Dead Time Read online

  He said, “I like the road.”

  “It’s summer, Sam. We’re talking desert. Hot.”

  “But they say it’s a dry heat,” he added with a smidgeon of sarcasm. After draining his beer, he added, “So you finally tell wife two you’ve been in touch with wife one?”

  “Merideth was first. Doesn’t make her number one.”

  “Whatever. Did you tell her?”

  “Yes.” I’d told Lauren during the same conversation I told her I was returning to Boulder from New York. She had seemed neither upset nor especially curious about the Merideth episode. I had been relieved.

  For the next few seconds I stared at the foam floating on top of my beer. Then I raised my eyes to the dusk pastels dissipating in the evening sky. Talking about first wives wasn’t a favorite topic for either of us. I hoped Sam would see the wisdom in changing the subject.

  I hoped for an end to global warming, too.

  Sam allowed about thirty seconds to pass before he went editorial on me. “Conversation went well, I guess,” he said. “The one with Lauren.”

  I laughed a little. “Went fine. Great. Better than this one is going. She knows when to leave well enough alone.” I changed the subject, finished explaining the favor I was doing for Wallace and Cassandra in California.

  “This isn’t another favor for Merideth?” Sam asked. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I wouldn’t be going out there if Wallace hadn’t begged me to go. He’s worried about his daughter.”

  Sam nodded in a way that was intended to be unconvincing. “When do you leave for L.A.?” he asked.

  “Couple days. What about you? When are you going to the Grand Canyon?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “You think the answer Merideth wants is in Arizona?” I asked.

  “Not really. But I told her she had to hire a real PI to do the missing-persons part of the puzzle. Staking out the surrogate’s apartment in L.A.? Tracking her cell-phone usage, her credit cards, seeing if she just got a speeding ticket in Tallahassee? That shit—that’s how she’ll end up finding Lisa. I don’t have an investigator’s license. And I don’t want one. I like the puzzle more than the chase. I like identifying perps more than I like tracking them down. This mystery starts that night in the Grand Canyon.

  “Anyway, I should get going—I’m heading out early, before dawn. Want to be clear of the metro area before all the idiots wake up.”

  “You’ll end up in the Springs just in time for rush hour down there.”

  Sam was feeling philosophical. “Life isn’t perfect, Alan. You avoid one thing, something else gets you. Fate abhors planning. Do too much and you become an easy target for the gods.”

  I had been convinced for almost a year that what fate abhors is contentedness. But I kept remembering contented times, and didn’t know what to do with the contrary evidence. “A target for what?” I asked.

  “More fate.” He attempted to finish his beer for the second time, returning his glass to the table with some force as a sign of his disappointment that the glass was already empty. “That’s it for me. I want to be all chipper in the morning.”

  I had slept in my own bed for a total of three nights before I boarded the flight from DIA to LAX. Mona was back with the dogs.

  The rental car that Hertz assigned to me in Los Angeles was a hybrid Camry. The sedan was significantly greener than the summer air that day in the L.A. basin, which I imagined was the point.

  Over the previous couple of days Wallace had given me some background on his daughter’s life in L.A. via e-mails and two additional phone calls. Cara was sharing half of a duplex in Mt. Washington with a couple of other people who were “in the business.” He e-mailed me a map and directions to her house. I never actually spoke with Cara by phone during the planning stage for my visit; Wallace played intermediary in making all the arrangements with her. Wallace maintained that was the way Cara wanted it. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was true.

  Once I’d made the airline reservations I let Wallace know what day I was going and when I’d get to LAX. Within a few minutes he e-mailed me back to let me know that Cara was expecting me to stop by her place midafternoon.

  My plan for my meeting with Cara was simple. I would wing it. While she and I talked I would assess what was going on with her and—ideally—be on my way back to Denver the next day, at the latest. If I could catch the last flight out of LAX to Denver the same day I flew in, I would do that.

  The trip from the airport through downtown—Wallace’s map routed me from the 405 to the 10 to the 110—was auspicious. Traffic was horrendous, but I didn’t get lost, which may have been a first for me as an adult in Los Angeles. Although I’d grown up only an hour north of the basin, most of L.A. was unfamiliar to me.

  Though the name of the place rang a bell, I didn’t think I had ever before had a reason to go to the Mt. Washington neighborhood. I might have ended up there once during an unintentional detour with a friend’s family when I was around ten. We’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to find our way to the Coliseum for an SC football game.

  Mt. Washington was north and—although my L.A. geography was challenged, I thought—slightly east of downtown L.A., on a rise above the basin. Cara lived in half of a pre–World War I, Mission-style duplex. The charming old structure sat about ten steps up from the street. The decrepit tiled stairs that led up from the sidewalk cut though a glacier of eroding ice plant. The progenitor shoots had probably been planted around the same time Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic.

  The duplex was in the middle of a block that intermittent redevelopment had left as a disjointed mishmash of homes. Oversize contemporary renovations loomed over neglected but charming eight-hundred-square-foot Craftsman bungalows. Yards full of lush landscaping were segregated from expanses of dead lawns, dry weeds, or packed dirt by new walls of stone or wrought iron, or by nothing more than dilapidated strips of half-century-old chain-link fencing. Rows of fan palms fronted a few of the oldest bungalows. Canopies of jacarandas shaded the more refined sections of the street.

  Developmentus interruptus. With time, it tended to be a self-correcting disease.

  A narrow courtyard packed with overgrown shrubbery and dark shadows divided the two units of Cara’s duplex. The halves met up in the back to complete the shape of the building into a U. Well-tended birds-of-paradise in big, heavy urns flanked the substantial oak door on Cara’s side of the building.

  The unit on the other half of the U had no urns and no flowers gracing its door. On that side of the duplex all the curtains were drawn and newspapers and flyers were yellowing on the tiled landing.

  I couldn’t find a bell, so I rapped on Cara’s door with my knuckles.

  The brass mail slot by the door had an envelope sticking out, waiting to be collected by the letter carrier. The return address was Cara’s, but the name on the envelope was Kanyn Gray. Wallace had said his daughter had roommates. I guessed that Kanyn was one.

  I turned and looked beyond an intervening ridge. The view toward the central business district of L.A. from the front of the home was splendid, or at least my imagination allowed that it would have been splendid on one of those crystal days when L.A.’s air is as clear as tropical water.

  That day wasn’t one of those. The skyscrapers downtown—much more numerous than I remembered—loomed like raised fingers in the haze. I tried to decide if the color of the air that day was closer to gray or closer to brown. A woman answered the door before I reached a conclusion.

  Kanyn? I wondered. Cara?

  The woman wasn’t at all cautious about opening her front door to a stranger. Whether that said more about the neighborhood or more about her I wasn’t in a position to know. She flung the door open wide and stood silhouetted against an orange wall, her feet set wide apart. Behind her, flaking shellac marred the finish of the old mahogany door of a coat closet. The wood on the door was stained, or had aged, until it was almo
st black. The door had a cut-glass knob and wasn’t closed all the way.

  Above the woman’s head a fat crack in the plaster fractured the cove that transitioned from the wall to the ceiling. The crack, I guessed, was why the closet door wasn’t closed all the way. Earthquake, I thought, reminding myself I was in Southern California. Old earthquake, I thought, reassuring myself that my personal seismic risk that day was probably manageable.

  I refocused. I didn’t think the woman at the door was Cara. Although they were about the same age, she was taller than I remembered Cara being. I had not given the first moment of our meeting much thought, but I realized that I had expected that I would recognize my friend’s daughter from her Colorado early adolescence.

  After a prolonged interlude of silence—I was the one who should have spoken first, of course, but didn’t—the woman said, “Hi. Can I…I don’t know, help you with something?”

  Friendly? Close. A little bemused, maybe. Nicer than I would have been had our roles been reversed. By the time she finally spoke, the duplex’s architecture had started fading into the background for me. I realized that I might have begun staring. At the woman, not at the orange wall, the glass doorknob, or the cracked cove molding.

  She wasn’t beautiful, not in any glamorous, stereotypical L.A. manner. But she was intriguing. The proportions of her features were off, but not in an unpleasant way. Her face was a little too narrow, her eyes too far apart. Asymmetric cascades of faint freckles spilled down her cheeks like sand-colored pebbles on a beach.

  She was cute.

  “I’m looking for…I’m sorry,” I said. I glanced down for a second to search for some composure, exhaled, and then I looked back at the woman again. “I’m looking for Carmel Poteet. I might be here a little earlier than she thought I’d be, but she’s…expecting me.”

  She was wearing two snug, casual tops. The layer below was pale yellow with narrower straps than the pink layer above it. Either one alone would have been revealing. Together the two managed to be modest and not-at-all modest at the same time. Her jeans were the kind of tight that always seems to inspire my prurient curiosity about the getting-them-over-the-hips part of dressing.

  She slid her fingers into the back pockets and allowed her shoulders to drop. The proportions of her body, I decided—thighs to hips to waist to chest to shoulders—were just fine.

  I realized I was having an Ottavia moment. Not good.

  “Mel’s not here,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and cocked out a hip. “Are you sure she’s expecting you? She’s good about appointments and things. Much better than me.” She rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. One side of her mouth curled into a grin.

  She wore no makeup, or she wore it so well that I couldn’t tell. Her hair was short and styled carelessly. The color was in the middle ground between blond and not. It was a shade that had to be natural; it was hard to imagine someone seeking it from a bottle.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, after forcing myself to recall her question. “I am. I actually flew in to town to see her…today. Just now.”

  She opened her eyes wide. I noted that her irises were the same color as that day’s L.A. haze. Not quite brown, not quite gray. The hue worked better—much better—for eyes than it did for atmosphere.

  “She didn’t say anything.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

  I hoped I might be invited inside to wait. I wasn’t. “Okay, well. I guess I’ll wait for her in the car. I have her mobile number. Maybe I can give her a call. Is she at work? I don’t want to interrupt her if—”

  The woman’s expression told me that she wasn’t about to tell me whether her roommate was at work.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. Thanks for your help.” I began to turn.

  “What’s your name?” the woman said. “In case I talk to her.”

  I said, “Alan…Gregory.”

  “You flew in from…?”

  “Colorado. Boulder.”

  She nodded. If the question had been a quiz, I had passed.

  “I’ve known Carmel for a long time,” I said. “Since she was—”

  She laughed softly as she stopped me with a headshake that was brisk enough to cause her hair to move. “Don’t say ‘little.’ Okay? She’s sensitive about it. Her size.”

  “A kid,” I said.

  “Better.”

  The woman stepped forward and pulled the door closed behind her. For a few seconds she stood on the compact tiled landing between the urns, her arms folded across her chest. I was startled when she reached past me. With a sudden motion she deadheaded a dated blossom off the bird-of-paradise. She twisted the flower off the stem hard, as though she were decapitating a chicken.

  Her shoulder brushed against my arm as she pulled back. “Sorry,” she said. “Sometimes the urge just…strikes.”

  “Oh,” I managed.

  “I love these,” she said, gesturing at the flowers. “When I get a house, I want to have an entire hillside of them.”

  “We don’t have them in Colorado.”

  “Mel misses Boulder,” she said. “She talks about it a lot. Is it as pretty there as she says?”

  She was standing no more than a foot from me, holding the faded bloom in front of her with both hands as though it were a wedding bouquet.

  “It’s pretty,” I said. “But there are lots of varieties of pretty.”

  Carmel’s roommate stepped away from me and sat on the top of the stairs that led from the cracked sidewalk. She’d picked the side of the step that was bordered by a rickety wrought-iron handrail, which left enough room for me to sit beside her. She was continuing to hold the dead flower in her hands.

  I would have tossed it into the black hole of degrading ice plant.

  Sunlight was fighting to find a way to sneak through the chemicals and moisture in the air. In the distance—above the flatlands that spread between downtown and the Pacific Ocean—I watched two breaks form in the low ceiling. Bright shafts opened, scalding the ground with light. The brilliance shifted, fragmenting the sun’s rays. The shafts drifted closed. In seconds, they re-formed somewhere else.

  I sat beside her.

  She said, “I don’t think I could live that far from the ocean.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “You an old…boyfriend?” she asked without looking my way.

  “Me? No,” I said, probably a little too incredulously.

  “What, then?”

  She sounded sincere. Although I was tempted to answer, I found a gram of discretion somewhere. “I think it’s better if I leave it up to Carmel to tell you that.”

  “Nobody calls her that, you know. Carmel. Too…I don’t know, precious.”

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time. The last time was…in Boulder. I’ve known her since—”

  “You said that already.”

  “I did. You’re right.”

  After about fifteen seconds, she said, “It’s my job. I’m a script supervisor.”

  “I don’t…know what that is.”

  She adopted a husky, faux–Old West voice—she did it well—and said, “You’re not from around these parts, are you, Cowboy?”

  I didn’t respond. I always embarrassed myself when I tried to do accents.

  “I keep track of what’s on film. Continuity. Chart deviations from the script. Keep everybody on the same page, literally. Keep the editor from trying to kill the director. I have to pay close attention to what everyone says on set. It becomes a habit.”

  It made perfect sense that there was such a job, but until that moment I’d been unaware of its existence. Often I can guess whether someone likes his or her work from the way they describe it, but I couldn’t tell how Carmel’s roommate would answer the question had I posed it to her. I did. “Do you like it? What you do?”

  She eyed me. I thought she was assaying my sincerity. She said, “Not really. But it brings me a little closer to what I want. On a good day, if I hit it off
with the assistant director or the DP, I pick their brains, learn things. That’s good.”

  “DP?”

  “Sorry. Director of photography.”

  “A step toward…? What is it that you want?”

  “To direct,” she said. “I’ve done some shorts that have been…that are good. A friend has offered me AD—assistant director—on an indie thing he’s doing. He almost has financing.” She grinned self-consciously. “But he’s almost had financing for a year.”

  Dreams, I thought. I remember those.

  She said, “My roommates didn’t expect me home today—maybe that’s why Mel didn’t tell me you were coming by. We were supposed to be on location today in Redondo. We had talent problems.”

  She emphasized “talent.” I made a guess. “An actor didn’t show up?” I liked hearing her talk, hoped she would continue. The alternative was sitting in the Camry and listening to the radio.

  “Drunk from last night. Producer’s pissed.”

  “Movie?” I asked.

  “TV series.”

  “Which one?”

  She told me. I hadn’t heard of it.

  “We debuted last spring, after sweeps. Did okay for a few episodes. Ratings softened, the show runner got squirrelly. I’m just praying”—she pushed her palms together like a chaste schoolgirl—“we get to finish our twenty-two. I can use the work.”

  She was still holding the core of the faded flower in her hands. She had pulled off most of the dead petals. What remained was hard bud.

  I didn’t know what a twenty-two was. Or a show runner. I could have asked. Instead I gestured toward the other half of the duplex and said, “Your next-door neighbor is kind of…reclusive? Is that a good word for it?”

  She laughed. “The Addams Family? Mel met them when she first moved in. Two women, I guess. They’re in the business. Since I’ve been here, they’ve been on some location shoot in, I don’t know, the Czech Republic? Prague? Is that right? I’ve never seen those curtains open. Ever. Kanyn knows them best. She says they’re all right. Their place gives me the creeps.” She was twirling what was left of the flower in her hand.