I could barely reach the shelf above Dad’s suit jackets—the one where he kept all kinds of odds and ends, along with a box of medicines and bandages and wraps—the things I was constantly needing when I was new to tae kwon do but we hardly ever used anymore. Pushed behind it all was a boxy cassette recorder—the old-fashioned kind that would have had a microphone that you plugged into it. He probably still had the microphone lying around somewhere, too.
I pulled it down, shoved everything back in its place, and brought the recorder to my bedroom. If he came home before I was finished with the recorder, I would just hide it under my bed. He would never know it was missing. He probably hadn’t used it in twenty years.
I crawled onto the middle of my bed and sat cross-legged, staring at the recorder and the cassettes and wondering if I was strong enough to handle whatever I found out. I would have to be.
My phone went off, making me jump. A text from Chris.
Looked up the plate.
And??? I texted.
The name sounds familiar. No record on her, though.
Her?
I waited for him to respond, but he never did. If there was a way to hear frustration in someone’s text voice, I was definitely hearing it in Chris’s. It had to be maddening to remember bits and pieces of things, but have the most random information wiped from your mind. Especially if the random information helped you figure out who was trying to kill you.
Address match? I asked.
Yes was all he responded. Translation: I’m done talking about it. I know nothing more than I did before.
I tossed my phone to the side and chewed my lip. If we didn’t have Luna or Heriberto, we might as well get my dad.
I put the cassette marked with a big 1 into the machine and pressed play.
At first there was nothing. Just the hiss of the tape and some faraway clicks and dragging noises. Then there was some mumbling—something garbled—and my dad’s voice came in, so loud and clear and close to the microphone it sounded like he was actually in the room with me. It made my heart skip.
“Uh, Milo Kill. M-I-L-O K-I-L-L.”
More mumbling, then a rustling and the voice coming in clearer. “. . . Thursday night?”
There was a pause. “Uh. I was home? I don’t know, maybe I was out. I . . . can I get a drink of water?” There was the sound of liquid being poured, and then, “Thanks.” A pause. “I mean, the whole week has been such a blur. I’m not sure what I remember. What’s real and what’s fake, you know?” A breath.
“So you don’t remember anything about the night your wife was murdered? Not even where you were?”
“I . . . I was with my daughter. With Nikki.”
I sat up straighter, staring at the recorder, which was bursting with gold fireworks, dripping gray contrails, and melting into a deep indigo sky. I pressed rewind and listened again. “. . . I was with my daughter.”
“Fucking liar,” I said out loud. I clicked off the tape, my entire room blotted out with inky rage. I had been at my friend Wendy’s house. Her mom had given me Tootsie Rolls in a bag. I’d dropped them in Mom’s blood. I remembered everything. Everything, down to the warmth of the blood as it soaked into the knees of my jeans. Down to the look in Mom’s eyes when she told me to run. And he couldn’t even remember that he wasn’t with me that night? “Bullshit,” I said to the recorder, hopping off my bed and pacing the length of my room a few times, my thumbnail jammed in my mouth. I looked longingly at my desk drawer, where I knew I’d stashed an old, stale pack of cigarettes. If there ever was a time I was saving them for . . .
Instead, I took several deep breaths and hit play again. “Well, now, see, we’ve been told your daughter was at a friend’s house, Milo. Were you with her at that house, or . . . ?”
“I . . .” A sigh. “I guess I must have been. I must have picked her up, dropped her off. That’s . . . I mean, I don’t know where else I would be.”
“Mrs. Coughlin—your daughter’s friend’s mother—has given a statement that she picked up your daughter and brought her home that day. She said you and your wife were going out on a date, and she’d agreed to do the driving so you two could be alone.”
A long pause. “She did?”
“Yep. So how about we start over. Do you know what you were doing . . .” On and on it went. A faceless officer asking Dad where he’d been the night Mom was killed, and Dad giving him every transparent lie in the book. At one point, Dad broke down, his tears sounding angry and frustrated. Calculated? Yes, maybe even measured.
I listened to both tapes, and never did Dad offer a believable story. And he’d offered so many unbelievable ones it was impossible to think that a believable one existed. Why? Why would he lie unless he was guilty?
“Am I being arrested?” he’d asked at one point, and the officer had sounded brusque when he responded, “No, sir. We’re just trying to get a sense of what happened that night. We don’t have anything to arrest you for, do we?”
Dad’s response had been chilling. His voice flat, impassive. “No. You don’t have anything.”
I let the second tape run until it reached the end. The machine gave a squeak and then clicked off, and I was left sitting in bloated silence in my room, my legs drawn up and my arms wrapped around them.
Not, No, I didn’t do it. Not, Whatever it takes to find my wife’s killer. Just, No, you don’t have anything. Which was definitely not the same as saying there was nothing to have.
He didn’t come out and say that he’d done it. He didn’t confess and throw himself on the mercy of the court. But he’d lied. He’d done nothing to convince me that he hadn’t done it.
I popped the cassette out of the machine and put it back in the manila envelope, then took the recorder back downstairs to Dad’s closet.
But when I moved the bandage box to put it back, I noticed a stack of yellowed, clipped newspaper articles under where the recorder had been sitting. I pulled them down. The headline on the very top one caught my eye.
PRODUCER PAIRS WITH UP-AND-COMER FOR HOT NEW THRILLER
Hollywood, CA—Noted producer Bill Hollis has announced his newest film venture—an as-yet-unnamed cat-and-mouse thriller about a professional football player who is hiding the fact that he’s a serial killer, and the young journalist who is next on his hit list. Hollis, best known for the 1994 Academy Award–winning Penelope, has paired with fledgling director Carrie Kill, in what he is calling his best work yet.
The article went on to name a short list of actors who were speculated to be in the film, and talked about Mom’s work at Angry Elephant. Below, there were two head shots—one of my mom and one of Bill Hollis. Seeing his face filled me with a familiar mix of anxiety and hatred, while Mom’s picture made me sad and nostalgic. The emotions swelled into a soup of colors that swam across the paper.
I flipped to the article beneath: BILL HOLLIS INTRODUCES NEW DIRECTOR TO HOLLYWOOD SCENE. Another photo of my mom, beaming into the camera. I kept flipping through the articles, all of them with similar headlines—wildly famous producer gives a shot to a nobody director, and wasn’t she lucky to be making what would be such a smash hit movie?
So . . . what had happened to this movie? As far as I knew, Mom was never part of anything that actually made it to the big screen. She was amateur until the day she died. I checked the dates of the articles. They were all written about two years before she died. Something had happened in those two years. Something that made the movie go south.
Dad? Had Dad happened?
I flipped to the last article and froze. The headline was similar to the others. Nothing new about the story. It was the photo that sent my stomach to my feet. The first photo that showed them together. Mom and Bill Hollis, arms around each other jovially. Off to one side, my dad, unaware that he was being caught on camera, a scowl driving down the corners of his mouth.
And behind him, the white-blond man.
Luna’s getaway driver. The director at Pear Magic. The guy with the VP belt buckle.
The man in one of the photos in Dad’s desk drawer. The ones that went missing.
14
I COULDN’T TELL if things were falling into place or getting more confusing. I didn’t understand why the blond man kept popping up in so many places. He was connected to Luna. He was connected to the Hollises. He was connected to my parents.
Who the hell was he?