8
I woke up the next morning at ten, to find a note taped to the bathroom mirror.
Hailey—Have whatever you like from the refrigerator, etc., for breakfast. Also, you should check out the profile of Violet Eastman in today’s LA Times, it’s quite good.
Whatever you do, please don’t leave before I get back and go out on the streets by yourself.
—Tess
She didn’t say where she’d gone, and it wasn’t until I saw the cheerful colored egg and the words Happy Easter by the date on the Times that I remembered it was Easter. Church? Tess had never seemed religious to me, but you never could tell.
The kitchen was so perfectly clean that I didn’t feel comfortable cooking. I poured myself a large bowl of cereal instead, and sliced up a banana on top. The kitchen had a generous island with two stools, and it was there that I ate breakfast and read the profile of Violet Eastman.
Eastman’s grandfather had been Johnny MacClain Eastman, the tenth-grade-educated Tennesseean who’d formulated Eastern Gentleman whiskey. By his death Eastman Distilleries had bought up several rivals and produced not only Eastern Gentleman but a costly premium blend called MacClain’s Extra Rare and a line of ciders and hard lemonades favored by college students. After Johnny MacClain Eastman’s death, his son, John Eastman Jr., took over the business for two decades before selling to a big umbrella corporation.
Eastman Jr. had had a single child, Violet. Her father’s acquaintances remembered an always-tall-for-her-age girl who seemed perpetually to have a book in her hand or to be rambling the estate with her dogs, who’d shunned girlish pursuits like sleepover parties and shopping expeditions. But where conventional wisdom would call for a bookish heiress to be unprepossessing and awkward, Violet Eastman was remembered as confident and dryly funny when she did appear at parties. Photos from her youth showed good cheekbones and long-lashed eyes, and adolescence took her tall frame from the pejorative “skinny” to the approving “slender.”
Though something of a tomboy, Eastman had a traditional coming-out and then went away to school at Oberlin. After college she’d seemed to be living the idle life of an heiress, settling down in New York City, working only part-time as a drama critic, traveling when she pleased. Only much later did friends learn her secret: She’d been steadily gaining a readership in science-fiction magazines, writing under the androgynous name V. K. Eastman.
A few paragraphs followed about her writing career, some of which was lost on me; I wasn’t familiar with the names in science fiction to whom she was compared, nor the magazines in which she’d published. But her work was lauded as technically accomplished and more subtle and literate than could usually be expected of the pulp magazines of the time. Her stories were regularly chosen for year’s-best anthologies. In the late eighties, she’d co-written the screenplay for a very successful film, one whose clever dialogue and subtle antiracism themes elevated it beyond the label of “space opera.”
At age thirty-six, after seeming to commit to a life of single blessedness, Eastman surprised everyone by marrying a man twenty years her senior, a CDC epidemiologist for whom she moved from New York to Atlanta. The popular guess was that the marriage was one of convenience, between a man facing the discomforts of old age and a middle-aged single woman who feared a life of loneliness.
Again the easy supposition was wrong. They bought a house on the river and entertained there. They kept dogs. They traveled, often to exotic Third World locations instead of comfortable resorts. They moved together to San Francisco when he traded his CDC position for a department chair at UCSF Medical Center. In all, Eastman and her husband stayed together for twenty-two years, and she nursed him through more than a year of cancer treatments before he died.
Afterward Eastman stayed in the home they’d shared in the quiet, wealthy enclave of St. Francis Wood. She continued writing, though she published less frequently. Health problems were cited: a bad hip, vision problems that caused her to surrender her driver’s license.
So last winter she’d advertised for a tenant to live in a semidetached private apartment in her home, offering free rent in exchange for light household help, errand running, and care of Eastman’s elderly borzoi, the last of the four dogs she’d adopted with her husband. The horrible outcome of that venture was now well known. Readers were referred to a sidebar on the newest developments in the murder investigation.
The sidebar didn’t have much to say. LONGTIME FRIEND RAISED THE ALARM, the headline read. The story explained that a Crescent City woman, Karen Adkins, had become concerned after Eastman failed to call Adkins on Adkins’s birthday. It had been a longtime, never-fail tradition between the two friends, once classmates at Oberlin, that they exchanged birthday greetings by phone. Phoning the house, Adkins had spoken to a young woman calling herself Hailey, who’d said that she was Eastman’s live-in personal assistant and that Eastman was too ill to come to the phone. Questioned about the exact nature of Eastman’s illness and why she wasn’t in the hospital if she was too sick even to take a phone call, Hailey had become vague and evasive. Adkins became suspicious. Something, she told the Chronicle reporter, was just “off” about the young woman she’d spoken to.
Adkins had tried to call Eastman again the next day and this time had gotten no answer at all. She was torn—worried about her friend yet feeling unable to justify calling the police. She’d compromised by calling Greg Stepakoff, a police officer and the son of another old friend, asking him to go by Eastman’s house, unofficially, and check out the situation. Stepakoff had said this was no problem. It was when hours passed with no return call from him, and when he’d proved equally unreachable on his cell, that Adkins had been worried enough to call the SFPD main line and make things official.
This had cleared up the issue of whether Stepakoff’s death had been a line-of-duty killing—it wasn’t—but the SFPD saw the difference as merely semantic. Stepakoff’s actions had been “clearly consistent with his sworn goal to protect and serve the public,” the press liaison said. “We feel this investigation deserves the respect that a line-of-duty death would receive, and we’re sure the public is in agreement with us on that.”
• • •
I’d rinsed my cereal bowl and started a pot of coffee brewing when I heard a key in the lock of the front door, and Tess came in.
“Is that coffee? Perfect,” she said. She set a box down on the counter, with a woman in a glamorous, hair-swinging pose on the front. It was hair color. “I thought we’d change your hair a bit,” she said.
I looked more closely at the box and the shade, a medium brown, about the color of a portobello mushroom. I said, “I’m a little disturbed by how quickly you’ve gotten with the fugitive program.”
She was checking the progress of the drip coffeemaker. “Turning yourself in still gets my vote, but last night you closed the door on that, and next you’re going to tell me that you can’t stay in my house indefinitely. Right?”
“Probably.”
“Then you need to be less recognizable.” Tess took an oversize mug covered in bright polka dots down from a wall rack and poured herself a generous amount of coffee.
“You know,” I said, “this’ll help some, but my birthmark is the real problem. It’s worse than having a name tag on my face.”
“There’s makeup for that,” she said.
“Won’t work,” I said. “When I was younger, I’d get into my mother’s cosmetic kit and try to cover it up with liquid foundation and powder. Then more liquid, then more powder. Makeup never quite covers it. All it does is draw attention to the fact that I’ve tried to cover it up.”
Tess gave me an obliquely amused look. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind. You need to start thinking like a movie person.”
About ninety minutes later, I couldn’t stop looking in the mirror with fascination. My hair was newly brown, and high on my cheekbone, covering the birthmark, was a deep bruise. Tess had created it from a mixture of mascara, eye shadow, a little mineral oil to blend, and then face powder to counteract the shininess of the oil.
“I wish I knew a makeup person I trusted to keep your secret,” Tess said, speculative dissatisfaction in her voice. “A pro, with professional-grade stage makeup, could give you a bruise that would fool an ER doctor.”
“Don’t run down your own work,” I said. “This is pretty good.”
Tess was in her bedroom, and I was in the attached master bath, where we’d done the work. The chemical-perfume scent of the dye still hung in the air, rising in part from several stained hand towels and the disposable latex gloves Tess had used, now lying in the sink.
While I’d been sitting on the bathroom vanity with my wet, dye-soaked hair covered in a plastic bag, Tess had called two friends in San Francisco, politely fishing for news and gossip about the Eastman murder, but without luck. Neither woman had known Eastman personally, nor had either of them heard anything that hadn’t already been reported on the news.
“You know,” she said now from the other room, “I have Joe Laska’s phone number. He took over several of my father’s businesses up there.”
I came to stand in the doorway, leaning against the frame. “Meaning he filled the vacuum in the organized-crime scene, too,” I said. “Bringing heroin and undocumented Eastern European immigrant labor into California.”
“Somebody was going to,” Tess said. “I seem to remember you giving me a little lecture on the importance of it not being me.”
I lifted a shoulder in a half-embarrassed shrug. “I was still in pain from my finger. It made me a drag to be around,” I said.
“You weren’t.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter. I could call Laska, but if he knows which of his merry men sold my ID, do you really think he’s going to tell me?”
“Actually,” Tess said, pausing in the midst of smoothing the covers of the bed she was making, “I’m hoping he’ll tell me.”
“Wait,” I said quickly. “I’m not sure you want to reopen an acquaintance with this guy. I’ve seen Joe Laska with his mask off. It’s not pretty.”
“So have I. I was in that projection booth, too, and I saw what he did to you,” she said. “Then I successfully negotiated your way out of it, remember?”
I did remember, and I had to admit this situation was long-distance, and thus safer. “Just be careful what you say,” I told her. “He’s virtually the only person who knows that you and I know each other. You’d be best off leading him to believe that we didn’t stay in touch. I wouldn’t put it past him to drop a dime, if he suspects you’re helping me.”
“I’ll be discreet,” she said. “You can even listen in. There’s an extension on the little table at the end of the hall.”
I walked out into the hall, saw the table, and picked up the phone. “Ready.”
I heard her pick up her receiver and dial. Three rings sounded, and then a male voice answered. “Hello?”
It was Laska, no question. I hadn’t expected to be certain, to remember so clearly his voice from the defunct adult theater, the tunnel in Mexico, even the hotel in El Paso where he’d first spoken to me. Such a calm, reasonable voice.
“Joseph,” Tess said. “This is Teresa D’Agostino.”
“Ms. Skouras?” he said. “It’s been a while.” Then, “Is there something I can help you with?”
“This isn’t really a business call,” she said. “I just … I’ve been very busy and have only now caught up with the news from up north. Those two murders, isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? I’m not mistaken—it is the same Hailey Cain, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is,” Laska said. “I saw her DMV photo in the Chronicle. It’s the same girl.”
“What do you make of it?”
There was a short pause. “People will do anything for money, I guess,” he said. “She was pretty resourceful, so it doesn’t surprise me that she was capable of something like this. How she was wired up psychologically, I never really got a good read on that. I never understood what made her do the things she did last year, with Mr. Skouras’s grandson.”
“Mmm,” Tess said noncommittally. “I just thought there seemed to be such ill will between her and you and your men, that when I read the news, I did wonder—you guys didn’t have a hand in this, did you?”
“Why would we help her kill an old lady and a cop?”
“Not help her,” Tess said. “Frame her. Last year it struck me that she was rather obsessed with honor and doing the right thing. So it occurred to me that if she didn’t do this, then someone else did and planned for her to take the fall. And no offense, but I thought of you and your colleagues. You people do have your vendettas.”
Laska chuckled, unoffended. “I’m Greek. We don’t have vendettas.” He paused. “I’m telling you, she’s been off my radar since last winter. I’m a businessman. I do what has to be done; I don’t waste energy chasing my ego needs around. Quentin Corelli, he was a little more personally bothered by her, but I see him all the time, and he hasn’t mentioned her at all.”
“Interesting,” Tess said.
“Can I ask why you’re asking about this?”
“My own ego needs, perhaps,” Tess said. “I rather liked that girl. I hate to think my judgment of her character was so far off. Listen, I’ll give you my number. If you hear anything interesting that’s not being reported on the news, can you give me a call? Likewise, if you’re ever in need of some information in my sphere of things, down here in L.A., maybe I could help you out.”
Hearing that, I winced.
“That’s nice of you, Ms. Skouras. You never can tell when it’ll be useful to have the acquaintance of someone in the know.”
They exchanged final pleasantries, with Tess giving him her phone number before hanging up.
Walking back into her bedroom, I said, “You didn’t have to give him your phone number. If he doesn’t know anything now, he probably won’t down the line.”
“It never hurts to ask.”
“It does if you’re agreeing to trade favors with a guy like Babyface.”
“I’ve swum with sharks before,” she said.
I leaned against her dresser, studied her, and said, “You suggested to him that this was a deliberate frame-up. You and I didn’t discuss that possibility last night.”
Tess tilted her head slightly. “You think it’s too great a logical leap? If this were only about your identity papers, I’d say maybe it was just a crime of convenience. The use of your gun, the failure to pick up the casing at the scene … It was simply logical to me that there was an aspect of this that was about you personally. Don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Seemed egotistical to assume that.”
“But maybe it’s not. Laska did say that one of his guys was ‘personally bothered’ by you.”
“Quentin Corelli. He was one of the other two guys in the projection booth.” I played with a strand of newly brown hair, thinking. “He was making it kind of personal. We had a little history, from up in Gualala, where I took Nidia away from him.”
“So that’s not anything new, that this guy didn’t like you.”
“No,” I said. “He has a grudge, and he was in the tunnel in Mexico, which would have allowed him to steal my identity papers.” I lifted a shoulder. “I have to start somewhere. I might as well make that my working theory, that he’s the one who sold my papers and gun to some female con artist. If he isn’t, maybe he’ll know who is.”
“You can’t go to San Francisco alone and brace one of Joe Laska’s men. You don’t even know where he is.”
“Laska said that he saw Quentin regularly,” I pointed out. “And Laska took over your father’s businesses. It sounds like he doesn’t just see Quentin, he also signs his paychecks.”
Tess’s face had darkened. She stood up. “This is insanity. The last time you opposed these men, you nearly got killed. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead now.”
“I know,” I agreed. “Have I said thanks recently? Thanks.”
“Don’t be flippant. You know what I’m saying.”
“Actually, I don’t,” I said. “You just helped me change my appearance. You knew I wasn’t going to the police and that I was planning to go back out in the world and straighten this out. Where’d you get off that train?”
Tess looked away, out the window. She said, “I knew you were going to do something typically risky, but I didn’t think you were planning something suicidal.”
“Nothing’s planned just yet,” I said. “I’m still thinking through my options.” I moved closer, put a hand on her shoulder. “If I go get my gym bag and walk out your front door, are you going to call the police? Tell them what I look like now, that I’m traveling on foot in the vicinity of Westwood?”
Tess shook her head silently.
“Then I hate to be a pest,” I said, “but can you give me a lift?”