Doing errands. Errands. That’s when I had this thought. I carried Toast down to Eddie Stanton’s space, said a quick hello to Eddie, then took off in the Focus to do fucking errands. I really don’t enjoy doing errands, okay? I know, I know, learn to like the things you’re not supposed to like. And I do that, sometimes. But I can’t get there with most errands. So I slogged through the drugstore, skulked through the grocery store, went to my house, unloaded everything, then went to one of those do-it-yourself car washes. Now this errand I actually enjoyed. I enjoy making the Focus look crisp and clean and new, like a just-readied rental. Like I said, we were still in the honeymoon phase.
And then, once my car was nice and clean and perfectly unmemorable, I went to gas it up. Get the tank nice and full again. And putting gas in my car made me think. It connected me to something. It threw a line to my subconscious, gave me a feeling not unlike déjà vu. Moments. Moments I’d collected over the course of the Keaton Fuller investigation all started reappearing now in my mind. But with new meaning attached to them. Because something, something didn’t feel right. At first the images, the moments, were a little scrambled. I saw Greer Fuller as a kid in his yard standing next to Keaton, who was aiming a twenty-two at an innocent animal. I saw Craig Helton saying: “You get a bar up and running and you can print money. Print it.” I saw Sydney and Geoff Scott behind their house in the Venice canals, clad in karate uniforms, pulling slow-motion noncontact moves.
And then, now sitting in my car, just about ready to take off from the gas station, I looked out the driver’s-side window and saw the face of Heather Press. The gardener who stole Muriel Dreen’s ring. She wasn’t actually there, of course, but her face was there, hanging in my window, just like it had that time she’d walked over to my car to tell me that she’d taken the ring to hurt the hurtful Muriel Dreen.
This was the image I needed to see.
Because Heather Press was telling me something this time too. Her face was giving me a rush of thoughts and images and possibilities. Yes, somewhere down inside I sensed that I had unfinished business. Was Graves not my guy? Did he confess to killing Keaton Fuller simply to complete his tough-guy act? To show me, right before he tried to kill me, that he was ruthless, that he wasn’t the type of guy Keaton Fuller, or anyone else, could fuck with?
I left the gas station and drove back to my office. Opened up the slider, sat at my desk, called Detective Mike Ott. But not to talk to him about this, no. To get him to connect me to a colleague of his who could get me records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Which he did. I spoke to this person, a woman named Janet Falcone.
And then I hung up, and looked around the web for some other information I needed.
And then I left my office, locked up the slider, and drove to an apartment just south of the Pico–La Brea intersection, to visit a sad, nearly broken woman who lived there. I knocked on her door, and she answered by opening it and just walking right to her chair and sitting down with her back to me, not even saying hello.
And I said to this woman, “I want to ask you another question about your daughter.”
And then we talked.
And then I left and went to a Home Depot.
And then I left the Home Depot and went to a cemetery.
And then I left the cemetery and drove south.
And then I went to another gas station, my second of the day, a gas station I’d been to before, just last week with Nancy.
And then I drove a little farther south.