15

The address my ex-cellmate Rose had given me for the lawyer who had arranged the green card marriage connected to a two-storey faux French chateau in Hancock Park, the final outpost of wealth and privilege separating the Westside of Los Angeles from the melting pot of poverty to the east. Like most of the city’s enclaves for the moneyed, the residential streets were wide and quiet, save for the occasional whoosh of a Mercedes Benz or the distant buzz of Mexican gardeners mowing a lawn. Those lawns were, inevitably, like the houses themselves, big. In Hancock Park, anything under three thousand square feet was tear-down material. Water piped over the mountains from the Owens Valley coursed through automatic sprinklers and flowed into swimming pools, sustaining an almost tropical landscape rich in hibiscus and palm trees. The neighbourhood was lush in a way that only natural sun shining upon imported water, soil and plants tended by foreign labour can make a place.

The street sign in front of Harry Bendel’s mini-manse prohibited parking, as did the sign across from it and the one down from that. All the signs up and down the block carried the same warning. Parking anywhere on the street was illegal. If you needed to park on the street, you didn’t belong in the neighbourhood. I pulled into Harry’s half-circle brick drive. Like all old cars the Caddy leaked considerable oil. That was going to be Harry’s problem.

‘Jesus! Harry, it’s one of yours!’ The woman who shouted this to the cavernous hall behind the front door was thin and blonde and from the smooth sheen of her face it looked like the most serious problem she had was an overstocked refrigerator. Her clothes were Sunday casual but had that crisp, out-of-the-box look. Some people have a talent for that, mostly people with money. She shut the door in my face. Though of solid oak the door wasn’t strong enough to bar her voice. I heard the word ‘unhappy’, a long but muffled adjective preceding the word ‘clients’, and the emphatically voiced phrase, ‘in my house!’

The door snapped open to the pink face and massive body of a fifty-something man who started life big and got bigger eating too much steak and playing weekend golf. His shoulders stretched to both sides of the door frame and the size of his chest was prodigious though his belly had some time ago overwhelmed it. His body might have been out of shape but his voice wasn’t. ‘I don’t care what your problems are or how you got this address, never come to my house, ever. Are you absolutely clear on that?’ I’d never met someone whose natural speaking voice could be described as stentorian. His was.

‘One of your clients has been murdered,’ I said.

‘That is not a rare event. My clients are frequently murdered. That is the type of clientele I have. If you wish to discuss it with me, stop by my office tomorrow morning. I charge one hundred and fifty dollars an hour.’

I straight-armed the door before it closed. ‘The client is my husband, the man you set me up with, Gabriel Burns.’

‘The Englishman?’

‘I’m Nina Zero. I roomed with your client, Rose Selavy.’

He nodded with his entire body, leading with the shoulders, and darted a glance over his shoulder. He looked like a big kid worried about what might catch him from behind. ‘Go around to the side gate,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

When I crossed the lawn in front of the living-room window they were going jaw to jaw beside the sofa. His voice boomed out, ‘She’s not a drug addict, she’s a widow for chrissake!’ The thin blonde didn’t flinch. I couldn’t grasp her exact phrasing but the substance of her snarl and yap was clear. Maybe her smooth face was like the crispness of her clothes, a given attribute of class and completely unconnected to her inner being.

‘Sorry I can’t let you inside,’ Harry apologized when he slid the bolt and opened the side gate. ‘My wife has a hard and fast rule: no clients allowed at home.’ He led me along the side of the house into the small piece of paradise found in the back yards of most California homeowners, though his was larger and considerably more paradisiacal than most. We sat in lawn chairs by the side of the pool, shaded by forty-foot palm trees. A hundred and fifty dollars an hour can buy a nice chunk of cloud. ‘Nobody’s contacted me about this,’ he said. ‘No reason they should, I suppose. I didn’t know him that well, only performed the one small legal service which I suppose you know about.’ He was just filling space, waiting for me to begin.

‘They found him up in Lake Hollywood, beaten and stabbed to death.’ The words ground together in my gut like stones.

Harry leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his hands together. Though out of shape, he moved with an athletic grace that made me think he could act quickly if needed. ‘Frankly, his death shocks me. Mr Burns wasn’t a typical client. He was a fun guy, the last of my clients I’d expect to catch the scythe.’

‘How was he not typical?’

‘He wasn’t a prostitute or a drug addict. Almost all of my cases involve so-called lifestyle crimes.’

‘Then I don’t get the connection, why he would come to you.’

Harry tilted back in his deck chair and gazed somewhere up among the palm trees. ‘I met him in a bar. I had to pull some overtime for a case on the docket the following morning. But I didn’t want to miss the 49er game – Monday Night Football you know – so I dropped by a local sports bar to catch the second half. Mr Burns was at the table next to me. He didn’t understand a damn thing about the game. Whenever anybody kicked the ball for any reason he’d shout, “That’s right, that’s the way to do it!”’ Harry’s smile faded with the realization that the memory was now his alone. He tilted the chair back down to all fours. ‘Damn. I’m sorry to hear he’s dead. But to be blunt, what do you care? His death absolves you of legal responsibility. Is that what you came to hear?’

‘No. I came for personal reasons. I came to find out…’ I couldn’t finish the sentence. The thought splintered to the hundred things I didn’t know, then crystallized into the one thing that perplexed me the most. ‘Why me? Out of the million and a half single women in this city why did you choose me to marry him?’ When his hands came up to calm me I realized I had stood and shouted at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘There’s just too many things about this I don’t understand.’ I knelt by the pool and splashed water on my face.

Harry watched as though he suddenly remembered I was an ex-con and could not be counted on to obey the laws of decorum or even those against physical violence. Or maybe he realized that if he didn’t placate me I could tell the police how Gabe and I met. I wasn’t an expert in the law but arranging a green card marriage had to be as illegal as participating in one.

‘I’m not an immigration lawyer,’ Harry admitted. ‘I advised him straight away to go to a specialist but he said he already had one of those and didn’t trust him. He wanted to go outside the circle. He was working on something he described as incendiary and feared an immigration lawyer could be extorted into betraying him.’

‘Didn’t that sound paranoid to you?’

‘Paranoia is when you’re snorting a dollar for every two dollars you deal and you think the FBI has planted a homing device up your ass. Mr Burns told me he’d been threatened with deportation, that somebody was investigating his life and asking a lot of questions that seemed directed to proving he was violating his work visa. Based on the type of photographs he took for a living, I’d say he was reasonably cautious, not paranoid.’

As it set, the sun reflected whole and clear at the deep end of the swimming pool. I didn’t wonder whether Gabe had lied to me, but how often he lied to me. When we were attacked in Las Vegas he said he hadn’t known the assailant but from what I had seen the assailant certainly knew him. A gust of wind rippled the surface of the pool. The sun bobbed precariously, split apart and warped to an orange smear. The image of a smile carved into flesh – the purplish line left on the skin by a stab wound – clicked before me like a slide. The man in Las Vegas had attacked us with a knife.

‘Would you like a glass of water?’ Harry knelt beside me, his hand on my shoulder.

I shook my head. The surface of the pool calmed to glass. The sun again became whole. Gabe hadn’t loved me enough to leave me with the burden of his death. ‘The cops told me they found coke on his body. Could he have been a dealer?’

‘No.’ His voice was terse and sure. ‘I’m around these people all the time. Mr Burns was not of that ilk.’

‘An addict?’

‘In certain professions every Angeleno under the age of fifty has sniffed coke. It’s a fact of life in the fast lane. He didn’t seem like a heavy user those few occasions we met. But anybody can be a recreational user and only a lab technician with a urine sample would know.’ He grunted and rubbed his right knee when he stood from the side of the pool and settled again in his deck chair. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ The question was rhetorical. He was a lawyer, accustomed to giving advice and being paid well for it. ‘Cops like to exaggerate when interviewing someone they think might be connected to the case. They wanted to throw a scare into you, nothing more. As a parolee, you’d be suspected of everything from supplying him with the coke to killing him.’

If their objective was to frighten me, they succeeded. I understood the situation. When my urine sample came back negative, they’d look for another pretext to revoke my parole. I had no rights. The burden of proof was on me. ‘Rose told me Gabe was her cousin.’

A derisive Ha! boomed from his chest. ‘Rose was not Mr Burns’s cousin. Rose is my cousin.’

‘Why would she lie to me?’

‘She lies to everybody. Part of her charm. I asked her if she knew somebody. She named you. I do all her legal work pro bono. She lied to you because she owes me. When I mentioned you to Mr Burns he authorized me to go ahead and arrange it.’

‘A green card marriage to an ex-con. Why?’

‘He wasn’t sure he could trust the people he knew. If word got around that he was looking, there were people who would turn him in. He wanted to marry a perfect stranger. But in your case specifically, the deciding factor was probably the money.’

He watched me while he twisted a massive gold football ring around his index finger, as though he weighed the impact of what he was about to say.

‘What about the money?’

‘The other girl I suggested wanted five grand. You settled for two.’