Chapter 8

“Jesus, lot of people.”

“You checking up on me?”

“Look to your right.”

“Mayor looks shiny. That a new suit? I never did get the appeal. He’s plastic to me. Never trusted the eyes. Kind of shifty, don’t you think, in that I’ll-say-this-but-really-do-that kind of way?”

“Keep your voice down and don’t be a wiseass,” says Ortiz, looking me over. “You could have dressed a little better, Carver.”

“This is dark,” I say, pointing to my jacket. “Funeral attire. Polished shoes too.”

“Stacked deck today. Police chief, commissioners. Bunch of brass. Reporters. I saw that chick from the Times again. Christ, she’s pushy. You talk to her? These architects carry serious weight. Who would have thought, right? It’s the money, man.”

“And aesthetics.”

“Yeah, that too,” says Ortiz, rolling his eyes. “Building a whole new Rome, and shit. Need these guys, I guess.”

“Hitler wanted to rebuild Berlin to look like ancient Athens.”

“Screw Hitler. Who’s this friend of Gallagher’s? This Jamieson guy?”

I nod left.

“The big blond guy with the sunglasses.”

“You talk to him yet?”

“I will after.”

“Kimmel said he was close to Gallagher, right?”

“Best friends. You want to hold my hand on this?”

Ortiz gives me his best fuck-you glance.

“No. But I think you might need a partner for this one.”

“I work alone.”

“Yea, but a lot of pressure on this case.”

“Let me work it like I do. I’m better that way. Haven’t let you down yet. Besides, you’re my partner.”

“I’m your boss. I got a whole section to run.”

“Which makes you the ideal partner.” I smile.

“All right, I’ll be over by the mayor, but we’re not done talking about this partner thing,” says Ortiz, tamping his black mustache the way he does when he’s distracted by a moment of reflection. “Forest Lawn’s a peaceful goddamn place, huh? Bucolic. Brochure says ‘bucolic.’ I should be planted up here. Nice chapel, good view of the city. Cost my whole pension probably. There’s movie people up here. Michael Jackson’s in some mausoleum. Remember that case? Christ. How’s Gallagher doing it?”

“Cremation.”

“The urn. Probably go that way myself. Tidy and cheap. You ever think about it? The end?”

Ortiz slips toward the mayor’s entourage. The crowd follows a curl of incense into the chapel. The altar is crowded with lilies in glass vases. A priest in green and gold vestments raises his hands. A big red book opens, and the death mass begins. The readings are brisk. Stories of prophets and disciples, dust and paradise. Redemption has become a cheap word, but it is all we have, I guess—a bit of succor for the corrupt soul. Death came so fast to Gallagher that he didn’t have time to atone. I don’t know what his sins were, except maybe the hooker, but is that enough to keep a man out of heaven? He had marks on his soul, though. We all do. Venial and mortal, glowing in the recesses.

The priest swings incense over Gallagher’s bronze urn, and the scent reminds me of when I was a boy on Sundays in St. Mary’s, sitting with my mother and sometimes my father, studying the stained glass and wondering about the weight of the cross and how a man is lifted into the clouds. It is a wondrous story. The sky opening, the tomb, the shroud pushed aside. Perfect story for a cop. The priest’s voice fades. He closes his red book. The altar boys flutter, and the architects file out of the chapel and into the sunlight. They look like the feathers on a crow’s wing stretching through the grass. The mayor shakes a few hands and scurries away.

“Tragic day, Detective,” says Arthur Kimmel, wiping his eyes and folding his handkerchief into his breast pocket. He looks back to the chapel doors and then to me. “If there’s anything you need, let me know. Do you have any leads you can talk about? Are you close to knowing who did this? I talked to the mayor and he assured me you’re doing everything you can.”

“We are. I’m here to talk to Paul Jamieson. I’m hoping he might have insight that could be useful.”

Kimmel looks over grass and hills of stones and symmetrical rows.

“There’s Paul over there. Let me introduce you.”

He hurries forward.

“Paul, this is Detective Sam Carver. He wants to speak with you about Michael. I’ll leave you two.”

Kimmel wanders away. Jamieson and I walk through mourners to the side of the chapel. Men pat him on the back. A woman holding a lily hugs him. He’s about six-two, blond, and packed, with the fading lines of a flanker. His eyes are green, his face smooth as if shaved by a barber. His is the air of a man who lets others tend to the lesser things. He is accustomed, I can tell, to praise and to people humming like bees about him. But the boy in him—I can see him just behind the eyes—is not quite sure what to do with Gallagher’s death, as if it were a sacrilege against men so brazen and sure of themselves.

“I saw Michael two days before he died,” Jamieson says in a voice higher than the rest of him suggests. “We had a burger in Los Feliz and drove to Perch for a few drinks. We were supposed to play tennis Sunday, but …”

He wipes his eyes and slides on sunglasses.

“Was there anything bothering him? Anything different?”

“Not that I could tell. He was himself. He was planning on buying a new car and he had convinced me to take another surfing lesson with him. He wasn’t very good, but he was determined. Neither of us are natives. We’d lived here long enough, though, that Michael said it was a sin we hadn’t learned how to surf. He called someone in Venice, and we decided to start next month.”

“You look like a surfer. Where you from?”

“Back east. Port Jefferson, Long Island.”

“I grew up in Newport.”

“No shit. An LA detective from Rhode Island. Not many of you, I’d guess.”

“I’m it.”

Jamieson rubs his hand over the chapel’s stone wall.

“Feel this. Old World.” I reach for the wall; he presses his face closer to the cuts and chisel marks. “Why do we want this stone, this style, Detective?” he says, turning to me as if I am someone to be taught. “These buildings hold the past up for us. I suppose they fit the quaint notion of religion, don’t you think? God, at least the Christian one, was enshrined in architecture the moment the medieval touched the Renaissance. It fits, though, doesn’t it? A kind of permanence that reminds us of our imperfections and how temporary we are. Here, at least. Among the stained glass and the dead.”

He pulls his hand away and wipes another tear.

“It doesn’t have to be about the past, though, does it? People like the Europe of cathedrals and palaces. Those gargoyles and gilded halls. I love them too. They inspire, but I don’t want to imitate them. Why rebuild what once was, Detective? You can’t anyway. There are no stonecutters anymore. The earth has changed. Cities grow and evolve. Our notions of beauty change. Don’t you think? We must build from the materials and genius at hand. To take the now and coax into tomorrow. That sounds pompous, I suppose. But I’ve been thinking a lot about this since Michael died. We talked often about this.” He takes a breath. “Michael loved Disney Hall. Its curves and angles and stainless steel skin. A building as vital to its time as the Pantheon was to ancient Rome. Michael called it a ‘great silver dream.’”

Jamieson puts his hand back on the chapel wall.

“In its day, this design was modern, Detective, but now it’s dead.”

He pulls his hand away and wipes another tear.

I pull out my notebook, see the way he reacts to it, and slide it back into my pocket.

“Arthur tells me it wasn’t robbery,” he says. “His wallet wasn’t taken. Was it some homeless nut?”

“Not likely.”

“I can’t imagine who, then. I’ve been trying. Michael could be a hard-ass. He was vain. He understood how big his talent was, and he wasn’t shy about it. That naturally turned a lot of people off. But he was respected. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill him. He was rarely disturbed by anything, not that I noticed anyway. The only time I saw him not his confident self was a year or so ago. His computer had been hacked. His laptop at home, not his work one. I suppose he kept some work on it—we all do—but not important projects. He felt quite violated. As anyone would.”

“Did he have any idea who might have done it? A competing firm?”

“No.”

“Were files stolen? How did he know?”

“An alert from his firewall. He didn’t know if anything had been taken or if it was a malware infection or something else. He destroyed the computer. Smashed it with a hammer and threw it in the ocean. That’s what he told me.”

“Any idea what could have been on it that somebody would have wanted?”

“No. I mean, how would I know?”

“You two were close.”

Jamieson doesn’t answer. He’s told me something he wishes he hadn’t. I let it pass.

“How well did you know Miranda?”

“The three of us were close. Have you seen Miranda? She’s quite lovely in a waifish way. She’s like a fairy. You would not have put her and Michael together. That’s nothing against Michael, but Miranda is a woman easily noticed. She loved him, though. You could tell that over time. She was fascinated by him. Michael could be poetic when he talked about architecture, what it means, how it defines us and yet is in a constant state of metamorphosis. He never seemed to arrive at what he wanted to be.”

“He was young.”

“Incredibly impatient.”

“Why did they split?”

“I don’t know, Detective. You’ll have to ask Miranda.”

“He must have told you something.”

“Things like that he kept to himself. Michael was very compartmentalized.”

His answer is terse, but again I note it and let it pass.

“So you don’t think …”

“No, Detective. Not a chance Miranda could have had anything to do with this. She doesn’t need the money, and vengeance is not her style.”

“Why do you say ‘vengeance’?”

“A word I associate with hurt, I suppose.”

“So she was hurt?”

“They both were.”

“But you sound as if it may have been Michael’s doing.”

“I don’t know anything about that, Detective.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“No. Arthur called her and gave her the news.”

Jamieson runs a hand through his hair. He feels for his tie, brushes his jacket sleeve. He looks right, left, anywhere but at me. I can’t see what’s in his eyes. His sunglasses reflect only me. He takes a breath and apologizes for not knowing more and being out of sorts. “You can understand, I suppose,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. He likes the word “suppose”; it hangs like an affectation, a sound of both condescension and wonder. I stand in silence, keeping him in my gravity. Pauses are good, let the moments linger between questions. I pat my pocket but remember I don’t smoke anymore. Jamieson wants to slip away, but he won’t. We watch the passing faces of mourners, mostly men, their small, whispered huddles filling the air like the hum of insects. The priest, vestments slung over his arm, walks down the hill, a black figure growing smaller against the gravestones.

“Arthur tells me you and Michael were close to another man—an architect too.”

“We ran around for a while with Stephen Jensen. The three of us met years ago at Cornell and ended up out here. Michael and I joined firms. Stephen went out on his own. He’s a few years older than us. Late to college. His office is in Santa Monica. I haven’t seen him in a few years, except at parties now and then. We went our separate ways, I suppose. Michael and I stayed close, but Stephen had other aspirations and interests.”

“He’s not here today?”

“No. As I said, I haven’t seen him in a while. He may be out of the country. He travels a lot.”

“Did you guys have a falling out?”

“No. Nothing like that. Men change, I suppose.”

“Not a lot, in my experience.”

Two birds flicker in the sky. I shake Jamieson’s hand.

“Thank you. If I need anything else, I’ll be in touch.”

“Whatever I can do to help. Michael was dear to me.”

He turns.

“Oh, one more thing,” I say. “Did you know about Gallagher’s hooker friend downtown? The one he kept a room with at the Chaplin Hotel? He had just left her when he was killed.”

Jamieson’s cheeks flush. He swallows, takes a soft breath, and, after a moment, regains composure.

“No, Detective, I didn’t know about her. I find that rather surprising.”

“True, nonetheless,” I say. “The woman said he once brought a man with him. Big, handsome blond guy, like you. Had a Mad Men look to him, she said.”

“Wasn’t me. Not my style. This is LA, Detective; lot of Mad Men out here. I must get going.”

“Must have been someone else. We’ll figure it out. Thanks.”

He walks away and joins Kimmel. The mourners are gone. The two men walk side by side down the hill. The last streak of incense fades. I’m alone at the chapel. I run my hand over the chiseled stone, remembering the months I spent backpacking across Europe—my mother insisted—after graduating from Berkeley. One morning, just after dawn, I awoke on a hilltop above Assisi. A river of cloud ran below me over the valley, obscuring all except the top of the basilica, which pricked the blue sky and seemed to float between two worlds. I stood there until the cloud burned away and the line between heaven and earth disappeared in the clearing of a new day. It was an astonishing moment. I felt alone but not abandoned, and tears came to my eyes—not from a holy revelation, but from my capacity to imagine myself in the world.

The groundskeeper closes the chapel door. The sun skims west. I head down the hill and call Ortiz and tell him I’m flying to New York to talk to Miranda.