent running away from? There’s a missing piece to this equation, some variable I haven’t figured out. Greg. Kim. Brent. Barbara. Four players. One possessive, one secretive, one aggressive, one utterly vulnerable. They could add up to a murder, but I am not seeing a clear chain of events. Unless Greg himself was the killer. Which I don’t think is possible. Although he sure made himself look guilty.
“When you thought Kim was breaking up with you,” I say, “you texted her seventy times?” I can’t help the ring of anger in my voice.
Greg looks ill but doesn’t answer.
Why was Kim working on her next show when Still Lives hadn’t even opened? Because she was scared of going broke? Maybe Greg was right to be suspicious. But not to stalk her.
“I could have suspected you,” he says accusingly, shading his eyes. “That note. You’d better watch out for Maggie.”
The statement hits me like a blow. “Yeah. Not to mention my expertise with coffins and sodium therpenal,” I say.