14
Sometime in the night, the media had discovered what Ford and Joel Kelleher already knew. When I woke up, Serena was reading the story in the Chronicle: SLAYING SUSPECT WAS USMA CADET.
“You’re getting more famous by the day,” she said, wet black hair pinned up atop her head. She’d already taken a shower; scented humidity hung in the air.
“Looks that way.”
“And,” she said, “you ditched me last night. Pendeja.”
“You were sleeping.”
“I was supposed to be your backup.”
“You were sleeping,” I repeated. “You can’t actually be complaining that I left you in a warm bed at midnight instead of taking you across town to stand around in the dark.”
Actually, she was right. Leaving her had been a big mistake. If I’d had a lookout last night, I would have gotten out of the Eastman place before Joel was in. Now Ford’s right-hand man knew I was up here in San Francisco. Was I going to have to look over my shoulder for him everywhere I went?
“What?” Serena said. “You look kinda funny.”
“Thinking,” I said, dismissing that train of thought. “Let me see the paper.”
Details were pretty thin about my West Point career; the Army’s famous dislike of dealing with civilian reporters was working in my favor.
Of more interest, at least to me, was a related story on CNN: With banks once again open for business, details were coming out about Eastman’s accounts. As Tess had predicted, there had been “irregularities.” Apparently “Hailey” had written herself four checks on Eastman’s account on Thursday and Friday, cashing them at different bank branches. Each of the checks was for an amount just shy of five thousand dollars, the level that triggered bank oversight. In addition, there had been large purchases made with Eastman’s Visa and American Express cards those same days, at Neiman Marcus and Macy’s and a lower–Market Street jewelry store.
I kicked off covers and went to pour myself a cup of coffee from the little machine on the counter.
“So how did it go last night?” Serena said. “Was it interesting?”
“You can’t imagine,” I said dryly, tipping my face down into my cup.
“Yeah? What’d you learn?”
Shit. I didn’t really want to tell her about Joel; it’d freak her out. I sipped coffee and backtracked. “I was being ironic. It was a wash. Everything interesting has been cleaned out.”
“Mmm,” she said, and then, “So what’s the plan today?”
“Surveillance,” I said. “If Joe Laska is working out of Skouras’s old offices, we might be able to catch my good friend Quentin coming and going from there. This is going to be the boring part, surveillance.”
“That’s okay,” Serena said, “as long as I get to be there when things do get interesting. Like when you’re ready to throw down on this guy.”
“Sure thing.”
“I mean it, Insula. No ‘This part’s too dangerous, go wait at the hotel’ shit.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “You remember who these guys are. They’re heavy. If we don’t have to mix it up with them, we shouldn’t.” I drained the last of the coffee. “Let me take a shower, and we’ll head out.”
That’s how we spent the rest of the day: at a discreet distance from Laska’s office not far from the Port of San Francisco, watching people arrive and depart. I saw Babyface himself and pointed him out to Serena. Quentin did not appear. At one point I found some scratch paper and tried to draw him from memory, an exercise that reminded me I couldn’t draw at all. Serena smoked cigarettes and fielded occasional phone calls and slipped away to talk in private; Trece business, I knew.
By seven that evening, we were back at the hotel, eating Indian takeout and watching cable news. I’d been hoping that by the time the prime-time shows were on, I’d have been supplanted by a missing child or a homegrown-terror plot. That wasn’t the case. On CNN’s marquee crime-news show, generic footage of West Point cadets drilling was intercut with my military ID photo, footage of police activity outside the Eastman house on Friday night, and a brief snippet of Lucius “Luke” Marsellus getting out of a black Escalade and walking into the offices of his record label in L.A.
Marsellus? I set down my plastic fork and looked at the banner at the bottom of the screen. It read, BREAKING NEWS: MURDER SUSPECT HIT, KILLED CHILD IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.
“Oh, great,” I said.
The show’s host was saying, “This terrible story, these two murders up in San Francisco, the story just keeps getting more tangled, everything we hear just keeps getting worse.” She spoke not in sentences but in strings of clauses, with drawling emphasis on the key words. “The news late today out of Los Angeles about a traffic fatality in which—”
“Well, you knew that shit was gonna come out,” Serena said philosophically.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
On the screen the host was now talking to a remote guest, identified as a “psychologist and popular author.” Serena was about to speak again, but I held up a silencing hand.
“Now, Dr. Schiffman,” the host said, “what we’re hearing about this young woman, this suspect, more and more we’re seeing a picture of someone whose life has gone very wrong, who set herself this very high goal of going to the U.S. Military Academy and then failed at that; she later, for whatever reason, is responsible for the death of a small child.… Dr. Schiffman, what kind of effect would this string of, I guess you’d say missteps and failures, have on the psyche of a young person like Hailey Cain?”
The psychologist, a man with very short, curly hair and round glasses, cleared his throat. “Well, I think it’s important first to remind everyone that Cain is still a suspect, she hasn’t been tried or found guilty—”
“Of course, of course.”
“—and that the Wilshire Boulevard accident was found not to be her fault. But with those … uh, caveats, you’d have to say that the failure to complete West Point and then the death of this child, those kinds of life events at a fairly young age, could have a potentially devastating effect.”
“Certainly.”
“You could potentially be looking at someone who’s saying, ‘I’ve tried hard, I’ve failed, what’s the use?’ I mean, particularly someone being the agent of a child’s death, and completely by accident, that’s someone who could be saying, ‘Society’s going to look at me like I’m some kind of monster no matter what, so I give up, I’m just going to be as bad as I can be.’ I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but it could be.”
“So you’re saying that this could be someone who just snapped.”
“That’s entirely possible.”
West Point and Wilshire Boulevard—they were the two turning points of my adult life, the two points that allowed these people who’d never met me to triangulate, to plot out my psyche like they were laying out a map.
“For God’s sake,” I told Serena, “the Eastman thing was obviously a planned-out, long-term crime, moving into an old lady’s house and embezzling her money. That’s not ‘snapping.’ ”
“They gotta make it interesting,” Serena said.
Finally the news shifted to an update about a missing woman in South Carolina. Serena muted the TV and turned her full attention to her food. I tried to do the same, but I wasn’t very hungry.
I went to bed early that night, to make up for the sleep I’d missed the night before, in St. Francis Wood with Joel. But instead I fell into that dark, dreamless, not-quite-asleep state for I don’t know how long, coming fully to consciousness at the sound of Serena shaking an Ambien out of the bottle I’d left at bedside.
Eventually I succumbed, dreaming that I was far from California and my troubles. Instead I was on an African beach, alone with CJ.