Dead Time Page 24

  Mel sat up and her mouth flew open. “No shit! No way! Lisa is having Eric’s baby? That’s perfect. Kanyn is not going to believe this. I wonder if she’s off work. I have to call Kanyn.”

  “Our deal? Mel? You can’t tell Kanyn.”

  She looked at me like I was nuts. “Kanyn can’t be part of the deal,” she said. “I tell Kanyn everything.”

  I swallowed a sigh. I had no leverage. I said, “Just you and Kanyn?”

  “Wait. Whose egg did they use? Is it Lisa’s?”

  “No, it’s Merideth’s.”

  “Ohhhh, too bad. It’d be so much a better story if it was Lisa’s.”

  I reminded myself that Mel worked on the set of a soap opera. The over-the-top was everyday drama for her.

  I said, “Does Eric know that you and Jules think you saw Jaana that night?” When she didn’t respond right away, I added another thought: “Maybe more important, did he know it then?”

  “Eric’s an ass. He knows he’s smart, he knows he’s hot, and he expects everyone to…whatever. I didn’t find it easy to be with him during the trip. He wasn’t kind to Jules. He plays it so cool. I mean, he’s gorgeous, but there’re lots of pretty boys in L.A. So what? That night? He said he didn’t see Jaana.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “He said he didn’t see her. It’s either true or it’s not. Just go to the video.”

  What? “I’m trying to understand this,” I said, forcing patience into my voice.

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “What about Lisa?” I asked. “Do you know if she saw Jaana that night? Where does she fit into the story?”

  Mel looked off into the night. “I’m sorry, Alan. Answering your questions won’t help you. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  She actually sounded sorry. I looked away from her into the fog. I could barely make out the time on an electronic clock atop a building a few blocks away. In one more minute I would excuse myself so I could call the airlines and see if there was a red-eye back to Denver. Before I did, I played one of the few cards remaining in my hand.

  “The reason I’m in Los Angeles? I mean, other than to check on you for your parents? This is my reason, not your parents’. Okay? About a week ago, Lisa disappeared with Merideth and Eric’s baby. They are desper—”

  “We are desperate,” said a voice from behind us, “to find Lisa.”

  Mel and I spun simultaneously.

  A man stood silhouetted behind the screen in the open doorway. He was wearing a dark suit over a white shirt. No tie.

  “Hello, Carmel,” he said. “Long time.” He looked at me. “You must be Alan. I’m Eric Leffler.” To establish his bona fides, he held up a condo key and electronic fob on a ring. “Hector pointed out your friend when I was downstairs. Amy? She was kind enough to explain what’s been going on up here.

  “Merideth forgot to tell me you would be using the condo, Alan. I bet she doesn’t know you’re having a party. I don’t think she’d be happy.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Amy was standing a few feet behind Eric. She had an I’m-sorry-what-could-I-do expression on her face.

  Mel said, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  Eric asked, “Carmel, do you know where I can find Lisa?”

  “How much did you hear?” she asked him. “Just now.”

  “Simple question, Carmel. Do you know where Lisa is?” he repeated.

  Eric’s tone with Mel was stern and condescending. My first impression was that although he was superficially gracious, he had some latent bully in him. I reminded myself that there was a lot of history between him and Mel that I didn’t know.

  Mel was shrinking into her chair. She said, “What did you just hear?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. I just got here. Do you know where Lisa is? Yes or no?”

  “I don’t believe you, Eric.”

  “I don’t care what you believe, Carmel. Does Jules know where Lisa is?”

  “I don’t know what…Jules knows.”

  Eric slid open the screen door and stepped outside. He walked between us and leaned against the railing, facing back indoors, looking down on Mel. “Is Kanyn here? Has she heard from Lisa?”

  “She’s at work.”

  He said, “I know about you and Jules. And I don’t…care. Just tell me if either of you knows where I can find Lisa.”

  Mel and Jules? I thought. What about Mel and Jules?

  Mel said, “I know all about you and Lisa, Eric.”

  Mel’s reply to Eric sounded to me like immature retaliation—pure playground in tone.

  “What?” he scoffed. “There is no me and Lisa, Carmel.”

  “And I know about—No.”

  “About what, Carmel? You think you know about what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Carmel…” he said. “Come on.”

  She said, “I know about you and Lisa. Okay?”

  “Jaana? Were you just talking about Jaana? What do you think you know about Jaana?”

  “Nothing.” Mel pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them.

  “Tell me all about Jaana, Carmel. Come on. Tell me your delusions. You were a silly kid back then. It appears that hasn’t changed.”

  Mel turned her head away from him.

  Eric spoke to me. “Alan, would you please leave us alone for a moment? We need to discuss some things in private.”

  Mel seemed to be at a significant disadvantage. I thought about Wallace, what he might like me to do in that situation. “Mel?” I asked. “Would you like me to leave?”

  “No. Please stay.”

  “I think I’ll stay,” I said to Eric.

  “I could ask you all to leave.”

  As Merideth’s fiancé, not her husband, he really didn’t have any authority to ask us to vacate the condo. I could phone Merideth and ask her to referee. But that wasn’t a fight I wanted to start. I said, “If you want us to go, Eric, we will leave.”

  A yell from inside intervened before he could cast his vote.

  FORTY-THREE

  “Mel! Mel!” The clarion call was from inside, from Amy. “Come here, come in here! Quick. Mel! Get in here. Oh my God. That’s our house! That’s our damn house. Right there. Look!”

  I stood to see what was going on. Amy was standing in the middle of the living room, pointing at the television with one hand, urging Mel to come back inside with the other.

  I followed Mel to the living room. It took me a moment to orient myself to what was on the screen. The camera view was from a helicopter. The shot was focused on what looked like a residential street on a hillside. A small fleet of stationary vehicles with flashing lights was clustered nearby. After a couple of seconds I was able recognize that the home the searchlight was illuminating was the charming duplex that Amy and Kanyn and Mel were renting in Mt. Washington.

  The sky seemed clear. The misty fog that was hovering over West L.A. apparently hadn’t drifted inland that far across the basin.

  A brilliant floodlight highlighted the street-side façade of the duplex. One side of the building was dark and curtained. One side had large urns by the front door. In those urns, I knew, were birds-of-paradise.

  The television screen split. On the left side was the aerial shot. A police chopper—the one with the floodlight—passed quickly into and out of the frame, entering on the lower left corner, exiting on the upper right. The camera choreography was becoming clearer—the shot we were watching had to be from a news chopper that was tracking the movements of an L.A. police helicopter from a higher altitude. The right half of the split screen was a live, street-level view of heavily armed officers moving away from large police vans. I guessed SWAT.

  Shit. I wondered if it was some kind of hostage situation.

  Mel said, “Oh my God, that’s our—” Her tone had an odd hollowness to it that caused my clinical antennae to perk.

  “Yeah, it is,” Amy said. She sat on the edge of the coffee table, gripping the
remote in both hands, the same way she’d grasped the spent flower bud earlier that day on the steps in front of the house.

  “What is—” Mel stepped closer to the screen. “Why are they…Is that the police that’s—”

  The same hollow affect continued to invade her voice. Shrinks call the tone “flat.” I suspected that her recognition of the crisis at her home wasn’t the only precipitant for her sudden affective vacuum. Eric’s presence was certainly a contributing factor.

  Amy stood; then she sat again. “Some kind of shooting—that’s what they said when it first came on. They broke into Jimmy Kimmel. Then there was…Another woman came on and called it a home intrusion, not a shooting. I don’t think they really know.”

  The ground-level side of the split screen refocused to become a grainy shot of the front of the duplex. The heads of the two anchors in the studio popped up in a box in the lower left corner of the busy screen.

  “It couldn’t be our house, could it? It must be the Addams Family. Right? Don’t you think?” Amy said. “I wonder what they did. Wait, are they back in town, Mel?” Mel didn’t respond. Amy said, “We have to call Kanyn. See if she’s okay. She could be home from work.”

  In seconds, Amy had her cell phone on speaker, the call to Kanyn placed, and the phone was ringing. “Pick up, baby. Pick up,” Amy pleaded.

  The center of the left side of the television screen flashed brilliant white.

  The reporter at the scene screamed, “Oh shit!” as she ducked out of the frame. The person holding the camera at ground level lost his balance. The shot jumped to the sky before it resettled on the front of the duplex.

  Dark gray smoke billowed out and up, obscuring the view of the porch.

  One of the anchors in the TV studio, a taciturn woman whose manner reminded me of an assistant principal, said, “Was that an…explosion? Jennifer? Jennifer Itou is our reporter on the scene, live. Do we have Jennifer? Jennifer?”

  I found myself hoping we still had Jennifer. And that she was still live on the scene.

  Amy said, “That was a bomb. My God.”

  I looked at Mel. Her lips were parted. She wasn’t blinking.

  I turned to find Eric. He was standing on the far side of the room, near the entry hall. His arms were crossed.

  A second explosion rattled the front of the duplex.

  Jennifer Itou had one hand covering her earpiece in a way that was almost a parody of a reporter at a scene full of chaos. She said. “Brett and Carl? My cameraman, Tony, is telling me the second explosion was a flash-bang. Repeat, we think the explosion was a flash-bang. Tony was a Marine.”

  Kanyn hadn’t picked up her phone. The ringing finally stopped. Voice mail kicked in. “Hey, it’s me,” her recorded voice announced. “Leave a message, or even better send me a text. A nice one. Adi.”

  “Adi?” I said.

  Amy said, “Adios. Oh my Jesus.”

  Mel lowered herself to the floor in a single languid motion that was as fluid as a dancer’s. It was as though she felt the long bones in her legs dissolving at a measured pace and she was determined to get her torso to the ground before the bones disintegrated.

  Amy said, “We have to go home, Mel. Get up. Come on, now. We have to check on Kanyn.”

  My eyes returned to the television screen. As the smoke from the explosions drifted away from the front of the building, it wasn’t apparent to me which side of the duplex was the focus of all the law-enforcement attention.

  Eric said, “Does anyone know what is going on?”

  Amy said, “That’s our house.”

  He turned and walked out the door.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The plan was for me to follow Mel and Amy to Mt. Washington.

  Execution turned out to be a problem. Amy was more inclined to obliterate L.A.’s speed limits than I was. Her speed, or my lack thereof, caused me to lose track of the solitary working taillight of her car—she drove an aging Honda CR-V—before I was five blocks from Merideth’s condo. I wasted a few minutes weaving through traffic trying to once again spot her car before I pulled to the curb on Beverly Boulevard. I pushed tiny buttons until I had communicated my pathetic situation to Chloe, the GPS lady.

  Chloe was cool.

  I’d elaborated on Chloe’s avatar life. She was a work-at-home single mom sitting in a pleasant, quirky room lined with north-facing windows. She was mildly agoraphobic. When she wasn’t busy responding to my electronic queries about road life in Los Angeles, she did watercolors.

  Chloe said, “Turn left in…three…blocks.” I was grateful that she delivered her geographical counsel without either irony or sarcasm. She was the perfect shotgun.

  I speed-dialed Sam while I was stopped at the next red light.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m on the 10 heading into L.A.,” he said. His voice was bright. “That’s California talk, by the way. They don’t say ‘I-10,’ or ‘Interstate 10, or even plain old ‘10’ like we do. Here it’s got to be the damn article and the damn freeway number. You need to remember that if you don’t want to sound like a tourist. Sometimes the locals trip me up and use the name of the freeway instead. The San Diego. The Pasadena. I haven’t figured out why they do that. Any-hoo, I am on ‘the 10’ somewhere in the vast suburban wasteland between Pomona and L.A. I can already see the glow of the big city on the horizon.”

  Sam blew through his entire speech without an audible inhale. I was pretty sure he had topped off his personal tank with a few cups of nasty truck-stop coffee to wash down his sublime truck-stop patty melt.

  Before I had a chance to tell him why I was calling, he started up again. “You make a decision whether I’m going to be allowed to bunk with you in Merideth’s palace? I should be in your general vicinity before too long. Be nice to know where I’m sleeping. My butt is, like, numb.”

  Sam was still listening to contemporary country on the radio. The volume was still loud. I still didn’t like it. I paused to be certain he was done before I said, “Have an emergency here, Sam. Need to run something serious by you.”

  “Okay.” His tone lost all its playfulness.

  “Something’s going on with all these people. The Grand Canyon people. Eric showed up in town. I don’t think Merideth knows he’s here. And there’s a police emergency at the place where Mel lives with her friends.”

  “What kind of emergency? What kind of serious?”

  I explained to Sam what I knew about the events taking place at the duplex, starting with the fact that the two girls had stopped by Merideth’s condo so I could finally have a chance to talk to Mel. I stressed the part about the live TV coverage, the hovering helicopters, the apparently determined SWAT response, and the possibility of dual explosions.

  I added, “I’m on my way there now. The girls are in Amy’s car, heading home—I’m following them. Or I was…. I couldn’t keep up. You know anyone in the LAPD? Can you find out what’s going on? It’s a big deal, Sam.” I reconsidered, and added, “Maybe not for L.A., but it would be a big deal in Boulder.”

  The girlfriend Sam had broken up with in the wake of the disclosure of his sexual affair with the young Boulder cop was a detective with the Laguna Beach police. Laguna was in Orange County, not L.A. County. I didn’t think Sam and Carmen were on speaking terms anyway. I held out hope that Sam had met someone through Carmen who might be able to shed some light on all that was going on, but I wasn’t counting my chickens.

  “Maybe,” he said. The intimate timbre I’d been enjoying during our last few phone calls had evaporated. “Carmen has a friend who’s LAPD. Another Raiders fan. I can try her. You’ve thought this through, Alan? You think it’s wise? For those girls to go home? Given what might be going on?”

  I hadn’t considered that it might not be wise. My instinct would have been the same as theirs was when they saw the televised live shots of the explosions at their house: get home as fast I possibly could to check on my roommate.

  I said
, “There are a lot of cops there, Sam. Your colleagues will keep the girls at a safe distance from trouble. I’m sure they’ll be fine.” I didn’t bother to tell him that I didn’t think the girls really cared what I thought was wise.

  “That conclusion,” he said evenly, “is based on an assumption that my colleagues recognize that they may need…some attention. And that the girls aren’t mixed up in…whatever this is.”

  “You mean Jaana?” I said.

  “I mean Jaana going missing when all of these people were together. The girls were there. That’s means and it’s opportunity. And now there’s Jack. Where the hell’s Jack?”

  “You’re right. I have been assuming that the girls had nothing to do with any of that. For right now, they’re worried about Kanyn. Their roommate.”

  “Kanyn—K-a-n-y-n—was on that damn trip too,” Sam said. It wasn’t a question. He had read the file. “What’s their address?”

  The street and number in Mt. Washington remained on the screen of the GPS. Thank you, Chloe. I read them to him.

  “I’ll meet you there,” he said. “Wait. What are you driving?”

  “I got upgraded to a Camry. It’s a hybrid.”

  “Shit. Figures. What color?”

  Sam arrived in Mt. Washington before I did. I spotted him almost immediately—he was the only person on the scene wearing a Colorado Avalanche sweater. The old-school kind. Sam didn’t tilt toward svelte. The sleeves were pushed up to his biceps. His forehead—as prominent as the grill on an old Buick—was mottled with sweat. He was overdressed for a summer evening in L.A.

  Sam was behind the taped-off perimeter almost a block away from the duplex. He was chatting with a woman cop. His hands were in his pockets. The fleet of SWAT vehicles that I’d seen on the news less than half an hour earlier had departed. I couldn’t hear any helicopters overhead. Only one ambulance remained nearby. The paramedics were killing time. Uniformed cops were doing sentry duty, feet apart, arms crossed over their chests. The firefighters were more industrious. They had hoses to retrieve. Equipment to pack up.